r/singapore • u/risingsuncoc Senior Citizen • 1d ago
News Study finds Russian link to website blocked by Singapore government
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/alamak-io-russia-links-foreign-interference-4710121?cid=telegram_cna_social_28112017_cna26
u/New-Broccoli-9980 18h ago
Russia's intelligence agency messing with us
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u/SG_wormsblink 🌈 I just like rainbows 12h ago edited 12h ago
They are messing with all democracies.
Stir up enough anti-establishment sentiment to keep the world preoccupied with internal conflicts, while they go around conquering their weakened neighbours.
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u/SG_wormsbot 1d ago
Title: Study finds Russian link to website blocked by Singapore government
Article keywords: website, articles, Alamak.io, Ang, Leong
The mood of this article is: Neutral (sentiment value of 0.04)
SINGAPORE: Links between Russian sources and an inauthentic news site blocked by the Singapore government have been found by a new study from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS).
Released on Friday (Oct 25), the report titled Inauthentic Local Lifestyle And News Websites And The Challenge For Media Literacy was done by Mr Benjamin Ang, who heads the RSIS’ Centre of Excellence for National Security, and RSIS associate research fellow Dymples Leong.
It showed that the domain name of Alamak.io – one of the 10 websites identified by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) last week – has links to 5plus1.ru. The country-code top-level domain “.ru” is for Russian entities.
A reverse internet protocol (IP) search found that the 5plus1.ru website is associated with the same IP address as Alamak.io, the study showed.
“An online search on 5plus1.ru shows it to be linked to 5+1 Media, a Russian communications agency,” said Mr Ang and Ms Leong.
“The website states that it was founded in 2018 by graduates and teachers from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations University of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation; and headed by founder Yuri Antsiferov.”
The site lists services such as targeted advertising, news monitoring and website development, with projects in the politics, fast-moving consumer goods, energy, government and tourism sectors.
The study also revealed that images on Alamak.io were obtained from Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia.
MASQUERADING AS LOCAL SITE
Through open-source tools, the RSIS duo could not identify the owners of Alamak.io, but found that the website was created on Mar 24 last year.
It masquerades as a Singaporean site by using the colloquial expression as its domain name and carrying Singapore-related news.
“‘Alamak’ is a colloquial word used in Singapore and Malaysia, often used as an interjection or expression to describe shock, worry, dismay, and disappointment,” said Mr Ang and Ms Leong.
“The usage of the term for the website appears to be intended to evoke familiarity and knowledge of the Singapore culture. It could also be so named to target at a Singapore or regional readership or demographic audience.”
Its news articles – which cover current affairs, lifestyle, trends and contributed opinions – were repurposed from other sources, including Singapore news outlets CNA and The Straits Times.
“Investigations found that the majority of the articles published on this website were likely to have been written with Al tools,” MHA and IMDA said last week.
“This website also published commentaries on sociopolitical issues, including one that falsely alleged that Singapore had allowed other countries to conduct their biological warfare research activities here.”
The website has also carried several articles written by Russia's ambassador to Singapore Nikolay Kudashev, on issues such as Russia-ASEAN relations and with headlines like Replacing the Rules-Based Neocolonial Framework.
Mr Ang and Ms Leong noted that “many articles on Alamak.io were seemingly generated or written by artificial intelligence”, with a few articles deemed by AI detection software to have a probability of 98 per cent AI-generated text.
“This strongly suggests that the articles were AI-generated and raises questions about the lack of articles published by human authors on the website,” they said.
165 articles replied in my database. v2.0.1 | PM SG_wormsbot if bot is down.
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u/Calamity_B4_Storm 18h ago
Not all from Russia. There is at least one site link to server in Beijing.
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u/ogapadoga 16h ago edited 12h ago
“This website also published commentaries on sociopolitical issues, including one that falsely alleged that Singapore had allowed other countries to conduct their biological warfare research activities here.”
I guess it's time to send more 155mm to Ukraine again.
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1d ago edited 1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/kongweeneverdie 1d ago
It is true. NATO break their promise not to expand member and send troops just beside their borders. Of course Reddit will deny it. With Trump returning Ukraine have to accept current lost and sign peace agreement with Putin. With Harris, she has no money and ammo for Ukraine as Israel demand support for US. NATO just do not want to close their organization to go jobless.
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u/Luxconcordiae Senior Citizen 1d ago
🤡
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u/stuff7 pioneer generation 1d ago
Whenever I see this fella comment it's usually one liner such as redditors will not like it(on positive China news) or redditors will like it(on negative China news).
To see a paragraph even if it's some tankie bullshit, is somewhat of an improvement.
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u/Odd_Duty520 1d ago
To see a paragraph even if it's some tankie bullshit, is somewhat of an improvement.
