Keeping the net human

[Pangolin]

Yeah you're right. I think when I made that post I was referring to the idea of only being able to make an account on social media by some sort of 'digital ID verification' thing. There have been proposals for compulsory digital ID cards but they haven't been made a reality (yet).

I think such a system would promote a market of sorts where stolen digital Identities can be used for things.

 

[penguinblanket]

I think such a system would promote a market of sorts where stolen digital Identities can be used for things.

The people trying to push it in my country argue the opposite - that it would help reduce fraud. I don't know whether it would or it wouldn't. I just don't want it at all. Simple as

 

[Insect]

Last year I was working on some journalist projects and one of them was focused on homelessness, unfortunately had to work with some right wing influencers that were speaking about the issue. When they posted me and my research for their audience, I gained about 1k new followers. Many were bots. Odd enough, the bots never set off any notifications like a real person does when they follow you. It was highly odd and made me question Twitter. I stopped using the app soon after.

Yeah, Twitter is incentivized to let bots roam their platform, so long as it doesn't cause human users to leave. Bots just look like users to the advertisers Twitter sells to, more bots means more 'consumers' reached by Twitter.

 

[nakadashi]

One Agorian here for a while wrote all their posts in cursive and then took a picture and uploaded it (I forgot who it was but if anyone remembers feel free to link in a reply).

LOL, that was me, with my old username "Eric Outfield". Glad to see I made an impact. And yeah, I actually used it as a form to make my interactions feel more organic. Maybe I should do it again (I should just work on my calligraphy).

 

[nakadashi]

Or, In the land of bots how we can ensure things are human written while remaining private?

This is kind of an expansion of the dead-internet theory so I will not spend time re-stating that most of the internet is bots. (It is)
View attachment 74843

Instead this will be a brief review on current methods to ensure internet posters are HUMAN, with a discussion on potential new ones. In a perfect world we will be able to know 95% of postings are human while also allowing posters to maintain pseudo-anonymity.

Captchas​

Captchas are simple and privacy respecting, but annoying to deal with and easily circumvented by motivated botters, with captcha solving services as cheap as .0003 a cent per captcha. [1]

SMS Verification​

SMS verification is not privacy respecting unless users are out buying burners, and it's also easily circumvented with SMS verification services running at .0079 cents per message. [2]

Participation Requires a Subscription​

It's becoming more common for traditionally free services having paid alternatives. Kagi for search, Nebula for videos, Medium for blogs. Subscription based services have a much higher quality product than their free counterparts and tend to be more privacy respecting as the business model is not centered around data collection and ad delivery. Social services like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat have been offering premium subscriptions to provide extra features, but there's yet to be an exclusively paid forum / twitter / social-media platform. It seems social media platforms require getting big to be captivating (network effects), and they can't get big if it's paid to begin with.

People don't seem to mind paying though, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, and even traditional news [3] have plenty of subscribers.

Digital ID​

Digital Identity is also being pushed as a way to "solve" covid / election / general misinformation. [4] Mr. Bill gates has been investing a lot of money into Digital IDs. [5] Most European countries have their own form of Digital ID, and although most services are related to public administration or banking, some private services are allowing you to sign-up using your Digital ID. In some countries the digital ID is used to do just about everything; banking, confirming online purchases, sending money, and taking public transport. [6] In the US digital ID is shaping up to be an extension of Google / Apple Pay, rather than a direct government led endeavor and app. [7] But some are state-led. [8] Americans generally seem to trust private corporations more than government, even though they're symbiotic (people will happily install an Amazon Echo and Ring but object to government installed cameras). The goal seems to be instead of having your wallet and phone, you just bring your phone with you which handles banking, taxes, payments, drivers-license, and probably soon enough, authentication with social internet platforms. A Digital ID has its fair share of critics for aiding in a surveillance state. [9] [10] [11] Generally though critics see Digital ID as an inevitability and are advocating for open-standards and individual ownership, with you explicitly choosing what parts of your Digital ID to share and what not. This would be effective at stopping bot-campaigns and could be implemented in a way that maintains individual ownership, with social services knowing your ID is valid and hasn't been used before, but not able to know your PII (think as if your SSN was your private PGP key and you provide your public to services). I think in a world where a Digital ID is required for twitter sign-ups, regardless of how well implemented, identity theft and broad phishing scams would see an exponential rise, with the elderly being disproportionately harmed.

