Elixir @jesuiselixir

I’m a second-generation bookseller, and a few weeks ago when my family’s store got hit with a series of strange bulk orders, I publicly said that it didn’t look like AI companies to me. I had good reasons. The orders we received had the signature of reseller arbitrage on obscure books. These types of books already get bought, warehoused, and quietly liquidated all the time by the ecosystem Amazon built and sits at the center of. I know this world intimately as I’ve been in a used bookstore my whole life. Plus, I’ve spent the past year building technology to rapidly catalog rare books into an open database precisely because these books were already disappearing. Today 404 Media made me question my “resellers not AI” theory in the most direct way possible. A bookseller let a journalist hide a tracker in a book in one of the weird bulk orders. That book ended up inside an Amazon warehouse that is known among Amazon workers as a cushy gig because all you do is slice books and scan them all day long. So the original villain of the story (Anthropic) isn’t what 404 Media’s evidence showed, but the new evidence also goes directly against my “likely not AI” suggestion. It is still possible that many of the strange purchases are resellers. (Both of the companies previously named in various investigative reports have since denied selling to AI companies.) There’s also still no way to prove which AI companies are buying books, or exactly what happens to every book. The scale is also unclear. I personally went through all the media coverage and every group and forum discussion I could find, and counted fewer than 100 individual sellers reporting these orders. Of those, a few outliers sold thousands of books and a handful sold 50–150, but most who mentioned sales sold under 20 books. That pales in comparison to what came out last year about the industrial-scale book destruction for AI training. But it would be naive to double down and not start to question how much of this sales bump is attributable to AI companies. If you’re outraged at this wholesale destruction of books, I am too, and I have been since before AI companies even got involved. I made the case for the project and got funded on “saving books before they’re destroyed” over a year ago before any of this was news. I like to focus on how much control I have over the “how” as opposed to the “what.” Books were being destroyed before AI companies wanted them, but it was already an enormous and complex system. There’s no single villain or focal point to fix. The deeper problem is this: we cannot protect what we cannot identify. Rarity is illegible. Nobody (used booksellers, arbitrageurs, Amazon, the AI labs) actually knows which books exist in five copies versus five thousand. Each has access to limited data on proprietary platforms that don’t often communicate. I don’t think that as one guy I can stop all these books from being destroyed. But we’ve built and are improving a tool that makes destruction visible: rapid cataloging into a public database of record, down to the edition and copy level. My mission is to get it into enough hands that we can make informed decisions about what gets preserved and hold people to account when the last copy of something goes into a shredder. Regardless of whether you’re interested in my work specifically, if you’re concerned, do what you can. The last time the Library of Alexandria burned it wasn’t invading armies or roving marauders but rather generations of “not my job” and “who gives a shit.” --- Mirror blog post - charliebecker.substack.com/p/is-an-ai-com…

International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest

2 days ago

‼️ BREAKING: Journalists hid an Airtag in a rare book shipment and confirmed Amazon to be one of the buyers behind the bulk orders destroying rare-books to feed their AI. They tracked it to Amazon's LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas, home to VGT3 (see logo below), a scanning operation

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Imagine me going to the packed ER waiting room and seeing who'd pay $500 to be seen next. That'd be disgusting, immoral, unethical, stupid. But that's what Alberta is doing. And the doctors (my peers) just follow the money - just like you would. They don't care about ethics.

@KaneMayfield @ScrillaVentura @Mighty_33 @subterranean_1 @MikeHardiman251 @FAKERARES_XCP @GMONEYPEPE @LiannaAdams @shawnleary @mcpepewtf @w_s_bitcoin Bonus points if it unlocks a hidden track, people can only find if they randomly stumble across that plaque

THERE'S A SOLAR ECLIPSE TODAY

@data_barbs There actually was a lawsuit about that so you might want to check if that's even still allowed

@AdrienGon62720 @DoingFedTime Probably for the same reason they didn't ban digital cameras *eye roll*

So first off, DPRK isn’t really hunting these sorts of things in this fashion. Their primary is still brute forcing people socially. Bc it’s wildly effective. And it’s free. Plus, even if they were, it would still be for free, bc they are fucking hackers and they hack credentials and keys and accounts. Including AI accounts. Duh. But more interesting is the rest of the point. So swap "DPRK" and every other specific APT for a generic attackers who ARE grinding with AI and let’s talk about that. — I would argue it’s still the wrong mental model. AI is a force multiplier for EVERYONE who uses it. It is NOT a complete game changer. Hard costs are NEVER the constraining factor for security. Not for defenders, not for attackers. Skills, expertise, and priorities are. AI is a tool, it is powerful, but it doesn’t upend the entire structure of the world. For example, it’s easy to say "if Coldcard had spent more compute hunting their own codebase, they'd have found it before an attacker did." But that's NOT why they didn't hunt it. They didn’t hunt it in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, or 2026. Not with AI. Not without it. They didn't hunt it because they're a five-person shitshop with a fat marketing budget and zero security budget. They don't peer review their own merges. They antagonize engineers and security researchers who try to help. That's the limiting factor. They don’t prioritize security. That's why attackers won here. As has always been the case. A bigger compute budget doesn't fix this type of team or product or architecture. And AI being available to attackers makes it slightly easier to find this issue, but it was ALWAYS going to be found by an attacker. Bc the team wasn’t fucking looking bc they don’t fucking care. And no whitehat could be bothered to persist thru the shitshow to look either. Which only leaves blackhats. So the blackhats won. End of.

