/tech/ - Technology

Marx taught us how to do material analysis by looking at societies and economics in motion. I'll endeavor to apply this to surveillance capitalism.

We'll take the perspective of the other side. There are essentially 3 search engines.

Number One is the hustle-search. It's a search engine that allows scammers to search for consumer-victims based on what kind of psychological weaknesses can be used to trick them.

Number Two is the snoop-police-search. This is a search engine for finding people with dissenting political views, and it also serves the vital function of enabling wife-beater cops to find out in which women's-shelter the soon to be ex-wife is hiding for example.

Number Three is the massacre-search. A search engine for finding the designated human sacrifices. For example the Zionators are getting their murder machine target data to eradicate the human-shield-ethnicity of the Palestinian population and of course students from American/European universities, from this type of search engine. Obviously it's also going to be used by other ethically-challenged groups, like religious nuts taking out abortion doctors or people that frequent gay-bars. Or neocons taking out journalists and whistleblowers, to ensure freedoom and democrazy. The legislators that fail to understand that privacy has to be an absolute right, have blood on their hands.

Lets contrast with an ordinary web-search that finds web-pages. If you have a webpage you want your auto-generated click-bait at the top of the search results. To shove your generic page above all the relevant stuff, to the top, you use something called SEO (search engine optimization). For the 3 previously mentioned search engines you want the opposite type of SEO. That puts your 'page' near the bottom of the search results.

SEO has ruined websearch. The same will happen to the rest of surveillance capitalism. There are powerful incentives to feed this machine bogus information that favors your advantage. For many people it will become a matter of survival.

To elaborate the coming paradigm. Think about ad-blockers those deny the monster the ability to steal your information soul, but it still knows that you are there, it knows that some of it's pray escaped, it will keep hunting and harassing you. The next evolutionary stage will be add-fantasy. Adds are no longer blocked, instead it willPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Recently there has been a lot of commotion around large language model text based AI.
They are able to do impressive stuff, they give useful answers, and even can write somewhat usable programming sample code.

The most famous one currently is chatgpt, but all of those AIs are basically black boxes, that probably have some malicious features under the hood.

While there are Open-Source Implementations of ChatGPT style Training Algorithms
https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/01/open-source-chatgpt/
Those kinda require that you have a sizeable gpu cluster like 500 $1k cards that are specialized kit, not your standard gaming stuff. To chew through large language-models with 100 billion to 500 billion parameters.

The biggest computational effort is the initial training run, that chews through a huge training data-set. After that is done, just running the thing to respond to your queries is easier.

So whats the path to a foss philosophy ethical AI ?
Should people do something like peer to peer network where they connect computers together to distribute the computational effort to many people ?

Or should people go for reducing the functionality until it can run on a normal computer ?
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A terror group with japanese origins (that calls it self "Neentendoh" or something like that) has just launched a mass dmca cyber attack against github where they managed to destroy 8500 forks of an open source project. In their terror manifesto they tried to justify their crusade with other people making software they didn't like.

Is there a better place for hosting source code that isn't so vulnerable to this kind of organized crime ? Github seem to have become a precarious place.

This is the place to share articles.

>Leaked Microsoft documents reveal effort to "Gender Transition" young children
https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/5120067/leaked-microsoft-documents-reveal-effort-to-gender-transition-young-children


>Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla


>IBM / Red Hat whistleblower leaks internal, racist, anti-White presentation.
https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/4996525/ibm-red-hat-whistleblower-leaks-internal-racist-anti-white-presentation


>Microsoft's growing control of Linux
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Here is a thought experiment about a hard problem in auditing computer security
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=sOeuYuvOcl0

if you didn't watch it here's the tldr:
In principle it's possible to compromise enough of the existing software and hardware stack so that a intelligent enough malicious security flaw could hide it self from you no matter how hardcore you go with your security audit. The conclusion being drawn is that the only solution to making sure you have a clean system, is to start from scratch with basic logic circuitry and then slowly build up a trusted software and hardware stack.

It's a clever argument, but there is a much easier way to get around all of this.

You can get to a trusted stack simply by scrambling the logic of a cpu. The only one that will be able to run logic operations on that cpu will be the person that can use the de-scrambler-key on the logic instructions given to that cpu. Malicious inserts into the hardware will return gibberish if they try to listen, and make the cpu produce logic errors if they try to inject code. It doesn't need to be a performant cpu either, something equivalent to 1985 era processors is good enough, as it's only necessary to bootstrap a trusted environment. A moderately sized organization can probably muster the necessary funds and technical sophistication to get a small batch of scrambled cpus produced.