Handwriting everything​

One Agorian here for a while wrote all their posts in cursive and then took a picture and uploaded it (I forgot who it was but if anyone remembers feel free to link in a reply). This is privacy respecting, free, and maintains pseudo-anonymity. There's arguments to be made with how posting handwriting would be vulnerable to graphology and thus non-private, but even your ASCII posting is vulnerable to stylometry so I don't think it's a valid criticism. It is though inconvenient and kind of unnatural, but I can see a niche-forum succeeding where only images of hand-writing or drawings are allowed, but this is no global solution.

Speaking In-front of a Camera​

In a way TikTok is great for human created media. You know it's not a bot when it's a flesh and blood human speaking the message, thankfully even the best CGI and AI faces fall into the uncanny valley. Young people use TikTok to find human created information about things way more than using the wasteland of SEO and AI results that is Google search. [12] But this is not privacy respecting.



Personally I think the normie-net will be more human in 10 years, but much more walled, with Digital ID being a pre-requisite to participation. I think almost all pseudonymous and human communications will be limited to the underground of niche forums, image boards, and chat-rooms. I think they'll be staying bot-free mostly for not being a target of psy-ops due to their underground nature and limited userbase, with technical solutions being the lesser factor.

I'm curious to hear other agorians thoughts on this and I hope to hear some novel ideas about preventing bots on platforms big or small.

Alright. It's Thursday night. I have no date, a three liter bottle of orange soda and my all-K-Pop mixtape. Let's rock.

First of all, I think we should define what the Internet is. It is a communication medium used to transfer information. I think that the main difference between it and more traditional mediums (like the telephone) resides in the fact that the Internet has broadcast capabilities by design. It is a one-to-many medium, as opposed to a one-to-one medium such as the telephone. Television and radio also share this capability, with the difference that they are more tightly regulated by government bodies. Still, particularly radio, they have been used by amateurs to transmit their messages to broad audiences.

View: https://youtu.be/jjeUuakHsLw?si=6SMKL_EtLl1BJ3my

Let's go back to the telephone. I don't think I'm alone when I say that the telephone is also a medium that of recently has been inundated by garbage. Scam and extortion calls are a given for most persons, to the point that the sheer usage of the phone has become unthinkable. And yet many, included myself, keep a phone number because it is a convenient, when not the only, form to contact a certain set of people, specifically those on the elderly range. As such, I would like to examine what the verification process for a phone call is. When one receives a call, the first thing that one does is to ask who the person on the other side of the line is. This is then matched against the voice of the one who is speaking. If no name is provided, or if the voice doesn't match the name provided, then we proceed to further ask more questions in order to determine if the person calling is who they claim to be. "What are you calling for" and the like are the questions that are often asked, in order to not provide the potential scammer with any information (asking questions such as "oh, are you calling for grandma's birthday?" provide a cognitive backdoor that experienced scammers perfectly know how to exploit) while also trying to inform us of any shared knowledge. "Oh, I'm calling for grandma's birthday". Well, grandma's birthday is effectively nearby. But this is something not a scammer could know (this is of course, up to debate, as talented scammers could use publicly available data such as family relationships and birthdays. Thanks Facebook!) so the verification is complete and one can proceed as if the person on the other end is effectively the person they say to be.

This cumbersome example is nothing but an application of the two-step verification process, which must match at least two of the following factors of authentication : a) something you know, b) something you have, c) something you are. The name and the voice are examples of a) and c). The questions asked are a deeper dive on a). While security experts have called that a single factor of authentication is not enough, it can be observed that going deep enough in the shared pool of knowledge can be enough when discussing non-vital information. This persons claims to be Aunt Lillie, she also knows of grandma's birthday, so I can discuss with her the details of the birthday party but not my banking credentials.

