#astroturfing

[titleknown]

...There's this thing going around by the Concept Art Association trying to raise money to fund anti-AI-Art stuff, that big stupid "Protecting Artists From AI Technologies" Gofundme, and I feel the need to inform y'all that it's a scam, or at least suspicious as hell.

Like, the main person behind it, Karla Ortiz, is a major NFT person and the organization they're trying to get buddy-buddy with; the Copyright Alliance; is basically an astroturf organization funded by megacorps like Disney and Warner to push against orgs like the EFF who're doing good work to push back against said corps overreach.

It bears all the signs of an astroturfing attempt to cozy up with megacorps and expand copyright law to something akin to what the music industry has. Which, as anyone familiar with that industry will tell you, you do not want.

Regardless of your views on AI art, the expansion of copyright is a bad idea for all artists, especially anyone who does fanart, and we shouldn't let the people trying to use this wave of panic to smuggle in a draconian expansion of copyright law that will only be used to hurt independent artists and help megacorps.

Remember, no matter what anyone says, Disney is not your friend. If they get their way on expanding copyright law, they will stab you in the back and then discard you.

#art #ai art #scams #astroturfing #copyright

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A link-clump demands a linkdump

Cometh the weekend, cometh the linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

The country code top level domain (ccTLD) for the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla is .ai, and that's turned into millions of dollars worth of royalties as "entrepreneurs" scramble to sprinkle some buzzword-compliant AI stuff on their businesses in the most superficial way possible:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/

All told, .ai domain royalties will account for about ten percent of the country's GDP.

It's actually kind of nice to see Anguilla finding some internet money at long last. Back in the 1990s, when I was a freelance web developer, I got hired to work on the investor website for a publicly traded internet casino based in Anguilla that was a scammy disaster in every conceivable way. The company had been conceived of by people who inherited a modestly successful chain of print-shops and decided to diversify by buying a dormant penny mining stock and relaunching it as an online casino.

But of course, online casinos were illegal nearly everywhere. Not in Anguilla – or at least, that's what the founders told us – which is why they located their servers there, despite the lack of broadband or, indeed, reliable electricity at their data-center. At a certain point, the whole thing started to whiff of a stock swindle, a pump-and-dump where they'd sell off shares in that ex-mining stock to people who knew even less about the internet than they did and skedaddle. I got out, and lost track of them, and a search for their names and business today turns up nothing so I assume that it flamed out before it could ruin any retail investors' lives.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance" – which is to say, it's a pearl in the globe-spanning necklace of tax- and corporate-crime-havens the UK established around the world so its most vicious criminals – the hereditary aristocracy – can continue to use Britain's roads and exploit its educated workforce without paying any taxes.

This is the "finance curse," and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it. Nick Shaxson dubbed them "Treasure Islands" in his outstanding book of the same name:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341722/treasureislands

I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever – anything that can't go on forever eventually stops – and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.

The AI bubble is indeed overdue for a popping, but while the market remains gripped by irrational exuberance, there's lots of weird stuff happening around the edges. Take Inject My PDF, which embeds repeating blocks of invisible text into your resume:

https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf/

The text is tuned to make resume-sorting Large Language Models identify you as the ideal candidate for the job. It'll even trick the summarizer function into spitting out text that does not appear in any human-readable form on your CV.

Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2012, when Ang Cui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njVv7J2azY8

Cui figured out that one way to update the software of a printer was to embed an invisible Postscript instruction in a document that basically said, "everything after this is a firmware update." Then he came up with 100 lines of perl that he hid in documents with names like cv.pdf that would flash the printer when they ran, causing it to probe your LAN for vulnerable PCs and take them over, opening a reverse-shell to his command-and-control server in the cloud. Compromised printers would then refuse to apply future updates from their owners, but would pretend to install them and even update their version numbers to give verisimilitude to the ruse. The only way to exorcise these haunted printers was to send 'em to the landfill. Good times!

Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security. After all, printer manufacturers have devoted enormous resources to hardening their products against their owners, making it progressively harder to use third-party ink. They're super perverse about it, too – they send "security updates" to your printer that update the printer's security against you – run these updates and your printer downgrades itself by refusing to use the ink you chose for it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, their security is antithetical to your security. That was the case with Web Environment Integrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

WEI is now dead, thanks to a lot of hueing and crying by people like us:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/

But the dream of securing Google against its own users lives on. Youtube has embarked on an aggressive campaign of refusing to show videos to people running ad-blockers, triggering an arms-race of ad-blocker-blockers and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-will-the-ad-versus-ad-blocker-arms-race-end/

The folks behind Ublock Origin are racing to keep up with Google's engineers' countermeasures, and there's a single-serving website called "Is uBlock Origin updated to the last Anti-Adblocker YouTube script?" that will give you a realtime, one-word status update:

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

One in four web users has an ad-blocker, a stat that Doc Searls pithily summarizes as "the biggest boycott in world history":

https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Zero app users have ad-blockers. That's not because ad-blocking an app is harder than ad-blocking the web – it's because reverse-engineering an app triggers liability under IP laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which can put you away for 5 years for a first offense. That's what I mean when I say that "IP is anything that lets a company control its customers, critics or competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

I predicted that apps would open up all kinds of opportunities for abusive, monopolistic conduct back in 2010, and I'm experiencing a mix of sadness and smugness (I assume there's a German word for this emotion) at being so thoroughly vindicated by history:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The more control a company can exert over its customers, the worse it will be tempted to treat them. These systems of control shift the balance of power within companies, making it harder for internal factions that defend product quality and customer interests to win against the enshittifiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The result has been a Great Enshittening, with platforms of all description shifting value from their customers and users to their shareholders, making everything palpably worse. The only bright side is that this has created the political will to do something about it, sparking a wave of bold, muscular antitrust action all over the world.

The Google antitrust case is certainly the most important corporate lawsuit of the century (so far), but Judge Amit Mehta's deference to Google's demands for secrecy has kept the case out of the headlines. I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried is a psychopathic thief, but even so, his trial does not deserve its vastly greater prominence, though, if you haven't heard yet, he's been convicted and will face decades in prison after he exhausts his appeals:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/sam-bankman-fried-guilty-on-all-charges

The secrecy around Google's trial has relaxed somewhat, and the trickle of revelations emerging from the cracks in the courthouse are fascinating. For the first time, we're able to get a concrete sense of which queries are the most lucrative for Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/1/23941766/google-antitrust-trial-search-queries-ad-money

The list comes from 2018, but it's still wild. As David Pierce writes in The Verge, the top twenty includes three iPhone-related terms, five insurance queries, and the rest are overshadowed by searches for customer service info for monopolistic services like Xfinity, Uber and Hulu.

All-in-all, we're living through a hell of a moment for piercing the corporate veil. Maybe it's the problem of maintaining secrecy within large companies, or maybe the the rampant mistreatment of even senior executives has led to more leaks and whistleblowing. Either way, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous leaker who revealed the unbelievable pettiness of former HBO president of programming Casey Bloys, who ordered his underlings to create an army of sock-puppet Twitter accounts to harass TV and movie critics who panned HBO's shows:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hbo-casey-bloys-secret-twitter-trolls-tv-critics-leaked-texts-lawsuit-the-idol-1234867722/

These trolling attempts were pathetic, even by the standards of thick-fingered corporate execs. Like, accusing critics who panned the shitty-ass Perry Mason reboot of disrespecting veterans because the fictional Mason's back-story had him storming the beach on D-Day.

The pushback against corporate bullying is everywhere, and of course, the vanguard is the labor movement. Did you hear that the UAW won their strike against the auto-makers, scoring raises for all workers based on the increases in the companies' CEO pay? The UAW isn't done, either! Their incredible new leader, Shawn Fain, has called for a general strike in 2028:

https://www.404media.co/uaw-calls-on-workers-to-line-up-massive-general-strike-for-2028-to-defeat-billionaire-class/

The massive victory for unionized auto-workers has thrown a spotlight on the terrible working conditions and pay for workers at Tesla, a criminal company that has no compunctions about violating labor law to prevent its workers from exercising their legal rights. Over in Sweden, union workers are teaching Tesla a lesson. After the company tried its illegal union-busting playbook on Tesla service centers, the unionized dock-workers issued an ultimatum: respect your workers or face a blockade at Sweden's ports that would block any Tesla from being unloaded into the EU's fifth largest Tesla market:

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-sweden-strike/

Of course, the real solution to Teslas – and every other kind of car – is to redesign our cities for public transit, walking and cycling, making cars the exception for deliveries, accessibility and other necessities. Transitioning to EVs will make a big dent in the climate emergency, but it won't make our streets any safer – and they keep getting deadlier.

