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Hey, very good evening indeed.
The program is Off The Hook.
Rob T. Firefly here with you on this Wednesday evening.
And I am joined in the studio apartment studio by Gila.
Good evening.
And we are joined out in Skype land by Alex.
Are you with us?
I am, good evening.
And Alex, you seem present and accounted for in this particular country this time around.
I am, I am.
I am not in New York, though, today.
I'm out in Pennsylvania, so I have been traveling quite a bit over the last couple of weeks.
Back from London, back to New York.
Drove here a couple of days to spend the Fourth of July.
So it is good to be back in the same time zone as I think all of us tonight.
It's good to have you on a somewhat compatible sleep schedule with us and this program.
Emmanuel and Kyle are out on assignment, but we have brought in a special guest also in Skype land.
We have The Gibson.
Hi, everybody.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to be here.
Now, The Gibson is a Fediverse admin.
He is in charge of Hackers.Town, which is the Mastodon instance that this program uses to putter around on Mastodon.
You can find us at OffTheHook at Hackers.Town.
Gil and I also have personal accounts on there, and it is a lot of fun.
And we're going to get into why we wanted to speak with you in particular.
But before we do any of that, I mean, there is so much going on.
So much in the way of news.
So much in the way of development.
So much in the way of things just happening in all sorts of directions in the tech world.
And the one story that I'd like to quickly update.
You know what?
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Absolutely.
Now, we'll just get down to it.
I think a major piece of news that has happened this week is sort of a general mishmash of different news stories at places like Twitter.
At places like Reddit.
At places like Metta.
Where the siloed social media services that so many people have been depending on for a very long time are kind of experiencing what our friend Cory Doctorow described as a word that we cannot say on the radio.
The most radio-safe translation, I think, of it is encrapification.
But it's when a service deliberately makes itself less useful for its users.
Deliberately makes itself worse.
And it does this incrementally.
And this happens over time.
And this happens because companies really...
The companies that have been in charge of these social media services have decided that the users are kind of a resource that they can exploit to the fullest.
And not all social media is like that.
Gibson, I wanted to ask you for a really quick, just sort of cliff notes explanation for someone unfamiliar of what the Fediverse is.
Yeah, sure.
So the Fediverse is basically a collection of server operators.
And if you're old enough to remember some of the early internet, Usenet, BBSs, things like that.
It's been compared to some of those before.
So you have individual operators that run community-based, or in some cases, single-user-based instances or servers that all talk to each other in an interconnected fashion.
If you look back at Buran's network diagrams from 1962, if I remember correctly, those diagrams show centralized services, decentralized services, and distributed services, right?
A distributed network being point-to-point.
Or person-to-person, or however you want to describe that.
But where Mastodon and the Fediverse itself falls is a decentralized service, right?
So you have these individual servers run by, hopefully, beneficial admins who gather people of like mind and kind of build a community out of it.
And are able to grow something that becomes possibly bigger than the server it actually runs on, right?
That's what I love about it.
There are also some very large instances out there.
Some people call them flagships.
They're kind of silos in their own right.
They're the ones that most people land on when they come in because they hear about Mastodon.social or whichever one is one of the big ones.
So those exist out there as well.
But the real flavor and the real community that brings Fediverse together exists on a lot of those smaller instances out there.
There's a few big ones that still manage to do it.
Overall, that's where the real interesting part to me is because you actually have organic social interaction as opposed to an algorithm feeding you rage bait, right?
So it kind of backs off of that and gives you what we used to have kind of sort of at the dawn of the Internet, maybe a little before that even with BBSs, right?
You get that tight-knit community that communicates with each other and builds a stronger experience for everybody.
Yeah.
And how these things distinguish themselves apart from the siloed surfaces like Twitter.
And I want to talk about Twitter a little bit because there's a big – the big changes that have happened over the past week or two at Twitter.
I think the first major one that we can talk about is that Twitter is now a walled garden itself.
You used to be able to look at Twitter no matter who you were, no matter where you were.
You didn't need an account.
If somebody posted something on Twitter, you could look at the tweets.
You could see what your favorite celebrities or whoever else had posted.
That is no longer the case.
If you try to go directly to a tweet that you've been sent, you know, look at this funny tweet, you will then be prompted to log into the service.
