pluralistic

pluralistic, 1 month ago to random

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

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pluralistic, 7 months ago to random

This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."

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pluralistic, 3 months ago to random

I wuz robbed.

More specifically, I was tricked by a phone-phisher pretending to be from my bank, and he convinced me to hand over my credit-card number, then did $8,000+ worth of fraud with it before I figured out what happened. And then he tried to do it again, a week later!

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

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pluralistic, 2 months ago to random

Hard to overstate how enshittified and botshitted Google Maps has become. Went looking for my local locksmith on Gmaps. Maps shows 20+ fake locksmith referral scam outlets and doesn't even register the real locksmith, despite it being fully visible in Street View.

Instead, a red pin on the shop identifies it as a fake locksmith scammer. The real locksmith - which has been there SINCE 1942 (!!) and is a verified merchant - doesn't even show up.

Google Maps, showing the storefront for Golden State Lock as an empty building.

pluralistic, 7 months ago to unity

"#Unity isn't a game engine. It's a advertising and malware network that merged with a popular game engine as a delivery channel and now wears its corpse as its skin"

-#RobBeschizza

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/17/game-developers-flee-unity-after-exorbitan-price-plan-announced-but-not-everyone-can-get-out.html

pluralistic, 4 months ago to Watches

It's time for action

#horology #anarchism #sign #nola

pluralistic, 9 months ago to random

My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it's a #BigTech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the #audiobook comes from me - because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

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pluralistic, 21 days ago to random

ceci n'est pas une bannière

#StreetFurniture #Recursion #Torino

pluralistic, 2 months ago to random

It's been 21 years and 29 days since Tor Books published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the years since, Tor has published every one of my novels, sending me around the USA and Canada to talk about them. Now, they've teamed up with @humblebundles to sell 18 of my ebooks on a name-your-price basis, with part of the proceeds going to benefit @eff:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cory-doctorow-novel-collection-tor-books-books

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pluralistic, 3 months ago to random

It's been 40 years since #EmmanuelGoldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing @2600: The #Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first #phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:

https://www.2600.com/

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pluralistic, 3 days ago to random

Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

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pluralistic, 2 months ago to random

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google - which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic - suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

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pluralistic, 6 months ago to random

#Enshittification is the process by which a #platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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pluralistic, 2 months ago to random

Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

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pluralistic, 4 months ago to infosec

I talk a lot about the incompetence of digital voting vendors a lot, but HOLY CATS

https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2023/12/14/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-forced-to-rerun-contract-vote-after-crew-discovered-ballot-system-was-vulnerable-to-fraud/

#infosec

pluralistic, 10 months ago to threads

Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires

https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

#FireDebt #Enshittification #SwitchingCosts #Threads

pluralistic, 4 months ago to random

In A City On Mars, biologist #KellyWeinersmith and cartoonist @ZachWeinersmith set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren't going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead:

https://www.acityonmars.com/

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pluralistic, 4 months ago to random

There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else - environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.

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pluralistic, 5 months ago to Toronto

Ignite Minds, Not Books

#Toronto #TorontoPublicLibrary #MetroRef #BannedBooks #MomsForLiberty

The grand, modernist atrium of Toronto's Metro Reference Library with a banner reading "IGNITE MINDS NOT BOOKS"
The grand, modernist atrium of Toronto's Metro Reference Library with a banner reading "IGNITE MINDS NOT BOOKS"
The Tower of Banned books, a sculpture composed of a cylinder of stacked banned books.

pluralistic, 7 months ago to random

The booksellers at #HalfPriceBooks achieved union recognition in Jan 2022, but their employer won't give them a contract. That's a scummy way for a "family business" to treat hardworking booksellers, who are seeking a living wage - and are being offered a real-terms pay cut instead. Booksellers can't live on love of literature - they need to pay rent, buy groceries and support their families. Half Price, give HPB Workers Unite the contract they deserve!

https://www.ufcw.org/actions/campaign/half-price-books-workers-united/

pluralistic, 1 month ago to random

Earlier this month, Ed Pierson was supposed to fly from Seattle to New Jersey on Alaska Airlines. He boarded his flight, but then he had an urgent discussion with the flight attendant, explaining that as a former senior Boeing engineer, he'd specifically requested that flight because the aircraft wasn't a 737 Max:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/boeing-737-max-passenger-boycott/index.html

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pluralistic, 7 months ago to ontario

As a teenager growing up in #Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers #TreePlanting; they'd come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they'd made a new forest with their own blistered hands.

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pluralistic, 9 months ago to random

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/

#Pluralistic

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pluralistic, 3 months ago to random

Republicans want to defund the (corporate) police

"The Antitrust Division has fewer people enforcing anti-monopoly laws in a $24 trillion economy than the Smithsonian Museum has security guards."

-Matt Stoller

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/congressional-republicans-to-defund

#antitrust #corruption

pluralistic, 25 days ago to ai

> I find my feelings about #AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about #blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

• @molly0xfff

https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless-2/