@jsrailton@mastodon.social
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jsrailton

@jsrailton@mastodon.social

Chasing online badness. Senior Researcher at Citizen Lab. Views mine.

Also, I like tracking stuck boats.

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jsrailton, to random
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Remember Tara Reade?

The one-time accuser is live on 🇷🇺Russian State TV announcing that she's defected.

Sitting with Maria Butina whom she refers to as a friend.

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jsrailton, to random
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Notice how fast alleged medical concern for youth became... smash rainbow displays at Target?

This is a playbook.

It must be forcefully resisted.

jsrailton, to random
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Life in prison for sex in .

American evangelical extremists got the ear of Uganda's dictator & helped this happen

They have the same goals for people that are in 🇺🇸America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/29/world/africa/uganda-anti-gay-bill.html

jsrailton, to random
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Proven way to stop an autocrat?

Don't be a spoiler candidate like this guy.

jsrailton,
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Everything you need to know.

Letting Steve Bannon flatter you into a vanity candidacy is the opposite of moral courage.

jsrailton, to random
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Whenever I see
I wonder: anybody check that phone for etc. lately?

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jsrailton, to random
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Countdown Florida trying to pass a law absolving of responsibility for sudden death.

jsrailton, to random
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Sedition has consequences.

18 years of prison for Elmer Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers leader.

First sentence in the & cases

Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/politics/oath-keepers-stewart-rhodes-sentenced.html

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jsrailton, to random
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They just made it up.

The industry is a scourge.

Not content with tricking people into paying for security talismans by misrepresenting what VPNs do..., they are SEO-optimizing fake advice to drive signups.

The perverse thing is that the high risk people like dissidents & journalists that need to get safer from Predator not only won't be.helped, but real advice is getting drowned out.

Glad to see @maldr0id call it out.

jsrailton,
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@maldr0id For those asking:

Big VPN is shady because a VPN doesn't do most of the safety things users think it will do (protecting from hackers, phishing, etc)..

And for the most part, without changing IPs without wiping cookies, using new browsers, logging out, VPNs won't confer any additional privacy from the websites you visit.

Finally, the industry is consolidating around companies with shady histories around monetizing peoples data.

jsrailton, to random
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Mastodon friends. I've got a search results problem.

When you search for me by name none of the results are... me.

They are all scraped "unofficial mirrors"

Thoughts on how to fix this?

It's a double issue:

1 - how to get my own correct result to show.

2- flag these empty mirrors as spam

jsrailton, to random
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had Murdoch.

has .

jsrailton, to random
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NSO Group sharing password tips is like a landmine manufacturer posting first aid advice for papecuts.

jsrailton, to random
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    jsrailton,
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    UPDATE: when I tweeted this around 30% of the replies celebrated, defended, or deflected from Henry 's promotion of antisemitism.

    Digging into the reply accounts & the likes I found.

    • Explicit pro-nazi content
    • White supremacist accounts
    • Plenty of antisemitism

    A little galaxy of hate & nazi amplification.

    jsrailton, to ai
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    deleted_by_author

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    jsrailton,
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    2/ A big part of the messy soup of issues we have in America is because complex industries successfully avoided regulation.

    In all the consequential industries where regulators defer or are captured by industry... societies get harmed.

    Moreover, Industries that choose how they are regulated often wind up less competitive.

    US automakers kept regulatory pressures at bay on gas mileage.

    Ultimately, their cars were less globally competitive & they lost domestic market share when gas $ went up.

    jsrailton,
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    3/ The argument that the government has no resources to really understand is also false.

    The US gov, national labs, as well & major public universities have incredible levels of talent in AI.

    All available to help craft regulations without capture.

    It's also a familiar irony that an industry that has been mining public institutions for everyone with talent & trying to hire them away... is implying that there is no role for those institutions to play.

    jsrailton,
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    4/ Some in the industry are simultaneously saying:

    "We are going to change everything"

    and

    "Nobody should hold us accountable except by rules we set. Eventually. Maybe"

    Think about that for a second.

    When has that ever, ever been a good choice.

    jsrailton, to internet
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    defending caving to pressure:

    "But they threatened to block us"

    Autocrats will read this as a playbook.

    jsrailton,
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    Next step we gave up dissidents' DMs & locations.

    We could have been blocked otherwise!

    Every platform does give & take w/ gov & user data requests.

    Sometimes different teams push for different approaches. At minimum, you want serious friction & transparency.

    jsrailton,
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    Musk has global liabilities & equities from other business ventures.

    And duties to those shareholders.

    From market access & government customers to manufacturing & materials inputs...

    Autocrats won't hesitate to use these as levers.

    jsrailton, to random
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    Late to the party here, but the chance that new .zip and .mov domains mostly get used for malware attacks is 100%

    Not sure who asked for this, but this is a bad move.

    Block it all.

    This sort of thing undermines our collective & is fundamentally unhelpful.

    jsrailton, to ai
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    Adding the incessant tHiS ThInG iN Ai ChAnGeS EvErYtHiNg threads to my list of Harms...

    jsrailton, to random
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    Spate of spurious claims about messaging apps lately.

    Unless they come with receipts, don't amplify.

    Realtalk: People panicking & switching to a less safe app = godsend to intelligence services like Russia.

    Don't get played.

    jsrailton, to ai
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    Had to factcheck hallucinations about my work by

    Again.

    It's sanity-bending.

    Like trying to hold together the fabric of reality as it rips.

    A bit further each time.

    The factual gravity of the written word, already diminishing, is basically at Martian.

    jsrailton, to random
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    ' is newsworthy & people need to know what he's about'

    This is the justification that the media wrapped around itself in 2016.

    Then spent the last half dozen years soul searching over.

    We're headed right back there.

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