They are positioning AI as the nuclear weapons of the 21st century, angling for a nationalization as a strategic weapon when the bottom drops out of it.

The AI bubble bursting will wreck the economy far harder than the Dotcom bubble did. And the dynamic is OBVIOUS. This is not an "if" problem, it's a "when" problem.

If AI produces a maximal result along the lines of what the frontier labs suggest, it'll eat fifty million jobs, which will wreck the economy far harder, and for far longer.

The constant chatter about AI breakout is half legitimate concern and half positioning to nationalize it, shielding the circular dealing crew from consequences.

This will not be Skynet; as a society we are far too primed to envision events that can be told in a single two hour action adventure with a clear, satisfying ending. When the historians get to this they will note the breakout happened 2025 - 2027 -- because that will be the time where human network threats enhanced by AI will starting further enhancing AI.

There are no "sides" to this, it'll be like the African savanna - lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, servals & caracals, clear down to my personal favorite, the black backed jackal. A network of carnivores of various sizes pursue networks of herbivores. Nation states, corporations, non-state actors, activist groups, talented individuals; all are making use of AI in conflicts already.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle, the open models are only a little behind the frontier, and things are going to keep happening no matter what bellicose policy pronouncements come from an increasingly irrelevant Washington, D.C.

I'll be riding the Claude subsidy until it ends, then hopefully have acquired a potent professional GPU or unified memory setup of my own. Won't be nearly as quick, but it'll keep me moving.

Now scale that thinking up by whatever percentage of eight billion people have technical capabilities. That's the future.

The AI industry has blown a spectacular bubble via circular dealing - Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, etc are all doing monopoly money deals. Nvidia "sells" some GPUs, then "invests" the proceeds back into OpenAI, nothing got done, no money changed hands, but their stock values zoom. This looks exactly like the Dotcom bubble in the late 1990s and such things always implode - the market doesn't just correct, it panics, it liquidates, nobody can tell what's real, so everything is for sale at pennies on the dollar.

The industry's strategy to not go to prison for this stunt is to make AI equivalent to nuclear weapons. When the bubble begins to burst, the Trump administration will "make a deal", what you see is the beginning of that process. This will work about as well as the attempt to shake down Iran for their oil, but cause and effect are not the Trump administration's strong suit.

Let's be more specific about how and why this could happen? What scenarios could lead to the total destruction of mankind?

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.

Well, technically, we're letting Natalie do it, which is, of course, worse in every way imaginable, since she's immune to the sense of embarrassment that sometimes restrains him from acting on every little whim.

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.

I believe the plan was to give that sobriquet to Lake Michigan, in honour of its decidedly flaccid silhouette.

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.

Freenet is also based on middle-out compression.

No. Trying to push 30TB into Freenet will be interpreted as an attack on the network by other peers and they'll disconnect from your peer.

Freenet is better viewed as a communication medium than a storage medium. Data is prioritized according to demand, somewhat like an LRU cache. You can't upload 30TB and expect the network to preserve it for you.

On liability, running a Freenet peer is more like running network infrastructure that automatically routes and caches other people's traffic than intentionally publishing it. US law explicitly recognizes this distinction in the DMCA's provisions for transitory network communications and system caching. We discuss this in more detail in the FAQ.

You obviously haven't tried Freenet. You can join our room on River and you'll see no spam, no fraud, no hate speech, none of that.

Decentralized doesn't mean unmoderated. Systems built on Freenet can be moderated however their creators and communities want. River is moderated.

The difference is that nobody running one service gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to run.

Back in the teens we found a couple of instances where political actors were encouraging people to install screen savers or cryptocurrency wallets that turned their phones into reverse proxies. This was thought to be specifically for the sake of giving hostile foreign operations (read: Russia) access to U.S. domestic politics.

The fact that smart TVs are facilitating this is just ... we're going to need home networks that treat IoT stuff as different than our actual systems.

Oh, wait, TP-Link had well over half the U.S. router market, but they're getting banned over national security concerns?

Maybe there's a market for a router with traffic accounting as a service so one can see what's happening?

This is why the only device in my house with internet is a Roku. I simply will not tolerate the rest of that invasive junk.