..... to find and exploit "zero day" problems in various operating systems it has become clear over the last 24 hours that FreeBSD simply is not secure and Linux is to a much-higher degree.

Therefore this afternoon the system will be taken down to convert it, and all my data here in Sevierville, to a Linux base from a FreeBSD one.  Thus Beastie must die and the Penguin shall live.

I apologize in advance for the disruption and it will be considerable, as this is likely to require 12 hours or more for a "data only" restore, along with the redeployment of operating system software and recompilation and/or adaptation of all of the various components that make The Ticker possible.

Nonetheless this has to happen now, as these exploits are in active use and the threat is simply unacceptable.  You should expect the outage to begin by approximately 1500 hours ET today.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Yes, check the date... 

This is a large part of what is wrong with American tech today.

Over a decade ago, Meta – then known as Facebook – hired researchers in the social sciences with the goal of analyzing how the social network’s services were impacting users. It was a way for the company and its peers to show they were serious about understanding the benefits and potential risks of their innovations. 

But as Meta’s court losses this week illustrate, the researchers’ work can become a liability. Brian Boland, a former Facebook executive who testified in both trials — one in New Mexico and the other in Los Angeles — says the damning findings of Meta’s internal research and documents seemingly contradicted how the company portrayed itself in public. Juries in the two trials determined that Meta inadequately policed its site, putting kids in harm’s way. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s company began clamping down on its research teams a few years ago after a Facebook researcher, Frances Haugen, became a prominent whistleblower. 

If you parse that "reasonably" the conclusion is that Meta knew their services were addictive and tried to bury it -- and failed, as one of the people doing the work "become a whistleblower."  You don't blow a whistle on something the company is transparently disclosing to begin with, do you?

As I've noted all social media -- and all "public" AI -- has the same basic goal: Keep you on the site and thus earning money for them.

In other words addiction is the business model when you get down to it.  You might not call it that but a thing is what it does and is designed to do, not what is claimed for it in some marketing material.  Marketing is generally not enforceable against a firm due to a legal principle called "puffery" (that is, everyone tries to claim they're the best and this is expected both behaviorally and should be expected by consumers.)

Thus the paradox for so-called public "AI" models: An "AI" that says "I don't know" causes you to stop spending money.  After all, why would you pay for no answer?  If even some part of the time that's the answer you get back it deters you from spending more money.  Therefore it gives you "an answer" (which consumes credits) even if its crap because to make money said program must give you an answer.

All of the arm-waving over "hallucinations" is silly; computers do as they're programmed and the primary purpose of such a system is for people to consume "credits" which they have to acquire (buy) in some form or another.  When you distill down the purpose of all publicly-facing sites like this which either sell advertising or direct purchase-for-units-of-use model that's their prime directive since no firm ever tries to make less money.

Contrast this with, say, my old ISP (MCSNet.)  We sold access but your price was invariant with use; we had a (very large) cap and other technological means to deter abusive acts like nailing lines open that you were not actively using because those circuits were a scarce (and expensive) resource we had to buy, but other than that we had no financial incentive to increase the number of hours you used the service or the number of emails, articles or pages you read because in point of fact the more you used the more resource you consumed but the amount of money we made from you as a consumer or business user was fixed.

On the other hand Meta's web properties along with all the other social media sites are the exact opposite.  They do not charge a direct fee however their earnings are entirely dependent on your eyeballs being screwed to your screen on their site or app because that is what they sell to advertisers and some of them split that revenue with the people generating the views.  Yes, the earnings are "indirect" in that other people pay them but what they pay for is your eyeballs screwed to said screen.

If you've not noted the ridiculous and obvious "fake content" spike following the initiation of hostilities with Iran you're blind -- but all that really shows is the shift in focus.  It doesn't matter the social media platform; they all can detect this ridiculously-inauthentic content (e.g. alleged things being reported as "I saw this in the US" but the connection comes from Vietnam) but choose not to.  Why?  Because the more you engage the more money they make and whether the content is authentic is immaterial to them -- so long as you engage.  Indeed the more outrageous, either in the dopamine or adrenaline category, some piece of content is the more of a psychological reaction it will probably provoke in you and thus the more-likely you are to engage further on the platform.

There is an entirely-legitimate legal and societal question here: We do not allow minors to purchase things that are potentially addictive or harmful as it is our carefully-considered position that such persons cannot give consent.  You can, as an adult, buy all the booze you want and consume it.  Most people are not addicted to alcohol, but some do become addicted and that alcohol can cause addiction is known.  That most people don't become addicted or experience harm from their use of alcohol doesn't change the law; the potential for such harms, which are known and documented, is sufficient for the law to prohibit minors from purchasing and possessing said things because said minors cannot legally give consent to the potential harms that might occur.

