Dodgy app developers make dodgy apps, and convince naive users to install them.

The dodgy apps make the naive user’s Internet connection available to some partner the dodgy app developer has done a deal with - and since the naive user is typically using a residential network, and it lets their connection be used by someone else, it’s called a residential proxy.

The partner sells access to a huge network of residential proxies to scrapers, often those wanting to do AI scraping against the wishes of the owners of the site being scraped. This is valuable to the scrapers because they appear to be coming from large numbers of different residential addresses. Cloud / hosting provider addresses are usually the first thing people block if they don’t want scrapers, and they also block how much each address can access. So the scrapers scrape a little bit per address, making it hard for the victim sites to detect what is scraping and what is legitimate traffic.

This creates a security risk for the naive users, because as well as connecting out to the Internet, usually the proxy customer can connect to and maybe exploit things on their home network. The naive users usually don’t know their connection is being used this way.

So the headline here is that one of the affected naive users is someone in the White House, and one of the ‘residential’ networks being sold is in fact the White House’s Internet connection.

To be Kafkaesque is to not know what you are accused of and/or to have no real mechanism to defend the accusations. The Kafkaesque part is the private network of ‘justice’ that makes judgements which impact someone’s access to basics like food based on an opaque algorithm with no recourse.

These private systems are worst when they are networks across multiple stores - you could imagine a future where, if left to the devices of late stage capitalism (i.e. not effectively regulated), it could become virtually impossible to buy food and other essentials once you are on a privately held denylist that retailers pay to access, where those on the list have no insights into how they got on the list nor any mechanism to correct any inaccuracies that unfairly led to them being on the list.

TL;DR: I think Kafkaesque is correct here.

Also when Raspberry Pi started, it was a not-for-profit. In a way, they went through the same transformation as OpenAI (which started not-for-profit too) but slightly earlier.

I wish people would stop repeating without evidence the idea that Luigi M did anything other than get harassed eating at a fast food restaurant. The official story makes no sense - someone apparently recognised him from a blurry CCTV release that is likely another person albeit of the same build and hair colour, and phoned it in with absolute certainty, and then the police happened to find a ‘manifesto’ on him, and then later, not even straight away when he was searched, an improvised weapon. If the real killer could do the crime and get away to a completely different state, they’d have had numerous opportunities to dispose of everything - it just strains credibility.

Consider on the other hand that the powers that be were eager that someone take the fall for this - they couldn’t have the perception that such a thing will go unpunished (see also: the extreme push for the death penalty, and the involvement of very senior political appointees). They can achieve that by picking any random approximately fitting the description off the street and framing them.

I think it’s actually the legislative intent that they can do stuff like that and blame it on the AI. If the law says that there’s no liability unless it was intentional fraud, then the courts are going to follow that unless there is a higher law that overrides it.

That’s why it’s important to fight things like this before they become law.

If these are relatively inexpensive to set up and dispose of, corporations could even set them up automatically for individual consumer transactions and between individual employees and themselves.

For example, you go to a fast food restaurant, and you are actually being served by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, founded 2 seconds ago, and leasing the right to operate in the building amongst other similar AI companies, as well as the part-time services of McGermKing Employment Services fd176cc4-bb95-4c1b-80e7-2aec39f02917, who hires a human to take your order, and McGermKing Employment Services 5336b4f1-0594-4df1-8387-5ec9b638db77, who assembles your GermBurger (TM used under licence by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd).

If you pay them and they make money, it goes back to the owner. If you get food poisoning and sue McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd (since the parent company is totally innocent and some other subsidiaries are just honest suppliers), it comes out of the money they made selling you the burger, and if their liability to you was higher than the cost of one burger, well, the AI corporation tried its honest best at business, but you can line up for your share of the payout - keeping in mind they also owe franchise fees to the parent company out of that burger, so the AI liquidator will divide up the assets, and if it doesn’t cover liabilities, the parent company loses its 50c investment into McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, and how sad it was a bad outcome for you as a creditor.

Likewise if an employee gets hurt, same story.

This is not running it as root (i.e. privileged userland, still ring 3), this is running it as ring 0 (i.e. the level that the kernel runs at, with no restrictions on access to memory and hardware at all). A tiny bug in ring 0 code can take down the system or open security vulnerabilities, where the kernel can provide more hardening to protect applications to an extent.

You could say this is the inner circle of hell.

Yep, and if you’re a real techbro, you start off by making the offering great. But then, you gradually enshittify it. Popups start coming up that ask her to consent to things she doesn’t really want forever, on unconscionable terms, but at first there is a ‘Yes’ or ‘Not now’ option. Behind the scenes, there are terms saying you can change the terms any time you like, and her only option is to leave within 14 days, and it is her responsibility to monitor the terms and stop using it if she doesn’t agree. You start silently changing the terms to allow you to opt her in by default to consent to things she doesn’t want. She opts out, so you change the terms again so she has no choice. All the while the service gets worse - but what’s she going to do, she’s locked in.

And that sort of thing is why working for companies known for doing the equivalent of the above but to the public is not going to get a good reaction.

But I also think he did really believe in electric cars and solar power

Musk is very good at separating wealthy investors from their money. Said investors are not entirely stupid - but Musk has historically been very skilled at cultivating a perception that he’s going to do something revolutionary that will change the world and make his investors rich, if only investors would give him money. You know, that he can colonise mars, build fully self-driving (on motorways) cars by 2015, and build a practical LA to SF hyperloop.

To con investors he was an amazing futurist, there needed to be a grain of truth mixed in there, even if there were other significant logical gaps in his claims. I don’t believe he genuinely cared about the planet or other people, but he did see (as many people were, in fact, already screaming) that change was coming and decide he could sell it to investors and enrich himself.

Pretending to be an amazing engineer and to care was his modus operandi for a long time - perhaps the most notable incident was in the 2018 Tham Luang cave incident in Thailand; Musk pledged to put engineers on inventing a submarine to rescue them. When Tesla’s design was unlikely to work, but a heroic team of divers rescued the children, instead of expressing relief the children were safe, Musk labelled the rescuer a ‘pedo’, showing that he never really cared and it was just a stunt.

Maybe technically in Florida and Texas, given that they passed a law to try to stop sites deplatforming Trump.

https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess125_2023-2024/bills/3102.htm

“The owner or operator of a social media website who contracts with a social media website user in this State is subject to a private right of action by a user if the social media website purposely: … (2) uses an algorithm to disfavor, shadowban, or censure the user’s religious speech or political speech”.

In May 2022, the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled to strike the law (and similarly there was a 5th Circuit judgement), but just this month the US Supreme Court vacated the Court of Appeals judgement (i.e. reinstated the law) and remanded it back to the respective Court of Appeals. That said, the grounds for doing that were the court had not done the proper analysis, and after they do that it might be struck down again. But for now, the laws are technically not struck down.

It would be ironic if after conservatives passed this law, and stacked the supreme court and got the challenge to it vacated, the first major use of it was used against Xitter for censoring Harris!