Last summer, my dear old pal Ted Kulczycky got in touch with me to tell me that Talking Heads were going to be all present in public for the first time since the band's breakup, as part of the debut of the newly remastered print of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert movie of all time. Even better, the show would be in Toronto, my hometown, where Ted and I went to high-school together, at TIFF.

Ted is the only person I know who is more obsessed with Talking Heads than I am, and he started working on tickets for the show while I starting pricing plane tickets. And then, the unthinkable happened: Ted's wife, Serah, got in touch to say that Ted had been run over by a car while getting off of a streetcar, that he was severely injured, and would require multiple surgeries.

But this was Ted, so of course he was still planning to see the show. And he did, getting a day-pass from the hospital and showing up looking like someone from a Kids In The Hall sketch who'd been made up to look like someone who'd been run over by a car:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53182440282/

In his Globe and Mail article about Ted's experience, Brad Wheeler describes how the whole hospital rallied around Ted to make it possible for him to get to the movie:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-how-a-talking-heads-superfan-found-healing-with-the-concert-film-stop/

He also mentions that Ted is working on a book and podcast about Stop Making Sense. I visited Ted in the hospital the day after the gig and we talked about the book and it sounds amazing. Also? The movie was incredible. See it in Imax.

That heartwarming tale of healing through big suits is a pretty good place to wrap up this linkdump, but I want to call your attention to just one more thing before I go: Robin Sloan's Snarkmarket piece about blogging and "stock and flow":

https://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890/

Sloan makes the excellent case that for writers, having a "flow" of short, quick posts builds the audience for a "stock" of longer, more synthetic pieces like books. This has certainly been my experience, but I think it's only part of the story – there are good, non-mercenary reasons for writers to do a lot of "flow." As I wrote in my 2021 essay, "The Memex Method," turning your commonplace book into a database – AKA "blogging" – makes you write better notes to yourself because you know others will see them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

This, in turn, creates a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragments that are just waiting to nucleate and crystallize into full-blown novels and nonfiction books and other "stock." That's how I came out of lockdown with nine new books. The next one is The Lost Cause, a hopepunk science fiction novel about the climate whose early fans include Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. It's out on November 14:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein

#pluralistic #hbo #astroturfing #sweden #labor #unions #tesla #adblock #ublock #youtube #prompt injection #publishing #robin sloan #linkdumps #linkdump #ai #tlds #anguilla #finance curse #ted Kulczycky #toronto #stop making sense #talking heads

[nebulamist]

Remember, in general, people who tell you voting doesn’t matter, or that not voting, by any means, is a good option, are people who’d benefit if your voice was silenced. Yes, even if they act like they’re on your side. Ever heard of astroturfing?

#politics #voting #astroturfing #signal boost #social justice #reproductive rights #lgbtqia+ #lgbt #trans #lgbt rights #trans rights #climate change #my post

[anarchywoofwoof]

hey, do you wanna see how astroturfing works and why Reddit is on basically a complete blackout of Israel / Palestine news and information on all of the major subreddits?

identify a post that paints israel as the aggressor or in a negative light

flood the comments with as many contradicting opinions as humanly possible

directly contradict comments that have the most upvotes and are sympathetic to the cause you oppose. repeat prescribed talking points. minimize and normalize atrocities.

these are the same user who has been on reddit for... 32 days. and basically only posts on Jewish subs.

there are hundreds of examples just like this if you bother to go click around the reddit comments of just about any post regarding what's happening in Palestine right now.

#astroturfing #reddit

[dlasta]

#amber heard #johnny depp is a wife beater #tortoise media #spear campaign #online harassment #bots #astroturfing #abuse #there is curiously little thumbs up for these two videos #for this level of quality and subject #if you can please watch and show your opinion #they say in the video that while they have the material to study many experts did not want to get involved for 'reasons' #it's still going on and the only way to get actual facts out is by promoting it and showing our opinion #this is genuine moment that would help since youtube won't promote #Youtube

[seven-oh-four]

ok so here's the plan. i create a bunch of different accounts on a bunch of social media platforms, and use all of them to post screenshots of my own tumblr posts. people seeing an influx of my posts will assume that the posts breached containment naturally, and think "oh that must be a tumblr funnyperson" and follow me on tumblr dot com. then with my newfound clout i uhhh ummm hmmm i will uhmmm uhhhhhhh mmm hrmmm uhmm yeah

i will call this new strategy "astroturfing"

#tumblr #tumblr itself #funny #i should make a tag for posts where i say things #like uhhh #the garbage pile #but not in the sense that my posts are garbage #but rather in the sense that we are all little creatures showing each other worthless shinies we found in the dump #and oohing and ahhing at them #yknow? #shiny pile #astroturfing #new product ideas

[the-puffinry]

sorry another article but due to the insane goat story I'm in the California section of the Guardian now I guess and this is, again, cartoonishly evil. Actively endangering workers' lives.