The internet is dying, maybe it's actually already dead. This is a general thread about the dead internet theory. Share articles, first hand proof that the internet is dead, discuss etc. There is alot going on which indicates, that the dead internet theory is becoming reality.

So it appears that in Italy the IPmafia has infiltrated the state and issued a dictate dubbed "Piracy Shield". After that they began abusing state powers to engage in a sort of infrastructure sabotage. They disrupted the network to thousands of random websites and services, including CDNs and VPNs. It caused a huge political shitstorm. Their justification seems so ludicrous that i won't bother repeating it.

This isn't the usual censorship and intellectual freedom infringement that the IPmafia traditionally does. They upped their game. Disrupting lots of online services was a show of force. Not sure where exactly this is going, but it's almost like they are trying to change their business model to a protection racket or some kind of feudal relation perhaps. Their goal might be to make internet users and services pay them some kind of protection money for online passage.

Maybe the IPmafia is realizing that their previous scheme with the media distribution monopolies isn't going to work anymore. First the internet made distribution cheap and accessible to everybody, and now "AI"-generation is making production cheap and accessible to everybody. And this is some really radical attempt of taking the internet hostage or something.

Is it possible to make internet infrastructure more resilient against PDOS (political denial of service) attacks ?

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/27/italys-piracy-shield-creating-real-problems-as-vpns-start-turning-away-italian-users/
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-shield-cloudflare-disaster-blocks-countless-sites-fires-up-opposition-240226/

In the early 20th century armies used search lights to find airplanes in the sky. They sometimes fitted shutters on these lights and used them for Morse-code. The light was pointed at the sky, sometimes at clouds. That enable transmitting "blinky-messages" beyond line of sight over significant distances. Armies eventually abandoned this method of communication for radios.

But there might be cause to bring this idea back. Science has advanced quite a lot in the last 100 years and we can use light to make tiny low power plasma bubbles in the air that emit brief light pulses. Enabling over the horizon optical communication with minimal to no infrastructure costs.

Imagine projecting a tiny holographic blinking dot of light in the sky to transmit information and a photodetector+optic to receive information.

A communication link is configured in 3D space.
-The upside is that the available volume of sky is functionally unlimited, and you never again have to deal with network-collisions and interference from communication signals of others.
-The Downside, it requires a good deal of precision in mechanical systems, so it'll be fiddly for a while. Picture using Binoculars to look at a firefly floating high up in the sky, you need to get up-down, left-right and focal distance just right to see it. There is a technology upgrade path to a solid-state chip version, that works similarly to matrix array antennas, It needs Terra-hertz switching logic, which requires photon-based micro-controller (it exists but it's very bleeding edge)

The range can be tremendous, there is enough gas molecules in the stratosphere to make this work. It will enable hops over the ocean with a small number of relay buoys.

The military might want this technology because
- it's harder to triangulate the origin of a transmission (you need to intersect the light-beam, to find the source), relay-transmitter-stations, soldiers, planes and ships will suffer fewer attacks from signal homing weapons, making it very robust.
- it's very hard to jam, (you need to flood the sky with very thick smoke, usually associated with forest-fires and volcano eruptions)
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I graduated as a software engineer but all jobs and technology seem geared towards making the capitalist class richer, surveilling the people and overexploiting the resources of the earth even harder, should I switch careers and become a unabombing tech hater or can I actually get a job that is at least isn't in a corporation making the world infinitely worse than it already is?

attack on digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/full-chat-control-proposal-leaked-attack-on-digital-privacy-of-correspondence-and-secure-encryption/
heckernews thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39913946
got to the front page rank 1 and then soft-censorship kicked in: bam kicked it down to rank 40
https://hnrankings.info/39913946/

A year ago (give or take) there already was a chat controle law proposal, which got rejected by a number of countries, this is the same thing, zombie resurrected, just even more insane full spectrum mandatory privacy massacre. It's not just the surveillance rape, it's also expropriation of personal property. If you own your tech gadgets that means you can controle what they do and turn off all data collection.

it seems to be violating human rights too:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/european-court-human-rights-confirms-undermining-encryption-violates-fundamental

People have a right to sane privacy rules. Op-out telemetry for the sole purpose of fixing technical issues is OK. Any data collection beyond that is a privacy violation. Definitely no technical implementations that can be used for profiling, tracking or identifying people. Also people must own and controle their stuff so no client-side scanning crap or undermining of encryption. People also have a right to have unmolested digital correspondence. Enough with the dark age persecution culture.

I'm not so sure about this being a total attack on privacy by mad surveillance extremists or an attempt of de-legitimizing the EU regulator. Because it's neither compliance nor enforcement are even remotely plausible. The EU regulator has recently reduced the monopoly power of big tech, could this be a conspiracy to make the regulator appear crazy and lawless ?