And I believe also if someone sends you a link from Twitter, so if you get that short link that starts t.co, you may not be able to access those either, which is just cutting off access to the broader internet in general.
Yeah, that opens up a whole other can of worms because every link you post to Twitter to an external site gets – basically, the idea originally was link shortening where you would have a shorter URL that would point to the full URL.
But Twitter basically adopted the procedure of throwing every link through their own t.co link shortener, which also obscures what the link is.
And that's – sorry.
Go ahead, Gibson.
I was going to say – I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to interrupt.
But I was going to say much – to paraphrase Roy Batty, all these things lost like tears in the rain, right?
I mean, a significant number of these links are in articles and actual publication out there that don't work anymore.
Yeah.
It's become a very common occurrence to be reading a news article and a tweet from the person it's about is embedded in the page or linked to or things like that.
And that is no longer a thing that you can easily do.
Also, archived tweets, people pulling their own archives down to get just a historical record of their tweets or things in the Internet Archive and so forth, those t.co links are now not viewable if you're not a Twitter user.
So it's broken a significant amount of the sort of tendrils that Twitter has spiraled out into the Internet at large.
And it gets stupider.
There is a story on 9to5Mac talking about this where the title is quite simply, Twitter Rate Limits Even Dumber Than We Thought.
And they instituted even if you are a Twitter user, if you are not a premium Twitter user, if you are not a paid Twitter user, you could only look at so many posts per day.
And so the people, the eyeballs on the tweets that are the lifeblood of the Twitter service in any estimation, if they have any hope of making money, those eyeballs have been shut by Twitter itself.
And this is quite a meltdown to be witnessing.
And at the same time, and I know I'm going on and on about this, but it's a big deal.
At the same time, over at Reddit, they have, and we spoke about this on the last couple installments of this program, they have closed off their API to most third-party apps, including the apps that were providing accessibility for those with special needs.
For the blind community, for example, to the point where the subreddit, which is the smaller community on the Reddit site that people can create for whatever subject or special interest they want, the one for the blind, which was at r slash blind on Reddit, is no longer accessible fully to the blind.
The moderators of the blind community, some of whom are themselves blind, have no access to usable mod tools to continue their moderating duties.
So Twitter has deliberately degraded its service and in such a way that it is affecting those with specific disabilities and specific needs.
And so the blind community on Reddit basically got together and started a Fediverse instance, this on the software Lemmy, and it's at rblind.com.
And that is Lemmy, which is basically a similar user experience to Reddit in that people post links and you can upvote the ones you like, downvote the ones you don't.
But this one is for the blind community that could formally gather on Reddit.
They basically had to go off and roll their own and become part of the Fediverse.
And now we're getting into things like the Americans with Disabilities Act and similar sorts of laws and requirements.
So we have seen these big siloed sites basically in a tailspin, in a panic, in furious efforts to try and either fix things that they perceive wrong or try and make things profitable that aren't,
or just squeeze a little more cash out of what user eyeballs they have, and in the process making their services much worse.
And Gila, I know, like, I was quite a heavy user of both these services. I've all but abandoned Reddit, I've all but abandoned Twitter.
And Gila, I know you've still been using Twitter a bit more, you know, after I kind of walked away from it.
So how are you finding the experience as a user who's been there through all this?
It is fascinating to watch.
The comedian Eddie Izzard has this really... Eddie Izzard is fantastic, by the way, let's just start with that as a stipulation.
But there's a bit in The Special Address to Kill talking about how empires would collapse, and the metaphor she used was a flan in a cupboard.
It just kind of falls apart. And watching Twitter doing that is kind of amazing.
A lot of people have left. My follow list was not as extensive as a lot of other people's, it never got above 250.
So it's fascinating to see there are only about seven or eight of those people who are around and still doing stuff on a regular basis.
So seeing that is amazing, seeing the predominance of the blue check ecosystem and what that's becoming.
Because people who are now paying for a blue check, and if you're paying for a blue check, your stuff gets up... not upvoted, but it gets...
Given priority.
Thank you, prioritized.
So you're seeing a lot more of it. And people who are willing to pay for a blue check, so people hear what they say, don't always have great things to say.
