Monday, September 05, 2022

Inevitable? No doubt there’s an App for that. “Dis is my friend, Guido. Guido will do tings for youse. You want Guido should break some knees?”

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/09/violence-as-a-service-brickings-firebombings-shootings-for-hire/

Violence-as-a-Service: Brickings, Firebombings & Shootings for Hire

A 21-year-old New Jersey man has been arrested and charged with stalking in connection with a federal investigation into groups of cybercriminals who are settling scores by hiring people to carry out physical attacks on their rivals. Prosecutors say the defendant recently participated in several of these schemes — including firing a handgun into a Pennsylvania home and torching a residence in another part of the state with a Molotov Cocktail.





Also inevitable? The only new thing is the organization. Individual dissenters have always been active.

https://www.politico.eu/article/nafo-doge-shiba-russia-putin-ukraine-twitter-trolling-social-media-meme/

The shit-posting, Twitter-trolling, dog-deploying social media army taking on Putin one meme at a time

Ivana Stradner opened her iPhone and typed a simple call-to-arms: Unleash the hounds.

A Washington think-tanker and an expert in Russian propaganda, Stradner is also a member of NAFO — or the North Atlantic Fellas Organization — an informal alliance of internet culture warriors, national security experts and ordinary Twitter users weaponizing memes, viral videos and, yes, dog photos to push back against Russian online disinformation.

I see myself as a NAFO civilian propagandist,” said Stradner, an adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank. “Until now, Russia has been the only ones willing to play a dirty game.” By posting on Twitter, she was letting her 26,000 followers know who they could turn to if they needed to deal with an infestation of “Vatniks” — a Russian pejorative for Kremlin sympathizers.

Whenever a NAFO fellas spots a Russian official or sympathizer posting a pro-Kremlin take on Twitter, for instance, they can use the hashtag #Article5 — a nod to the part of the NATO treaty that calls for collective defense — to bombard these accounts with support for Ukraine. They’ve also flooded Twitter with viral memes attacking Russian President Vladimir Putin and videos mocking the Kremlin’s war effort. On an average day, there are now more than 5,000 Twitter posts linked to NAFO versus a mere handful in May, according to an analysis shared with POLITICO by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online activity.





Yet another application of facial recognition.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/sep/05/iran-government-facial-recognition-technology-hijab-law-crackdown

Iranian authorities plan to use facial recognition to enforce new hijab law

Government says it will use technology on public transport in crackdown on women’s dress





Just what my AI wants you to think...

https://www.niagara-gazette.com/news/web_extra/ub-philosopher-claims-ai-will-never-rule-the-world/article_07822006-2816-11ed-8d2a-77c043e92339.html

UB philosopher claims AI will “never” rule the world

Barry Smith, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy in UB’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Jobst Landgrebe, PhD, founder of Cognotekt, a German AI company, have co-authored “Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear.”

Smith and Landgrebe offer a critical examination of AI’s unjustifiable projections, such as machines detaching themselves from humanity, self-replicating, and becoming “full ethical agents.” There cannot be a machine will, they say. Every single AI application rests on the intentions of human beings – including intentions to produce random outputs. This means the Singularity, a point when AI becomes uncontrollable and irreversible (like a Skynet moment from the “Terminator” movie franchise) is not going to occur. Wild claims to the contrary serve only to inflate AI’s potential and distort public understanding of the technology’s nature, possibilities and limits.

Reaching across the borders of several scientific disciplines, Smith and Landgrebe argue that the idea of a general artificial intelligence (AGI) − the ability of computers to emulate and go beyond the general intelligence of humans − rests on fundamental mathematical impossibilities that are analogous in physics to the impossibility of building a perpetual motion machine. AI that would match the general intelligence of humans is impossible because of the mathematical limits on what can be modeled and is “computable.” These limits are accepted by practically everyone working in the field; yet they have thus far failed to appreciate their consequences for what an AI can achieve.





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