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Day three of Trump's term and the largest push for surveillance capitalism yet has been made: Project Stargate will be a $500.000.000.000 (500 billion USD) data center used for running a multitude of AIs with the purpose of spying on you.

Larry Ellison, the world's second richest man and CEO of Oracle, one of the main partners of Stargate, said:

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on [...]. We're using A.I. to monitor the video.”


— Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle on how the company's A.I. systems will be used for in the future [Source: Business Insider]

This is who is in power now. This is the vision they have.

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in reply to Stéphanie

@stephanie He said this as a response to how he e envisions his company's A.I. will be used for and how that makes money. Aiding law enforcement and the state in ensuring citizens will be on their best behavior.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

We already knew this was happening and would happen more. But, i don't know, something about the fact that they don't even bother hiding it now...
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

at first I was like no way Oracle is capable of producing anything functioning. But then I remembered that before crappy software would just not work. Now crappy AI will just make stuff up that everyone believes.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Read more about the Stargate Project here:

Or watch this good summary by Fireship:
<img class=" title=":youtube:"/> bbc.com/news/articles/cy4m84d2…

reshared this

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

France is investing 2 Billion USD per year into #AI the EU alltogether only 8 Billion. If this programme really becomes reallity we do have a problem here. Because standard becomes what is most not best (see Microsoft)
#ai
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

If there are no wormholes involved, it should not be called Stargate project

#NotMyStargate

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

No AI is needed to rid the US and the world of this idiot. Old-fashioned resistance will work, just fine.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Orwell käme sich heutzutage als absoluter Anfänger vor, wenn er die Möglichkeiten sähe, die uns nun ins Haus stehen

Erik Uden 🍑 reshared this.

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

let's be honest... This AI project will probably not do anything, besides making rich man even richer.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

oh it kinda clicked for me that Apple/Google/Microsoft jamming AI down our throats is all about surveillance to understand what we're typing without file type/format or even end to end encryption mattering

very cool, I hate it here

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I'm sure we could monitor the behaviour of that handful of billionair oligarchs for a lot less money than 500G, and the returns will likely be much better ...
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Narrator:

"Ellison and is fellow oligarchs were sure that they alone could avoid surveillance. But what they didn't know was that they too would be watched, and their crimes recorded and delivered to the people who would become their de-facto masters."

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Will AI monitoring prevent the rich and famous from visiting another "lolita island" or prevent another Epstein from "taking his own life" in a highly guarded cell block of a famous jail? Almost seems like someone from the 4th estate should be asking Mr. Ellison these questions.
in reply to Pete

@philpetree No. Surveillance only for conformity, not to uncover horrors conducted by the rich.
@Pete
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I’ll never forget reading George Orwell’s 1984 and thinking to myself, I can hardly wait until we are living in that kind of dystopia.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Will they release the resulting analysis though? Perhaps if they could create a "public trust score", it could be used to discriminate social benefits to only the best citizens, and people would quickly learn what a great and generous country they live in with such a wonderful, competent and benevolent leader.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

an iron rod could help Larry Ellison forget this shit. He probably thinks it's some sort of Carnegie-style benevolent oligarchy; it isn't.

It's also far easier to just surveil the billionaires.

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

So where are they getting that $500bn from?
I ask because from what I see, none of the people involved seem to have access to that sort of money
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

The Stasi would have wet themselves to have this kind of technology.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Octogenarian bazillionaire Larry Ellison thinks it's a good idea that AI-based surveillance system will "police" citizens. He's so rich, the only thing other people could possibly want is something he has.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

China has a much better surveillance system than us! We want too!

Watch this and tell me you really want that. That and worse is where Ellison's fantasy is heading.

imdb.com/title/tt5497778/

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I was wondering who would see a 500B business case for AI, but the public-private surveillance industry makes perfect sense.
in reply to Winfried 🏳️‍🌈

@winfriedtilanus In hindsight, this was fully obvious. We were promised medicine, better logistics, less labor, and got the devaluing of all global art of all forms, more inhumane weaponry, and surveillance systems beyond what we've previously thought possible.

reshared this

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Ich erinnere mich an ein Zitat, welches von mir selbst stammt. „Verschwende nie dein Vertrauen an ein Weichwarenunternehmen, welches mehr Juristen beherbergt, als Weichwarenentwickler.“ ca. 1337
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Erik, has anyone asked Larry Ellison how much the price of eggs has gone down on day three of Trump 2.0?
in reply to Guill.Jones, Honorary Canadian

@Guillotine_Jones Hahahaha, my god. People who wanted lower egg prices will be so out of their mind over this. With 500 billion USD we could've had free eggs.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

i'm sure turning the US into a surveillance state will lower the price of eggs
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Orwell’s prophecy is about to come true, Totalatarianism…a boot forever stamping on humanity’s face.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

And by "citizens," he means us, never hin.