Yet these social media companies -- all of them -- argue that this standard should not apply to their services, and I'm sure the same applies to those peddling "AI".

Indeed even "soft" addiction attempts are part and parcel of corporate behavior.  Apple has not and does not give schools large discounts on their computers because they're nice.  They do it because they wish to imbue into children the premise that an Apple computer is "desirable" even if for no other reason than familiarity.  The goal, of course, is for said person when they become an adult with purchasing power to buy an Apple computer instead of a competing model.

That we all recognize but there's no particular risk of harm to the kid who is incentivized to buy, when they become an adult, a computer that might cost more than another for equivalent capability.  Macs have always been more expensive for a given level of performance over PCs; it is simply that PCs have literal hundreds of companies building hardware that all runs the same operating systems and the Macintosh is single-sourced so if you want the Macintosh "look and feel" you must buy from Apple.  By the time such potential harm (to your wallet in that you spend more) becomes realized you're an adult and the potential risk from the minor's point of view is both so diffuse and small that we legally ignore it.  As a former CEO I disliked this as it resulted in young adults "wanting" said machines to be provided in my workplace (which were vastly more expensive than a PC that could perform the same tasks expected of said workers) but the answer there was simply for me to say "No."

Plenty of apologists argue that in the context of social media and similar (now "AI") this is a parent's role to police.  Really?  Do we let liquor (or weed, in the states where its legal) retailers sell to kids and rely on the parents to prevent that?  Of course not; we recognize that while minors will obtain access illicitly to various things making money by marketing and selling said things to minors is a prohibited act and subject to both civil and criminal penalties.  Indeed two days ago as a 62 year old man with rather-obvious gray hair I was forced to present government ID in a local store proving I was of legal age to buy a six pack of beer!

Well?

This isn't about "rights" in any meaningful sense for the simple reason that a minor cannot legally give informed consent, and in some cases we even go so far as to not permit the parents or others who are "in loco parentis" to consent for them (e.g. car seats for children.)

“AI companies seem to be mostly studying the models themselves – model behavior, model interpretability, and alignment – but there is a significant gap in research regarding the impact of chatbots and digital assistants on child development,” Blocker said. “AI companies have a chance to not repeat the mistakes of the past – we urgently need to establish systems of transparency and access that share what these companies know about their platforms with the public and support further independent evaluation.”

No such study is required.

These firms -- all of them -- design their products to increase their use because that is inherently necessary for them to exist and grow their userbase and thus revenue, earnings and market cap.

You need know nothing more than that which is inherently the core design of anything that is "metered" in this fashion (e.g. AI "tokens" expended by consumption) or has value inherently determined by frequency and intensity of use.  All such services and products are designed to addict, on a psychological (or possibly physical, in the case of a good) the user because at their core their revenue and thus potential profit is derived solely from your frequency of use.

The legal (and political) debate is whether minors should be able to lawfully access any such product or service outside of the direct observation and consent with each use of their parents.

A reasonable position is that no, only adults may choose that which has as its primary goal the increase in consumption of said thing no matter what it is -- in this case, all social media and "AI" type public tools for which advertising or other use-sensitive value (including fees, credits or similar expenditures) accrues to the owning entity.  Yes, this applies to "pay for thing" games where spending or time in use accrues benefit to the user and similar too.

How to enforce it?  Simple: For users signing up or accessing inside the United States you must pay for the original account in some capacity that can be validated as only held by an adult (e.g. a credit card.)  The amount is not material, but that you must prove you are an adult via some reasonable proxy means is.  Yes, some minors will cheat (e.g. steal Mom's credit card) just as they do with fake IDs but the firm is required to take reasonable steps to verify compliance.  For example, if someone signs up using a VPN and then makes access from the US evidencing that their VPN usage was for the purpose of concealing domicile the account is to be suspended.  If the holder of the card disputes the transaction the account is banned, and so on.  This is easy; there are inexpensive databases from which "where did that connection come" verification can be obtained and I use one of them here.  Is it perfect?  No, nothing is but it demonstrates intent and reasonable attempts and that's the point.

For those who say that's "unreasonable" explain why Meta, when after a decade or so post-voluntary closure of my Facebook account by myself (not them due to some "violation") when I tried to set up another one they claimed I was "inauthentic" despite the email address I used for registration being one that has been under my exclusive control for two decades, and when challenged they upheld their "finding" as final with no means of dispute or manual review by an identified person who I could speak with.  My purpose for signing back up was to view and interact with Marketplace, not for other general use, and I can reasonably surmise they know exactly who I am, they also know that I have written many pieces for publication that are very critical of the firm and rather than simply state "we refuse service to you because we dislike you and do not want you on our property" they lied.  Well, if they can do that then they can certainly block, with a high (but not perfect) degree of reliability, use by those who are not of legal age.

