Weekend Edition 54: More AI Shenanigans, Elon World, and Internet for all?
Weekend Edition 54 – AI Shenanigans and Community Internet
SpaceX Now Has Military Comms Contract
AI Shenanigans with Bard, ChatGPT, the CIA, and More
FCC & Net Neutrality: Part ?
FTC Suing Amazon
X Axes “Election Integrity”
Community Internet Access
WE 1 – SpaceX Nets US Mil Comms Contract
Just what Elon needed, another gov’t contract. If it weren’t for gov’t contracts and corporate welfare, he would be a broke side note because his “inventions” and “innovations” are mostly crap when evaluated on their own merits. If you couldn’t tell, I’m tired of talking about this clown and his “achievements”. I see him as a creation of the deep state who vacillates in his opinions and actions depending on which way he senses the wind blowing. I do not trust him worth a damn. I used to want a Tesla, now whenever I see someone driving one, my first thought is, “well, there’s another sucker”. But I digress. This contract is actually relatively small in Musk terms… Only up to $70 million for a siloed communications platform based on Starlink technology. What else is involved? We don’t really know. Is Starlink up to the challenge for providing military grade communications? I don’t know. These feels like a PR move, to me. Back to my initial point, though, this feels like the DOD saving one of its creatures because Starlink is not profitable yet, and with as high end of a client as the DOD, it seems like that would add prestige to the company and encourage people to give it a shot. Personally, I don’t get the drive toward satellite communications methods, when they are necessarily farther away than terrestrial options, introducing more latency to the connection. Just dumb.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-wins-pentagon-contract-to-supply-military-communications
WE 2 – AI Shenanigans This Week
Bard conversations have started to be indexed by Google Search. What did you think would happen when you feed the search giant more information, anyway? Use your brains, people. If it makes shareable links to your “conversations” with Bard, then why wouldn’t the Google Search crawler grab those links and put them into its search results list? Let’s use our brains, people. Google claims that they are working to stop that from happening in the meantime, but why take the chance, anyway? These chat bots are a privacy nightmare to begin with, “Thanks, Microsoft!” (sarcasm) Remember, Microsoft was the one who threw data gathering caution to the wind about a year ago when it heavily invested in OpenAI. They decided that security and privacy were secondary concerns to just getting ChatGPT out into the wild ASAP, and could be “dealt with later”. Do you value your privacy that little? Are convenience and expediency that important to you that you are willing to give that much more data to our would-be tech overlords (not to mention the 3-letter agencies which gave them life originally)? You may be thinking, “I don’t have anything to hide. I haven’t done anything wrong.” Well, have you ever searched for truth on the internet? Tried to dig into election interference claims? Questioned the Narrative? These are online actions which get you “noticed”. You may be on a list or two, already. You may not have been de-platformed or de-banked, but many have been. Choose to learn the best ways to move forward with privacy as a primary concern, and let me tell you, using these chat bots ain’t it, Chief. It is time to get away from MS products with Co-Pilot (aka ChatGPT) built into the OS and accompanying software. It is time to ditch Google for everything, unless you are willing to encrypt every file you upload there (which would do nothing for your emails and search histories), so just find alternatives, ideally through self-hosting as much as you can. It is time to get away from Apple (not that my co-host is doing so, but yeah… He’s a walking oxymoron, a privacy wonk who uses Apple because it is pretty and “just works”, even though they snoop on all your data) for the same reasons… When you trust them with your data, it is private from everyone but Apple, kind of like with the MS ecosystem. Except, with MS, there is no such thing as security, as Windows, and the rest of their ecosystem, is so full of security holes that you’re lucky if you find something that is actually protected well.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/be-careful-with-bard-google-search-showing-private-chatbot-snippets