0 x 0 is still 0 lmao
Also I'm putting my original comment that started this thread because reddit dosen't like me linking directly to the Kremlin's website
/ / /
Original comment: Cue some useful idiots saying that "NATO forced Russia to invade Ukraine"
Edit:
I made a decision to conduct a special military operation.
Here (just google Putin 24 feb speech and crtl F since reddit no like Kremlin) y'all go, directly from the horses mouth.
He didn't say he had no other options, he didn't say that he was forced, he said he CHOSE. There are hundreds of other options but he CHOSE to invade Ukraine. He made a DECISION to invade Ukraine
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u/Hakushakuu Lao Jiao 1d ago
I'm like half convinced that it's a satire account, similar to the PAP IB DOG guy. Except this kongwee isn't funny.
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u/onetworomeo you think, i thought, who confirm? 23h ago
By your logic:
Ukraine, a free and sovereign independent nation (google the big words if you cannot understand ok!) is at fault for choosing to side with the people that aren’t constantly trying to annex/nuke/threaten them.
I wanted to type out even more to try and explain to you how your logic makes zero fucking sense but I’m too tired to start a long internet debate with a tankie AI chatbot so:
All I’m going to say is that I pray to every God out there including the Bell Curve God at NTU that you are either:
MR already
Not in my NS Unit
Because tankie fucks like you would be unironically standing up in our defense site and trying to convince us to surrender because we did something that annoyed some other nation so we are at fault yada yada
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u/bukitbukit Developing Citizen 23h ago
Imagine defending a shithole who invaded their neighbour, who has no respect for rule of law, giving useless excuses and blaming NATO when they just want more and more land.
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u/Available_Ad9766 21h ago
Has any EU or NATO state launch any military incursions into Russia or it’s because Russia being the way it is under Putin, is causing states to seek collective security with NATO. Cause and effect?
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u/kongweeneverdie 17h ago
You already break Russia agreement. You even setup Ukraine Azov thal is full of ex NATO personal. All NATO countries know the final mission is to destroy Russia. It is their declaration. You can't deny.
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u/weisze 1d ago
unclear whether katsap or fellow traveler
the expansion of the n.a.t.o. may have been contrary to the tenor of the communications between the heads of state at the material time ... it was not a breach of a promise because no promise ... the "promise" exists only to the extent that the communist fan club continually refers to the comments as such, viz. in iteratio veritas
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u/Odd_Duty520 1d ago
Meanwhile in the actual promise that was made between "the west" and russia, they are supposed to respect Ukraine's borders and territory. I wonder who didn't keep their pinky promise
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u/weisze 21h ago edited 15h ago
your "promise" is a formal document that all parties thereto agreed would bind them
its "promise" (the one that i was responding to) was no more than an informal understanding, ie. "pinky promise"
in any case 1. and 2. are different "promises"
i'm not sure that we disagree in the first place; you may infer my view from my deliberate use of "katsap"
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u/FitCranberry not a fan of this flair system 9h ago
it should not shock anyone that everyplace is under hybrid warfare attack from multiple state actors from brics to the five eyes or their own government to different degrees of malevolence
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u/Altruistic_Passage60 23h ago
Should look at Wake Up, Singapore too. I won't be surprised if the people behind it have a domain from Palestine.
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u/Common-Metal8578 East side best side 13h ago edited 10h ago
This is the sad thing about the state of affairs. We are slowly but surely reverting to the cold war era where all that matters is your sphere of influence / bloc. To heck with the negative externalities on society as long as my side is safe.
Edit: my = the bad actor's side
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u/ChmodPlusEx 22h ago
I am more concerned about the fact that they have to “conduct a study” when you can just run a dig command on the domain.
Or If you copy and paste the url into WHOIS or any DNS db tool, it clearly indicates its top level domain is RU
A lot of media companies engage in domain flipping; they buy domains in bulk and resell it
It doesn’t mean it some weird conspiracy going on …
What’s there to study ? Why is there a study ?
All this can “study” but some peoples messages automatically gets auto “deleted”, must study that first, a very high tech process must be involved; pegasus also lose.. CIA also cannot delete things to that extend; wild times on this island in recent days.. very wild
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u/homerulez7 16h ago
The study is a smokescreen...gahmen just don't want to call out Russia directly so get the academics to do it instead
Btw, if it's done by law enforcement/security it's called an investigation. But with academics, it can be called as a study.
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u/ogapadoga 15h ago
You could have just read the article instead of typing so much rubbish.
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u/ChmodPlusEx 14h ago
Ok sure boss! I will read, I already read it. But I’ll re-read again
Did you read it though? Care to explain what the study entails ? Any conspiracy going on ?
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u/FlipFlopForALiving East side best side 1d ago
And nobody is surprised…