"what is Fivecast ONYX? an AI-powered surveillance platform purchased by ICE for $4.2 million and CBP for additional license costs. according to Fivecast’s own documentation and EFF’s reporting, they do automated collection of multimedia data from social media and dark web, build “digital footprints” from biographical data, tracks shifts in sentiment and emotion, assigns risk scores, searches across 300+ platforms and 28+ billion data points, identifies people with “violent tendencies”"
Glad to know that my tinfoil hat wasn't too tight when social media came to be and this obvious use was predicted. How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
According to Persona's damage control article[0], the subdomain had "onyx" in its name because that's the internal code name for the project, and it's named after the pokémon Onyx. No connection to Fivecast ONYX.
Naming a fantasy creature after a common gemstone should make it non-trademarkable anyway, but I'd love to see Nintendo tie up the US government in court for years.
On a macro scale, in Australia if you don't have a paid private health policy, you get slugged with additional tax come tax time. The same could happen here - "oh, you don't have social media? Well the state needs more tax from you to pay for your additional state surveillance"
Could it though? I have lived in rural areas and urban areas of the US. This speaks more to the rural areas than the urban, but only marginally--Americans like their firearms, they're suspicious of The Government, and they don't much care for the tax man. And by and large they like to be left the fuck alone. If the revenuers show up demanding too much we have a rich and storied history of mistreating them.
It's an interesting conundrum.. I've always viewed "the law" as something that doesn't really materialize until you're arrested, arraigned, tried, and sentenced. So "breaking" the law and "getting away with it" isn't actually "illegal" it's just... normal. The law only matters if some filthy rat narc catches you and summons the pigs. Not sure how any of that adjusts in this scenario, really.
I am not that old and I remember when people warned other to put too much info on social media. You can even identify people through a few sentences and some people have basically a complete life encyclopedia about themselves online. Sure, those are usually not the most influential for political developments besides being called influencers.
Recent paper by Nicholas Carlinini and others really showcases how little it takes to deanonymize users across platforms with LLMs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800
I'm 99% sure this is one of them. I thought 404media posted a leaked list of the platforms once but I can't find it. Search is dead (this is a general statement)
> How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
Ah, it already is. Just being trialed against people with less rights and no voting power.
Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.
If you think the government is spending a hundred billions on this category of tech for vetting a few thousand people, you are a prime candidate to buy a bridge that I can sell you for a discount.
> Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.
I don’t think this is true. You can get a visa just fine if you don’t have social media profiles. Source: me. I don’t have facebook, insta, twitter etc and travel to the US just fine. When I filled in the form I left those empty.
What I think you can’t do is get a visa if you have social media profiles and choose not to disclose them or you post things or have friends/links on your social media that cbp considers elevates your risk etc.
Can I just ask gpt to ask me questions to create my profile directly? I can't be bothered with any social media. Whatever it is supposed to addict me with is missing, I just find it all very boring.
I got into the USA in September last year. On my esta I put a private instagram account I begrudgingly made to talk to some friends, and my LinkedIn. I guess that’s enough data?
Governments in Europe should be seriously scrutinising this with the background conversation of departing American tech going on. Discord users globally were being coerced into handing over their ID to this American surveillance tech. Are we just going to let this go on?
You act like the governments of Europe weren’t the reason Discord decided they needed to get government issued identity information from European users…
Please note that Persona primarily operates as a "service provider" or "processor" for its customers. We act as a "business" or "controller" only for specific services, such as identity verification for LinkedIn, FoxCorp, and Reusable Persona. To learn more about how Persona manages your personal data, please refer to our privacy notices, which can be accessed through the following link: https://withpersona.com/legal/privacy-notices
If you wish to exercise your privacy rights related to services where Persona is a "service provider" or "processor," please contact the entity using our service, as they are the "controller" of the data. We will assist the relevant customer to fulfill your data subject rights, but we do not handle such requests directly on their behalf.
For any privacy rights request related to services where Persona acts as a "business" or "controller," including identity verification for LinkedIn, FoxCorp, Reusable Persona, and personal data related to our sales, marketing activities, or website browsing on withpersona.com, please use our Data Subject Request (DSAR) available at the following link: https://withpersona.com/dsar
For all other inquiries, we will respond as soon as possible.
That does not match the very similar reply I got as a California resident asserting my rights under California's "Right to Know" Act , regarding LinkedIn profile data and related
This is the same complete bullshit trying to remove oneself from political donation emails. "Oh, okay, we will remove you from that one." Days later it's a "different campaign." Sometimes it's the exact same people from weeks ago who have just renamed their campaign and started sending again.
We need far stronger laws for all of it, which will never happen because the rot and corruption has fully metastasized.
100% the political campaigns pinging you is endless and you cannot escape it. I have dozens of campaigns pinging me daily and I mark them all as spam as I never signed up for this nonsense. Give me a way to block them all and remove me from their database.
I don't like it playing sound, I can't read the blog post in the metro. In fact I will direct my attention to the next thing and not remember reading this later.
I like it. It's like wandering into someone else's house. Their stereo is playing, they're telling you some interesting story. It's their party, I'm just a guest. It reminds me of how the web used to feel.
Or for noticing that Discord, Roblox, OpenAI, Anthropic, Persona, and Palantir all have Zionist Israeli founders / co-founders / CEOs / funding. Or that 98% of US congress members received donations from AIPAC or that the US president is a staunch Zionist / supporter of Israel.
In before I get downvoted and flagged for speaking the truth and noticing patterns.
It seems like at every technological step, we're sold the dream and delivered the meme. We always end up with the worst possible combination of players, ideas and outcomes; with the promise of what the said technology delivers in terms of additional freedom or free time never realised. How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
It's "socializing the losses and privatizing the gains"… but now alarmingly supercharged well beyond purely financial realms, and into really basic and fundamental matters of individual physical autonomy and liberty.
> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
Having any kind of agency in those things would be a start.
If <FAANG bigcorp of your choice> announces with great fanfare "We're building this totally awesome new technology that will make everything better! And the best thing? You won't have to do anything, we will auto-update all your devices/accounts/etc with it for free! Trust us!", then whether you personally believe their enthusiastic predictions or not doesn't really matter a lot - you will get it anyway, unless you spend a lot of energy to deliberately avoid the new technology.
I felt compelled to write this email to 1password today:
Dear 1password,
Please stop trying to "innovate". I really like your password manager. That's all I want. I don't want "automatic watchtower AI phishing prevention" I just want a password manager that works across my devices. Make it simple, make it secure, and don't change it. You have a great product. Adding more features will only make it worse. If you keep this bullshit up I will churn.
From my understanding, we are pretty close to a Dystopian world where all elites of a certain group collaborate to run a Super Leviathan. We still gotta choose our flavors, which may not be feasible in maybe 5-10 years when those leviathans clash into each other.
Likewise, thank you for the recommendation. I obviously haven't read Goliath's Curse yet, but it seems like Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) might also be interesting for the same readers.
It's not like this is surprising, there have been plenty of sci-fi books/movies that have predicted this very thing. How many movies have the haves lived above ground/off planet, while the have nots have lived underground or stuck on a apocalyptic planet.
This is just furthering the previous history. Currently, the lords have just been able to keep the serfs appeased to a longer extent. Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.
