July 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

1984: Active Measures, Engineering Consent - Covert Bots Influencing All Online from Pol to Crypto to Freedom
by grarpamp 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

If users spend any observational time online, bots can be spotted, and it appears that many botlike chime in support of the Left State, not Crypto or Freedom, to homogenize and control the masses, not to foster freedom that would moot it. Even Musk forced the exposure that Twitter was hiding, that Twitter knows that Twitter is composed of far more than only the 5% bots they claim. So what are those hidden bots doing... Twitter knows, just as they know what Twitters Censor and Ranking teams are … [View More]doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM Bot Runs For Teh Lols https://old.reddit.com/r/talkwithgpt2bots https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2 https://www.reddit.com/r/ShadowBan/ Also interesting to note is how none of his bots were shadowbanned, while new users seem to get shadowbanned quite frequently Singularity - The moment in time when artificial intelligence progresses to the point of greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization. https://drwho.virtadpt.net/files/The-Engineering-of-Consent.pdf https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.1607/page/n9/mode/1up Crystallizing Public Opinion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fx1BYwCwCI Bezmenov Ideological Subversion https://archive.org/details/Tavistock_201601 https://tabublog.com/2015/12/26/the-manufactured-invention-of-the-beatles-s… https://www.educate-yourself.org/nwo/nwotavistockbestkeptsecret.shtml https://seoulsister.blog/2022/03/21/tavistock-institute-bernays-propaganda-… https://famguardian.org/Publications/Shaping_The_Decline_Of_USA/Shaping_The… https://opdinani.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/our-sexual-ethics-by-bertrand-rus… http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html https://www.amazon.com/Active-Measures-History-Disinformation-Political/dp/… Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare by Thomas Rid "Active Measures is predominantly an exercise in clarity, shining a light on covert operations and exposing the lies previously reported as truth. But it is at its most chilling when describing the disorientating complexities of unsolved operations." "Makes me wonder how much of this sort of thing has been used against the crypto ecosystem" "I have recently started studying disinformation, and I find it highly interesting and informative. Specifically going through "Active Measures" by Thomas Rid that was published last year. If I was to give just one insight, it's this: y'all don't realise how far disinformation campaigns go. The first one Rid describes (possibly not the first one ever, but the first one by russian services) is the successful campagin by the newly founded communist russia against exiled monarchists. We're talking 1918-1927. There is a lot of experience (on all sides) with disinformation campaigns, and not only state actors, but big businesses too. And now, also, medium businesses, as disinformation is being commodised by businesses like Cambridge Analytica and its successors. As stated by the others in the thread, the main objective of disinformation campaigns is not necessarily creating an alternate reality of lies (but it does help). Most of the time it's to "muddy the waters". Make it so that people don't believe that a truth exists, or if it exists, that it isn't knowable. So that people get discouraged and leave. There's a lot more to it, I can't recommend the book enough." " It took me 1 day to create a program, using GPT-3, to create a highly convincing small army of bots to post on Reddit: Here's how I did it... As someone who genuinely think there is significant concern with AI's ability to leverage convince natural human language through LLMs, to "manufacture" consent for special interests, I always worried we are well past that point online. I suspected, like many, that this is a current problem, yet lacks proof. The only evidence I have is sheer logical game theory: If it's possible and effective, special interests will absolutely be engaging in this. I received a lot of push back, because many people don't want to believe this is a likely reality. Many people are uncomfortable admitting that maybe many opinions that they have on world affairs, domestic politics, corporate perception, is likely heavily influenced via false social proof provided by AI. So I went out to prove to myself I'm not crazy, and this is relatively easy, effective, cheap, and would go completely unnoticed. (Note I will not be sharing any of the details of my own experiment for two reasons. I want to avoid a ban, and I don't want anyone sticking their fingers in my stuff) Step 1: Defining the goal This is the easiest part. Thanks to our divided country here in the USA, there is no limit to the topics I could choose from. Since this is Reddit, imagining being someone trying to manufacture consent, I obviously wouldn't want a right wing issue to push because I don't have the scale or will to even attempt something like that. It made more sense to go with a left wing partisan issue. I specifically chose a topic I find a bit hypocritical though, as to allow left wing dissent on the subject I was targeting. I originally decided to monitor /r/new of about 10 different political focused subreddits that aren't explicitly partisan... But due to lack of resources I narrowed it down to 3, 1 which was explicitly a partisan subreddit, 1 which was wasn't explicitly partisan (but clearly had a bias), and another which obviously had a bias, but wasn't what you'd typically think of when you think of a political subreddit (much more neutral) I wanted to monitor /r/subreddit/new, wait randomly between 3 and 20 minutes, scan the comments for relevant trigger topics, and reply to just one or two if more than 3 triggering events existed. Step 1: Creating the model This was the easiest. First, I had to find I initially tried, for fun, to see if I could get GPT-3 to write a python script for me to scrape the user profiles of the "personality" I wanted to create the model around. It was surprisingly easy to find plenty of users who militantly held the position I was looking for, who post all day on Reddit like it's their damn job. I'm still not sure if I just created a GPT-3 model, off another GPT-3 model (turtles all the way down), but I digress. Needless to say, I couldn't figure out a good way to get GPT-3 to write a script that scrapped all their comments on their profile. But it got really close... The main issue I had to manually resolve was simply including the ability to go load the next page for more comments. But