Guess what? The CIA is now developing own AI tools that we are allowed to know about now. Oh boy. Yes, they need AI to help them and the rest of the USIC (US Intelligence Community) to sort through all of the data they gather from US citizens (thanks, W!) You, if you are an AI researcher, could get a job helping the Devil to spy on the rest of us and parse that info into something more useful for them. Doesn’t that just sound like a utopian vision? Try 1984 to the max. They have the surveillance apparatus trained on us already, but particularly for those of us who are not wise to their games at all, that just looks like playing in the Big Tech sandboxes, as usual. You can foil some of their data gathering by using tools like encrypted DNS and no-log VPNs, but aside from that, if you MUST use spy OSes and software, stick them in virtualized environments, where they can only see and communicate if you allow them to, vs taking all your telemetry and phoning home constantly to report on you, like some sort of Stasi or KGB or CIA informant. If this feels like allot of work, it is, but thanks to the Patriot Act and others since then, our personal privacy is no longer guaranteed in this country. Is it worth a bit of work to clamp down on the firehose of data that you volunteer to Big Tech and the 3-letter agencies by using Big Tech tools? I think so. If all of us woke up and stopped making it easy on them to mine our data, then I think we would make a big impact.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/bard-chatgpt-and-the-cia-us-agency-prepping-its-own-chatbot
Now you can allegedly tell Bard to fuck off from your website without harming your SEO rankings on Google Search. The tool is called Google-extended, and you can modify your robots.txt file on your website with the following string to tell it to buzz off:
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
Will it work? I don’t know. I will be implementing it on my websites though, since I do not want these stupid bots getting any smarter reading my content, then using it to cobble together some answer to someone else’s query. No thanks. My sites don’t have paywalls anyway, but I want credit for whatever marginally original thoughts I may have, and being spat into some database doesn’t offer that. Call me old fashioned, but if 242 of the top 1000 websites have already implemented the ChatGPT version of this string, then why not me? I know, odd that I would make any appeal to popularity like that, but there it is.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/dont-want-google-to-use-your-website-for-ai-training-you-can-now-opt-out
Here we go again… ChatGPT can easily browse the internet again. Enterprise and Plus users can now use Browse with Bing in the Bing Chat window. It had been rolled out, but due to abuse by some users, and outcry from creators and stakeholders whose material behind a paywall had been illegitimately accessed through the tool. Seems like this was inevitable. We know that these AI models can get around paywalls, and that there have been lawsuits about that capability, yet MS/ OpenAI is continuing on with this, even doubling down. I know that Connor and I have opposing opinions about intellectual property and the like, but this just seems stupid, unless MS figures that they have enough data gathered over the last 25 years on all gov’t officials that they don’t need to worry about negative rulings being particularly effective or brutal. They say that it will also be rolled out for free users soon as well.
https://www.engadget.com/chatgpt-is-allowed-to-browse-the-internet-once-again-211332316.html
Meta, not to be outdone, has created 25 AI personalities of famous people, from Snoop Dogg to Bear Grylls, and many in between. Now these personalities are not specifically clones of the real person, but based on the real person and tied to specific interests. That is creepy AF to me. These AIs are apparently voiced by these celebrities, somehow. This just feel like desperation on the part of robot lizard boy, Zuck, to make everyone look at Meta again when the core platform is more or less dead. I don’t know. These bots will play characters who can directly pull search results from Bing. That just sounds like a bad thing to me. If I’m gonna talk to a chat bot, I’d rather it be a blank slate rather than have a gimmick personality tacked onto it. I can’t imagine that this is going to be well-received by the user base for Meta. Then again, I’m weird. I know that. Perhaps the younger set, whom this has been squarely targeted at, will be awed by having some of their favorite influencers (such as Mr. Beast) involved with the project. I hope not. Just stay away from this nonsense, guys. It may be kind cool on the surface, but do you really want to give even more data to Zuck than you already volunteer through using Meta, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads (who actually uses Threads, anyway?)? Ditch these platforms and use your brains for something more beneficial, please.
