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You can't trust the internet anymore

nicole.express

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Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#101

Post by marginalia_nu »

sunaookami wrote: post #98
marginalia_nu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either. Though all that stuff is…

>A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. If you trust your government's propaganda that is used to jusitfy "hackbacks" and buying 0-days on the darkweb that fucks us all.

Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%.

Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#102

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

holoduke wrote: post #60
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I "got online" in 1985. I don't recall a single point in time that a geographically local internet was ever useful or of interest to me.

Bbs. Downloaded first shareware version of doom. Was it 4mb or something? I remember I had like 5kb/s and paid 5 cents a minute. My parents weren't happy those days. Now they are :)

BBS were a little off-tangent if you were actually using the internet itself, which I was (or least, I was pretty shortly after a few months on JANET (UK) and Bitnet (US & Israel).

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#103

Post by hcs »

anigbrowl wrote: post #61
nicole_express wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of my annoyance is that in the past, something like Phantasy Star Fukkokuban would not really be worth lying about; people need a reason to lie.

I'm gonna guess that it's just popular enough that being in the top 5 results on search engines yields a small net gain in ad revenue. It's possible the decision to generate the fake article was itself made by a machine. Great piece btw

Seems much more likely it's just going through a list of all games, collated from databases that humans have painstakingly curated.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#104

Post by 47thpresident »

I had a similar experience when I was looking for YouTube videos on the Intel i7-4790T, it's a relatively obscure CPU that was only found on small-form factor pre-builds during the Haswell era. The only recent videos I found were slop videos [1] narrating a script clearly generated by an LLM, with a link to their Amazon affiliate in the description. The CPU has never been put on retail sale! These channels upload a dozen times a day on random products just to get an affiliate commission.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHUBC681iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w5a33Jeen0

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#105

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

krapp wrote: post #77
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.

>to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" It literally started meaning that hours after it was first posted to HN and being used. Sorry, that's just how language works. Enshittification got enshittified. Deal with it and move on.

that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated), and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression, the source of Doctorow's neologism and much closer to what the loose use of it is trying to get at.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#106

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

LPisGood wrote: post #78
anigbrowl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how about we put some effort into actually picking the correct words and not just handwaving everything? Especially since the whole topic of discussion here is 'internet research is increasingly less reliable because people just wrote/publish any old BS for clicks.'

I don’t think it’s necessarily handwaving. I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the way language is used and broadening terms is a very natural thing that happens as language evolves

we already had "it's getting shittier every day". no need to lose the specific meaning of "enshittification".

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#107

Post by grahamburger »

WD-42 wrote: post #16

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for peopl…

This is a cool idea and sounds like a fun project. That said, I imagine you could accomplish roughly the same thing with an invite only Wireguard network, with the benefit of not being geo-locked.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#108

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ninjagoo wrote: post #74
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The specific strategy is not about using LLMs or polluting the internet. Enshittification is ... ah screw it, let's turn to wikipedia: > Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve busin…

Feels like there is a case to be made here that the decline of The Internet rather precisely fits those definitions, with the exception that it is a collective of those products and services undergoing enshittification, since high-quality internet-based products/services no longer exist in quantity. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Impact which talks of the broadening of the usage of that term.

> high-quality internet-based products/services no longer exist in quantity.

asserted without evidence and likely false.

Re: You can't trust the internet anymore

#109

Post by giancarlostoro »

WD-42 wrote: post #16

This is why my friends and I are setting up a mesh network in our town. The open internet has been going downhill for a while, but LLMs are absolutely accelerating it's demise. I was in denial for the last few years but at this point I've accepted that the internet I grew up on as a kid in the late 90s to mid 2000s is dead. I am grateful for having experienced it but the time has come to move on. The future for peopl…

Why not just make an invite only site on the regular web? Drastically less friction.
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