The Internet is a shithole

[Sean Hayden]

You guys know we're all screwed because of the Internet right? All that data doesn't just help a corporation tailor ads, it can be used by them and governments to develop insights and tools beyond what any of us can imagine; obviously, because it's just a new field of science, and what well funded scientists can discover and create is seemingly limitless.

I guess the space to watch is China's social credit system(s).....

[Brian Peacock]

It's all data.

[Brian Peacock]

It's been good knowing you guys ..

Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together

It is the morning after the internet went offline and, as much as you would like to think you would be delighted, you are likely to be wondering what to do.

You could buy groceries with a chequebook, if you have one. Call into work with the landline – if yours is still connected. After that, you could drive to the shop, as long as you still know how to navigate without 5G.

A glitch at a datacentre in the US state of Virginia this week reminded us that the unlikely is not impossible. The internet may have become an irreplaceable linchpin of modern life, but it is also a web of creaking legacy programs and physical infrastructure, leading some to wonder what it would take to bring it all down.

The answer could be as simple as some acute bad luck, a few targeted attacks, or both. Extreme weather takes out a few key datacentres. A line of AI-written code deep in a major provider – such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft – is triggered unexpectedly and causes a cascading software crash. An armed group or intelligence agency snips a couple of undersea cables.

These would be bad. But the real doomsday event, the kind that the world’s few internet experts still worry about in private Slack groups, is slightly different – a sudden, snowballing error in the creaky, decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet. Think of the plumbing that directs the flow of connection, or the address books that allow one machine to locate another.

We’ll call it “the big one” and if it were to happen then at the very least, you would need your chequebook...

[pErvinalia]

That's it, I'm going to bury some cash in the backyard.

[Sean Hayden]

a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service

“Our system analyzes what works to make the content smarter over time. The best performing content becomes the training data for what comes next,” Doublespeed’s site says. Doublespeed also says its service can create slightly different variations of the same video, saying “1 video, 100 ways.”
“Winners get cloned, not repeated. Take proven content and spawn variation. Different hooks, formats, lengths. Each unique enough to avoid suppression,” the site says.

https://www.404media.co/a16z-backed-sta ... a-service/

It’s a bot farm. But they’ll just get better and better, and those new insights and tools are coming…

[pErvinalia]

How long until 95% of the internet is just bots talking to each other?

[Tero]

I think 95% of the Internet has been in and out of my junk mail.