"Larry Ellison, the world's second richest man and CEO of Oracle, one of the main partners of Stargate, said:

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on [...]. We're using A.I. to monitor the video.”

#capitalism

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

single scariest thing that every single person should be concerned about
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

single scariest thing that every single person should be concerned about
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in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

And how much water and electricity will this horror consume, I wonder?
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I wonder where Trump will find 500 billion, while at the same time cutting taxes. Taking a loan from his billionaire "friends", possibly?
in reply to Joana de Castro Arnaud

@jcastroarnaud
As I may have said elsewhere, governments CREATE the money they spend. That's how they always turn out to have enough.
in reply to Joana de Castro Arnaud

@jcastroarnaud @Walrus
Inflation does not follow if there are resources and Labour idle. Rather the expansion of money supply (aka "national debt") enables resources to be mobilised.
Modern monetary theory ... cnbc.com/video/2019/03/01/step…
#MMT
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

, ha, the US might soon beg for immigrants because anyone in their right mind who can afford it will leave.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

What was the name of the surveillance project he offered to run for the US government after 911?

Didn't know Oracle started as a CIA project

"His first project included a database for the CIA, code-named "Oracle""

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_El…

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

wisst ihr noch, als wir über die Kommunisten in China und ihr Social Scoring gelacht haben?
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Sounds like China. Total surveillance. Ah, maybe not total. Some billionaires might be safe from being watched.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

And those who collect and record everything are doing everything they can to not be part of this. Hasn’t Zuckerberg bought all surrounding houses to to be more private?
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in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

alte Frage: wer kontrolliert die Kontrolleure? AI der sichere Weg in die Tyrannei.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

so this is why they elected Trump for going after "the elite"?
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Great (sarcasm off)
On a sidenote - I wonder how many European citizens personal data is already placed in #OracleCloud. Like in accounting data for regional hospital services.
@sorenhave
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I know this is scary, but I think it's important to point out that it won't work. This is a combination of grift and bluff.

There's an exponential dropoff in the effectiveness and accuracy of models as they grow. There's also an increase in attack surface. In terms of signal intelligence, it will be insanely leaky.

So this thing will lie and hallucinate, make it easy for people to tell they are being investigated, and be trivial to evade. It will also burn insane amounts of electricity and money. It will never match expectations, but that's unlikely to stop investment.

The more work they do to avoid evasion, the more vulnerable it will be. They won't be able to make it more accurate because they're going to run in to the fundamental limitations of the technology.

Let me get in to some concrete examples to make it clear what I mean.

Let's say some people are taking, say, on Mastodon, about something. First, the system has to scrape. It's already leaking information about itself just by doing this. We can know how often it runs and may even be able to fingerprint the technology stack. We can use this information to poison the data set.

Ok, let's say they're just getting stuff from phones via company installed backdoors. How do you know how someone is communicating? What platforms are they using? Simply using signal increases the complexity of getting at this data, even on a backdoored phone, a bit. This is more true at scale than for individually targeted attacks, but I'm not going to get in to the details there.

Ok, so let's say this thing is going through every text you sends, every message that goes through a FAANG owned messaging app. You send a link to someone. There are three options for how to handle this link:

1. Ignore the link. The model loses information.
2. Follow the link immediately. The model is vulnerable to a DoS. Basically a bunch of people send links to poisoned data to each other, the AI ingests this and poisons their data set. You also leak data about how often you scrape.
3. Follow the link only on investigation. The model leaks information about who is being investigated and is also vulnerable to a DoS. So, if you want to know if you're being investigated you occasionally send links to resources you control (that's not easily found any other way, like a url with a UUID that's not indexed) to people but ask via external channels not to follow those links. If the link gets hit, your communication channel is compromised. Now you poison the data set anyway.