You seem very confident. This seems to imply you feel the haves will know when to leave enough on the table for the have nots to still feel like they are a part of the haves. I'm not so confident in that.
People in technologically advanced societies have more than enough & the people who are not as advanced can not do anything that will have any effect on the people who own the fighter jets, missiles, robot factories, & "internet" satellites. The current system has no historical precedent. It is very close to an almost perfect panopticon w/ an associated media & police apparatus to keep everyone docile & complacent. Like I said, this time is different.
Far more likely is that we head back to a feudal era where data mining tech is used to identify and eliminate potential rabble-rousers. Once enough production is automated, all remaining have-nots are exterminated.
The weak link is that for “the haves” to have, the “have -nots” are needed. To have or to not is just a comparison, a millionaire needs the poor to be rich and to feel special otherwise when everyone is special nobody is.
It will instead eventually fall apart in more thoroughly destructive ways. But not until it does a possibly-unrecoverably (at least in the medium term) amount of damage to civilization, humanity, and life on Earth first.
It's already crumbling. That's why we have AI-powered fascism in the first place. Society destabilizes and a significant fraction of the population says "perhaps authoritarianism is a good thing." It's never worth it, though.
The story here is that a FedRAMP-authorized system had 53MB of Vite dev source maps exposed on a production government endpoint. That's not "sold the dream, delivered the meme," that's a specific auditable compliance failure. Meanwhile a fintech engineer explaining that this is all standard legally-mandated KYC infrastructure got flagged to death. The interesting question isn't whether technology betrays us, it's why US law requires this surveillance apparatus in the first place and why the security assessment apparently missed checking for /vite-dev/ on a government system.
Also every technological step? Ever? Really? This wouldn't happen to be typed on a computer from a climate-controlled room on a nice global network or anything?
Except it wasn't a production endpoint and there's no actual security risk in having source maps available. It's more annoying to read source code that has been minified, but if a security professional tells you that minifying source code is something that increases security, you should be wondering what other bullshit they've pedaled you.
I'm not a fan of persona and have gone out of my way to not provide my details to them even before this, and I really dislike Thiel, but... let's be honest about the stuff we're complaining about.
I think that's a natural outcome of a model where sociopaths climb to the top, with a layer of sycophants beneath them that shield normal workers from perceiving the amount of depravity going on at the top which would make them unable to continue and tank the business. AI might remove the reliance on regular folks and give sociopaths direct execution of all ideas they have without any moral opposition, and that would explain a lot of the rush for AI everywhere we see nowadays.
This is the part that doesn't get enough attention. The historical check on concentrated power wasn't just democracy or law — it was that executing any large-scale agenda required thousands of people who could refuse, drag their feet, or leak. AI doesn't just automate tasks — it removes the human friction that was always an informal veto on the worst ideas.
The surveillance apparatus isn't new. What's new is that you need fewer people with moral objections in the loop to operate it.
I would be careful with this kind of reasoning, because it suggests corruption within a corporate model is inevitable, giving it implicit permission to continue existing. It's not inevitable.
I would suggest it is inevitable when the goal is to grow without end. The sociopaths buy the shares and push the businesses to ether become "evil" or get pushed out and taken over. Its what the current models leads to when there are no checks and balances.
Pursuing growth at all costs is inevitable though. If you don't continue to grow, you get superseded by entities that do. Goes for both countries and companies.
Communist countries like the Soviet Union and China have even had the explicit goal of outgrowing the US.
Enough said. Since the "death of God" (per Nietzsche - the collapse of the metaphysics underpinning our morals and therefore cultural norms and behaviors) the modus operandi has been the utilitarian "get what's yours."
Reprehensible.
Additionally, people are typically only "gifted" on one domain -- if one's gifted enough in the domain of intellect to become a SWE, they're typically lacking elsewhere, whether that be in moral scruples or the ability to discern social things such as when they're working for sociopaths.
Yes, many of them don't. They're fed convincing cover-stories like "we need this to stop CSAM" or "this prevents terrorism", and then put on a security theater about E2EE and military-grade cryptography. They sleep like a baby because most of them genuinely think they're the good guys, hell, even people on HN appear to buy the obvious lie whenever Client Side Scanning or Flock is brought up.
You can hire sociopaths to work the ~1% of jobs that require a complete understanding of your moral bankruptcy. Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, none of these people ever apologized for their ethical flexibility because it's precisely what qualifies them for such a lucrative job. Persona can be a shell org with 20 evil engineers while their partners absentmindedly do the integration work.
Many tech execs operate under the thesis that china & the democratic party are existential threats that warrant a surveillance/military/police ramp up. Meanwhile, many tech employees are credulous and frequently adopt self-serving geopolitical narratives. The current macro trends don't help (huge defense budgets, bad labor market power, China is in fact more powerful)
What's crazy is I know engineers like this in real life - and they're good engineers! So I know they do exist, but their existence to serve their company or CEO no matter what is completely foreign to me. Like, you're smart enough to understand that large codebase and generally function as a member of society, but you've completely given up your higher level decision making for someone or something that would throw you away in an instant.
surprised nobody responded with the most straightforward, occams razor explanation
they think what they're doing is actually good for society
not everyone is in the hackerspace libertarian / socialist sphere
i used to work for a place that used persona despite it adding extra friction to signups (literally resulting in less paying customers to the dismay of PMs) because it was worth it to combat fraud. theres a tradeoff in everything
All of them are complicit. You only need ~50 greedy sociopaths to work at Persona, and 10,000 dumb-as-rocks engineers hyped to work at Microsoft/OpenAI and "stop the bad guys" or whatever the boogeyman du-jour is.
We saw it with Bitlocker, we saw it with Client Side Scanning, we see it with Salt Typhoon. Most people that work on weaponized surveillance systems are entirely apathetic, or see themselves as righteous. Even when the system is known to be bugged, obviously flawed, or outright controlled by a foreign adversary.
My employer isn't particularly bad for society, but let's pretend they are.
My company is a large employer of foreign workers. I already live in fear of being priced out by foreign bodyshop firms. If I decided what we were doing was immoral, and dug my heels in. I'd just be replaced by a H-1B worker. If everyone else in my company decided they wouldn't build the torment nexus, we'd all just be replaced by H-1B workers. It'd be a minor inconvenience to the company, but they'd weather it just fine. Under this system, any kind of collective bargaining becomes impossible, moral, financial, or otherwise.
Organize in your country and advocate for data deletion jubilees, organize in your country to champion new taxes against US digital services, organize in your country to advocate for homegrown solutions over US tech.
If you aren't actively organizing you aren't going to accomplish anything.
Remember that people power trumps monetary power, but you have to commit for people power to work.
Why? Every country on Earth is capable of creating and maintaining software. There is nothing unique about America or Silicon Valley (outside of the massive amounts of corporate welfare), devs can be found anywhere and who better to write software for local citizens than the local citizens themselves?
We know how useful open source software is, there's no reason why this can't be replicated across the planet.
Not because they cannot do it, but because why they're doing it, which in turn becomes what they're doing. America is being perceived as isolationist, so countries solve that by becoming isolationist about what software they use, whether its open source or not is kind of irrelevant, though in several cases the software will primarily be focused on the countries own language.
The better alternative in my eyes is to contribute to existing open source, and only if the US becomes hostile against this, fork said code and move on.
1. Request your data. Email idv-privacy@withpersona.com or privacy@withpersona.com. Under GDPR, they have 30 days to respond.