WE 3 – FTC on Net Neutrality… Again
Rosenworcel, with her newly minted, imbalanced board at the head of the FCC, is looking to re-roll out the controversial regulations that were so important to the Obama administration and now to Depends’ so-called administration. What is Net Neutrality, and why do GOP/ conservative lawmakers and pundits hate it as we do? In brief, Net Neutrality makes broadband ISPs into something like phone companies, a utility. This exposes big money mega-corporations to regulations which they do not want to deal with. I’m not suggesting that anyone on either side of the aisle is more influenced by special interests than the other, here, that is not my point. DC politics is a nasty swamp which has very little to do with We the People anymore. That is 90% of our “representatives” on both sides of the legislative branch. My primary concern as a constitutionalist is when the bureaucracy creates more power for itself without consent from the governed. I believe that the government should be small, taxes should be low, if they exist at all, and regulations should be close to non-existent. However, that requires a moral, intelligent, and informed populace, which doesn’t really exist at scale right now. That is how we got where we are from Ben Franklin’s comment in response to what sort of government they created for the US, back in the 1780s, “A republic, if you can keep it”. Also how we have degenerated from John Adams’ famous quote that our constitution is “a government for a moral people, and is ill-equipped to govern any other.” Here we are, though. With companies big enough to be governments in their own rights, buying influence with senators, representatives, cabinet-level officials, and even presidents. Companies large enough to readily abuse everyone because they have near-monopolies on the tools and services that we have become dependent on in the present moment. I believe in the free market and that the free market is the most just way to handle the means of production that humanity has developed, therefore, I also believe that on a long enough timeline, governments should not need to be so big as to be tyrannical. However, in our current situation, government is unfortunately necessary to put these giants in their place from time to time, so that they do not become abusive to the point where the public is harmed by their practices (which could be argued to be the case right now). The banner rules for this set of regulations hinge on the FCC being able to force companies to keep their services “free of unnecessary impedance to the flow of data”, such as data caps, bandwidth caps for specific services or customers, and other such things, which are not really a super issue right now.
On the surface, like most of these regulatory efforts, that sounds rosy and hunky-dory, doesn’t it? If you dig down, the veneer is only deep enough to fool someone who just glances at the patch for the “problem”, though, and that is why people like me don’t see that it is a net benefit to be net neutral. The problem is that it centralizes too much more power in the hands of unelected officials, so they need means to police these regulations, which would give them even more access to data than they already have, and could snowball into more ability to shut down dissent in our country. Have we recently seen proof that (((they))) would do just about anything to maintain their power? Yes. Yes, we have. Why are the January 6 participants still being held in DC jails? Why are they having the book thrown at them when they did (mostly) nothing wrong that day? This could potentially turn into something really nasty for We the People. That is why I stand against it, from what I understand of it.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-prepares-to-take-another-swing-at-writing-net-neutrality-rules
WE 4 – FTC Sues Amazon, Claiming Monopoly
It’s about time. Amazon is too damn big. It uses dark patterns throughout its customer facing properties. It makes it hard for merchants to sell things elsewhere, particularly if they find that they could sell their wares for less elsewhere.They will bury those sellers’ listings beneath layers of Amazon house brands and other ads for related things, such that those sellers’ wares may as well not be on that marketplace. This seems like it should be an open and shut case, but then, like MS, AMZN probably has copious amounts of blackmail data on the people seeking to knock it down a few pegs. We will see what, if anything comes of this suit. How many mom and pop businesses have had to close down because drop shippers on Amazon undercut them? One could argue that this is progress, but if progress entails destroying the life’s work of many, then is it really worth it? I don’t buy it. That isn’t to say that I am not among the throngs of people who hold Prime memberships, and on whom Amazon has far too much shopping and search pattern data. I am a hypocrite on this one, because I do not yet see a viable alternative to the Amazon near hegemony, quasi-monopoly situation. Do I want one? Yes. Are there a few marketplaces which are trying to do that, I think so. However, none are there yet. I think Amazon should be broken up, just like Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple should be. It should be splintered as AT&T once was, though that didn’t last all that long, as AT&T is probably bigger now than it was before the efforts of the FTC in the late 90s and early aughts.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ftc-sues-amazon-claiming-e-commerce-giant-maintains-a-monopoly
WE 5 – Engadget Whines About X Firing Election Tampering Team
Awww, poor leftists. Crying over Elon actually following up on what he promised when he took over Twitter almost a year ago. Yaccarino, who was hired about 6 months ago, promised that X would abide by the rules set forth by the EU regarding mis and disinformation, which they have found to be much larger issues on the platform than on others, such as Meta. X/Twitter is the wild west right now. I still think that Elon is trying to torch it. There are many things which do not make sense from a business standpoint, such as how he always runs his mouth on the platform. That is not a normal CEO thing, typically CEOs get insulated behind layers of gatekeepers and PR people. This is so that whatever the public sees from a high profile CEO is sanitized and en pointe, so that they don’t have to do damage control a’la LMG. I don’t want to throw gas on that pyre, but in brief, there were issues at LMG (Linus Media Group, which operates the Linus Tech Tips, Short Circuit, and other tech-related news channels on YouTube) surrounding the accuracy of their videos, as well as some company culture issues which have led to what should be a criminal investigation. Linus Sebastian, the founder and owner of the company, likes to run his mouth, and often gets himself into trouble doing so. This is very similar to Elon’s approach with X/Twitter at this point. I don’t need to repeat my take on him from earlier in the blog, so suffice to say that I do not trust him worth anything. I think that he pulled the plug on these teams because he knew that they were ultimately bad for users. So, good on him for that. That’s where I’m going to leave this one…
https://www.engadget.com/x-reportedly-cuts-half-of-its-election-integrity-team-091135783.html
WE 6 – Mesh Internet: Achievable Goal or Unobtainable Pipedream?