Seriously folks, I've written about this a lot and its the root of literally every bit of what's wrong economically in America today, and has been for the last nearly 20 years.

It does not matter who you elect, Democrat or Republican.  Neither has changed this and the hand-on-the-stick has changed both in Congress and the White House several times.

This is, with mathematical certainty, the cause of all of the bubble in the markets and it must be halted before it blows up in all of our faces and ruins all -- most importantly and immediately in medical which is driving it on the deficit side.  It cannot be sustained as it is why both interest payments and inflation are in fact going vertical -- the first already has, the second is starting to occur now.  It is not temporary due to the Iranian situation nor will the resolution of it (which will eventually come) reverse it.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1UgTx

The hyphenated green line may not be below the blue because the blue line is the monetary inflation the US Government is directly and intentionally causing through deficit spending.  If it is then those who can borrow at that rate are in fact stealing by force, literally by force, from everyone else because they are being paid to borrow and the funds with which they are being paid are forcibly extracted from everyone else, including you, exactly as if you were held up by an armed robber.

All this nonsense about this being a "long-term" thing that has gone on "forever" is a lie.  This was simply never the case through good times and bad, from the point that the effective Fed Funds series has existed (1950ish) forward, with rare exception (the notable one being right after the 2000 scare and 9/11), until after the 2008 blow-up.

We either reverse this now and enforce it by whatever means are necessary or the outcome is certain.

NPR says "oh noos, the government is buying data!"

A whole industry of data brokers buys up vast quantities of electronic information from cell phone apps and web browsers and sells it to advertisers who use that data to target ads. The same industry also sells that data, including bulk cell phone location data, to police departments and federal government agencies in ways that can reveal intimate details about Americans without a warrant.

Now, privacy advocates say that the best chance for Congress to close the well-known loophole around the Fourth Amendment that allows for that sort of governmental snooping is coming up in just a few weeks.

Really?

"Privacy advocates"?

Precisely why is the government different from anyone else in this regard?

Data that we allow to be bought and sold in the so-called "private market" isn't private anymore.  The issue is not the government buying that which anyone with money can buy -- its that we permit this sort of collection, collation and abuse to occur in the first place.

The extraction of money from you is why the data is collected and sold in the first place.  That is, you're abused in this fashion without being compensated and literally nobody has any way to know where that data is, who's collecting it and the use(s) to which it is put.  It only has value because it can be used to disadvantage you -- that is, to in some way extract money from you.  If this was no true it wouldn't be collected, collated and sold in the first place!

After a 2015 change to the law, federal agencies are not supposed to collect data on U.S. citizens in bulk. But some found a workaround to requesting warrants by simply buying the data instead.

And?

The problem is permitting the collection, collation and sale in the first instance.  That the government is doing the buying is not a problem at all; you solve this by removing the capacity of entities to collect and store said data and if they violate that you hold them criminally accountable because they should be.

Davidson said when the federal government purchases data broker data, "You're collecting data that really you would never get a warrant for, that kind of a broad dragnet sweep under normal warrant requirements," he said.

If the government would require a warrant to obtain something then no private party should be able to collect, keep and market said data at all under any circumstances beyond their own entity's collection and internal use and any violation of the boundaries of said internal use should be a criminal act.  So if a store, for example, tracks what you purchase to offer you discounts and such that's fine but if it sells said data whether directly or through some back door means that should be a criminal act carrying a penalty requiring the destruction of the firm involved and negligent or "accidental" violations should lead to severe civil penalties sufficient to deter such "accidents."

If I have a right to privacy then it exists not just against the government but against anyone, including "big Tech companies" all the way down to the grocery store.

"What kind of new Pandora's box do we open when we not only have these huge quantities of data, but we have tools that can start to scan and analyze patterns in unprecedented ways and at an unprecedented scale that you can never do from human analysts," he said.

Explain it to me like I'm five why its perfectly ok for Amazon, General Motors or Kroger to collect and sell said data, which is then aggregated with millions of other sources and marketed to anyone who has money to spend on it but the government, whether local, state or federal, can't buy that which is sold on the open market to anyone who desires to use it to your disadvantage -- that is, to extract money from you whether through coercion or enticement.

I remind you that in the hierarchy of "speech" commercial speech, which such data certainly is ("where is Joe Blow"), commercial speech has the least protection of all types of speech so if this is deemed a problem (and I argue it is) it must be banned at the point of collection, collation and sale, not based on who is doing the purchasing.