"When record-breaking wildfires burned through the picturesque vineyards in 2017, winemakers and Sonoma county officials decided to salvage their region’s economic lifeblood by sending workers into mandatory evacuation zones deemed too dangerous for the public. Since then, the county has repeatedly deployed a hastily assembled system for approving worker entry into evacuation zones, known as Ag Pass.

Vineyard workers, supported by the coalition North Bay Jobs with Justice, won a small but significant victory in February when the county board of supervisors agreed to establish a committee to formalize the permitting system for work in wildfire evacuation zones. For the first time, the public has a say in how the Ag Pass program will work. Whether or not the county will incorporate demands from workers like García has become a major point of contention.

But in recent months, a slick website has appeared under the name Sonoma Wine Industry for Safe Employees, or Sonoma Wise, featuring counterpoints to demands from North Bay Jobs with Justice.

Vineyard workers apparently affiliated with Sonoma Wise have rallied by the dozens against the new protections proposed by Jobs with Justice. Since then, several have stepped forward to say they felt pressured to participate by their employers.

In early May, around 150 vineyard workers wearing matching t-shirts flooded into a weekly meeting held by Sonoma’s board of supervisors. They weren’t there to fight for better protections. “NBJwJ does NOT Speak for Me,” said the T-shirts, using an acronym for North Bay Jobs with Justice. “I am a Sonoma County Vineyard Employee,” they said on the back. According to local reporters, the workers were there as part of Sonoma Wise.

One by one, workers told county board members similar versions of the same story: they always have access to clean water and clean bathrooms, they feel safe at work, and North Bay Jobs with Justice does not represent them. Translating for Spanish-speakers was Raul Calvo, owner of Employer Services, a firm that has earned at least $2m over the past eight years by attempting to convince workers to vote against unionization, US Department of Labor records confirm.

The testimony led to positive news coverage for the wine industry. “Farmworkers show support for wine industry in front of Sonoma County Board of Supervisors as debate continues over wildfire safety,” read a local headline.

However, since the meeting, nine workers have contacted North Bay Jobs with Justice to say they felt obligated by their employers to attend the meeting. “If I didn’t do it, I would be out of a job,” one of the workers who wore a t-shirt told the Guardian. The worker declined to be named out of fear of repercussions, adding, “None of us are going to speak against the ranchers or the companies.”

#wildfires #sonoma wise #wine #california #fire safety #astroturfing

[kaydub80]

Watch "The Third Party Bid That Could Sabotage Trump and Biden" on YouTube

When we said to overthrow the two-party duopoly, this was not what we were talking about! Astroturfing at its finest.

#this is not a game #2024 election #kyrsten sinema #joe manchin #no labels #wtf is this bullshit #astroturfing #Youtube #billionaire #corporatocracy #oligarchs

[toastyslayingbutter]

#climate change #astroturfing #capitalism #big oil #climate town

[kurumssocial]

Astroturfing: A Deceptive Marketing Practice

Astroturfing is a deceptive marketing practice that involves creating the illusion of widespread grassroots support for a product, brand, or organization. It is often used to mislead consumers into believing that a product or service is more popular or well-regarded than it actually is. Astroturfing can take many different forms, but some of the most common include: Fake reviews: Astroturfers…

View On WordPress

#Astroturfing

[xipe-slayground]

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hbo-casey-bloys-secret-twitter-trolls-tv-critics-leaked-texts-lawsuit-the-idol-1234867722/

lol. This article confirms what I already knew about a lot of supposed fan accounts on social media sites.

#hbo #rolling stone magazine #television #fake fans #how much of fandom is real anymore #netflix does this too #look at the time when a show was announced and the fan registration dates #look at how the “fans” interact with the actors on social media #their graphics are too slick #they also steal content from other fans #steal from archive.org uploads too #you're not fooling anyone #astroturfing #fandom

[theporcelindoll]

The People And NGO's On Show, Are All Fronts. Look Deeper, It's Not What You Think.

