'Nuff said?

In direct response to your mostly off-topic joke, I think it just shows again what a lousy businessman the YOB is, even when he's breaking new ground in corruption. To actually make it relevant to this story, we'd have to figure out how to get the YOB to run the scam over on Bluesky, and that can't happen. Or at least it's beyond the bounds of my imagination. However here's my "criminal mindset" scheme to maximize the loot from your joke:

Sell off early access to EVERY official government announcement. The first one-minute auction would bid for the "most important" word from the coming announcement. Then there would be an auction for the top two words, then three words, then four, and all the way up to 100. Then the announcement is released to the public peasants like us.

But of course it needs AI to be a modern FinTech scam! So they use an AI to pick the words with the training objective of maximizing the loot. And of course the bidders are all using their AI agents to try to figure out what the coming announcement is about as each word is revealed. But their training objective is mostly to decide when "the story" is about to break because the big activity in the FinTech game market will happen at the point where the meaning is revealed. Hmm... That seems to increase the urge to bid big for early words, because that lets your AI study the pattern of released words to predict exactly when the break will happen.

Now I am worried about my criminal mindset. I've thought of how to adapt this business model to funding Bluesky. Considering the biddable value of messages on Bluesky it would be more of a micropayment auction, but millions of micropayments might wind up with some real money?

Deservedly Funny, and I think a good opening joke is always a fun FP, but I already want to get serious. I think "Why?" is the question.

Personal anecdote needed? I'm still using Bluesky, but never used it much. It would be amusing if there was a tool to track my personal Bluesky usage stats over time--but I don't think I care enough to click on such a link even if it already exists. I think the federated approach is a good idea, and Bluesky is nicer than Mastodon, but the Bluesky trend has been towards feeping creaturitis, and I'm not interested in fancy and time-consuming toys. Rather too similar to what went wrong with Firefox... And some more besides.

I think Bluesky is mostly a charity, but whenever I hear about new features in a charity-based nonprofit project, I start by asking myself "Would I donate money for that feature?" But the answer is almost always "No", and the implication is that my donation would be used to create more features I would say "No" about, except then it would be too late and I'd also be out the money.

What if features were ONLY added when enough people agreed in advance that the feature was worth paying for? And if they had to put their money where their mouths are before the implementation would start? What if you could easily see how much measurable cost you are creating by your usage of a website and consider that in terms of a possible donation?

So I think I have devised a mechanism to implement positive answers to such questions, but I'm not going to do an entire CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) spiel again. I'm just going to ask for your better ideas. Oh wait, I seem to have stumbled back into joke territory. The idea of constructive solutions on today's Slashdot is quite hilarious.

Insightful? Mod parent Funny.

The word "through" is not the same as "threw", but that's just the entry point for proof of stupidity. Must have been motivated by disappointment in missing the lynching party.

Mod parent insightful or funny or something.

My own wording would focus on the meaning of the DNA. It's NOT a unique individual, which is the root of that particular flavor of insanity. It's more like a book of recipes that might produce a human being. But it's such a complicated process that quite often it just aborts spontaneously.

Or maybe go for the joke about building complicated human "devices" with unskilled labor?

Me? I favor a right to reproduce along with a right to genetic counseling. With current technologies that leads to the 1/e solution of the Secretary Problem... But technologies keep improving.

Can't even decide whether or not we agree on any of the philosophic principles here. Seems to me that you sound like a lawyer playing word games and I could spend a lot of time trying to guess about what context you want to use next.

So I'm just going to plead innocent by reason of mootness. The Slashdot clock effectively moots each topic after a day or so, and this story is already that old. Not sure what kind of innocence I'm pleading. However I suppose innocence of comprehension seems to be the easiest plea to cop.

I'm trying to suggest a higher-level solution approach that should even mesh with Apple's claims that they are trying to protect the customers from scammers. I think that is a legitimate concern, but Apple is largely using it as camouflage.

