Defrauding the Internet of Lies

and bots and scams and ....

[tangor]

A long-ago cartoon in The New Yorker put it plainly: "On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog." If that cartoon had been written today, the caption might have read, "On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a fraud."

Scam artists, snake oil salesmen, sock puppets, bot armies and bullies - every time we look up, it seems as though we discover another form of dishonesty, grifting grown to global scale via the magnificent yet terrifying combination of Internet and smartphone.

[theregister.co.uk...]
Many threads at WW touch on these very issues every day. As the web matures and splinters at the same time, there is a reckoning in the future. When will it appear?

AI will be part of the fighting tools against those who expend enormous energy and talent toward theft, often more than it would take to make an honest living. A walling off, new gardens, or even USER IDs at birth, may also appear. Who knows?

[keyplyr]

Staring Tom Cruise

[brotherhood of LAN]

It seems like one of the fundamental issues is centralising vs. decentralising, and of course factual integrity and authority.

Google, Wiki could be good examples of centralised services. Bitcoin and certificate authorities could be examples of decentralisation. There's trust/authority issues on either side of the scale.

The whole fake news phenomenon has touched on how easy it is to make factually wrong or adverserial views propagate far and wide.

It seems like any newsworthy thing will be enumerated and contorted to fit pretty much any point of view that could be taken. It's hard for someone to wade through the BS and have a measured point of view, even someone with a healthy dose of scepticism.

I'm not so sure AI can really help people decide 'truth'. Perhaps the web cannot be intelligently designed [youtube.com] (the whole talk makes sense in the context of the thread and information on the web). I'm quite convinced at the point he's getting at. One of his salient points is that we should be extremely wary of AI where it becomes a black box.

Ultimately for factual info, I think people just have to be taught on how to find and decide on authoritative sources, and authorities have to be careful that they're not taken out of context. Same goes for security, the issues there are similar.

Maybe if we all wore Google Glass tech then we can sidestep that issue ;) Certainly, if I were president of the US of A for example, I'd have someone following me around with a camera in public 24/7.

IDs for the web does sound quite scary, though.

/ramble