So it's this weirdly self-perpetuating cycle. And people are just vanishing, and bots everywhere, and a lot more porn than I was prepared for, or used to at least, because that's what's coming up. Alex, you have a question.
I'm glad you mentioned the porn. I noticed the same thing, I thought it was just me. I thought it was saying something about my browsing activities or something like that, or reading my mind.
But I never saw porn before on Twitter as having been recommended to me until relatively recently. And this wasn't like softcore stuff, this was pretty horrendous things that were being recommended to me.
And it makes you wonder what minors are seeing on this platform. But I also totally agree with you that I think that it's just falling apart. The whole thing has just become almost insufferable.
I was never a huge Twitter user in the past, but I always enjoyed going on. Now I feel like there is so much more velocity behind a lot of the scams and this promoted nonsense that's on Twitter, that it's not just, in my opinion, inane and lacks utility, but also a much more dangerous place for ordinary users who don't really understand the good cybersecurity hygiene.
And I think also, what is there? There's quality, there's quantity, and both of them are just sucking so hard right now. Who's willing to advertise on Twitter anymore? It's not a lot of people. So I can't even describe the stuff that I'm seeing just because it's bad. And Gibson?
Yeah, it's interesting to me because we see the same effect on Facebook already. I mean, those same ad channels for adult material, and to your point, Alex, very graphic adult material, frankly, are there as well.
These silos are so desperate to be able to monetize user engagement that whatever advertisements they can shove out is what they're going to use. And to me, we've hit the point where money is no longer a 0% interest rate for them to get from VCs, etc., and you're starting to see pressure on them to be able to find new ways to monetize.
And that's what a lot of these changes we're seeing are about. They're experimenting, trying to find ways to drive down their costs and drive up how much they can extract for a user.
As an admin, what's the activity level been like that you've been seeing?
I remember that there was a lot of adjustments that had to be made just to keep our server up, and we weren't even taking on new users. We were just having to manage the influx of traffic from the larger siloed instances on the federal servers, sending us their federated data.
So it was a really huge lift then. The tuning that went on in that time period has benefited us this time around. We have seen that similar spike, not quite as high this time, but I think that's mainly because, frankly, most of the people that were going to leave already have.
And now we're seeing a little bit less of a sharp, a little less of a hockey stick, if you will, but that rise is starting right now. We're starting to see it. Just yesterday, we did have a performance issue. I had to go troubleshoot due to that rise in traffic.
So we're seeing that. It looks similar to before, not quite as extreme as it was in November, but it is out there and happening right now. I think several admins would answer the same experience of having to go tweak messaging queues and such to get everything running the right way, but yeah, it's definitely there.
And the irony of that is every time something new and interesting, if you will, happens with Twitter, we as admins on the Fediverse experience the fallout of that from people moving over to the Fediverse. I made a joke just the other day that I love it when Elon Musk makes a change to Twitter on Friday, because my whole weekend is gone now. Thanks.
Yeah, wow. And just the scale that we're seeing. And one thing that I've been seeing is a lot of people will look at the Fediverse and go, well, it's not the same as Twitter, is it? This isn't all the way like Twitter. And I can't go viral here. I can't be an influencer here. And focusing on the differences, basically, the functional differences to the distributed nature of Mastodon.
Could you talk a little bit about how Mastodon finds itself distributed by interest, by community, and so on?
Yeah, so you tend to have siloed communities that take up an interest like Hackers.Town. Just as an example, we were kind of formed of the late 80s, early 90s hacker subculture mindset. And during the past presidential administration, we may have gotten a little bit radicalized, perhaps, and we wanted to bring together a safe space for people that knew what that was and people showed up for it.
So technology oriented, politics oriented, frankly, because hacking is political, let's call it what it is. And things like that bring that community together. So those common bonds. But you may see the same thing, for example, with another instance that might be dedicated to, I don't know, there's so many, there's like 15,000 instances out there right now.
But like InfoSec Exchange, there's one that's, you know, similar overlap, right? We have people in both of those communities that fit. But InfoSec Exchange is much more focused on the actual business of information security, right? And that's kind of their orientation.
So slight differences there. And I'm not going to pretend like we aren't friends with them. We are. But, you know, there's overlap, but slight differences make those silos different. But at the same time, you can go to mastodon.art, and you've got a visual and performing art community that's huge and sprung up, started about the same time we did six years ago and grew very, very quickly.
