@hex@kolektiva.social2026-05-25 10:09:12
So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-26 23:02:28
It’s Arizona Senator Mark Kelly.
AZ-06 is a dogfight we can’t afford to lose. That’s why I’m stepping up
to help
Jo Mendoza and her team launch Mendoza Victory fund
so she has the resources she needs to win.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this is a tight race.
Polling shows this race as a dead-heat again, but I know Jo is ready to step up and win in a race this close.
She’s a retired U.S. Marine Corps Drill Instructor who served 3 combat tours in…
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-05-27 05:09:00
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-07-26 17:31:24
Semi-subtoot: there's a certain kind of anti-genocide narrative that draws comparisons between the Gaza genocide and the genocide of Jews, queer, and disabled people during WW2, with an incredulous overtone, the subtext of which is: if the good nations invaded Germany to stop the Nazis' evil in WW2, it's hypocritical for this nations not to take action to protect Gazan civilians now. There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning, but the most obvious from an anarchist perspective (which sees "good nation" for the oxymoron it is) is that it's ahistorical. The reasons for the various allies' entrance into WW2 are varied, but they weren't about good and evil, and in fact the full depth of the evils of the Holocaust *was not known* in allied countries until after the war. Nations never really do things to "fight evil" like some humans might; they always act out of a kind of (imperfect) self-interest. The motivations for many of the allies were simply "we don't want Germany to conquer and destroy us" (and the imperfection in that motive is amply evident in the appeasement that preceded the war). America was of course not swayed by that motive, and it was the Japanese that (thinking the issue would have to come to a head eventually and that a surprise attack was worth speeding it up) put America in a situation where it joined for similar reasons.
Why is this extra relevant right now? Because neither the US nor any European country is existentially threatened by Israel (or threatened at all in fact, quite the opposite they're all benefiting economically from the situation in Gaza). The lesson of history isn't "brave, good nations will stand up to fight against anyone who commits genocide or other major evils", it's "nations act in their narrow and twisted and often mistaken self-interest (the interest of the national entity, which is often counter to the interest of it's citizens), and they always mythologize their actions after the fact as having been a fight against evil, which sometimes by luck is partially true."
To double down on this point: in the European theater the U.S. war actions were pretty good overall, defeating an evil opponent through military force and being a fairly gracious victor to the civilian populations there. In contrast, in the Pacific theater the U.S. was one of two evil empires duking it out for global dominance at the expense of civilians on both sides. The Japanese empire was a vile regime and perpetrated horrors in China, Korea, and across southeast Asia. The U.S. was barely better, between Japanese internment camps at home, and mass targeting of civilians on Japan, both with the firebombing of Tokyo and especially the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if your model of how we stop genocide is "convince the good guys to invade (or exert political pressure) and save the day", your model is wrong. That's not what happened in WW2. I'm not confident I know the perfect solution, but I do think it involves a mass of people making increasingly disruptive protest so that the cost *to rich companies and thus politicians* of falling to intervene is too high to stomach. That's a large part of what succeeded in South Africa, for example. Thankfully, there is already a vibrant protest movement to end the genocide in Gaza, and even though they haven't been fully successful yet, I'm optimistic that as things naturally (and through hard work) fall apart for various fascists politically, that movement will be able to succeed.
#gaza #genocide
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2026-04-27 06:40:28
Israel is not a race.
Condemning genocidists isn’t discrimination. Israel’s apartheid regime is discrimination.
Israelis are settler colonialists. That’s not a slur, it’s a fact.
No one is committing genocide against Israelis. The only people committing genocide are the Israelis.
***
(Please report and block this pro-genocide Israeli hasbara bot that spams posts and blocks – this is one of three copies of the same reply I got – and has been banned from countless…
@jake4480@c.im2026-05-27 05:55:46
@johl@mastodon.xyz2026-06-25 13:38:58
@cdarwin@c.im2026-07-26 22:12:01
A federal appellate panel on Saturday rejected the Trump administration’s request
to lift a lower court’s injunction blocking the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing Donald Trump’s March executive order targeting mail-in ballots as part of Republicans’ broader attack on voting rights.
A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against a motion by the administration
seeking a pause on U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s June order blo…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-07-25 13:59:03
Trump’s undermining of U.S. elections is not a simple partisan issue
The United States has for a decade “rightly focused on shoring up our elections against foreign meddling”
after Russia’s chicanery in the 2016 presidential race.
“But,” Senator Mark Warner added chillingly, “I fear that foreign interference is no longer the most pressing danger to our elections.
It is increasingly evident that the greatest threat now comes from inside our own government.”
Fro…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-07-26 23:25:30
U.S. airstrikes at sea are killing Mexican citizens
Eight fishermen from Mexico’s Nayarit state vanished after U.S. missile strikes on suspected drug boats.
The Trump administration labels targets ‘narco-terrorists,’
while legal experts and human rights advocates warn the airstrikes amount to extrajudicial killings.
In coastal towns, some people acknowledge that fishermen have been drawn into the world of cartels
and provide fuel for drug boats making long jo…