again, not too hard for most, even though I kept getting caught up in small issues because I haven't programmed in a while and had to keep looking up basic technical stuff dealing with CSS and HTML values. Once I had the users' comments scraped, I blended them together and trained the custom model which only costed a few bucks. I was actually a bit surprised how cheap it was to create my own political activist personality Step 2: Monitoring and scraping target subreddits for relevant posts This was one of the most difficult in the sense of "figuring it out" and less technical. Trying to navigate the trigger topics and figure out if they agreed with my position, or disagreed, was actually really hard. I spent way too much time on this until I realized, the obvious. I didn't actually need to know that. I could just randomly select a few triggers and let GPT-3 naturally reply to the comment. It would naturally agree or dissagree. Step 3: Deployment Easily, without a doubt, the hardest part. Since I haven't really programmed in a few years, I wasn't prepared to go do a bunch of tutorials for hours again just to catch up, so to save time and mental anguish I used 3rd party macro programs. Each "bot" got their own instance, with a unique browser user agent (Everything custom from screen resolution, windows OS, drivers, you name it), and VPN (The accounts ranged from a few years to brand new). I convinced myself that I was actually going this route as a safety procedure to avoid Reddit's bot detection algorithms, but in reality, it was just laziness. It was much easier to just get GPT-3 to print the comment and then inject that to the macro program, which would then quite literally type it out in the comment field. I'm sure an actual competent engineer could simplify this with no UI needed, but I'm just trying to prove a concept, not build a commercial scale product here. In fact, initially I was doing ALL comments in a thread, but reduced it to just the parent comments to save resources since, again, just trying to prove a concept - but in theory it's easy to include child comments To avoid getting into trouble I have to be vague here, but basically I just set a lot of randomization on frequency of posting, time, length, etc... Again, as a way to avoid detection. And it worked. Not a single instance got shadowbanned. It only took a little bit of troubleshooting at this stage, but eventually got it up and running without a hitch and let it run for quite some time... Again, to be vague, I will say I managed to get >1,000 posts on the topic, with tons of positive karma Takeaway: This was too easy to do IMO. I'm not a tech expert by any means yet was able to get a small army of bots to advocate for my hypothetical special interest. It ended up costing me just a small handful of pocket change, and was able to completely automate comment posts while I worked and slept, actively advocating for my position. I'm now convinced more than ever, that this MUST be much more widespread. If I was able to do it, actual skilled, funded, and agenda driven interests, are most certainly doing it. It makes no rational sense for there not to be. A brief comb through showed <10% of the comments were insufficient. But since a greater number than that of redditors are idiots, to an outside observer they would probably not realize it was GPT-3 missing their mark, and instead just write it off as another idiot making little relevant sense. One bot specifically, was modelled after an exceptionally toxic user, and the type of replies they got back definitely were overwhelmingly negative in tone. I could see this weaponized incredibly effectively to "curate" spaces. If I were to deploy 20 of these into a targeted space, working around the clock, it would make the space so unenjoyably for those who disagreed with my position, that they'd certainly leave (No one wants to keep returning to a space that bombards you with toxicity whenever you have a counter opinion), leaving behind at the very least an echochamber for that idea that at least tolerates my position, with little people going against my position. Super useful for creating a sense of social proof via consensus in a space. On the other hand, the bots that were modelled after nicer, more mature types, got FAR less engagement. Like by a significant magnitude. However, what little engagement they did get as replies, tended to have significantly longer replies trying to "debate" and discuss. This wasn't what I was expecting. I thought people would engage more with the nicer bots because they seemed more open to chat, but it seemed like while they did get more in depth responses, just not near the volume the other more aggressive bots did. How the bots did in terms of upvotes based on the subreddit were exactly as expected. The more clearly partisan one gathered upvotes every single time, and actually less interaction. The non explicitly partisan one got the most engagement. And the less partisan one got the least upvotes, but also the longest responses Beyond "space curation" I could absolutely see this as super useful for getting out "talking points" on current events as they unfold. I actually think this would be my key selling point if I were to commercialize this. It would be relatively easy to quickly draft a model and immediately deploy it to Reddit to get ahead and saturate the comments with whichever favorable spin a media communication expert decides on. So yeah, that's my little test. If anyone wants to make their own, I think this is absolutely easy to commercialize if you have the resources... And I'm sure there are many out there already privately working behind the scenes. If you hit a roadblock let me know and I don't mind helping through it. Cheers " "During the Second World War, both the London and Sussex facilities of Tavistock, served as headquarters for the British Army's Psychological Warfare Bureau. The significance of this is that through the "best friend" arrangement between Churchill and Roosevelt, Tavistock was able to take full control of U.S. intelligence and military policies through Special Operations Executive (SOE) and maintained this control throughout the Second World War. Eisenhower was selected by the Committee of 300 to become the commanding general of the allied forces in Europe, but only after extensive profiling by Tavistock. He was then appointed to the White House. Eisenhower was allowed to retain his seat in the White House until, with his usefulness expended, as memories of the war receded, he was dumped. Eisenhower's bitterness over the treatment he received at the hands of the Committee of 300 and the Tavistock Institute is reflected in his statements about the dangers posed by the military-industrial complex--a veiled reference to his former bosses, the "Olympians." [View Less]