It's as diverse as you want it to be, right? Whatever your interest is, there is probably an instance that represents that.
Absolutely. And it's very easy also to maintain, as you mentioned, you can be present on more than one of these at a time. You can also move from one to another pretty easily. We moved this programs account from a larger, I think, 900 pound gorilla of an instance that didn't pay proper attention to what was going on to Hackerstown. You were gracious enough to have us and we appreciate that.
And yeah, making the move was technically, technologically simple. And all these instances can talk to one another. So you can follow anyone out there on whatever instances for the most part. And have your, you know, curate your experience as it is.
The one of the big differences is that there is no algorithm. You are the algorithm. Your community is the algorithm. You have to curate and follow and find the things you want, because it is not going to be magically given to you.
I find it harder to doom scroll. Sorry. Go on, Gibson.
You're fine. Go ahead. Go ahead.
So what I was saying is doom scrolling on Mastodon is a completely different experience. I find it very difficult and partially I think because I don't follow a huge number of people, but also because there is not the same kind of manufactured algorithmic outrage that is getting created in there to keep you doom scrolling.
There are real people on Mastodon and I'm getting, it's dealing with real people in a very organic sense. I personally, I don't want to over romanticize the Fediverse, but I'm gonna, to say that I feel safer and freer to say stuff on Mastodon that I wouldn't have said in other social media environments.
Is it because, I don't know, my mom's not on Mastodon? Perhaps. But I think there's also just an understanding that it's there and you can't necessarily become the main character of Mastodon in the same way you could become the main character of Twitter.
There's not, you know, people aren't going to quote toot you and pile on because quote tooting doesn't exist, which is kind of awesome. But I think also there's, I get more of a feeling of purity almost to it. And again, not to over romanticize, but maybe that's just the instance I'm on. It could be. I don't know. But I don't know. I love the feeling of it though.
I think we're there seeking community more than we are anything, right? I think that goes for a lot of instances. I don't think it's always the case.
As far as the going viral thing, you can do it. It takes organic growth to get there, right? It takes time. You're not going to just jump in. I mean, if you have a large enough following elsewhere, you can jump in and you'll get all the followers you need in a heartbeat. We watched that last November.
But, you know, it's like you can still make that happen. I mean, we have users on Hackers.Town that regularly go viral just saying something that doesn't seem that outrageous to us, right? But the rest of the Fediverse sees it and hadn't thought about it from that perspective and we get traction. And then I have to go adjust server settings to keep things flopped.
But it's good, right? It's good that it works that way because it is free from that algorithmic rage machine, as you mentioned, right? It's just not there. And because it's not, we're able to have a better experience.
Absolutely. I mean, not to get off on a total rant, but I think I might as I start this sentence. But the experience of social media, this is something that I have been doing since such a thing started. I was on BBSs. You know, I'm an older user. I was on BBSs. I was on the dial-up online services. I was on Usenet. I was on IRC. I was on things back in the day.
And as things moved to email lists, and then specialized web forums that you'd have to go to each one individually. And then finally, we started seeing sort of these all-in-one social media sites pop up. And as more of the mainstream and not just the nerdier netizens, the, you know, console cowboys jamming through cyberspace or whatever started making social media part of their lives.
That coincided with the Facebook boom, the Twitter boom, Instagram, these sites that want to be everything to everybody. And in the course of that, you find that your friends who you have through like a sci-fi show you like are right up there on the same thing as your relatives and your teachers, your peers in school or at work, your colleagues.
Potential bosses. And I think when things were consolidated like that, there was something lost. I think what we're starting to see now is people now having to rediscover the idea that maybe social media can be something that is just what I want.
It doesn't have to be this firehose of the entire world and the entire, you know, every form of humanity, including people who maybe don't like people like me. You know, trolls, you know, Nazis all over Twitter, things like that.
So I'm thinking there is real value in rediscovering what it means to use social media and make it part of your life and what it means to find communities and maybe these smaller sorts of services that are more specialized and that don't have the 800 pound gorilla controlling it that wants to institute algorithms, keep you angry enough to keep interacting with it and sell your eyeballs to advertisers.
Totally with you.
I do go on, don't I?
