I associate May 1 with getting mashed in Helsinki as for many years I
spent it in Finland, with amazing parties in the park for Vappu [0]
the Spring Festival. It's a celebration of Spring, labour day, and
also "education and industry" since people proudly wear their school
colours, company badges and graduation caps. Quite an atmosphere!
I like the arts metaphor and enjoy the writing style. Understanding
"AI" as a component in an ecosystem of materials, tools, techniques,
plans, abandoned attempts and final products is helpful.
The essence of the article is a topic of concern, but is expressed
rather lightly in TFA. End runs around security happen at the
edges. From the bottom; by undermining hardware, or code libraries,
supply chains. And we're now seeing "decapitation attacks" right at
the top. Our "western" security models have a weakness, with their
roots in Prussian military organisation and bureaucratic technical
management, by default they trust up. The whole DOGE caper (what I
would call a Dr Strangelove scenario - variation of insider-threat)
exposes this as actually very vulnerable.
Cybersecurity services that operate as MSPs (the acronym variation
where S is for security) hit a fundamental problem. A managed security
provider becomes a bigger and juicer target since all of its clients
are implied spoils. If they in turn defer-to/buy-from bigger actors up
the food chain, those become juicer targets too.
This a frequent chestnut when we interview cybsersecurity company
CEOs. Although it resurfaces the old "Who guards the guardians?",
there is more to it. One has to actively avoid concentrating too much
"power" (non-ironically a synonym of vulnerability ... heavy lies
the crown) in one place, but to distribute risk by distributing
responsibility for building trust relations (TFA mentions this). I
expect we'll see more and more of this sort of thinking as events
unfold.
Very far from confirmed. I just finished reading [0,1] accounts of
atmospheric heat anomalies being touted as a cause - alongside
speculation about cyber-attacks. Something to remember about terrorist
groups and propaganda merchants, is that they'll claim
"responsibility" or otherwise misattribute acts immediately to gain
attention. Often the first thing reported is what sticks in the public
mind.
My childhood was in the 1970s and 80s when the 'Troubles' [0] affected
Britain, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. There were a
dizzying number of factions, paramilitaries, volunteer groups,
splinter groups... In those times it was rather common for killings and
other actions to be mis-claimed, or tactically denied, with specious
bomb threats or actual terror acts blamed on a different group. It was
a very complex situation, as smouldering war zones usually are.
Eventually the leaders from various camps developed codewords and
protocols, so that for example the IRA or UVF could message MI5 and
have a bomb warning taken seriously, or properly attributed in
reporting. Many things that happened in those days were not at all
clear cut and remain unknown to this day who really did what. Based
on this I would counter that clarity is the exception.
This is about Microsoft, a corporation so giant and unaccountable that
it's able to hide behind complexity. The OP's email issues may even be
a non-malicious expression of that complexity. Nonetheless, the result
is opaque power, from which European tech must rapidly divest
dependency.
But there is a larger pattern to acknowledge here. It's about
unaccountable digital privilege and the ability to wield technology
for capricious harm.
This week I've been interviewing US government tech workers about the
misuse of the SSA "master death file". If you're in this file you're
digitally "deleted from society", after which all credit cards are
automatically cancelled, bank accounts frozen, so one cannot get paid,
see a doctor, travel or function in US society. DOGE are actively
working to consolidate and centralising systems to make it "easier" to
nudge undesirables to "self-deport".
In order to do this, huge amounts of illegal activity are already
afoot, but most people, including judges, are not technically able to
comprehend what is being done or what technofascism looks like.
If we want a "Bill of Bytes", it is going to need some very wise and
far sighted thinkers who understand the nature of digital harms, and
it will need to apply as much to governments and individuals as to
private enterprise.
Existing "cyberlaw", including things like "computer misuse" are
looking decidedly stone-age in the face of 21st century "layer-8/9"
threats.
> …”the SSA "master death file". If you're in this file you're digitally "deleted from society", after which all credit cards are automatically cancelled, bank accounts frozen, so one cannot get paid, see a doctor, travel or function in US society.”
That is the general idea and working theory, but in practice experience has taught me that the MDF doesn’t actually reliably perform this function. As always, it comes down to implementation.
I’ve handled the estates of multiple deceased members of my family, and in that capacity I have witnessed that the result of your death being reported to SSA varies wildly even across businesses in the same industry.
My favorite is ISPs. At least two of the major national ones don’t actually seem to close accounts upon death, even if notified, with no services active and the account settled to $0.
I still receive bills even after notifying the sender of the account holder’s death. There are still financial services accounts with no activity that seem never to close.
I assume that many businesses are just using open accounts they know belong to dead people in order to artificially inflate their customer counts.
The federal government and its agencies very quickly update their databases with additions to the death file, and that seems to stick. Private sector is a crap shoot.