I think this shared pool of knowledge is the verification method that we see in use in platforms such as image boards and forums such as the Agora Road. We can proceed by assuming that everyone is a bot until they demonstrate that we share a common pool of knowledge. 4chan has been an excellent example, given how fast its meme culture moves, people who demonstrate their expertise on it are often granted with the trust of the rest of the users. Something similar happens in the Agora Road, in which cross-references to previous conversations and other users serve as proof of the proclaimed shared knowledge.

All of this is very similar to the way in which members of secret organizations (like the Freemasons) identify themselves. There are no credentials, no facial recognition, there is only shared knowledge of the secret rites. Anyone who proves to know them demonstrates to be a fellow member. As such, I believe that the only communities that share this common knowledge are the ones that are going to prevail as havens for human interaction in an increasingly automated Internet.

Hope I made myself clear, LOL.

 

[wavve-creator]

I think this shared pool of knowledge is the verification method that we see in use in platforms such as image boards and forums such as the Agora Road. We can proceed by assuming that everyone is a bot until they demonstrate that we share a common pool of knowledge. 4chan has been an excellent example, given how fast its meme culture moves, people who demonstrate their expertise on it are often granted with the trust of the rest of the users. Something similar happens in the Agora Road, in which cross-references to previous conversations and other users serve as proof of the proclaimed shared knowledge.

Solutions like this are things we can put into action.

They say we shouldn't restate what has been said but that is another level of doomerism. Shout it from the roof tops until we make change.

This forum is so full of saddness.

A crock down on scammer would not be impossible. It is not like they are so careful. Look at all the youtubers who make a living off of doxxing and pranking scam centers. It's a solveable probelm if the right international presser is applied.

Generative ai is also an issue and one we will find a solution too as well.

mfs betting against the indomitable human spirit.

 

[Digital Cheese]

Handwriting everything​

One Agorian here for a while wrote all their posts in cursive and then took a picture and uploaded it (I forgot who it was but if anyone remembers feel free to link in a reply). This is privacy respecting, free, and maintains pseudo-anonymity. There's arguments to be made with how posting handwriting would be vulnerable to graphology and thus non-private, but even your ASCII posting is vulnerable to stylometry so I don't think it's a valid criticism. It is though inconvenient and kind of unnatural, but I can see a niche-forum succeeding where only images of hand-writing or drawings are allowed, but this is no global solution.

if all of the members have both the time and the will to do so, you could also create your own writing script + language and then have everyone talk back and forth via it. However, this is a terrible idea in practice as few would be willing to do it and those that would do it likely are going to be total spergs rather than based autists.

 

[Captain]

inb4 AI becomes a protected class.
Too late: I can't even bomb data centers anymore
This souless building in midtown is where she resides.

View attachment 109171

I'm conflicted. 33 Thomas Street is my favorite Bell System property and represents the hight of their engineering and the last golden age of telecommunications before the internet. But what was a monument to man's technological progress has been perverted into the worst of it. NSA and all it's friends are hanging out in there and it has little to do with long distance telephone service and nuclear telecommunications protection today. If I became ruler of this land, it's one of the first places I'd hang my flag. Next move would be to reclaim the Bell System from the ashes and use them as my instrument to tare down the internet as it exists and restore it to glory. "Get your hardhats boys, we're storming the castle."

 

[wavve-creator]

I'm conflicted. 33 Thomas Street is my favorite Bell System property

My comments were mostly in jest. I do find it one of the more interesting NYC buildings. It has had a bad rep for the past decade due to the gov orgs associated with it. I do find it interesting that the block it sits on is a nice 5-10 degrees hotter than any other block.

 

[Aevisia]

Personally I think the normie-net will be more human in 10 years, but much more walled, with Digital ID being a pre-requisite to participation. I think almost all pseudonymous and human communications will be limited to the underground of niche forums, image boards, and chat-rooms. I think they'll be staying bot-free mostly for not being a target of psy-ops due to their underground nature and limited userbase, with technical solutions being the lesser factor.

