(2023-05-13) Doctorow Revenge Of The Linkdumps

Cory Doctorow: Revenge of the Linkdumps.

Ashton Kutcher has taken up the admirable, essential cause of fighting Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, which is better known as child pornography) online.

Kutcher's technical foundations are poor, and he has not improved them. Instead, he cites technologies that he has a demonstrably poor grasp upon to call for policies that turn out to be both ineffective at fighting exploitation and to inflict catastrophic collateral damage on vulnerable internet users.

Take sex trafficking. Kutcher and his organization, Thorn, were key to securing the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, a law that was supposed to fight online trafficking by making platforms jointly liable when they were used to facilitate trafficking

Five years later, the verdict is in, and Kutcher was wrong. Sex workers have been deplatformed nearly everywhere, including from the places where workers traded "bad date" lists of abusive customers, which kept them safe from sexual violence, up to and including the risk of death. Street prostitution is way up, making the lives of sex workers far more dangerous

On top of all that, SESTA/FOSTA has made it much harder for cops to hunt down and bust actual sex-traffickers, by forcing an activity that could once be found with a search-engine into underground forums that can't be easily monitored:

Kutcher, it seems, has learned nothing from SESTA/FOSTA. Now he's campaigning to ban working cryptography, in the name of ending the spread of CSAM

While Kutcher is presumably being simplistic because he lacks the technical depth to understand what he doesn't understand, technically skilled people are perfectly capable of being simplistic, when it suits their economic, political or ideological goals.

One such person is Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called "father of AI," who resigned from Google last week, citing the existential risks of "runaway AI" becoming superintelligent and turning on its human inventors. Hinton joins a group of powerful, wealthy people who have made a lot of noise about the existential risk of AI, while saying little or nothing about the ongoing risks of AI to people with disabilities, poor people, prisoners, workers, and other groups who are already being abused by automated decision-making and oversight systems.

Apple is a gamekeeper-turned-poacher. Even as it was blocking Facebook's surveillance, it was conducting its own, nearly identical, horrifyingly intrusive surveillance of every Ios user, for the same purpose as Facebook (ad targeting) and lying about it:

Remote attestation is the McGuffin of Red Team Blues, my latest novel, a crime-thriller about a cryptocurrency heist. The novel opens with the keys to a secure enclave – the gadget that signs the attestations in remote attestation – going missing.

Well, it's happened. The keys for the secure enclaves in Micro-Star International (AKA MSI) computers, a massive manufacturer of work and gaming PCs – have leaked and shown up on the "extortion portal" of a notorious crime gang

the MSI keys were just sitting on a server, connected to the internet, which wasn't well-secured.

an "idiot plot" ("a plot that only works if the characters are idiots"). Turns out, idiot plots may make for bad fiction, but they're happening around us all the time.