2. Request deletion. The verification is done. LinkedIn already has the result. There is no reason for Persona to keep your passport scan and facial geometry on their servers. Ask them to delete it.
3. Contact their DPO. dpo@withpersona.com — that’s their Data Protection Officer. If you want to object to them using your documents as AI training data under “legitimate interests,” this is where you do it.
4. Think twice before verifying. That blue badge might not be worth what you’re trading for it. A checkmark is cosmetic. Biometric data is forever.
I get the KYC concerns for API access, but I'm sortof baffled at why they'd need all of the AML stuff, given that they're not payment processors/financial institutions.
Or does Persona provide that by default? Don't know much about their service...
> OpenAI’s disclosures reference biometric data stored “up to a year.” the source > code shows face list retention capped at 3 years. government IDs retained
> “permanently” per Persona’s practices. which is it?
I keep saying this. This is the playbook -- everything is moving to standardize Sam Altman's biometric authentication cryptocurrency company to use internet services. This has been a slow moving strategy for /years/ and every new step over that period only get closer, not further from this goal.
"We weren’t hacked" is doing PR triage for "we exposed sensitive internal implementation details." Spy company semantics are always incredible. The house didn’t burn down, it just leaked gas.
calling data sovereignty laws a cybersecurity risk in the same week that Persona had 2500 files exposed on a government endpoint is an interesting choice of timing.
Another downvoted comment asks if this is all LLM output. While I don't think all of it is, chunks of it have LLM smells so I wanted to point those out as the author or other readers may find it useful:
The ASCII flowcharts all contain jagged vertical lines. This is the biggest indicator of LLM output as no human would ever produce that. You can simply see with your eyes that it's wrong if you even glance at it.
> there’s no way for us to prove that they don’t have access to all of that data anyway. we can only assume that they don’t have access to all of that data. but if you want my two cents, they probably do.
This doesn't quite read as LLM output but it makes the whole article look like a conspiracy theory.
> after trying to write a few exploits, vmfunc decided to browse their infra on shodan. it all started with a Shodan search. a single IP. 34.49.93.177 sitting on Google Cloud in Kansas City. one open port. one SSL certificate. two hostnames that tell a story nobody was supposed to read:
> and the company that runs all of this is the same one that takes your passport photo when you sign up for ChatGPT. same codebase. same platform. different deployment. same facial recognition. same screening algorithms. same data model.
> and as always, the information wants to be free. we didn’t break anything. we didn’t bypass anything. we queried URLs, pressed buttons, and read what came back. if that’s enough to expose the architecture of a global surveillance platform… maybe the problem isn’t us.
These all absolutely stink of LLM writing patterns.
Stand in a hospital and say that credibly. I recommend the maternity ward.
Our consumer markets are a wreck. We have no federal watch dog exercising any authority. We have unchecked intelligence agencies actively trying to enslave the world. Our desire for convenience is not the problem, the people taking advantage of it are.
Why a hospital? There's very little convenience at play when it's a life and death situation.
It is what drives the market quite a bit at least. It's why we've produced over 2 billion cars and use them every day to pollute our own air so we don't have to walk two blocks. Most home appliances are convenience personified, the dishwasher, the microwave, the clothes dryer. It's why we have supply chains up the wazoo to bring products from all corners of the globe to everyone's nearby supermarket, a large amount of it getting thrown away when it's expired unsold. We fly across countries for something as pointless as a business meeting. Hell people now even order a taxi for their food, so they don't have to go out to get it.
Modern life is like at least 60% wastefulness in the name of convenience. Of course people with the option to do so will exploit the one thing that's easily exploitable, that's like water flowing downhill.
Maternity is most often not "life and death." Is the maternity ward just a convenience? Or is the cost worth the benefit? You don't seem to be doing any form of honest analysis.
> Most home appliances are convenience personified, the dishwasher, the microwave, the clothes dryer.
Yes, because, those save time. It's worth having a point of view that other people saving their time, and thus freeing it for more worthwhile endeavors is ultimately a net positive for all of society. You pass these off as mere conveniences. It's a rather bleak misanthropic outlook you seem to have acquired.
> Modern life is like at least 60% wastefulness in the name of convenience.
People own cars to drive more than two blocks. You're only making the most ridiculous version of the argument and you don't have very much to back it up.
Oh I disagree completely, births are a very life and death situation for both involved if any compilations happen to set in. It's extremely worth the benefit to have some doctors around.
> people saving their time, and thus freeing it for more worthwhile endeavors
Do we? Use it for more worthwhile endeavours? I doubt scrolling an online feed of endless bullshit would qualify as that, and most people seem to spend their left over time doing that instead. We're dopamine rush optimizers, not some kind of paragon who spends their time working for the good of society.
Now I'm not saying it makes any sense for us to go back to washing things by hand, but I am saying that automating chores and saving time is like heroin to us and that we'll pay every cent we have for it, as OP's original point was.
> People own cars to drive more than two blocks
Yeah but once we have the ability to drive anywhere it's easy to use it for all kinds of things that we really don't need it for, cause it's just so convenient, fuel prices be damned :)
Thank god for noscript. Did see or hear any of that and dumped the text-only version of the article and HN discussion right to my local hard drive for off-line reading.
On mobile the cat sits in the middle of the screen and does not respond to touch input. The author has been told about the distracting elements and refused to acknowledge it.
General Alexander (former Director of NSA) admitted, around DEF CON XX (circa 2012), that the intelligence community defines "intercept" as when a human analyst catalogues a piece of information.
Reading between these lines, some decade+ later... we swim beyond seas of deception, in these interceptionless databases of humanity. Less than just a number, only weights held in artificial minds.
Except everything I said was factual, and nothing was conspiratorial. If you disagree, please point out where I was factually incorrect. Otherwise, you should probably change your username to ignoramus or denierofreality or something similar. Unless you want to be viewed as a hypocrite that is.
Author was doing such a good write-up, until I saw repeated AI syntax "its not x, but y" and "a is b. b is c. and, c is the final thing in this series of short, punchy sentences". Really tired of this. Why is it so hard to just write naturally? Maybe I'm just easily triggered
Maybe I overestimated how much was used here. I guess I'm so burned out by seeing it everywhere else, it's becoming hard to tell what's what.
I understand AI is trained on human output but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to distinguish between the two. I've seen blogs where this particular syntax "That's not x - it's actually y" is repeated 10+ times. That's not normal human writing. Admit I picked a bad example here, just read 5 AI articles in a row before this one.
The right wing went full censorship and surveillance after the Charlie Kirk assassination. It is probably not a coincidence that they targeted Discord first, because the suspect was in a Discord group.
They promised freedom of speech and liberty and this is what we get.
> The right wing went full censorship and surveillance after the Charlie Kirk assassination.
No, earlier. US tech is mostly surveillance tech, with Thiel being sponsor and broker for authoritarian right. The doge operation started around day 1, and was a breach into the government to steal data that was yet out of reach for certain plotters.
The right wing went full censorship and surveillance long before the Charlie Kirk assassination. Anyone who believed that the right wing (or the left wing, for that matter; let's not pretend that censorious dipshittery is not bipartisan) was honestly promising freedom of speech as opposed to merely freedom of speech they like and censorship of speech they don't like was at best willfully blinding themselves to the actual actions of politicians.