I don't think I disagree with anything you said.
See, and that's why I brought you on. Alex?
There is something else, I think, to this notion of going to the smaller circles or smaller ponds and interacting with more specialized users and not on some massive platform, too, because if you think about it, those smaller ponds are going to be a hell of a lot less attractive to, let's say, something like, you know, a state-sponsored adversary looking for an avenue to interject some kind of election interference.
That's just, you know, because you don't have that impact, you don't have that splash, you're going to have a much less – you're going to be much less attractive, far less attractive, I think, to those sophisticated adversaries looking to disrupt elections or even promote scams and things like that.
So, The Gibson, what do you think of this?
We've watched it happen.
Six years in the Fed, of course, we've watched those influence machines try to come over during election cycles, things like that, and try to gain some traction.
And it's so much more expensive for them to try to influence without having servers block them from being able to talk to them and just kind of putting them off and sitting them in the corner, if you will, right?
Because it's more expensive, ultimately, because the economics of it aren't as efficient as a Facebook or a Twitter or whatever, it doesn't work well, and they don't do it as well.
It kind of puts roadblocks to slow down their progress.
So you're absolutely right.
These smaller communities, even when they're tight-knit, are a little more defensive about their perimeters, right?
And so it's harder for – I won't say it's harder for misinformation to get in.
Misinformation still makes it in.
But it's harder for a specific threat actor to be able to manipulate that effectively.
And talking of threat actors, that leads nicely into the next thing I wanted to ask you about.
Gibson, tell us about threads.
Oh, boy.
I should not have said that while you started taking a sip of your drink.
Thank you for that.
I almost spit it out.
Okay, so threads.
We've been talking about Reddit.
We've been talking about Twitter.
We've been talking about the meltdowns they've had, and siloed social media does appear to indeed be on fire right now.
And Facebook has come to the rescue to save siloed social media.
So an Instagram app called Threads has been created.
It launched – as a matter of fact, it launched at 7 p.m. tonight, so the same time we started talking tonight.
This app basically ties together parts of the Fediverse, so servers on the Fediverse that are willing to federate with them have been included in this.
It ties together, as I understand it, and I have not used the app myself yet, but as I understand it, it ties together Instagram.
Some of those Fediverse instances ties together some Facebook capabilities.
And if I'm correct, I think there's also Blue Sky that's tied into that as well, which is basically a Twitter clone that's starting to come up.
It's theoretically going to be federated, but it hasn't yet really.
So we've got these many services kind of coming into this one app for users of Instagram and possibly Facebook to use and interact with.
Now, the concerns we have on the Fediverse for this, of course, is Facebook's history of data handling.
And we tend to be, at least in our corner of the Fediverse, we tend to be pretty independent of having our data mined.
We see our data construct on the Internet, if you will, as an exocortex.
It still belongs to us in our book, right?
Just because we put it out there doesn't mean someone else gets to mine it.
The concern now is because of the nature of federation, you have all these different servers talking to each other and passing information across.
One of those servers is connected to meta, to Facebook, to Instagram, to threads.
And when they're connected to that and someone on that instance sees your post and likes it and says, I want everybody to see this and boosts it, suddenly it goes to their service as well because they're federated on that end.
There is a command and control issue with this.
And honestly, I think we're looking at kind of a net split, if you will, of the Fediverse, which net splits are always bad for everybody.
I think we've probably all lived through a few of these at this point.
But it's happening right now as we speak.
At Hackers.Town, we preemptively took action to block all Facebook-owned domains.
And we actually have somebody that's adjacent to Hackers.Town set up a bot account on the Fediverse to watch Facebook's ASN in their registrar to determine if any new domains get registered so we can preemptively add them to the block list.
So we've done some work to try to automate this as much as we can at this point.
There'll probably be further automation coming.
But the problem is those larger instances, they're kind of silos in themselves.
We have a lot of people, say, at any of these instances that are following people on those larger servers that really like them.
I mean, there's some great people over there.
But the problem is that because those servers are now going to federate with Facebook, we have to decide how to interact with them.
We have to decide how to control our data flow.
And it becomes a real issue because ultimately you tell the people in your community, no, you can't talk to them, which is not good.
Nobody wants that.
Or do you say, well, your data is going to be taken by somebody else.
