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Cory Doctorow
pluralistic@mamot-fr.mostr.pub
npub1yxzk...5qvv
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow. Archived at pluralistic.net I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net. Tour schedule: https:/pluralistic.net/tour
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Cory Doctorow 1 year ago
Even Google admits - grudgingly - that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):
Google for Developers
What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers
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Cory Doctorow 1 year ago
Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:
AI bots hallucinate software packages and devs download them
Simply look out for libraries imagined by ML and make them real, with actual malicious code. No wait, don't do that
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Cory Doctorow 1 year ago
Moneybags on the moon #graffiti #nyc #sciencefiction #monopoly image
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Cory Doctorow 1 year ago
Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for *The New York Times* reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:
Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies (Published 2024)
LexisNexis, which generates consumer risk profiles for the insurers, knew about every trip G.M. drivers had taken in their cars, including when the...
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