True. The free speech narratives are mere tools against opposition by promoting the most childish and stupidly rigid interpretations thereof, not something they really believe in. The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.
> or the left wing, for that matter;
Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure, but a) far left is very fringe, and b) lets not equate them with a well funded actual insurrection of oligarch and white nationalists with a paramilitary.
> > or the left wing, for that matter;
> Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure
How so? Leftist censorship became quite popular on college campuses. The ACLU supported that, and got cold feet about promoting free expression more generally when it involves organizations or causes it doesn't like.
I'm a lefty, but I absolutely believe that both the left and right are deep in the "ends justify the means" weeds with respect to censorship and free expression. I blame partisanship. People used to have respect for someone taking a principled stand that didn't necessarily align with their overall political position. Now, that's just seen as a weak maneuver in the all-important "my team vs your team" culture war.
> The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.
I have no idea what you're talking about. There is no scientific or natural law that says that every human should have equal rights. You can totally make a stable society that discriminates on color of skin or possession of certain documents or account balance. It's been done many times. Science does not tell you whether votes should be extended all the way to ducks but not chickens, nor whether unauthorized presence in a country should enable arbitrary search and seizure. Plus, "conservative" covers a lot of ground and someone can legitimately be extremely conservative and completely opposed to (eg) white nationalism at the same time.
Sure, conservatism is always going to drag its heels to recognize and accommodate the sorts of progress in science and other understanding that I'm guessing you're thinking of, but progressives can just as easily go too far too fast and be blind to the tradeoffs and principles involved. The "conservative project" can't be doomed; it will always be a different point on a continuum from the "progressive project", and we'll always be able to argue over where the right point is.
Well, at least until we're all dead or so infantilized by our technology that we stop even asking the questions.
likely not. Being able to read and understand is a matter of skill though. There are many technical terms there that may make it unreadable for non-technical audience. But you can solve that by having an AI explain it to you.
Are you going to ignore the whole operating system emulation which plays audio when you enter it? I think the article itself is fine too but if this guy wanted to reach more people this should have been plain text .
This is the most important section, as the above ones any privacy-conscious person would assume most anyway. I did mention before that we need an open-source platform that tracks the people who work and build such systems. Those are the enablers who have no morals or ethics - a greedy corporation is always greedy, but when the average employee is willing to work full time on building such systems, they need to be exposed publicly, just as they are working relentlessly on violating private people's privacy. It isn't about public humiliation; it's about basic human decency and maintaining a minimum ethical code to abide by. These individuals shouldn't be hired or dealt with, not even a simple connection on LinkedIn.
These individuals are dangerous. They are like rats among us and should be exposed, and I bet some of them are reading this as well.
Please don't post LLM output on HN. If an article is unreadable, we accept a link to an archived version of the original content (on a site like Archive.org or Archive.today), not a summary, because then people comment in response to the summary, which may not be an accurate representation of the original content.
"what is Fivecast ONYX? an AI-powered surveillance platform purchased by ICE for $4.2 million and CBP for additional license costs. according to Fivecast’s own documentation and EFF’s reporting, they do automated collection of multimedia data from social media and dark web, build “digital footprints” from biographical data, tracks shifts in sentiment and emotion, assigns risk scores, searches across 300+ platforms and 28+ billion data points, identifies people with “violent tendencies”"
Glad to know that my tinfoil hat wasn't too tight when social media came to be and this obvious use was predicted. How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
According to Persona's damage control article[0], the subdomain had "onyx" in its name because that's the internal code name for the project, and it's named after the pokémon Onyx. No connection to Fivecast ONYX.
[0] https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
I don't really understand why ICE would have a Persona OPenAI connection...?
Really? Sounds like they are a customer.
I am not sure summoning Nintendo due to trademark infringement will help with damage control. ;-)
Naming a fantasy creature after a common gemstone should make it non-trademarkable anyway, but I'd love to see Nintendo tie up the US government in court for years.
Not a crime, necessarily, just a hefty debit against your social credit score.
On a macro scale, in Australia if you don't have a paid private health policy, you get slugged with additional tax come tax time. The same could happen here - "oh, you don't have social media? Well the state needs more tax from you to pay for your additional state surveillance"
Could it though? I have lived in rural areas and urban areas of the US. This speaks more to the rural areas than the urban, but only marginally--Americans like their firearms, they're suspicious of The Government, and they don't much care for the tax man. And by and large they like to be left the fuck alone. If the revenuers show up demanding too much we have a rich and storied history of mistreating them.
How's that working out right now?
Yeah, turns out Americans (rural or not) prefer creature comforts like Amazon and Netflix over exercising their 2A rights. All talk.
Source: American observing what’s going on right now.
82% of US households have an Amazon Prime subscription while only 30% own a gun.
Or a precursor to minority report precrime
It's an interesting conundrum.. I've always viewed "the law" as something that doesn't really materialize until you're arrested, arraigned, tried, and sentenced. So "breaking" the law and "getting away with it" isn't actually "illegal" it's just... normal. The law only matters if some filthy rat narc catches you and summons the pigs. Not sure how any of that adjusts in this scenario, really.
Joke’s on them, I’ve been LARPing as a tech founder since childhood.
I am not that old and I remember when people warned other to put too much info on social media. You can even identify people through a few sentences and some people have basically a complete life encyclopedia about themselves online. Sure, those are usually not the most influential for political developments besides being called influencers.
Recent paper by Nicholas Carlinini and others really showcases how little it takes to deanonymize users across platforms with LLMs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800
We need a list of these 300+ platforms
I'm 99% sure this is one of them. I thought 404media posted a leaked list of the platforms once but I can't find it. Search is dead (this is a general statement)
It's safe to assume any publicly accessible website is one of them or will be in the near future.
It's already frowned upon when crossing the border
Finally, a use for my LinkedIn account. In fact I think I might start posting AI slop to it.
[dead]
> How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
Ah, it already is. Just being trialed against people with less rights and no voting power.
Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.
If you think the government is spending a hundred billions on this category of tech for vetting a few thousand people, you are a prime candidate to buy a bridge that I can sell you for a discount.
> Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.
I don’t think this is true. You can get a visa just fine if you don’t have social media profiles. Source: me. I don’t have facebook, insta, twitter etc and travel to the US just fine. When I filled in the form I left those empty.
What I think you can’t do is get a visa if you have social media profiles and choose not to disclose them or you post things or have friends/links on your social media that cbp considers elevates your risk etc.
Leaving it empty is getting visas rejected nowadays.
Can I just ask gpt to ask me questions to create my profile directly? I can't be bothered with any social media. Whatever it is supposed to addict me with is missing, I just find it all very boring.
I got into the USA in September last year. On my esta I put a private instagram account I begrudgingly made to talk to some friends, and my LinkedIn. I guess that’s enough data?
They swiped through the photo gallery on your phone, right? (Standard for years from what I know based on Latin America to USA)
Going to copy paste my comment from today's other thread[3] that linked to this:
Note also there's a direct response from Persona's security team here[1], and a lot of back and forth from Rick on Twitter[2].
[1]: https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
[2]: https://x.com/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385?s=20
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136036
The author has published part 2 of the series... def worth the read: https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona-2
The withpersona.com URL seems to return 404.
fixed ty
They did good damage control with that post
Governments in Europe should be seriously scrutinising this with the background conversation of departing American tech going on. Discord users globally were being coerced into handing over their ID to this American surveillance tech. Are we just going to let this go on?