It's going to be siphoned up.
Now, the reality is we all know the Fediverse is not a private environment.
OK, we get that.
It's the principle of the matter that really is in discussion here.
Should our data be mineable by a megacorp, by, as I refer to it, Hope 2020, as Ibotu, right?
I mean, we've got these giant organizations.
Now, the interesting thing to me is that the European Union, they have not been able to launch threads in the EU because the GDPR is making it problematic enough for Facebook that they're afraid to start this thing there yet, which tells me all I need to know about what they're gathering and what kind of information they're taking.
So that's the reason we're preemptively taking action, and we are on a case-by-case basis, at least in Hackers.Town, deciding how to handle the other servers that decide that talking to Facebook is a good thing.
Now, there's a lot more detail to this, and I'm not going to get into it because I don't want to call out my fellow admins and people like that for decisions they've made that fit their worldview.
OK, fine. That's their choice, not mine.
But now we have a moral quandary, if you will, about how we go forward, and so that's how a split starts, and that's pretty much where I think we are.
We'll see how this goes over the next few weeks, but I expect us to see very much an old-school style net split, because it's the same architecture as we had back in the 90s, really.
So when this occurs, it's going to be the same outcome as we saw back then.
Yeah, one phrase that used to come out a lot about the big tech companies when they were like Microsoft or IBM or places like that is the strategy of embrace, extend, and extinguish.
And a lot of people have seen Instagram deciding, hey, we want to play in that Fediverse, too, to be basically that kind of a move where they see the Fediverse, they see that it's a threat to the way they've been doing things all these years.
And so they want to get not only a foot in the door, but a way to possibly shake things up and, for lack of a better term, mess up what's going on over there.
So this will definitely be interesting to keep an eye on. Go ahead.
I saw a very interesting statistic a few days ago. Maybe not even a statistic, just a number.
When Instagram was purchased by Facebook, they had 30 million users.
When Threads became a reality, the Fediverse had 30 million users.
I feel like I may start to see a trend here on when funds get released to take over something.
And in the case of the Fediverse, you can't just buy it. It won't work that way.
But doing something like what we're seeing with Threads does start to have that social chilling effect on the entire network.
It really does.
You mentioned the idea of stuff you put out on the Fediverse, things are public facing, but does that mean that anybody is allowed to use them for whatever purposes?
I want to get into a little bit of news outside of this.
There's a story on Gizmodo that came up the other day where Google says it'll scrape everything you post online for AI.
An update to Google's privacy policy suggests that the entire public internet is fair game for its AI projects.
And those who pay attention to Google's terms of service changes noticed basically the insertion of Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features, and technologies that benefit our users and the public.
For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, BARD, and Cloud AI capabilities.
So, yeah, that amounts to if Google sees it, they have announced that it's their intention to use it.
It's their intention to fold it into what they're training their AI with, which itself is a really sticky legal question going on right about now.
Alex, I know you had some feelings about that whole subject.
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of lawsuits, I think, that are swirling around now.
And I think there was even another lawsuit against OpenAI filed today, perhaps by authors.
But what's being litigated right now is the issue of the ingestion of artwork from artists in the training data for engines like stability diffusion and others that are then used to actually generate artwork in the style of Artist X, in the style of Artist Y, etc., etc.
And the artist's contention is that by ingesting their artworks as part of that training data, that is a violation of their copyright license, that they're doing so without their permission.
And on the other hand, you can – and look, I think this is a very tough argument, and I think I could argue it both ways, quite frankly.
But on the other hand, you can say, well, no, it's a minor use.
It's a fair use.
It's one of quite literally millions of different images that an AI engine may be trained on or trained to recognize.
It was just one tiny, tiny little thing.
So we're not making any commercial application based solely off of those images that you mentioned.
So shouldn't this be considered a fair use because it's so minimal?
And I think there'll be very interesting legal implications on how AI continues to innovate over the next couple of years based on how those cases shake out.
Absolutely.
In a related story, Valve, the video game company that runs the service Steam and publishes lots of games on there and also accepts games from the public to publish on their service, have been denying games that use AI-generated materials.
They've spoken about this.
Their reasoning is that the maker of the game cannot prove ownership of the materials that have been remixed by the AI into what they've put into their game.