I'm curious to hear other agorians thoughts on this and I hope to hear some novel ideas about preventing bots on platforms big or small.

I think the day I'm required to have a digital ID to participate in mainstream social media will be the day I permanently give it up. The only reason I'm still on it is for my friends and family, but, I'm also on it in hopes my friends and family will discover the small web and other forms of online spaces that aren't so centralized as well as the freedom that comes with it. But I think when the digital ID makes it's big push and becomes mandatory, a lot of people will fold and get one for the sake of continued convenience and staying connected on the platforms the know and love best.

As far as preventing bots, I'm not sure there's really much we can do. Images can be faked, voices can be faked, videos can be faked, writing can be faked. Once it gets on the internet it's not really reliable as being anymore in our current state. Though, it would be interesting to see bots being made to fight bots, or more offensive tools rather than just defensive tools against bots. One thing I stumbled across fairly recently is something called "Nightshade" which helps artists protect their work from unauthorized AI training, and what it does is "distort feature representations inside generative AI image models. While human eyes see a shaded image that is largely unchanged from the original, the AI model sees a dramatically different composition in the image." I think expanding on solutions along this line of thinking would be good. Defensive solutions are great, but offensive solutions designed to mess with how the bots operate in the first place that could potentially corrupt the malicious ones, I think that'd be great too if it's possible.

 

[Pangolin]

Its not terribly hard to make a bot that can read handwriting. I did that in grad school as like one of the first assignments in the homework. Presumably once you have the recognition down, you could just have it write the same scrawl out and if its a good system nobody could tell the difference.

As to writing our own custom language, it seems to be just as futile because there's only a matter of time before someone builds a translator. And a dictionary would have to exist to enable new people to join into the language. Ultimately, its all easy bot work.

 

[wavve-creator]

> grammer mistakes
> incoherent writting style
> insane takes

soon enough lack of perfection might be a good indicator of non-bot activity

 

[Some_porcupine]

Its not terribly hard to make a bot that can read handwriting. I did that in grad school as like one of the first assignments in the homework. Presumably once you have the recognition down, you could just have it write the same scrawl out and if its a good system nobody could tell the difference.

As to writing our own custom language, it seems to be just as futile because there's only a matter of time before someone builds a translator. And a dictionary would have to exist to enable new people to join into the language. Ultimately, its all easy bot work.

the only way is to obfuscate meaning ( = paradigm shift), fli it, talk in own language/dialect - like how politicians do, or activists on net do so (tumblr "kids"); e.g. see how gay and others (words) were taken from slurs, to positive words, to words of fight...
main point would be, to be the only ones in the known, that is, only in-group knows what the words really mean (sad example - democracy, means nothing nowadays, so does(nt) liberal so...)

sorry if i said this already somewhere else on forum (i have bad time locating it, ykh search on here is [ad-hoc]...)

 

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주체의 중요한 이상을 따름으로써 인터넷은 항상 인간성을 유지하며 결코 서구의 봇 선전에 빠지지 않을 것입니다. 사회주의 만세

 

[Hobo8240]

주체의 중요한 이상을 따름으로써 인터넷은 항상 인간성을 유지하며 결코 서구의 봇 선전에 빠지지 않을 것입니다. 사회주의 만세

View attachment 109298

Does North Korea even have the Internet?

> grammer mistakes
> incoherent writting style
> insane takes

soon enough lack of perfection might be a good indicator of non-bot activity

I make grmamar mistakes but that only because i type really fast.
I had to backspace a few typ times typing that so maybe i should just score them out if the boyt crisis because becomes really severe or oh wait this forum be doesnt seem to have that so i guess ill just paint them red isdk or maybe minituraized them

 

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네, 하지만 검색 결과는 정부에 의해 통제됩니다(당연히 그래야 하는 것처럼).

 

[Digital Cheese]

Does North Korea even have the Internet?

technically yes but its heavily limited, and its not accessible to the average person.

> insane takes

Fedposting online for the win