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Comment Re:Removal of middle man (Score 0) 123

This is actor worship, the new cult that appeared in the 1950s originated intentionally from Hollywood.

Normal human societies correctly identify that people who lie about everything, including everything about themselves for money are practicing a type of prostitution, and treat and have treated actors accordingly throughout human history.

Comment Re:Removal of middle man (Score 0) 123

In case of books, middlemen were horrifically abundant. Publisher, editor, official state censor/today's sensitivity reader.

Direct self publishing removed most of those, and now published, edited and officially state censored/sensitivity read "best sellers" sell five digit copies on a good release.

Meanwhile there are more book reading happening than ever, mainly on the back on direct self publishing which bypasses all of those.

Comment Re:Who will pay for this? (Score 4, Interesting) 33

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

Comment Re:Dumb crawlers require dumb solutions (Score 1) 43

To be honest that was actually my first theory, since the bots didn't seem interested in exploring the rest of the domain. I suppose there's no way to know for certain. I concluded that it must be an imbecile's attempt at harvesting, though, because the queries weren't really exploring the string space in any useful way. Here's a sample:

"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&re&results_&results_pagenum=2980 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=5440&template=41&type HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=33500&templat HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=32640&templ HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&res&results_page&results_pagenum=39300 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_&results_pa&results_pagenum=12340 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_r&res&results_pagenum=6100 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=2920&te HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&nam&results_&results_pagenum=17940 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results&results_pag&results_pagenu&results_pagenum=37720 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=9360&template=41&type_r HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&r&results_pagenum=28040 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_&results_pag&results_pagenum=10400 HTTP/1.1"

The only thing this is fuzzing is the query string parser. It's not testing the limits of string buffers, it's not using interesting characters, it's just brain-damaged. The fact that it's also fetching different page numbers shows it's trying to follow page links and failing badly at doing so.

The site gets plenty of sniffing from garden-variety pests. e.g. this half-hearted attempt to find a framework or two that I don't have:

"POST /__rsc HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth/session HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth HTTP/1.1"
"POST /__nextjs_action HTTP/1.1"
"POST /.action HTTP/1.1"
"POST /_rsc HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth/callback HTTP/1.1"
"POST /_middleware HTTP/1.1"
"POST / HTTP/1.1"

(of course, none of these URLs exist other than /, and you definitely can't just POST to it)

All this said... I've seen that spammers regularly misconfigure their tools, they'll try to register accounts with names like #[X:\LISTS\NAMES.TXT] and it only makes sense that some other cybercriminals trying to get rich quick have a similar lack of interest in programming shit correctly. Generally people don't turn to script kiddie shit if they have a personality conducive to putting in an honest hard day's work perfecting their craft.

Comment Re: He's right about one thing (Score 0) 126

Honey, no one cares about academia any more. It's been studied by people who replaced them after far left subverted the academia. The corpos. And you can see the results not because they publish what they find, but because they act to generate results they want in reality based on things they found by studying each subject.

Refer to Spotify's current recommendations algorithm for details. Log in as a young person and observe as your recommendations rapidly take you down the AI music route.

Because that's what gets best retention and best payout.

Comment Dumb crawlers require dumb solutions (Score 5, Interesting) 43

I had a problem where AI scrapers were absolutely DETERMINED to fish out every possible query string from a search results page. Almost all of the query strings they tried were invalid due to shitty and dysfunctional string substitution. "&page=100" wouldn't be followed by "&page=101", it would be followed by "&pag&pag=1010" or something even more insanely half-baked, until the query strings were like 100+ characters long. It was the technological equivalent of watching HIV mutate in real time.

But the insane thing was that, aside from page number, they were always requesting info about the same other criteria: filtered by the same user, the same page type, and with no text string. So I just took those particular values and started banning logged-out users who requested that combination of criteria.

I figured I'd need to change my tactics in a couple of days once the botnet got bored of that particular page and moved on to requesting bogus entries for another user.

MariaDB> select count(*) from ip_bans;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 671671 |
+----------+

It hasn't.

Comment Re: Reality check (Score 0) 126

Again, if you think the artists don't use AI, it's because they didn't tell you.

A good example here is "I'm stuck, what rimes with x" that is a stereotypical writer block for song writers. Do you know what easily solves that problem?

LLM trained for it. I.e. Suno.ai.

Song writers writing a specific tune that just doesn't sound right that want to iterate on several close variants to determine what would sound better. Do you know what does this quickly? Suno.ai.

Again, the artists probably could, as we say it here, "climb up the tree ass first" and do this themselves. It will take them thousands to tens of thousands of times longer to solve the problem at hand than AI would solve it. But they could do it by hand.

But successful people are always starved for time. So they take every tool that will let them have a significant amount of extra time. AI is currently by far the most important tool in this category.

Comment Re: He's right about one thing (Score 0) 126

Another fun part: this has been studied. You're wrong on both accounts. People don't actually care (and often prefer) AI music, as long as they're not told it's AI music. I.e. telling them generates a nocebo effect.

And young generations are very much positive on AI music. They form a decent bulk of people who ask the likes of suno.ai make it for them. It's just that most of this music is something like "take this song that sounds cool, and make it more like this, because I like it more if it was like this". Sing with girlfriend's/boyfriends/crush's voice, etc.

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