MTS @MTSlive

2 weeks ago

.@hosseeb on why beating North Korea's hackers now comes down to who can afford the most compute: "If the attackers are spending 500 bucks, and good guys are spending maybe a couple bucks, they're like, oh, I just wanna check and see if there's any low-hanging fruit. Otherwise

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I want to be clear and I won't mince words. This pisses me off, a lot. I don't care in any way shape or form if you think I'm being overly dramatic, I truly don't. If anything - you aren't mad enough. POAP is hands down a top 3 dapp/protocol and has been for years. We are losing an absolutely incredible thing here - and it's our fault. Rise Up has been using POAPs since 2021 for all sorts of things - community events, episode milestones, games, treasure hunts, and more. Knowing I won't be able to use it for our 600th episode, or 1000th, or anything else is absolutely maddening. Can you imagine for a second, if we elevated and paid attention to something like @poapxyz the same way this space has the Ansem meme? Even 10% of the attention? Every time something like this - a free to use, simple, and accessible tool for new user onboarding - goes away, it feels like we lose another piece of what brought many of us here in the first place. I personally used POAP to onboard dozens and dozens of people who had never made a wallet, minted an NFT, sent a transaction, or looked at onchain data. The process was SO easy, and just like that a brand new user got to enter this space with a great experience and immediate induction into a phenomenal community. My conviction to fight the erosion of our core ethos is stronger for staring down the barrel of losing a platform like this - and I hope everyone takes this as the warning sign that it is. I have seen this industry rally together when terrible things happen. The unity I saw in the wake of the Kelp DAO bridge exploit was so inspiring - I hoped it would catalyse a broader push to take our industry back. Yet here we are - letting another amazing piece of the space fade, all while pretending that Congress and Blackrock have our best interests at heart. Maybe it was just about greed the entire time. The fight goes on, there is so much work to be done. Don't let this canary go unnoticed.

isabel @izonline

2 weeks ago

After 5+ years, we're winding down POAP. Over the years, we: * minted millions of collectibles across hundreds of communities. * did incredible collaborations with world-class organizations - Coinbase, Amex, WMG, Bayer, and a long tail of others, including countless in crypto.

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@KaneMayfield 🤣🤣🤣

@mobinfiltrator Oh, and then just wait until you actually dig properly into the CPP and realize the mismanagement of their funds and how they shouldn't even be positive right now

*snickers*

GlitchLabs @_GlitchLabs

4 weeks ago

@vxunderground Calling Reddit “THE DARK WEB” is so FBI-like 😭

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This I not the complete truth. Cameras provide background so you know the intersection. They know your speed and direction so they can track you. Coupled with cell phone tower pings and other data that can feed a database you are tracked. Flock cameras are not needed. The security on accessing the cameras is not there. There have been lots of violations on usage and data sharing. No real evidence of crime deterrence or avoidance.

👮‍♂️The Badged Patriot👮‍♂️ @BadgedPatriot

a month ago

Let me stop this "Flock tracks people" conspiracy. Let's take my city for example. We have 8 cameras. All cameras are in points of entry & exit into the city. So, as u enter or exit your tag is read, a distant photo of your vehicle is taken, & the camera u passed by is logged.

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@fordnation Because you, the Premier of this province, don't.

@Marriott my family stayed at your hotel Elrment at Miami International Airport. ​We are strongly advising against staying at this Marriott property due to serious security issues. During our stay, an employee entered my daughter's and her financee's room and stole half of the cash from her wallet. When she reported the incident, hotel management was uncooperative. The hotel refused to provide door audit logs or camera footage to both us and the responding police officers. ​We filed an official police report and were informed by authorities that incidents of theft are a recurring issue at this location. This theft ruined the start of our vacation and caused significant financial hardship for the remainder of our trip. That was almost a week ago. Someone was to reqch out tonme as I made the family reservations. To date no on has. How can we rectify this?

Canada's New Social Media Ban is NOT About Your Children | Here's What They're NOT Telling You Canada just announced the Digital Safety Act — a social media ban for anyone under 16. Most Canadians think this is about protecting children. It isn't. To enforce a social media ban, every single Canadian will have to prove their age by attaching government-approved ID to their social media accounts. That's not child protection. That's a digital ID. And once you're verified on one platform, that verification follows you everywhere — linking every account you own under your real identity. But it gets worse. This isn't a standalone policy. This is the missing piece that connects Bill C-9, C-22 and C-8 into a complete surveillance and censorship system. Bill C-9 defines what you can and cannot say online. Bill C-22 forces platforms to save your data for up to one year. Bill C-8 gives the government the power to cut you off the internet entirely. The digital ID created by this social media ban is what connects all three. And they're selling it to you as child protection. Don't be fooled. All these bills are interconnected — and this is the last piece of the puzzle. youtube.com/live/tiwBDgstT…

@DRVNlabo I mean, look I hate to be fair, but Brundle had a rough weekend from everyone that day it seemed like

Paul Walker’s personal 1999 Ferrari 360 Modena now available onchain. From the Fast & Furious legend’s garage to fractional ownership on @base. This isn’t just a car. It’s a piece of culture you can actually own. Bringing car culture onchain - One legend at a time!

This has been a fast, long year.

@vohvohh Can I be real and still use AI for my videos? Makeup is hard