So you need to just have stuff you're allowed to use and clearly allowed to use in your game.
As far as Valve is reading it, that does not include AI-generated material at this point.
But speaking of AI-generated material, something that pinged my antenna when you went into this article from Gizmodo is that GeoMedia, which is the VC company that now owns a bunch of sites like Gizmodo, Deadspin, the AV Club, etc.,
is now beginning, actually today, to roll out AI-generated material alongside stuff from their journalists.
Here's one, a chronological list of Star Wars movies and TV shows by Gizmodo Bot.
Yeah, and that byline appears next to a picture of a row of stormtroopers looking mean.
And this is quite a combination.
Who says irony is dead?
Absolutely. And yeah, this reads like any other listicle that you might read.
There's a list of the movies, there's little summaries of what happens in them.
This looks ready to be read by people.
And yeah, it was written by a robot.
This is really fascinating.
What got remixed for this article to happen?
Who wrote the original text that went into this?
Do they deserve some kind of compensation, recognition, what have you?
I don't know. That's between, I think, the WGA and the lawyers right now, isn't it?
It's going to be a longer, hotter summer, I think, if the strike doesn't get resolved.
I saw something right before we went on air on Twitter, actually,
that a note went out to all the staff at GeoMedia, and they're like,
yeah, this is happening, and if you notice mistakes, please let us know.
And the journalists are like, no, sorry.
You decided to roll this out, you fix it.
Absolutely.
I've seen plenty of strike signs about this very topic, right?
I mean, I think I've seen Neil Gaiman himself out there holding up a sign
that was basically anti-AI in the entertainment industry.
So we're approaching the cyberpunk dystopia we were warned about in some ways here.
And what does it do to the quality of entertainment,
much less to the people that are writing for shows now?
To the breadth of this, I actually just received a report today
from a person adjacent to our community that even their Gopher server,
a Gopher server in the year 2023 was scraped by AI bots,
and the data from that server is in use in certain models.
Wow.
For those unfamiliar, explain a Gopher server, because this is archaeology right now.
Yeah, right.
It's kind of a pre-web thing.
You know, one of the things about being in a hacker community
is there's a lot of people that are retro computing enthusiasts, right?
They have old gear, they have old systems they really, really love,
and they'll bring them back to life.
And Gopher is one of those things that over time has managed to survive, barely,
but it's still out there.
And this server basically allows you kind of somewhere between BBS and web era, right?
So you're able to use a protocol on the web to communicate,
but it's more BBS in nature.
So it's, you know, there might be files you download,
there's definitely no live video,
there's definitely none of the multimedia features we think of usually in that particular area.
So the modern Gopher software is just like it used to be,
just a little more lightweight, right?
And so now we're at a point where even data from obscure points like that,
that use obscure protocols that you would think would not be considered a valid target for anyone,
that data is also getting pulled up.
So it's like even hiding in the corner does not stop the agrivor from coming for the information, right?
And so you're in a situation where, you know,
AIs are fueled by having access to more information.
So the further this goes, the further the reach will go
in order to find that information to assimilate it.
Go ahead, Alex.
I'll tell you a funny story about a Gopher server.
You know, way back in the day, it's got to be, I guess, the mid-90s,
you know, I was in high school and my, well, let's just say a public library
started running its own Gopher server.
And it was run locally in the library on a VAX VMS system.
And, you know, I'd always read about VAX VMS systems,
mostly in like frac text files and things like that from way back in the day.
And I'd never really played around with one.
So I didn't know a lot about VAX VMS.
So a friend of mine and I, who these days also works in cybersecurity,
we'll just say that we went to the library shelf.
We got a book on VAX VMS systems from the library itself,
which contained the default passcodes and logins for VAX VMS systems,
which of course still worked in this particular library.
And then we used that opportunity to go into all of the Gopher server pages,
which as Gibson noted, is kind of like web pages.
And everywhere there was public library spelled,
we actually removed the L from public and just left that word there.
So those were the days.
Classic.
Yep.
I'd do it again, I think.
Yeah.
That is wonderful.
But yeah, so everything old is new again.
And yes, stuff that exists out there is being grabbed with impunity.
And it will be very interesting to see how all this falls out.
