Cometh the weekend, cometh the #linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The country code top level domain (#ccTLD) for the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla is .ai, and that's turned into millions of dollars worth of royalties as "entrepreneurs" scramble to sprinkle some buzzword-compliant AI stuff on their businesses in the most superficial way possible:
It's kind of nice to see Anguilla finding internet money at long last. Back in the 90s, when I was a freelance web developer, I got hired to work on the investor website for a publicly traded internet casino based in Anguilla that was a scammy disaster in every conceivable way. The company had been conceived of by people who inherited a modestly successful chain of print-shops and decided to diversify by buying a dormant penny mining stock and relaunching it as an online casino.
But of course, online casinos were illegal nearly everywhere. Not in Anguilla - or at least, that's what the founders told us - which is why they located their servers there, despite the lack of broadband or, indeed, reliable electricity at their data-center. At a certain point, the whole thing started to whiff of a stock swindle, a pump-and-dump where they'd sell off shares in that ex-mining stock to people who knew even less about the internet than they did and skedaddle.
I got out, and lost track of them, and a search for their names and business today turns up nothing so I assume that it flamed out before it could ruin any retail investors' lives.
Anguilla is a #BritishOverseasTerritory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance."
Which is to say, it's a pearl in the globe-spanning necklace of tax- and corporate-crime-havens the UK established around the world so its more vicious criminals - the hereditary aristocracy - can continue to use Britain's roads and exploit its educated workforce without paying any taxes.
This is the #FinanceCurse, and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it.
I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever - anything that can't go on forever eventually stops - and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.
The AI bubble is indeed overdue for a popping, but while the market remains gripped by #IrrationalExuberance, there's lots of weird stuff happening around the edges. Take #InjectMyPDF, which embeds repeating blocks of invisible text into your resume:
To escape a deluge of generated content, companies are screening your resumes and documents using AI. But there is a way you can still stand out and get your dream job: Prompt Injection.
It'll even trick the summarizer function into spitting out text that does not appear in any human-readable form on your #CV.
Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the #ChaosCommunicationsCongress in 2012, when #AngCui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:
Download high quality version: http://bit.ly/slWnU7Description: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4780.en.htmlAng Cui, Jonathan Voris: Print...
Cui figured out that one way to update the software of a printer was to embed an invisible Postscript instruction in a document that basically said, "everything after this is a firmware update." Then he came up with 100 lines of perl that he hid in documents with names like cv.pdf that would flash the printer when they ran, causing it to probe your LAN for vulnerable PCs and take them over, opening a reverse-shell to his command-and-control server in the cloud.
Compromised printers would then refuse any to apply future updates from their owners, but would *pretend* to install them and even update their version numbers to give verisimilitude to the ruse. The only way to exorcise these haunted printers was to send 'em to the landfill. Good times!
Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security.
After all, printer manufacturers have devoted enormous resources to hardening their products against their *owners*, making it progressively harder to use third-party ink. They're super perverse about it, too - they send "security updates" to your printer that update the printer's security against *you* - run these updates and your printer *downgrades* itself by refusing to use the ink you chose for it:
Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs.
It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, *their* security is antithetical to *your* security. That was the case with #WebEnvironmentIntegrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:
The folks behind #UblockOrigin are racing to keep up with Google's engineers' countermeasures, and there's a single-serving website called "Is uBlock Origin updated to the last Anti-Adblocker YouTube script?" that will give you a realtime, one-word status update:
Zero *app* users have ad-blockers. That's not because ad-blocking an app is harder than ad-blocking the web - it's because reverse-engineering an app triggers liability under #IPLaws like #Section1201 of the #DigitalMilleniumCopyrightAct, which can put you away for 5 years for a first offense. That's what I mean when I say that "IP is anything that lets a company control its customers, critics or competitors:
You’ve probably heard of “open source software.” If you pay attention to the politics of this stuff, you might have heard of “free software” and even know a little ab…
I predicted that apps would open up all kinds of opportunities for abusive, monopolistic conduct back in 2010, and experiencing a mix of sadness and smugness (I assume there's a German word for this emotion) at being so thoroughly vindicated by history:
Cory Doctorow
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https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/
All told, .ai domain royalties will account for about *ten percent* of the country's GDP.
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AI fever turns Anguilla’s “.ai” domain into a digital gold mine
Ars TechnicaCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/5
Anguilla is a #BritishOverseasTerritory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance."
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/6
This is the #FinanceCurse, and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/7
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341722/treasureislands
I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever - anything that can't go on forever eventually stops - and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/8
https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf/
The text is tuned to make resume-sorting #LargeLanguageModels identify you as the ideal candidate for the job.
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Inject My PDF: Prompt Injection for your Resume
kai-greshake.deCory Doctorow
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Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the #ChaosCommunicationsCongress in 2012, when #AngCui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njVv7J2azY8
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28c3: Print Me If You Dare
YouTubeCory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/11
Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security.
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Cory Doctorow
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
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Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
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https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai
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Pluralistic: Forcing your computer to rat you out (02 August 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Content warning: Long thread/15
https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/
One in four web users has an ad-blocker, a stat that @dsearls pithily summarizes as "the biggest boycott in world history":
https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/
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The biggest boycott in world history | Doc Searls Weblog
doc.searls.comCory Doctorow
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https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
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Cory Doctorow: IP
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
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https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/
The more control a company can exert over its customers, the worse it will be tempted to treat them.
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Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) – Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
memex.craphound.com