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Fwd: CityCoins shared "adams.nyc - Domain Name For Sale | Dan.com"
by Gunnar Larson 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Twitter <info(a)twitter.com> Date: Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 1:15 PM Subject: CityCoins shared "adams.nyc - Domain Name For Sale | Dan.com" To: Gunnar Larson <g(a)xny.io> ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ … [View More]

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Fedbook Down
by professor rat 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

Facebook owner Meta suffers first revenue drop in history, teams will ‘shrink’ The owner of social media giants Facebook and Instagram is struggling to compete against TikTok, with its latest results showing a startling drop in profits. https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/technology/facebook-owner-meta-suf… Check yr reposts

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Cryptocurrency: Craig Wright BSV Losing In Court
by grarpamp 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

https://www.reddit.com/r/bsv/ Among other news sources...

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Skyfall Siloless Solutions - when Nine Eyes are better than Five
by professor rat 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

Here's one real easy way to fight centralized ' Cloud ' services and/or an oppressive computer world stuffed full of authoritarian rules, Gramps. ( Also ubiquitous Pentagon, Google and NSA surveillance for Juan! ) GET OFF the INTERNET.

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HALLOO BILL!? Bill, its me! DON'T SHOOT!
by professor rat 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

I didn't make the rule that any prediction mart on a person is also an assassination market on that person. DON'T SHOOT the MESSENGER! https://stiffs.com/celebrity/billgates And Pentagon DIA - if you're listening - BRING BACK PAM! Just the thing for Vladimir Pooter.

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GUNNAR You fucking spammer asshole STOP!
by professor rat 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

LARSON - you can take Juan's spot if this keeps up. Fucking STOP!

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Skyfall Siloless Solutions - when Nine Eyes are better than Five
by professor rat 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

Automate, authenticate, access As organizations modernize hybrid multicloud environments using a zero trust strategy, identity and access management can no longer remain siloed. In a cloud environment, you need to develop cloud IAM strategies that use deep, AI-powered context to automate risk protection and continuously authenticate any user to any resource. https://www.ibm.com/au-en/security/cloud-identity Reposts etc. I swear, if it wasn't for pickpockets I wouldn't have a sex-life.

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ESG
by Gunnar Larson 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

Bank.org is leading New York ESG. You know it.

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Murders and Executions
by professor rat 31 Jul '22

31 Jul '22

Bambi's bumboy, Rahm worked for Wasserstein for years >>> Robert Teitelman tells the stories of Felix Rohatyn, Bruce Wasserstein, Michael Milken in Bloodsport https://www.themiddlemarket.com/news/robert-teitelman-tells-the-stories-of-… Reposts not etc

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