this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
142 points (98.6% liked)

Technology

34669 readers
364 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.

The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”

In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Luffy879@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 minutes ago

Any government does anything shady Oh! I i would not have thought that any government is using my patriotism for their malicious things!

[–] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 28 minutes ago

I don't get it. They're not already?

[–] Wolfram@lemmy.world 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Jesus, even before I read the article it read like the U.S wants to emulate disinformation campaigns others are using. The irony of three letter agencies condemning AI campaigns while the Pentagon is going "We want that", is insane but its to be expected I guess.

[–] beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 41 minutes ago (1 children)

…Do you think the US government has never done disinformation campaigns before?

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 minutes ago

no, but they pretend otherwise, so them publicly salivating for it is a new level of embarrassing.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 hours ago

.world will double in users again

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

So they can save money by firing their army of nafo meat puppets?

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 hours ago

I mean they did had IRL meeting probably because even they didn't believed they are real people lol.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 61 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

Can we have a side internet, for us normal people?

[–] drwho@beehaw.org 1 points 1 hour ago
[–] off_brand_@beehaw.org 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I think the saving grace of the Internet is in the small holes that arent populated enough for these big actors to care about. If you're influencing a nation, you probably aren't going to inject your AI slop into a tiny proboards or like the forum on Gaia Online.

[–] refalo@programming.dev 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

except gaia is one of the largest forums on earth.

they have more subscribers than Apple TV+

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 10 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

That exists it's called tildeverse and gemini

[–] jcg@halubilo.social 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Have you got a more specific search term for Gemini? Unfortunately the word has been taken by Google

[–] disguised_doge@kbin.earth 5 points 11 hours ago

Unfortunately, if everybody goes there the bots will follow.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 5 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

What's the pros and cons of those?

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 11 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Both go back to 90s tech so you lose a lot of functionality. Gemini is mainly text based with links to files. So think pre web text pages at University's but it's cool to read people's pages without all the distractions of images and video. I have read some cool stories on there. Got an awesome cookie recipe as well from a person in Denmark.

[–] Sundial@lemm.ee 31 points 21 hours ago

So they want to automate the use of troll-farms?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 22 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

Dude I can't even pass a catchpa these day. I still don't know if a e-bike is a scooter, a bike, or a moped.

[–] essell@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

Are you jealous of the other bots who can?

[–] Serialchemist@ttrpg.network 12 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Captcha and I can never agree on what is and isn’t a bus.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 27 points 21 hours ago (1 children)
[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago

This would work for a short while as long as the user knows their hardware.

[–] django@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

They keep showing me strange street features from distant countries and ask me shit like "mark all the crosswalks". And i look at it and think "no idea, what this is, no crosswalk i have ever seen looked like this, so i guess it it is something different".

And then i have to do the next captcha. Sometimes i am caught in captcha hell, where i have to solve captchas until i give up and close the browser.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

There is a short story in here about someone who can't pass a captcha, loses their identity, and has to move on to becoming a fisherman in Norway.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 7 points 20 hours ago

Fisherman in Norway is probably an upgrade for some people lol

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

What sites are still using image captchas and not "Click here if you are not a robot"?

I just realized I don't surf the web randomly anymore, mainly because of crap like that.

[–] django@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 20 hours ago

When i click them, they oftentimes show me a captcha afterwards, as they apparently don't believe me. I once solved captcha after captcha for like two minutes and then ragequit, finally accepting, that i am a robot.

[–] Aradina@lemmy.ml 19 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Weird how they're doing the thing they accuse others of doing. Almost like it's a confession.

[–] DeathsEmbrace@lemm.ee 6 points 20 hours ago

Projection is a major problem

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.

Any chance that's the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 points 55 minutes ago
[–] zante@lemmy.wtf 20 points 21 hours ago

Bro I’ve about a dozen I can sell you right now

[–] SomeGuy69@lemmy.world 20 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Dead internet, it will be drowned in bots.