You act like the governments of Europe weren’t the reason Discord decided they needed to get government issued identity information from European users…
NSA spied on European leaders[1] and we did nothing. So yes, nothing happens.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/denmark-helped...
Unfortunately Persona already has a lot of contracts in the EU and is about to get more https://fintecbuzz.com/persona-to-launch-a-new-suite-of-solu...
Do you believe that the politicians, on the other side of the ocean, aren't getting paid by the same cheese pizza eaters?
In response to a data request, Persona says:
Hi there,
Thank you for reaching out to Persona.
Please note that Persona primarily operates as a "service provider" or "processor" for its customers. We act as a "business" or "controller" only for specific services, such as identity verification for LinkedIn, FoxCorp, and Reusable Persona. To learn more about how Persona manages your personal data, please refer to our privacy notices, which can be accessed through the following link: https://withpersona.com/legal/privacy-notices
If you wish to exercise your privacy rights related to services where Persona is a "service provider" or "processor," please contact the entity using our service, as they are the "controller" of the data. We will assist the relevant customer to fulfill your data subject rights, but we do not handle such requests directly on their behalf.
For any privacy rights request related to services where Persona acts as a "business" or "controller," including identity verification for LinkedIn, FoxCorp, Reusable Persona, and personal data related to our sales, marketing activities, or website browsing on withpersona.com, please use our Data Subject Request (DSAR) available at the following link: https://withpersona.com/dsar
For all other inquiries, we will respond as soon as possible.
###
TL;DR we're not responsible, go talk to LinkedIn.
That does not match the very similar reply I got as a California resident asserting my rights under California's "Right to Know" Act , regarding LinkedIn profile data and related
This is the same complete bullshit trying to remove oneself from political donation emails. "Oh, okay, we will remove you from that one." Days later it's a "different campaign." Sometimes it's the exact same people from weeks ago who have just renamed their campaign and started sending again.
We need far stronger laws for all of it, which will never happen because the rot and corruption has fully metastasized.
100% the political campaigns pinging you is endless and you cannot escape it. I have dozens of campaigns pinging me daily and I mark them all as spam as I never signed up for this nonsense. Give me a way to block them all and remove me from their database.
This is a hilarious personal website! Love it. Even better that it's paired with quality content.
I don't like it playing sound, I can't read the blog post in the metro. In fact I will direct my attention to the next thing and not remember reading this later.
If you browse random news with autoplay audio in browser enabled, that's on you.
I have "default for all websites: block audio" in my firefox settings and that site still played music.
Not so cute when there’s auto play audio and no controls to stop it on mobile
I like it. It's like wandering into someone else's house. Their stereo is playing, they're telling you some interesting story. It's their party, I'm just a guest. It reminds me of how the web used to feel.
The passengers next to me hate the website. And I can't blame them, I would too.
If you don't like the party.. just leave. You're not being detained.
Thanks for stating the obvious.
I felt alive again as I used my physical volume button down to focus on the text.
Same. Some good music too.
https://withpersona.com/customers/openai
Persona's side of the story.
Their side of the story is that they want to flag people as "too risky to be allowed to use AI"?
There's a problem here, right? Who else might want to flag you and lock you out of shit? Is this the new normal?
Will they flag Republicans / Democrats / Catholics / Buddhists / People Of Any Particular Skintone / People with Blue Shoes Who Are Exactly 5'9 / ????
The corporations are out of control. We should bring them to heel.
We should also resist and refuse to comply with these totally arbitrary requests we don't have to comply with.
Wonder how many lists I'm on for the unholy sin of saying the glorious american leader is a moron
Or for saying Israel shouldn't be committing a genocide.
Or for noticing that Discord, Roblox, OpenAI, Anthropic, Persona, and Palantir all have Zionist Israeli founders / co-founders / CEOs / funding. Or that 98% of US congress members received donations from AIPAC or that the US president is a staunch Zionist / supporter of Israel.
In before I get downvoted and flagged for speaking the truth and noticing patterns.
You can see it in each presidential address. The flag is right there along with our own.
[dead]
Isn’t this just normal KYC (for account opening).
What am I missing?
https://withpersona.com/customers/openai
There's nothing normal about it.
It seems like at every technological step, we're sold the dream and delivered the meme. We always end up with the worst possible combination of players, ideas and outcomes; with the promise of what the said technology delivers in terms of additional freedom or free time never realised. How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
It's "socializing the losses and privatizing the gains"… but now alarmingly supercharged well beyond purely financial realms, and into really basic and fundamental matters of individual physical autonomy and liberty.
> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
Having any kind of agency in those things would be a start.
If <FAANG bigcorp of your choice> announces with great fanfare "We're building this totally awesome new technology that will make everything better! And the best thing? You won't have to do anything, we will auto-update all your devices/accounts/etc with it for free! Trust us!", then whether you personally believe their enthusiastic predictions or not doesn't really matter a lot - you will get it anyway, unless you spend a lot of energy to deliberately avoid the new technology.
I felt compelled to write this email to 1password today:
Dear 1password,
Please stop trying to "innovate". I really like your password manager. That's all I want. I don't want "automatic watchtower AI phishing prevention" I just want a password manager that works across my devices. Make it simple, make it secure, and don't change it. You have a great product. Adding more features will only make it worse. If you keep this bullshit up I will churn.
Ever read 1984?
Who wins at the end?
Winston, obviously. He left behind his free-thinking and became unwavering to Big Brother. Truly a winner
Why, oh why, didn't I take the blue pill?
[dead]
All these memes are burning through our natural reserves at an ever increasing rate so it will crumble when the bread baskets fail anyway.
From my understanding, we are pretty close to a Dystopian world where all elites of a certain group collaborate to run a Super Leviathan. We still gotta choose our flavors, which may not be feasible in maybe 5-10 years when those leviathans clash into each other.
Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp covers it pretty well I think.
Likewise, thank you for the recommendation. I obviously haven't read Goliath's Curse yet, but it seems like Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) might also be interesting for the same readers.
Thanks for the recommendation.
It's not like this is surprising, there have been plenty of sci-fi books/movies that have predicted this very thing. How many movies have the haves lived above ground/off planet, while the have nots have lived underground or stuck on a apocalyptic planet.
This is just furthering the previous history. Currently, the lords have just been able to keep the serfs appeased to a longer extent. Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.
I don't think they are going to rise up this time. Maybe laying down flat is more realistic.
This time is different. The global system is not going to fall apart like isolated kingdoms in the past.
You seem very confident. This seems to imply you feel the haves will know when to leave enough on the table for the have nots to still feel like they are a part of the haves. I'm not so confident in that.
People in technologically advanced societies have more than enough & the people who are not as advanced can not do anything that will have any effect on the people who own the fighter jets, missiles, robot factories, & "internet" satellites. The current system has no historical precedent. It is very close to an almost perfect panopticon w/ an associated media & police apparatus to keep everyone docile & complacent. Like I said, this time is different.
Far more likely is that we head back to a feudal era where data mining tech is used to identify and eliminate potential rabble-rousers. Once enough production is automated, all remaining have-nots are exterminated.