First, we should probably define some terms, as mesh may not be a common idea. A mesh network is by nature decentralized, which grants it resiliency. Instead of a traditional ISP situation, a mesh-based provider has multiple points of ingress and egress, which means that if one point goes down, traffic is shuttled to another hub or switch, whereas if something happens to your fiber optic line in the street, you could be out of luck for weeks, as my co-host has been experiencing. If he was working with a mesh provider, such as one like NYC Mesh, then he would still get solid service, and it would almost certainly cost less. Given, he is not in NYC, but this could, at least in part, solve some of the issues he’s had over the last month or so. It involves low-cost, point to point directional WiFi transmitters and receivers to link the nodes of the mesh network. There are other similar organizations in Philly, LA, and Portland which have similar goals, which are to serve under-served communities with solid, unlimited broadband access. The more I look at this, the more apparent it is that they intend to create an open MAN, or Municipal Area Network, only without direct reference to the city of New York. This puts them in the crosshairs for AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum, and the rest of the ISP mafia which serves NYC, along with much of the rest of our nation. These companies see community projects like NYC Mesh as existential threats to their hegemony over internet access. This breeds much animosity because thousands of people per day (hard to tell how many exactly, since they do not gather personal data on their users) choose to access the internet via their mesh network rather than through those companies’ pipelines (at least directly). I can see how this is difficult to execute on for long term situations, as it is dependent on volunteers and on the main ISPs in the area to not shut it down whenever they realize that it is happening, via cutting off access for the main nodes or some other such draconian measure.
This also sounds like a security nightmare, since unless you are hardlining into your access node, it is just a giant WiFi access point network. That gives me a cold sweat thinking about it. However, if you, as a home user for a mesh access situation like Mesh NYC are intelligent and bring that goodness into your home via a personal router, then to ideally a separate access point for your network, and you set up a VPN and encrypted DNS for it, along with firewalls to keep your devices connected with the other devices on the MAN-type mesh network, but safe from prying eyes. That moves this from doable for the average bear to needing some sort of network engineer to adequately get safely connected. Maybe I am jumping the gun here, but in looking more closely at the documentation for Mesh NYC, I see that the mesh is really not about point to many type scenarios, but rooftop to rooftop, rooftop to hub, and hub to hub connections. Once installed outside, a GBe connection is established to an inside router for the user’s personal network, which they can have be as complex as they want. The main thing that NYC Mesh asks is that those end user private networks keep guest networks open. That makes me nervous, but if you set it up right, you could pass that onto neighbors as you might with a traditional connection (as a failback option for them, should their own traditional connections fail). That said, I feel a bit better about the whole scenario, here, from a security standpoint. Still seems very nerd-oriented, and there aren’t as many nerds in the populations that they claim to want to help the most with this. Sorry if this has been a bit random, but was writing as I read things. Take a look at the docs for NYC Mesh here, if you are interested: https://docs.nycmesh.net/