All Gmail users at risk from clever replay attack
Cybercriminals are abusing Google’s infrastructure, creating emails that appear to come from Google in order to persuade people into handing over their Google account credentials.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/04/all-gmail-users-at-risk

No one ever asks who built the trolley.

The most obvious reason that the DOGE twerps would steal sensitive NLRB data seems to me to target labor organizers.

Are there other angles?

#maine #spring #wildlife

In this paper, we experimentally show for the first time the strong incomputability of a quantum experiment, namely the outputs of a quantum random number generator. Moreover, the experimental results are robust and statistically significant.

#Ukraine #Russia #war #Trump

The wonder occasioned by the fact that the things we are at present experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is no philosophical wonder.

When the state of exception...becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system becomes a machine which may at any moment turn lethal.

#USPol

From the decision of Judge Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals refusing to halt proceedings in Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia's case:

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It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.

I also noticed a new Copilot button in GitHub so I zapped that one too.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Jira #Atlassian #NoAI #GitHub

Reflection is at once a creative endeavor and a fundamental refusal. The task of reflection in the face of eugenic modernity is not only to resist biopolitical operations that disallow life to the point of death, in the name of protecting the population and its production, though this is crucial. More fundamentally it means attempting to uncover the limits of the metaphysical apparatuses that render life as an object of knowledge.

What I thought then is still true today: to make something like a software agent legitimately useful for a lot of people would require a large amount of low-level grunt work and non-technical work (2) of the sort that the typical Silicon Valley company is unwilling to do. (3) The technology is the absolute easiest part of this task. Throwing a Bigger Computer at the problem leaves all those other pieces of work undone. It's like putting a bigger engine in a car with no wheels, hoping that'll make the car go.

By the way #AI companies and VCs, I'm available for contract work and have done due diligence research before if you ever want to stop wasting everyone's time and money!

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #agents #hype #SiliconValley #VentureCapital #dev #tech

(1) Which we've been told repeatedly is essentially infinite time in the tech world.
(2) Establishing semantic data standards and convincing a large enough number of people to implement them being an important component. LLMs do not magically develop protocols and solve all the ETL-style problems of translating among different ones. The Semantic Web didn't really stick for a lot of reasons, but one reason is that it's hard!
(3) Back when I was still in the startup world I was asked several times by VCs to tell them what I thought about some new startup that claimed to be able to magically clean and fuse data. I think they're still very keen on investing in this style of magic, because it requires an intense amount of human labor, but I think where companies landed was invisibilizing low-paid workers in other countries and pretending a computer did the work they did. Which has also been happening for well over a quarter of a century.

New from 404 Media: that "college protester" you see online isn't real. Instead it's an AI-powered undercover bot for cops.

We've obtained documents showing how 'Massive Blue' is helping cops deploy AI-powered social media bots to talk to protesters. Examples:

https://www.404media.co/this-college-protester-isnt-real-its-an-ai-powered-undercover-bot-for-cops/

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; BACKSTORY 3 . 36 YEARS OLD « RICHLAND HILLS, TX y | - RAISED IN SAN FRANCISCO a . DIVORCED $. WJ - NO CHILDREN i . - HOBBIES ( > ACTIVISM {INE - LEADER OF A LOCAL GROUP 5 «J ) - BAKING ES CNG 1 Mh fl « PERSONALITY Fue ID \ | i Jal - OUTSPOKEN SEE NY - LONELY Ce 1 WA SEEKING MEANING HEIDI ’ etal > BODY POSITIVE adilcallze . SOCIAL MEDIA Al Persona - INSTAGRAM, SNAP, WHATSAPP, TELEGRAM, SIGNAL, REDDIT, 4CHAN PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED pa

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Example of Our Al Personas PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED . 14 YEARS OLD ! pre 3 = 5 . LOS ANGELES Ru playin fortnite rn its pretty Fo )- i js chillin by myself, man. my = pY. « PARENTS EMIGRATED FROM : momz @ work n my dadz outta What's your fav strategy 4 247 oh ECUADOR | town. so itz jus me n my vid a | games. ; N : ; . ! idk rly hv

Google AI Search Shift Leaves Website Makers Feeling ‘Betrayed’

The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them.

Remember when Facebook told everyone they should change all their content to video, because it got more traffic? And then that turned out to be such a blatant falsehood that companies went bankrupt trying to do this?

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Google #Gemini #AISlop

New: LAPD demanded footage from a Waymo, whose cameras saw a hit-and-run. Shows the police are seeing these are roving surveillance cameras:

https://www.404media.co/lapd-publishes-crime-footage-it-got-from-a-waymo-driverless-car/

4chan Is Down Following What Looks to Be a Major Hack Spurred By Meme War

Hackers claim to have obtained 4chan's code, emails of moderators, and internal communications.

🔗 https://www.404media.co/4chan-is-down-following-what-looks-to-be-a-major-hack-spurred-by-meme-war/

We would appreciate your help in evaluating a new algorithm: https://www.mojeek.com/eval (desktop only)

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Mojeek Algorithm Evaluator screenshot showing side-by-side results

Whenever I'm feeling cranky I send Atlassian feedback about their "AI" features, but so far they've never responded and they seem to be adding more each week.

