deong

I don’t think it’s especially disguised…

It's not like the Republican party was engaged in a large scale effort to cultivate disinformation from Russian trolls. The Russians were doing it on their own, and the GOP was just the beneficiary, playing up whatever random disinformation happened to pick up traction and occasionally reaching out to coordinate efforts.

And it wasn't "a few dozen Facebook ads" -- it was a pretty large amount of activity, including things like breaking into private systems and leaking information. But aside from that, you're basically making the argument that astroturfing doesn't work, and we know that's just not true. Having a million "ordinary citizens" extol the virtues of some position often just works better as a persuasive argument than having one or two celebrity endorsers, or at the very least it adds credibility. That's why people do it.

It’s going to be extremely hard to convince a court that the thing you’re making is both a parody and a legit competitor you believe users should switch to.

As you point out, parody has to be a comment on the thing you’re parodying. In the Hyundai example, the problem was that it was commenting on something else. The problem here is that it’s simply not a comment on anything. It’s a product you’re making to compete with the original.

That all depends on Apple's ability to run it effectively, and they have basically no demonstrated ability to do that.

App Review is an absolute joke. Listen to last week's Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts is developing an IMDB competitor app, and he's been rejected three times as of that episode. One rejection was for playing copyrighted video without permission -- in an app that doesn't have any code that can play a video. One was for not having a link to his T&Cs in a field in the app store that can't render links. And the third was for displaying copyrighted media in his screenshots (maybe? no one really knows), and that media was the cover art for movie and TV shows. None of those even pass the sniff test. We all know that you're allowed to show the cover art for a movie in an app that has information about movies. We all know that's Fair Use, but beyond that, a third grader knows that literally everything in the world that presents information about movies does it. At the exact same time that all this is happening, Apple happily published some scammer's app called "Threads" and let it collect 300,000 people's information who thought they were downloading the actual Threads app from Meta.

It's always been this way. I personally wrote the original iPhone app for a large US retailer in 2008 -- the first year the App Store existed. App Review's only purpose then was to detect your use of private APIs, usually because that would let you build things Apple didn't want you to build. That's the only purpose it serves today, 15 years later. Everything else is random noise that just punishes you unpredictably for no reason. I had an update of that app rejected once for using our own company logo as the icon. They don't catch obvious scams. They never have. The people doing these reviews know nothing or are given so little time that the way to game their metrics is to just randomly reject sometimes without analysis. Unless they change something, it'll just be a thing that scammers fill out however they want with no consequence to them at all, and a random 5% of legitimate developers will waste a few weeks arguing over when it's applied to them with no logical basis in reality.

Adobe also has some legal experience and an IP lawyer or 80. And they have common sense on their side. You can't just say "parody" like a magic incantation. It's not like calling dibs on the front seat. It actually has to be a parody. I can't just release my own Guardians of the Galaxy 4 as a completely straight up movie with the same titles, characters, etc., and say it's a parody.

He has no shot. He has less than no shot. There's a better chance that his IP lawyer is disbarred than there is that he wins in this.

Yeah, that this is a name and logo that they even entertained for half a second is pretty strong evidence that they're not up to this challenge. This is like starting a law firm and calling it "Buttfuckers". No one is going to take you seriously, and you not seeing the problem means they shouldn't.

There's always a router, and there's always a DNS server. Normally, your device is asking to join a network, and something on that network assigns it an IP address, a DNS server, and a gateway router to use. That's true whether you're connecting to WiFi or a cellular network. The difference is just which device is assigning you those things. You can also override that on your side by specifying a static configuration that can break things, but I don't think that's your problem.

"Private DNS Mode" here is only referring to whether or not you want to encrypt the DNS lookup traffic. That's certainly not a bad idea, but it's a separate issue from whether or not you have a working DNS setup at all. From the screenshot below, it looks like you do have a working DNS configuration. To connect to a server, you type the server's name (e.g., mobile.pornhub.com), your browser sends a DNS request to your DNS server asking it to return the IP address of that server, and then it uses that IP address to ask the server to send it a web page. You're getting to the part where you've asked the server to send you a web page, but the server is refusing because your browser didn't make the request over HTTPS (i.e., using encryption).

I don't know why that is, but I'd try the steps outlined here.

I don't think you understand how a research organization works. This isn't three guys in a basement searching for child porn. It's a research institute at Stanford University. They'll have gotten funding to do the work by applying for federal grants, getting approval from multiple Institutional Review Boards who are charged with, among other things, making sure that the people involved in the research are appropriately taken care of. They'll be required to have counselors on board. However "legit" you think such an outfit might possibly be, multiply that by three.

This is their job. It is the same as if they worked for a law enforcement agency. When someone gets arrested for child porn, we don't also charge the police, prosecutors, and judges who might have to look at the material as part of prosecuting a case. I promise you Stanford isn't paying a team of professors and postdocs to just diddle themselves to kiddie porn all day.

So your advice to any organization seeking to minimize illegal activity is to willfully ignore any trace of it?

If you believe the web site, my nearest guitar center currently has 543 guitars in stock, some of which can only even be reached with a ladder. So if you assume one minute each to take them down, check the tuning, put them back, move the ladder, etc., you're at about 9 hours. A fair bit of that time will be spent just to see that it's already in tune anyway.

And Guitar Center in particular is in the phase of its life where private equity is pulling every dime out of the business until they can eventually just shut it down and sell the real estate, so they're not paying anyone to go tune guitars. You're lucky if they're paying someone to clean the bathroom.

There’s no real distinction between the two. We don’t have a definition of AI or intelligence — never have. Inside the field, ML has some recognized connotations, but outside of specialist literature, they’re just marketing fluff.

I think there are probably some ways to cross over a bit, but really, LLMs aren't necessarily aimed at the kind of things we want a virtual assistant to do today. Siri falls down mostly on its ability to correctly do things quickly and reliably. Generating 5000 words of convincingly human sounding explanations isn't what I want from a thing I quickly trigger on my phone. What I want is very short or no reply accompanying the action I wanted to take. Call this person. Start navigation to an address. Turn on the lights. Play the version of a song I like from this specific live album. Some of those things are things Siri really sucks at today, and none of them are likely to get a lot better with an LLM in place. Maybe playing music benefits from a more robust understanding of the language of my query, but the rest of it are things where the suckage is more that Siri takes 8 seconds for the server to respond or just inexplicably decides that today it doesn't know how to turn on a light.

At this point it feels like a great LLM would let Siri fail to respond to a much more varied set of ways for me to ask my question in English, but that's not really the target we're shooting for here.