[–] Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 17 points 21 hours ago
[–] Korkki@lemmy.world 9 points 19 hours ago

As if any institution, org or group that has an agenda to push doesn't have battalions of bots guiding the discussion of forums to whichever way they want and not just fake followers and likes. As if people would need permission or would ask for it even if they had to. You just cant have any real sense of the public opinion on the internet, if there ever was such a time.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 4 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

So we really are going for a dead internet. Nobody is going to want to interact with bots all day online. But maybe that's the point, harder to organize organically on the streets without a presence online.

[–] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 28 minutes ago

Wow. Hadn't thought about it that way.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Telling on themselves a bit given the implication is that they're so far behind every other country who're definitely already doing the same

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 11 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

definitely

Definitely, given the overwhelming mountain of evidence you’re sitting on 👍 Meanwhile, the US isn’t the largest intelligence/security state in the world by leaps and bounds. It’s just a little-bitty backward country whose military-industrial complex invented the internet.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it's embarrassing, we don't even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it's just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.

Its just... we've got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they'll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 10 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though.

Not relative to other countries.

we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms

We are not; we are told we are. It’s propaganda coming from our own security state, pointed at us. Why? To manufacture our consent to censorship. They are telling us that other countries are doing to us what they are doing to other countries, and have been since even before the internet existed.

Listen to this complete inversion of reality from Biden: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah... this is an example of what I'm talking about. It's the romanticized version of the wild west online right now, and whenever you talk about the need for increased security, you're subjected to a ~~propaganda lecture~~ (edit for clarity:) lecture about propaganda and the political implications of fucking twitter or something. Everyone is so primed to respond along the party line to the idea of troll farms that the conversation about how they're used outside of influencing our elections never even occurs to people. Most don't even realize it's an issue that could be discussed.

So lets be clear here, while you're absolutely correct about what you're saying, that's not related to what I was saying.

The near constant spear phishing, network intrusion, ransomware, impersonation, false landings, etc. attacks that every government, medical, social and technical system in the country is being constantly subjected to is the issue I am qualified to speak about. It's an area where the US isn't even attempting to fight back, and as beautiful as headline-darling things like stuxnet were, the developers that worked on it haven't figured out how to mitigate ex: the rampant identity theft throttling the country. My favorite new one has been the theft of identity and thence blackmail of recently paroled prisoners, since a bad actor can easily get them returned to prison by just, say, using their credit card at a walmart out-of-state, or applying for public benefits in a different city. This happens all the time and nobody, at all, is talking about it. It's so common I was brought in to write a set of tools that auto-generate the letter informing out-of-state LEO agencies that the person was the victim of identity theft and should not be found in violation of their parole terms, since that was so common it was all their entire staff were spending their time doing.

That's just the one example that has occured to me, if you want more I can go on for very literal hours (just ask my students (who are no doubt quite stick of the topic...)). There's no systems, or even the political or social will to investigate developing systems, that could even begin to address the most basic issues in this realm. That is the problem I was screaming helplessly into the void about.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I work in this industry, in the US. I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned. I’ve been paid to lose sleep over these things. I’ve worked extra hours dealing with DDOS attacks and suspected intrusions and zero-day fire drills. I know.

But this isn’t unique to the US. It’s basically the same everywhere. And the US isn’t uniquely “behind.” Everyone’s behind. If the US is unique at all, it’s that we happen to own & run more internet services than anyone else.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned

(I made "false landings" up.)

No, it's not unique to the US. But we're by far the most dependent on technology out of any country and knowing this we talk a big game and do nothing to back said game up. The frequency with which [any agency you care to name] fails information security audits is pretty much just one long interrupted string of failures, and having worked with many western non-US governmental groups, the difference in security culture is pretty shameful.

[–] hightrix@lemmy.world 7 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

More likely, they’ve been doing this for many years and it is basically obsolete, so they are spilling the beans now.

Or not and we really are doomed.

[–] nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

My first thought was if they're asking for this officially, they've piloted some version of it unofficially.

[–] thesohoriots@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Can I still be the one person who makes all the posts on 4chan, prove me wrong?