The weak link is that for “the haves” to have, the “have -nots” are needed. To have or to not is just a comparison, a millionaire needs the poor to be rich and to feel special otherwise when everyone is special nobody is.
It will instead eventually fall apart in more thoroughly destructive ways. But not until it does a possibly-unrecoverably (at least in the medium term) amount of damage to civilization, humanity, and life on Earth first.
I agree but my point was that it will not be like any previous collapse.
yep. There is too much infrastructure now. Its going to take a lot for this to end.
“ Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting – Haruki Murakami”
> Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.
this is a completely "WEIRD" outlook.. more than half of humanity has no illusions about "proletarians" they do not even discuss it that way
source: born and raised WEIRD
It's already crumbling. That's why we have AI-powered fascism in the first place. Society destabilizes and a significant fraction of the population says "perhaps authoritarianism is a good thing." It's never worth it, though.
The story here is that a FedRAMP-authorized system had 53MB of Vite dev source maps exposed on a production government endpoint. That's not "sold the dream, delivered the meme," that's a specific auditable compliance failure. Meanwhile a fintech engineer explaining that this is all standard legally-mandated KYC infrastructure got flagged to death. The interesting question isn't whether technology betrays us, it's why US law requires this surveillance apparatus in the first place and why the security assessment apparently missed checking for /vite-dev/ on a government system.
Also every technological step? Ever? Really? This wouldn't happen to be typed on a computer from a climate-controlled room on a nice global network or anything?
Except it wasn't a production endpoint and there's no actual security risk in having source maps available. It's more annoying to read source code that has been minified, but if a security professional tells you that minifying source code is something that increases security, you should be wondering what other bullshit they've pedaled you.
I'm not a fan of persona and have gone out of my way to not provide my details to them even before this, and I really dislike Thiel, but... let's be honest about the stuff we're complaining about.
I think that's a natural outcome of a model where sociopaths climb to the top, with a layer of sycophants beneath them that shield normal workers from perceiving the amount of depravity going on at the top which would make them unable to continue and tank the business. AI might remove the reliance on regular folks and give sociopaths direct execution of all ideas they have without any moral opposition, and that would explain a lot of the rush for AI everywhere we see nowadays.
This is the part that doesn't get enough attention. The historical check on concentrated power wasn't just democracy or law — it was that executing any large-scale agenda required thousands of people who could refuse, drag their feet, or leak. AI doesn't just automate tasks — it removes the human friction that was always an informal veto on the worst ideas.
The surveillance apparatus isn't new. What's new is that you need fewer people with moral objections in the loop to operate it.
I would be careful with this kind of reasoning, because it suggests corruption within a corporate model is inevitable, giving it implicit permission to continue existing. It's not inevitable.
I would suggest it is inevitable when the goal is to grow without end. The sociopaths buy the shares and push the businesses to ether become "evil" or get pushed out and taken over. Its what the current models leads to when there are no checks and balances.
Pursuing growth at all costs is inevitable though. If you don't continue to grow, you get superseded by entities that do. Goes for both countries and companies.
Communist countries like the Soviet Union and China have even had the explicit goal of outgrowing the US.
Birds of a flock crap on everybody together.
> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
I wouldn't call this much of a society if people's eyes are open.
What's that song name, they don't care about us?
Does someone have a version that doesn't force you to listen to unwanted music?
In FF you can click on a tab on left side to mute it not sure other browsers
There is a play/pause button in the lower right corner.
Not on mobile...
Why do so many engineers willingly build things bad for society?
Because it generally pays well. I'd wax philosophically, but you can come to your own conclusions from that little nugget.
Enough said. Since the "death of God" (per Nietzsche - the collapse of the metaphysics underpinning our morals and therefore cultural norms and behaviors) the modus operandi has been the utilitarian "get what's yours."
Reprehensible.
Additionally, people are typically only "gifted" on one domain -- if one's gifted enough in the domain of intellect to become a SWE, they're typically lacking elsewhere, whether that be in moral scruples or the ability to discern social things such as when they're working for sociopaths.
You'd think empathy would just be enough, its very sad.
Every accusation is a confession
Not every. That would be DARVO. Sometimes a spade is a spade, or a pedophile is a pedophile, to make a very clear example.
Because they do not believe it is bad?
Because they believe that it's going to be build anyone by someone else?
Because they are not entirely aware of what they are building?
Money can be exchanged for services.
Hope this helps.
All these bright engineers can’t figure out the bigger picture of what they’re building?
“Hey boss man, why does this database ‘tracked_individuals’ have columns for license plate numbers, home addresses, and political affiliations?”
Give me a break
Yes, many of them don't. They're fed convincing cover-stories like "we need this to stop CSAM" or "this prevents terrorism", and then put on a security theater about E2EE and military-grade cryptography. They sleep like a baby because most of them genuinely think they're the good guys, hell, even people on HN appear to buy the obvious lie whenever Client Side Scanning or Flock is brought up.
You can hire sociopaths to work the ~1% of jobs that require a complete understanding of your moral bankruptcy. Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, none of these people ever apologized for their ethical flexibility because it's precisely what qualifies them for such a lucrative job. Persona can be a shell org with 20 evil engineers while their partners absentmindedly do the integration work.
Because they're paid enough to retire at 30.
Many tech execs operate under the thesis that china & the democratic party are existential threats that warrant a surveillance/military/police ramp up. Meanwhile, many tech employees are credulous and frequently adopt self-serving geopolitical narratives. The current macro trends don't help (huge defense budgets, bad labor market power, China is in fact more powerful)
Edit:forgot the most obvious... money
Evil pays more.
A common theme in a lot of movies, books, et..
It is mostly a combination of Sinclair's Law and "I have nothing to hide" mindset.
Because the highest values of our society are non-values.
also theyre subject to the same anonymity many other internet users have and so dont feel any consequences for their actions.
The tribe won’t eat their own… probably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_apples
Immoral boot-licking human engineers are indistinguishable from LLMs.
What's crazy is I know engineers like this in real life - and they're good engineers! So I know they do exist, but their existence to serve their company or CEO no matter what is completely foreign to me. Like, you're smart enough to understand that large codebase and generally function as a member of society, but you've completely given up your higher level decision making for someone or something that would throw you away in an instant.
surprised nobody responded with the most straightforward, occams razor explanation
they think what they're doing is actually good for society
not everyone is in the hackerspace libertarian / socialist sphere
i used to work for a place that used persona despite it adding extra friction to signups (literally resulting in less paying customers to the dismay of PMs) because it was worth it to combat fraud. theres a tradeoff in everything
"Oh boy! I've always wanted to work at [microsoft, apple, google, etc.]!"
Those aren't the companies OP is necessarily talking about. "I've always wanted to work at Persona!", said no one, ever.
All of them are complicit. You only need ~50 greedy sociopaths to work at Persona, and 10,000 dumb-as-rocks engineers hyped to work at Microsoft/OpenAI and "stop the bad guys" or whatever the boogeyman du-jour is.
We saw it with Bitlocker, we saw it with Client Side Scanning, we see it with Salt Typhoon. Most people that work on weaponized surveillance systems are entirely apathetic, or see themselves as righteous. Even when the system is known to be bugged, obviously flawed, or outright controlled by a foreign adversary.
oh thats a good point, kind of like the military or how propaganda demonizes the enemy during a war, its us vs them.