The UN and other organizations are fronts for the people behind them, not Soros, Soros is a fall guy, Gates is a fall guy, WEF, UN, NATO, etc are fronts there are people behind these making all the shots. Clinton’s are not the people who are in charge, Obama is a puppet, Biden is a puppet, Trudeau is a puppet, all those on the WEF Young leaders are puppets and are just being used. There are more…

View On WordPress

#Astroturfing #Clinton&039;s #Deep State #Deep State Puppets #Front NGO&039;s #NGO&039;s #Puppet Leaders #Trump

[thementalhealthresourcehub]

The People And NGO's On Show, Are All Fronts. Look Deeper, It's Not What You Think.

The UN and other organizations are fronts for the people behind them, not Soros, Soros is a fall guy, Gates is a fall guy, WEF, UN, NATO, etc are fronts there are people behind these making all the shots. Clinton’s are not the people who are in charge, Obama is a puppet, Biden is a puppet, Trudeau is a puppet, all those on the WEF Young leaders are puppets and are just being used. There are more…

View On WordPress

#Astroturfing #Clinton&039;s #Deep State #Deep State Puppets #Front NGO&039;s #NGO&039;s #Puppet Leaders #Trump

[happydepressedandamess]

The People And NGO's On Show, Are All Fronts. Look Deeper, It's Not What You Think.

The UN and other organizations are fronts for the people behind them, not Soros, Soros is a fall guy, Gates is a fall guy, WEF, UN, NATO, etc are fronts there are people behind these making all the shots. Clinton’s are not the people who are in charge, Obama is a puppet, Biden is a puppet, Trudeau is a puppet, all those on the WEF Young leaders are puppets and are just being used. There are more…

View On WordPress

#Astroturfing #Clinton&039;s #Deep State #Deep State Puppets #Front NGO&039;s #NGO&039;s #Puppet Leaders #Trump

[ashysilentprincess]

The People And NGO's On Show, Are All Fronts. Look Deeper, It's Not What You Think.

The UN and other organizations are fronts for the people behind them, not Soros, Soros is a fall guy, Gates is a fall guy, WEF, UN, NATO, etc are fronts there are people behind these making all the shots. Clinton’s are not the people who are in charge, Obama is a puppet, Biden is a puppet, Trudeau is a puppet, all those on the WEF Young leaders are puppets and are just being used. There are more…

View On WordPress

#Astroturfing #Clinton&039;s #Deep State #Deep State Puppets #Front NGO&039;s #NGO&039;s #Puppet Leaders #Trump

[voxina]

[ENG] I'm sorry, but the more these "random people" try to make all of these sightings look like organic, the sketchier it all seems. Seriously, but I've seen too much emphasis on these bikes lately. Smells almost like a PR team astroturfing.

[ITA] Mi dispiace, ma più "persone a caso" cercano di far sembrare spontanei tutti questi avvistamenti, più sembra tutto più sospetto. Sul serio, ma ultimamente ho visto fin troppa enfasi su queste bici. E la cosa mi puzza parecchio di pura strategia astroturf da parte dei team PR.

[ENG] Astroturf? Nothing we haven't seen before unfortunately, someone might say.

[ITA] Astroturf? Nulla che non abbiamo già visto in passato, qualcuno potrebbe dire.

[ENG] And someone could maybe think why the hell he -one of the currently biggest celebrity on the planet, needs to be doing some promo to this brand? Well, I don't know (at least for now). But you know, "one's an accident, two's a coincidence, three's a pattern." And he's not even the only "big name" spotted riding one of these bikes recently and that made it to the news. (just to be clear, I'm in no way saying that Harry signed a brand deal with them. But I'm just observing and gathering facts, and it's all oddly weird.)

[ITA] E qualcuno potrebbe forse chiedersi perché diavolo lui, una delle celebrità attualmente più grandi del pianeta, abbia bisogno di promuovere questo marchio? Beh, la verità è che (almeno per il momento) non lo so. Ma "una volta è un caso, due è una coincidenza, tre è uno schema". E il suo non è nemmeno l'unico "grande nome" avvistato recentemente a bordo di queste biciclette, e che sia finito sui giornali.

(e giusto per essere chiari: non sto in alcun modo dicendo che Harry abbia firmato un accordo con loro. Ma sto semplicemente osservando e raccogliendo i fatti. E tutto è oggettivamente strano.)

#lime ad #lime promo #bike riding #harry in london #astroturfing #astroturf #mushroom management #pr tactics #pr strategy #harry's image