[draft] Defeating Botnets and Trojans: Episode 1

[Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many]

On 6/11/22, Nico Verrijdt <nicoverrijdt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >  I encountered quite a few coincidences in the last 15+ years.
>> > One such coincidence is when I once wrote 'that's  two flies in one
>> clap',
>> > right after writing this a few desks further someone clapped hard on
>> > his
>> > desk, that was in a quiet place.
>>
>> This sounds like a coincidence to me, because the sets of words in
>> sentences and nearby behaviors are huge, frequent, and happen adjacent
>> to each other.
>>
>
> I don't believe much in coincidence.
> Another such a coincidence is when I needed an eraser and somehow I typed
> that down
> while a short moment later an eraser flew from one side of the office to
> the other side,
> from one colleague to another.
> The probability of this happening is extremely low as an eraser was, even
> then, not much
> used anymore and one colleague in need for an eraser while other throwing
> one
> at the same time of me writing that, ..., I was never that fortunate when
> playing the lottery.
> I just like to think they snooped on the characters from my file
> explorer's title bar.

There were actually two responses in my reply; in one I considered the
experience a coincidence, in the other I considered it to be related
to ongoing acts of surveillance, marketing, and influence.

The things you describe are being described by a lot of people. They
are also symptoms of heightened paranoia. The fact that these things
are real, is heightening people's paranoia, and we get a lot of real
things we would not think are true, and also a lot of worrisome things
that can be just happenstance. It's hard to tease them apart.

The speed of the event described implies to me that both you, and the
other people, were primed with the concept of eraser somehow. I could
be wrong. I can also write you a python script to demonstrate that
coincidences exist: but really the fact that we notice them shows that
they're not coincidences, as our mind is not a uniform random
distribution.

About a decade ago, a paper was shared on these lists, maybe this one,
regarding tracking causality. I'm sorry I don't know more about it,
but I imagine researchers far off in their math towers, trying to make
the world make sense.

>
>
> Op za 11 jun. 2022 om 12:55 schreef Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim
> of Many <gmkarl at gmail.com>:
>
>> >  I encountered quite a few coincidences in the last 15+ years.
>> > One such coincidence is when I once wrote 'that's  two flies in one
>> clap',
>> > right after writing this a few desks further someone clapped hard on
>> > his
>> > desk, that was in a quiet place.
>>
>> This sounds like a coincidence to me, because the sets of words in
>> sentences and nearby behaviors are huge, frequent, and happen adjacent
>> to each other.
>>
>> > There were also times that the management seemed to react immediately
>> > to
>> > what I typed.
>>
>> My understanding is that this is considered be corporate machine
>> learning algorithms that have been overfit. The described scenario is
>> that they don't know what you typed, but AIs trying to make money or
>> politics (even at other businesses, in browser advertisements, for
>> example) are constantly trying things to see if they work, and we
>> learn to respond to the things they try (like suggestions). It kind of
>> seems like human body language and intuition could have gotten a
>> little entrained.
>>
>> I don't know how to find people who talk about that, but
>> https://www.humanetech.com/ puts some effort into connecting people
>> together who do.
>>
>> On this list, a big topic that isn't addressed directly very often,
>> but is continuously addressed indirectly, is information security
>> conflict. It's very normal for mainstream machines to be beset by
>> systems (backdoors) that let other groups control them. It's a
>> dangerous and relevant situation, extremely complicated by AI, where
>> often it can seem that a bunch of entities appear invested in clouding
>> discussion around it.
>>
>> Spy agencies. Governments. Military corporations. Political parties.
>> Other people likely know more than me about these topical things.
>>
>> I understand there are some groups at DefCon and likely other Cons
>> regarding AI security. This is a pretty important topic. I haven't
>> been to one myself.
>>
>