Praise inefficiency! It actually seems a really useful garbage
collection mechanism. And such a lame tool to abuse, if indeed the
points made about "weaponising" it are accurate. I'll post link to the
episode here when it's out.
As promised, here's an interview with Alt US Digital Service (AKA "We
The Builders") with some eye opening talk about misuse of digital
systems to harry and bully US citizens into "self-deportation".
Editing audio interviews for podcast I sometimes remove lots of
"particles" as the author calls them (I just call them "ums and ahs"),
TFA poses a question. Do particles have "meaning"? Don't think I ever
heard a discussion of that in any linguistics class, but they do have
an effect. Working in radio/podcast you get quite a deep feel for
speech as more than just words.
I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work
with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood,
excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So
often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between
multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational
leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven
into their speech.
(The article is satire. Particles are an ill-defined class, they may have "meaning" or change the meaning of something, like "up" in "look up!", or they may say something about the speaker's attitude towards the statement or they may be required syntactically e.g. when posing a question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle#Modern_me... )
Yup, I recall Atari ST (68000) and BBC Micro (6502) having unbuffered
and interrupt access to 6402 UART - which I used to C/ASM to fire MIDI
bytes to and from.
I'll counter that. The argument that complexity somehow itself
justifies anything is a retreat to the folly of philosopher kings that
Plato wrote an entire work against (you all have heard of "The
Republic" - which careful, thorough readers of political science
understand is a rejection of such simplicity. Indeed all philosopher
kings, like Hitler, Mao, Stalin etc... fail horribly and cause misery
and death)
Furthermore, incumbent conditions foster complexity. Complexity is a
symptom of political failure as much as a cause.
> professional politicians
We are surely seeing that these two words do not belong together in
21st century society. Most of our "politicians" are the antithesis of
"professional", being vain, shallow, corrupt and immoral.
It is surely clear that any randomly selected mature person could
fare better, with minimal training/induction.
With communication technology and "AI" as their new weapons, the
present cadre of egotist politicians are an ever more dangerous breed.
As the OP rightly says, that's because of a corrupt and captured
mainstream and social media landscape that they learn to play rather
than engage in listening, thinking and policy making.
We will have no fair politics or justice until the "lies machine" is
utterly destroyed along with those that ride on it. It's not that we
haven't had lies-machines all along, but part of ur political/civic
duty is to tear it down and counter it - something we have failed to
do in the Internet age.
Real experts, who are quiet civil servants and scientists are being
attacked and displaced precisely because they are ones able to manage
complexity and to communicate rationally. Almost all of these people,
who form the real government, are driven by duty, or pursuit of
truth, not base ambition.
You are confusing some things, but your central point is still correct imo.
Philosopher kings != democratic representants.
Our societal complexity is a result of our cultural evolution and not caused by political failure.
Professional politicans in the most basic sense know their craft and their field of expertise well enough to articulate legalese that achieves something intended and does not get ripped appart by courts or adused by others. Corruption, etc. is not a contradictor of professionalism.
That said, why should randomly selected people be better and not get corrupted or misinformed? Even harder, why should they push urgently needed political change that impacts them and many other negatively (bad short term, good/needed long term)?
Your central point of civic duty and democratic literacy falls on all of us, and right now, imo it requires long term thinking professionals to reform child care, education and as a 2nd order, our media and state. Right now, the populus is not able to drag itself out on its own.
> Philosopher kings != democratic representants. Professional
politicans in the most basic sense know their craft and their field
of expertise well
Indeed. What we see though is a decline in the quality of
representatives who are forced to skew toward immodest grandiosity and
media theatrics instead of statecraft. They forced into a race to the
bottom to present a veneer of "expertise" in everything, and
pontificate confidently.
> Our societal complexity is a result of our cultural evolution and
not caused by political failure.
I'll hold my position here; Culture and politics are not separate. If
politics is the project to attain a "good life" (Aristotle), then
managing complexity is part of that. There is no "perfect" society
that is such a burden on its people it's unfit to live in
(Tocqueville).
> Corruption, etc. is not a contradictor of professionalism.
Your pragmatic slant maybe, but it is not a definition of public
office I recognise or respect. Integrity and professionalism are
bedfellows in my take.
> That said, why should randomly selected people be better and not get
corrupted or misinformed?
This is a very good question. The question, indeed.
I don't think I've even thought about it, but simply started from the
clear perspective (one that I've arrived at reluctantly through
observing the world) that a random person could do no worse than
those who seek power today.
Maybe that's what the "anti-elite" populists wanted to achieve - a
devaluation of politics itself. Ready to offer up their "technical
solutions".
> civic duty and democratic literacy falls on all of us, and right
now,
How do you think real professionals and experts, who are being
excluded from the decision making arena, can be effective in exile?
Working with these guys [0] recently I see the emerging idea of a
functional government in exile ready to "restore from backups" after
DOGE crash the system.
[0] https://en.biginfinland.com/vappu-spring-fest-finland/