While we have a little bit of time left,
Gibson, I wanted to ask you about, you know, I heard tell here and there,
little whispers and mutterings of a little project,
talking of the old days, that you have going with those
Rapscallions over at the Cult of the Dead Cow.
And I don't know how much you're allowed to say about this,
but if you could give a little tease about what it's about
and where people could find more info about it.
So you're putting me on the spot a little bit.
I will try to say only what I can say,
because we are launching this project at DEF CON.
So about a month from now, it'll be public and out in the open.
You can get all the deep dive technical details you want,
everything like that.
A few years ago, there was, at the beginning of the pandemic,
as a matter of fact, I think I spoke to you guys on the air back then
about how we were trying to keep people afloat in our community
and Hackers.Town was there, and come on, we have meetings,
we have all these calls, and it just lets you know
somebody else is still out there in those dark early days, right?
And so we had this thing we called Office Hours.
It started a little bit before the pandemic,
but so one of the members of the CDC,
who I've become friends with over the years,
at least I hope we're friends, I think we're friends, but whatever.
Look, he told me,
well, let me know when you're doing these, I'll show up one day.
And so he did, and he had this very nascent idea
about how to bring together cryptographically secure messaging, right?
And it was pretty neat to hear him talk about it and such,
and so we went on with that.
But it was about a year later.
It was almost two years later, actually.
It was the DEF CON after, in 21.
We're at a party, and he comes up to me, and he's like,
hey, you remember that idea for the social media thing?
Yeah. He's like, I think we ought to do that.
And when the Cult of the Dead Cow comes, he says,
you know, we ought to do this. You go, yes, we should.
That's a great idea. Let's do that.
So I was introduced to some other members he talked to about it
and kind of brought them in.
And over the past three years, effectively,
we've been working on this project.
So what it is, it is a fully distributed,
open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first network application framework.
And what that means is we have created a application framework
you can build on top of that puts privacy in the networking portion of it
as a primary goal, as a key building block, right?
So that you don't have to worry about having exposed information.
And there's a lot more to it than that.
But basically, the way to think about it is if you take something like
interplanetary file system, IPFS, and mixed it with Tor,
but made it fast, that's sort of what it is, right?
So the idea is to be able to basically enable development of distributed applications
without a blockchain, without a transactional layer,
and to also be able to build communities in that same network
and make them cryptographically safe from, you know, surveillance.
It's going to be so expensive, much like we discussed earlier with the threat actors,
it's going to be so expensive to be able to mine users' data out of this
unless the app built on top of it exclusively allows that,
that it's not going to be a valid target, is the idea.
Okay.
So there's a lot more to it than that, but that's kind of it.
Really quickly, while we're running out of time,
where can people find info on that if they're interested?
Veilid.com, that's V-E-I-L-I-D dot com.
Excellent.
Send us email at O-T-H at 2600 dot com.
We will not be doing Off the Hook Overtime tonight,
that gear is beyond our reach,
but we will return to the airwaves, I believe, next week.
Don't forget 2600 meetings this weekend.
Absolutely. 2600 meetings happening all over the world.
Go to 2600 dot com slash meetings.
And we've come to the end of another one.
So for Off the Hook, thank you very much to Gibson for joining us.
Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Gila.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening.
Have a very good week.
Yeah
We are one
Oh, we are one
Oh, we are one
Yes, we are one
Worry is in the air
It goes from here to there
Spanning through a crowded room
Let's all make some noise
Show the world we have a choice
Together let's see what we can do
Oh, we are one
Oh, we are one
Oh, we are one
Yes, we are one
Yeah
We are one
Oh, we are one
Oh, we are one
Yes, we are one
Oh, we are one
Yes, we are one
Yes, we are one for one tonight
A bit overwhelming what we tell ourselves
It's not easy to shut your eyes
John and Yoko said it can't be such a chance
So let's all give it a try
That's right, you and I
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We are one
Whoa-oh-oh
We are one
Whoa-oh-oh
We are one
Yes, we are one
Yeah, we are one
Whoa-oh-oh
We are one
Whoa-oh-oh
We are one
Yes, we are one
We are one
Yes, we are one
Yeah, we are one tonight
Well, Ma, time to watch the frogs eating the flies
Yep, then off to the neighbors to watch the paint dry
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