11–20 of 97 posts
Given that current LLMs do not consistently output total garbage, and can be used as judges in a fairly efficient way, I highly doubt this could even in theory have any impact on the capabilities of future models. Once (a) models are capable enough to distinguish between semi-plausible garbage and possibly relevant text and (b) companies are aware of the problem, I do not think data poisoning will be an issue at all.
Just because traffic is coming from thousands of devices on residential IPs, doesn't mean it's a botnet in the classical sense. It could just as well be people signing up for a "free VPN service" — or a tool that "generates passive income" for them — where the actual cost of running the software, is that you become an exit node for both other "free VPN service" users' traffic, and the traffic of users of the VPN's sibling commercial brand. (E.g. scrapers like this one.)
This scheme is known as "proxyware" — see https://www.trendmicro.com/en_ca/research/23/b/hijacking-you...
> It seems quite likely that this is being done via a botnet - illegally abusing thousands of people's devices. Sigh. Just because traffic is coming from thousands of devices on residential IPs, doesn't mean it's a botnet in the classical sense. It could just as well be people signing up for a "free VPN service" — or a tool that "generates passive income" for them — where the actual cost of running the software, is t…
> It seems quite likely that this is being done via a botnet - illegally abusing thousands of people's devices. Sigh. Just because traffic is coming from thousands of devices on residential IPs, doesn't mean it's a botnet in the classical sense. It could just as well be people signing up for a "free VPN service" — or a tool that "generates passive income" for them — where the actual cost of running the software, is t…
sounds like a botnet to me
> It seems quite likely that this is being done via a botnet - illegally abusing thousands of people's devices. Sigh. Just because traffic is coming from thousands of devices on residential IPs, doesn't mean it's a botnet in the classical sense. It could just as well be people signing up for a "free VPN service" — or a tool that "generates passive income" for them — where the actual cost of running the software, is t…
sounds like a botnet to me
Proxyware is more like a crypto miner — the original kind, from back when crypto-mining was something a regular computer could feasibly do with pure CPU power. It's something users intentionally install and run and even maintain, because they see it as providing them some potential amount of value. Not a bot; just a P2P network client.
Compare/contrast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(P2P) — pieces of software which offer users a similar devil's bargain, but instead of "you get a VPN; we get to use your computer as a VPN", it's "you get to pirate things; we get to use your hard drive as a cache node in our distributed, encrypted-and-striped pirated media cache."
(And both of these are different still to something like BitTorrent, where the user only ever seeds what they themselves have previously leeched — which is much less questionable in terms of what sort of activity you're agreeing to play host to.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
sounds like a botnet to me
Eh. To me, a bot is something users don't know they're running, and would shut off if they knew it was there. Proxyware is more like a crypto miner — the original kind, from back when crypto-mining was something a regular computer could feasibly do with pure CPU power. It's something users intentionally install and run and even maintain , because they see it as providing them some potential amount of value. Not a bot…
I was very excited 20 years ago, every time I got emails from them that the scripts and donated MX records on my website had helped catching a harvester
> Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here's something to be happy about -- today one of your donated MXs helped to identify a previously unknown email harvester (IP: 172.180.164.102). The harvester was caught a spam trap email address created with your donated MX:
Does it? Encryption increases entropy, but not sure about compression.
> So the compressed data in a JPEG will look random, right? I don't think JPEG data is compressed enough to be indistinguishable from random. SD VAE with some bits lopped off gets you better compression than JPEG and yet the latents don't "look" random at all. So you might think Huffman encoded JPEG coefficients "look" random when visualized as an image but that's only because they're not intended to be visualized th…
> compression tends to increase the entropy of a bit stream. Does it? Encryption increases entropy, but not sure about compression.
Total information entropy - no. The amount of information conveyed remains the same.