My employer isn't particularly bad for society, but let's pretend they are. My company is a large employer of foreign workers. I already live in fear of being priced out by foreign bodyshop firms. If I decided what we were doing was immoral, and dug my heels in. I'd just be replaced by a H-1B worker. If everyone else in my company decided they wouldn't build the torment nexus, we'd all just be replaced by H-1B workers. It'd be a minor inconvenience to the company, but they'd weather it just fine. Under this system, any kind of collective bargaining becomes impossible, moral, financial, or otherwise.
This website really is incredible!
work of art
What can those do from a separate country, who unfortunately had their identity verified through Persona (LinkedIn in my case).
Organize in your country and advocate for data deletion jubilees, organize in your country to champion new taxes against US digital services, organize in your country to advocate for homegrown solutions over US tech.
If you aren't actively organizing you aren't going to accomplish anything.
Remember that people power trumps monetary power, but you have to commit for people power to work.
> advocate for homegrown solutions over US tech.
Some sweet irony about this btw.
Why? Every country on Earth is capable of creating and maintaining software. There is nothing unique about America or Silicon Valley (outside of the massive amounts of corporate welfare), devs can be found anywhere and who better to write software for local citizens than the local citizens themselves?
We know how useful open source software is, there's no reason why this can't be replicated across the planet.
Not because they cannot do it, but because why they're doing it, which in turn becomes what they're doing. America is being perceived as isolationist, so countries solve that by becoming isolationist about what software they use, whether its open source or not is kind of irrelevant, though in several cases the software will primarily be focused on the countries own language.
The better alternative in my eyes is to contribute to existing open source, and only if the US becomes hostile against this, fork said code and move on.
From the blog post I've recently read; https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verificatio...
1. Request your data. Email idv-privacy@withpersona.com or privacy@withpersona.com. Under GDPR, they have 30 days to respond.
2. Request deletion. The verification is done. LinkedIn already has the result. There is no reason for Persona to keep your passport scan and facial geometry on their servers. Ask them to delete it.
3. Contact their DPO. dpo@withpersona.com — that’s their Data Protection Officer. If you want to object to them using your documents as AI training data under “legitimate interests,” this is where you do it.
4. Think twice before verifying. That blue badge might not be worth what you’re trading for it. A checkmark is cosmetic. Biometric data is forever.
As heavily discussed here 3 days ago (Persona is the same company LinkedIn uses for their ID verification process):
I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245
1.4K+ points, 490+ comments
Just requested deletion through this form: https://withpersona.com/dsar
> 1. Request your data. Email idv-privacy@withpersona.com or privacy@withpersona.com. Under GDPR, they have 30 days to respond.
They just won't respond, then you can wait for 4+ years and nothing will happen to them. [0]
[0] https://noyb.eu/en/project/dpa/dpc-ireland
Based on the Anthropic distillation news yesterday I wonder if the AI companies are going to get much tighter with KYC.
I get the KYC concerns for API access, but I'm sortof baffled at why they'd need all of the AML stuff, given that they're not payment processors/financial institutions.
Or does Persona provide that by default? Don't know much about their service...
Websites with sound are a big no-no.
> OpenAI’s disclosures reference biometric data stored “up to a year.” the source > code shows face list retention capped at 3 years. government IDs retained > “permanently” per Persona’s practices. which is it?
I keep saying this. This is the playbook -- everything is moving to standardize Sam Altman's biometric authentication cryptocurrency company to use internet services. This has been a slow moving strategy for /years/ and every new step over that period only get closer, not further from this goal.
[dead]
"We weren’t hacked" is doing PR triage for "we exposed sensitive internal implementation details." Spy company semantics are always incredible. The house didn’t burn down, it just leaked gas.
Why the myspace music?
whimsy
Is that… Chrono Trigger?
calling data sovereignty laws a cybersecurity risk in the same week that Persona had 2500 files exposed on a government endpoint is an interesting choice of timing.
Another downvoted comment asks if this is all LLM output. While I don't think all of it is, chunks of it have LLM smells so I wanted to point those out as the author or other readers may find it useful:
The ASCII flowcharts all contain jagged vertical lines. This is the biggest indicator of LLM output as no human would ever produce that. You can simply see with your eyes that it's wrong if you even glance at it.
> there’s no way for us to prove that they don’t have access to all of that data anyway. we can only assume that they don’t have access to all of that data. but if you want my two cents, they probably do.
This doesn't quite read as LLM output but it makes the whole article look like a conspiracy theory.
> after trying to write a few exploits, vmfunc decided to browse their infra on shodan. it all started with a Shodan search. a single IP. 34.49.93.177 sitting on Google Cloud in Kansas City. one open port. one SSL certificate. two hostnames that tell a story nobody was supposed to read:
> and the company that runs all of this is the same one that takes your passport photo when you sign up for ChatGPT. same codebase. same platform. different deployment. same facial recognition. same screening algorithms. same data model.
> and as always, the information wants to be free. we didn’t break anything. we didn’t bypass anything. we queried URLs, pressed buttons, and read what came back. if that’s enough to expose the architecture of a global surveillance platform… maybe the problem isn’t us.
These all absolutely stink of LLM writing patterns.
I ask for forgiveness, but ...
The 90s called, THE CAT HUNTS THE MOUSE! :D :D
Quite some time ago I said and now repeat:
Convenience is to humans, what bulb lights at night are to bugs.
Ridiculous.
Stand in a hospital and say that credibly. I recommend the maternity ward.
Our consumer markets are a wreck. We have no federal watch dog exercising any authority. We have unchecked intelligence agencies actively trying to enslave the world. Our desire for convenience is not the problem, the people taking advantage of it are.
Why a hospital? There's very little convenience at play when it's a life and death situation.
It is what drives the market quite a bit at least. It's why we've produced over 2 billion cars and use them every day to pollute our own air so we don't have to walk two blocks. Most home appliances are convenience personified, the dishwasher, the microwave, the clothes dryer. It's why we have supply chains up the wazoo to bring products from all corners of the globe to everyone's nearby supermarket, a large amount of it getting thrown away when it's expired unsold. We fly across countries for something as pointless as a business meeting. Hell people now even order a taxi for their food, so they don't have to go out to get it.
Modern life is like at least 60% wastefulness in the name of convenience. Of course people with the option to do so will exploit the one thing that's easily exploitable, that's like water flowing downhill.
> Why a hospital?
Maternity is most often not "life and death." Is the maternity ward just a convenience? Or is the cost worth the benefit? You don't seem to be doing any form of honest analysis.
> Most home appliances are convenience personified, the dishwasher, the microwave, the clothes dryer.
Yes, because, those save time. It's worth having a point of view that other people saving their time, and thus freeing it for more worthwhile endeavors is ultimately a net positive for all of society. You pass these off as mere conveniences. It's a rather bleak misanthropic outlook you seem to have acquired.
> Modern life is like at least 60% wastefulness in the name of convenience.
People own cars to drive more than two blocks. You're only making the most ridiculous version of the argument and you don't have very much to back it up.
Oh I disagree completely, births are a very life and death situation for both involved if any compilations happen to set in. It's extremely worth the benefit to have some doctors around.
> people saving their time, and thus freeing it for more worthwhile endeavors
Do we? Use it for more worthwhile endeavours? I doubt scrolling an online feed of endless bullshit would qualify as that, and most people seem to spend their left over time doing that instead. We're dopamine rush optimizers, not some kind of paragon who spends their time working for the good of society.