I really do not understand french onion soup.

"Would you like wet, salty onions? Yes? Here. Have a bucket of them."

“Slopsquatting” in a nutshell:

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

#COVID #COVID19 #COVIDIsStillHere #COVIDIsNotOver #MaskUp #pandemic

Last year around this time (Apr 4 2024) we lost power because of a storm a bit like this one. It snowed much more heavily, and since the temperature hovered near freezing the snow was a heavy wet mess that tore down power lines and trees. Our power was out for around 4 days. If I recall correctly over 300,000 people were without power at some point, around 1/4 of the population of the state. We'd had a 2-day power outage only a week earlier, right at the end of March, and were feeling pretty rough by the time the power came back on. We were putting buckets of ice and snow into the refrigerator to keep the food cold that we hadn't put in the coolers on the porch. It's looking like we're in for some more snow yet but I don't think it'll be like the storm last year.

The tree in the foreground of this picture was crushed by the ice and snow of that storm last year. I had to take off a couple of limbs that were broken almost completely through.

#maine #spring

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Picture of a backyard lined with snowy trees. Snow is falling, and about an inch of snow covers the grass.

(For clarity this is a sardonic post).

#InfoSec #cybersecurity #security #web #dev #tech

OMG! Alonso is here!

Haven't seen him for a week, as his owners apparently made good on their threat to lock him the garage.

But he's escaped (of course).

He's a bit fearty, but he's back!

We have missed him.

Previous Alonso thread was here:

https://chaos.social/@dentangle/113917922178493188

#Trump #tariffs #USPol #USEconomy #GlobalTrade #trade

Public service announcement: this is *not* a dire wolf.

It is a genetically modified grey wolf made to resemble an extinct species, so a bullshit company can raise more money for their bullshit projects.

#Deextinction is a scam on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. It will *not* help us save endangered species. Instead, we should spend our money on preserving their habitats *before* they go extinct.

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Time magazine cover showing Remus, a genetically modified grey wolf claimed to be a "dire wolf." The headline reads: "This is Remus. He's a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years. Endangered species could be changed forever."

The low-effort generative AI looking tariff rates is a tell. The fact bitcoin moved the same way as US stock indices has a bad smell about it too.

#TrumpAndDump #PumpAndDump #tariff #USPol #USEconomy #con

After Trump was elected the first time, there was also a lot of talk about making iPhones in the US. At the time, I was co-editor of the sci-fi outlet Terraform, so I asked @timmaughan to imagine what such a future might really look like.

With his permission, I'm republishing the story in full:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/flyover-country

The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally.

I'm not finding the reference right now but I've read similar observations about writing as well: the political right used to have talented writers, but nowadays not so much.

(This is not an invitation for "duh, they're just MAGA idiots" responses or variations on that theme. I'm as frustrated as the next person about the political climate but I'm not here for that).

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #FarRight #RightWing

The culture industry is in the business of producing "culture" and distributing it, unidirectionally, to consumers of culture (think movies, TV shows, albums, books). We had a brief respite with the internet and social media, which are bidirectional and therefore interactive, as companies experimented with co-opting user content for use in cultural products. That period looks to be ending now, and companies are back to the business of unidirectionally firing cultural products at us. Since they never really figured out how to turn what the masses produce towards their ends without incurring significant costs, they are instead opting to fill the internet with generative AI output, which they can control and manipulate, and whose costs are the "better" kinds of costs (labor costs to hire content moderators, even contractors, are far worse to e.g. Wall Street than capital expenditures for servers or, even better, rental costs for cloud services).

The fact that Google took a perfectly good and functional internet search engine that lots of people liked and started turning it into an AI slop generator makes more sense, at least to me, when viewed through this lens. Google's search engine was never really a search engine. It was always a cultural artifact, complete with "commercials" (ads), with web page creators as producers. At some point Google calculated that using an in-house generative AI to produce the content for this artifact made more sense, so they started experimenting with it.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gemini #culture #CultureIndustry

fedi quibble: using "LB" to comment on the last thing one boosted is fiddly and ineffective. I usually fail to figure out which boost the person is referring to. I have turned off boosts from all but the finest Post Connoisseurs on my timeline, and Ivory puts boosts in a different chronological column on a person's profile page. by that point I am two clicks deep into the question and am ready to move on and live with the mystery

Here I explain why the idea that we are going to suddenly make iPhones in the U.S. is pure fantasy and if Apple WERE to do that it would come after several years of deep pain. The iPhone is perhaps the most global product that has ever existed: https://www.404media.co/a-us-made-iphone-is-pure-fantasy/

I love these paragraphs because they capture the exact moment when a scientist cashes in their reputation, and the public goodwill in science more generally, for VC money. The company has raised almost half a billion USD!