Your focus on the legal abuses strikes me as a different aspect of the financial scams that drive the modern "economic" systems. The key there is the Borking of monopoly law so that it focuses on a simple price metric. In the kind of double-sided economic model that has evolved in response to the effective death of monopoly law, the ostensible customers are too often paying nothing, but the money is still being harvested somewhere. Apple is not giving free access to the apps as some kind of charity, but the monopoly abuse can't be addressed by the courts (at least in America) because you can't accuse Apple of charging "free" as too high a price.

I actually think Apple is less evil than most of the corporate cancers, but it's almost accidental. The worst corporate cancers are probably the ones that are funded by advertising, which has become super-powered lies powered by applied psychology. In general I think psychology is a pseudoscience like economics, but in terms of fooling people into buying soap, widgets, and corrupt politicians, applied psychology has made way too much progress. Amazon is still a contender for most evil, but I think that scam is also advertising linked, but in a complicated way...

Sorry, but that's a silly question. The YOB is just trying to tilt the playing field for his own personal profit. You didn't know he owns a drone company? He doesn't want to risk destroying the drone market while he's in the process of looting it.

Good luck clawing back any loot from the YOB. Or clawing back the Constitution or even the Republic for which we all stood.

So my standard reaction, both to the story and your FP, is "Who's gonna tell us the truth?" (About anything these years? (Going for Funny?))

But as regards this specific situation, I think there is a truthful solution. It would be funny if Apple had already implemented it and I just don't know because I'm on the Android side. So I'm in some kind of paradoxical position here? This is a speculative solution and I'd love to hear that it's already there in Apple world in some form.

I think that Apple should try to help developers tell the truth about their business models. Then the users would be able to look for legitimate apps and everyone should be happy. (In a flying pig's eye. You can't make everyone happy and you're a fool for trying.) For most apps, this would be easy. There are not that many profitable business models, and if the app's developer claims to be using one of those business models, then that business model can be selected from a list. For most of those cases, Apple could add an annotation at the end saying whether or not the developer's claims seem to be justified. That may include the use of secret information Apple is controlling, but if you aren't trusting Apple, then why are you there in the first place?

The problem is leaving things open for innovation. There needs to be an "other" option for new business models. In most cases, it will not be possible to say much about whether or not the new business model makes sense, but at least the users will have some idea what they are getting into. Maybe I'm projecting too much, but I sure wouldn't be likely to trust any app that just says "I can't tell you how I'm going to make money out of this." I'd be even less trusting of an app with a business model like "After I get a million users I'm going to sell the app to someone." Too much honesty?

By the way, my personal interest is in stability. Some business models are likely to keep the app running and supported for a while. Others aren't and I don't want to use those apps.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

Mod parent funny, though the Subject could have included a joke about socializing the corporations.

As for the story, why shouldn't one form of insanity cure the other rather than making both of them crazier?

However when I look at the situation, especially the numbers, it seems insane. Cybercrime just don't make sense, especially the spam part of it. The criminals have to provide contact information or the suckers can't reach them. The scammers can't obfuscate their messages too much or the target idiots won't be able to recognize the bait. And the number of targets is tiny compared to the number of people who hate the crooks. My delusion is that a small fraction of the people who hate spam could be leveraged against the scammers to completely overwhelm the tiny number of suckers who want to send money.

So what's your better idea? Or your polite request for clarification of my poor writing? Or maybe you have a justification for "Live and let scam" as practiced by all the leading corporate cancers who provide the criminals with the infrastructure for their cybercriming?

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.

I normally connect to all online conference calls via their web UIs. At least then it takes both a screw-up in the communications system and a screw-up in a browser security sandbox that is independently developed to allow something like an RCE or data leakage vulnerability to be exploited.

People have called me crazy for not wanting to install native apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Zoom in the modern era of remote working, but every now and then, there's another story like this one that reminds me why I am extremely careful about what native software I install on anything these days.