Now I'm not saying it makes any sense for us to go back to washing things by hand, but I am saying that automating chores and saving time is like heroin to us and that we'll pay every cent we have for it, as OP's original point was.
> People own cars to drive more than two blocks
Yeah but once we have the ability to drive anywhere it's easy to use it for all kinds of things that we really don't need it for, cause it's just so convenient, fuel prices be damned :)
Surprisingly close minded and selective read. That way you'll see black swans even in paradise (or the whatever utopialand of your choice).
No pain, no gain.
Any time you "verify" your identity you are giving it to scum bags such as this.
Your biographic data will leak to every hacker and every government world wide.
thank god there's an annoying fucking cat in the way of what i'm trying to read
Thank god for noscript. Did see or hear any of that and dumped the text-only version of the article and HN discussion right to my local hard drive for off-line reading.
Move your mouse and the cat will follow
On mobile the cat sits in the middle of the screen and does not respond to touch input. The author has been told about the distracting elements and refused to acknowledge it.
If I tap somewhere else the cat goes there. I like the website, even though some design choices don't follow UX best practices.
That has changed in the last couple days.
[dead]
General Alexander (former Director of NSA) admitted, around DEF CON XX (circa 2012), that the intelligence community defines "intercept" as when a human analyst catalogues a piece of information.
Reading between these lines, some decade+ later... we swim beyond seas of deception, in these interceptionless databases of humanity. Less than just a number, only weights held in artificial minds.
In 2022 my friends were telling me how good of an investment this one really smart identity verification company was.
[dead]
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632.
[dead]
[flagged]
Well if you will turn your attention to my Straussian reading of the most popular comic books and anime, you may find that...
Yes
No
They rhyme
No, the mark of the beast is everyone in the Epstein files
So, less a mark and more an abyss to stare into?
What do the people in the Epstein files have to do with a mark that people need to receive in order to participate in society? I'm confused.
[flagged]
I love it when names of things match their characteristics.
Except everything I said was factual, and nothing was conspiratorial. If you disagree, please point out where I was factually incorrect. Otherwise, you should probably change your username to ignoramus or denierofreality or something similar. Unless you want to be viewed as a hypocrite that is.
I am earnestly disappointed your comment was flagged because I've forgotten what it was and can't newly reflect on your response!
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No, the problem absolutely is identity verification. No KYC should be needed for any kind of online API service, period.
The amount of green accounts that are obvious LLM spam has increased what seems to be 10x in the past couple of months. What's going on?
ClawdBots can now more easily interact with the Internet than regular agents, so you wind up with Moltbook leaking
> What's going on?
People are doing their best to turn Dead Internet Theory into Dead Internet Reality.
Why is this LLM spam?
Just check comment history, each comment follows the exact same structure
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Author was doing such a good write-up, until I saw repeated AI syntax "its not x, but y" and "a is b. b is c. and, c is the final thing in this series of short, punchy sentences". Really tired of this. Why is it so hard to just write naturally? Maybe I'm just easily triggered
That was writing naturally until AI stole it from us.
Maybe I overestimated how much was used here. I guess I'm so burned out by seeing it everywhere else, it's becoming hard to tell what's what.
I understand AI is trained on human output but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to distinguish between the two. I've seen blogs where this particular syntax "That's not x - it's actually y" is repeated 10+ times. That's not normal human writing. Admit I picked a bad example here, just read 5 AI articles in a row before this one.
The right wing went full censorship and surveillance after the Charlie Kirk assassination. It is probably not a coincidence that they targeted Discord first, because the suspect was in a Discord group.
They promised freedom of speech and liberty and this is what we get.
I mean, they got louder about it after Charlie Kirk, but they've been full censorship forever.
nothing to do with left or right. the UK is left and has the most Orwellian surveillance state outside of China
The current Labour Party is NOT Left by any definition.
The right wing went full censorship and surveillance long before the Charlie Kirk assassination. Anyone who believed that the right wing (or the left wing, for that matter; let's not pretend that censorious dipshittery is not bipartisan) was honestly promising freedom of speech as opposed to merely freedom of speech they like and censorship of speech they don't like was at best willfully blinding themselves to the actual actions of politicians.
> > or the left wing, for that matter; > Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure
How so? Leftist censorship became quite popular on college campuses. The ACLU supported that, and got cold feet about promoting free expression more generally when it involves organizations or causes it doesn't like.
I'm a lefty, but I absolutely believe that both the left and right are deep in the "ends justify the means" weeds with respect to censorship and free expression. I blame partisanship. People used to have respect for someone taking a principled stand that didn't necessarily align with their overall political position. Now, that's just seen as a weak maneuver in the all-important "my team vs your team" culture war.
> The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.
I have no idea what you're talking about. There is no scientific or natural law that says that every human should have equal rights. You can totally make a stable society that discriminates on color of skin or possession of certain documents or account balance. It's been done many times. Science does not tell you whether votes should be extended all the way to ducks but not chickens, nor whether unauthorized presence in a country should enable arbitrary search and seizure. Plus, "conservative" covers a lot of ground and someone can legitimately be extremely conservative and completely opposed to (eg) white nationalism at the same time.
Sure, conservatism is always going to drag its heels to recognize and accommodate the sorts of progress in science and other understanding that I'm guessing you're thinking of, but progressives can just as easily go too far too fast and be blind to the tradeoffs and principles involved. The "conservative project" can't be doomed; it will always be a different point on a continuum from the "progressive project", and we'll always be able to argue over where the right point is.
Well, at least until we're all dead or so infantilized by our technology that we stop even asking the questions.
Is this whole unreadable article just the output from an AI prompt describing a techno-thriller?
likely not. Being able to read and understand is a matter of skill though. There are many technical terms there that may make it unreadable for non-technical audience. But you can solve that by having an AI explain it to you.
It's not my skills. I could decipher it if I spent enough time (and had plain text).
the presentation is bad.
verbosity.
it takes many words for the writer to make a point.
that darn cat.
I didn't find this to be the case at all. It's quite concise and clear. There's just a lot of information presented.
Are you going to ignore the whole operating system emulation which plays audio when you enter it? I think the article itself is fine too but if this guy wanted to reach more people this should have been plain text .
What irked me was the main text was grey on grey, low contrast. While the code boxes were high contrast. And on the phone screen that stupid cat.
Hey, I got my first downvotes ever for my nasty comment!
> 0x18 - betrayal
This is the most important section, as the above ones any privacy-conscious person would assume most anyway. I did mention before that we need an open-source platform that tracks the people who work and build such systems. Those are the enablers who have no morals or ethics - a greedy corporation is always greedy, but when the average employee is willing to work full time on building such systems, they need to be exposed publicly, just as they are working relentlessly on violating private people's privacy. It isn't about public humiliation; it's about basic human decency and maintaining a minimum ethical code to abide by. These individuals shouldn't be hired or dealt with, not even a simple connection on LinkedIn.
These individuals are dangerous. They are like rats among us and should be exposed, and I bet some of them are reading this as well.
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Please don't post LLM output on HN. If an article is unreadable, we accept a link to an archived version of the original content (on a site like Archive.org or Archive.today), not a summary, because then people comment in response to the summary, which may not be an accurate representation of the original content.