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/08/1114371/game-of-clones-colossals-new-wolves-are-cute-but-are-they-dire/

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“I would say such an animal is not a dire wolf and it’s not correct to say dire wolves have been brought back from extinction. It’s a modified gray wolf,” says Anders Bergström, a professor at the University of East Anglia who specializes in the evolution of canines. “Twenty changes is not nearly enough. But it could get you a strange-looking gray wolf.” Beth Shapiro, an expert on ancient DNA who is now on a three-year sabbatical from the University of California, Santa Cruz, as the company’s CSO, acknowledged in an interview that other scientists would bristle at the claim. “What we’re going to have here is a philosophical argument about whether we should call it a dire wolf or call it something else,” Shapiro said. Asked point blank to call the animal a dire wolf, she hesitated but then did so. “It is a dire wolf,” she said. “I feel like I say that, and then all of my taxonomist friends will be like, ‘Okay, I’m done with her.’ But it’s not a gray wolf. It doesn’t look like a gray wolf.”

#tech #dev #web #DarkPatterns #GoogleDrive

As an analyst at Hudson Bay Capital, Stephen Miran authored the blueprint for the tariff strategy the Trump administration is now using:

Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects, consistent with the experience in 2018-2019. While currency offset can inhibit adjustments to trade flows, it suggests that tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline, and that the revenue raised improves burden sharing for reserve asset provision. Tariffs will likely be implemented in a manner deeply intertwined with national security concerns, and I discuss a variety of possible implementation schemes. I also discuss optimal tariff rates in the context of the rest of the U.S. taxation system.

From https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/research/638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdf

Miran became the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, appointed by Trump, in March 2025. He seems to be a conservative think tank creature too.

#USPol #USEconomics #TrumpTariffs #TrumpRecession #TrumpCrash

It's crazymaking to me that anyone believes companies will plan and build multi-billion-dollar production facilities like chip fabs in this environment. That's never going to happen. I also wonder a lot about fossil fuel investments, which usually take over a year to start paying off and I've heard can take as long as 18 months to start becoming profitable. It's difficult to manage the ordinary level of risk in that industry; now these new sources of uncertainty? I don't know enough to even guess but I doubt "drill baby drill" is what these folks are thinking right now.

#TrumpRecession #TrumpCrash #crypto #cryptocurrency #bitcoin #USEconomy #USPol

Out this week in Cognitive science! @samhforbes & I "urge extreme caution in facilitating the use of LLMs, which like much of modern academia run on private technology sector infrastructure, in classrooms lest we further normalize: pupils losing their right to privacy and security, reducing human contact between learner and educator, deskilling teachers, and polluting the environment."

https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70058

Maine has two Congressional districts. District 1 is the southern part of the state, where we live. It's relatively liberal. District 2 is the rural north and is much more conservative. I learned today that Susan Collins tends to respond only to District 2 voters who contact her. My father-in-law (a pretty liberal guy) lives up there. Her office responds to him all the time. Silly, naive me: I thought Senators were supposed to represent an entire state. #Politics #Democracy #Maine #US #USpol

git diff Taco Carne Asada

and was told

fatal: ambiguous argument 'Taco'

😢

#tech #dev #software #git #danger

More updates: This bullshit study that we've been following for 9 months got cited on the freakonomics podcast. Jump to 23min.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-a-i-companions-replace-human-connection/

Good news, though. Our Matters Arising is through peer review and currently awaiting publication:

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/pkt6e

Also worth noting that without my coauthor's UVM affiliation, there's no way I'd be shelling out 4 figures to respond in the journal.

(sorry)

#MAGA #USPol #economics #StockMarket #Trump #tariffs

Poll 📊

If you’d know a university degree is completely LLM-free, would you think more of it, less of it, or the same?

What if the machine were 10x more complex? 100x more complex? What if part of the machine could misbehave in such a way that the person at the end isn't harmed with certainty, but only with some probability? What if the machine has 10 switches, all of which have to be flipped by 10 different individuals before the machine starts and harms the person; do you hold any of the individuals responsible for the harm?

#morality #ethics #TrolleyProblem

(*) Trolley problems are silly because they are decontexualized, and so are the proposed Rube Goldberg ones. I am satirizing them all, in part, though I do think if you're going to play around with thought experiments RG is a bit closer to modern lived reality than a runaway trolley.

Emails show #Trump admin targeted #Maine 's #SocialSecurity as political revenge https://www.alternet.org/maine-social-security/

Of course Elsevier's "enhanced pdf viewer" tracks where you click, view, if you hide the page, etc. and then transmits a big base64 blob of events along with ID from University proxy when you leave. I'm sure straight to SciVal for sale.
Is this the way we want science to work?

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Screenshot of a paper opened in elsevier's PDF view on the top, and on the bottom viewing network traffic, showing a POST request to a newrelic server with a 'pointerdown' event

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Screenshot of JSON of a HTTP request similar to previous image, only this one is pageHide

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Screenshot of a split apart URL from a request to elsevier showing a bunch of events being transmitted along with identifying information from university proxy

#Maine #weather

Ok, time for a thread on what I've been getting lots of interviews about. I've dropped some hints and shared some info, but here's the story!

Remember this document I posted a while ago? https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_Satellite_Demisability.pdf

It casually mentions that a piece of a Starlink satellite was found in Saskatchewan in August 2024.