So URLs let you circumvent it or attack it. But there are a bunch of other ways too. The more a model is focused on English language, the worse it will do on other languages. This is especially true of rare languages, and even more true of niche cultural slang. So even if this thing reads every single text you and everyone else writes, it may have no ability to know that you're planning to "🦆 thr d474 alle ∆." That's just garbage to an AI, but a human can probably figure it out.

But even in English, you can just send your text inside a file. Now they have another choice:
1. Ignore the file and lose data.
2. Parse the file.

Which do you think management is going to tell them to do? So they parse the file. Now they're vulnerable to trivial DoS and almost definitely vulnerable to RCE (remote code execution, or "getting owned the fuck sideways" in simple terms). How are they going to get around compression bombs? Fingerprinting? Sure, but there are infinitely many of these.

That brings us to steganography (stego). Stego is the forgotten cousin of cryptography (crypto). Crypto (in this context) is about keeping a message confidential by making it impossible to read by anyone but the intended recipient, even with the text. Stego is about hiding the existence of the message in the first place. It has largely been ignored because cryptography works pretty well and can be easy to detect.

But this equation changes when you're dealing with mass surveillance like this. Trivial stego that would be easy for a human to crack becomes a huge problem at scale. A simple example is just putting text in image metadata. Ok, so the surveillance folks write a parser for that. Great, now hide data in the low order bits of an image. Write a parser for that. Now just put it in the text, ok so OCR it. Ok, create a doc file that has an XML bomb in it so that it crashes but put the raw text you want to relate inside... There are infinitely many ways to evade, many of them are trivial to detect and parse, but that means you're essentially writing infinite parsers. There are also *much harder* problems to solve, but I'm not even getting in to that.

Yeah, basically, this shit is *way* harder than they think it will be and someone still has to build it. Now they have to decide on hiring for competence or loyalty. Good luck with that shit. Maybe some comrades should go work at Oracle for a bit to make sure that doesn't even happen in the first place. ;)

in reply to hex

see this post for any comrades working at Oracle (or wherever gets this contract) on how to make sure this doesn't actually happen:
kolektiva.social/@Hex/11386679…
in reply to hex

@Hex Wow... Thank you for taking the time to write this explanation. I whole heartedly agree, yet think it's scary regardless to have such people in power and for this to be their stated goals. But as always, reality is even more sad since it's just a grift.
@hex
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I guess that's how they plan to "bring down the price for eggs and cheese".
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

"Best behaviour"

😂🤣😂🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤣😂🤣😂😂😂🤣😂🤣😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣

And breathe

🤣😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂🤣

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

As long as it has full unrestricted access to all billionaires finances and correspondence.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Hmmmm ...... Did they become part of China?
I guess this CEO knows because they must have helped the Chinese government builld the system...
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Imagine your tax money being used for this shit.

Not only terrible for privacy, but also for the environment.

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

America, land of the...nope...and the home of the....also nope.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

When there's no law there's no crime. Everything is permitted.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Sure, they can probably get a good discount from the Chinese on their social scoring Big Brother system.

Then they don't have to work out all the early bugs again.

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

and who is supervising the supervisors so that they are on their best behavior as well?
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I'm sure others have said this but the name is probably a reference to the CIA remote viewing project from the cold war. We are the new enemy of the state... All of us
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in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

damn, this is literally what China has been doing for years, I swear they are literally an inch away from implementing social credit scores
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Liz Truss, aka Rachel Reeves, (UK Finance Minister and all round economic and ecological ignoramus) will want one too.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

pay attention to ‘because WE’re constantly recording and reporting’, emphasis mine. Who is we? A bunch of techbros? No thank you.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

“This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die.”
— Colossus: The Ellison Project
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

now combine this with the news that Musks team has it hands in ine if the biggest sensitive government datasets (the one for benefits and medicare etc) 🫣😱
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Well, as I teach my students, Oracle is the closest we will get from a Pokemon evil organization IRL. They are so cartoonishly evil I do not even envision entrusting them with a cup of tea I would need held for a second
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

And here was me hoping we were going to visit other worlds and meet glowey-eyed snake aliens, but no, its more dystopian shit, go figure.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

the warning was there but 10M chose to stay home...should have shown up. Time to find out...
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

@dan_ballard No matter who would be in power, this is what the oligarchs wanted and that’s what would happen. Amerikkka is a failed republic/democracy.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

reminds me on "The Circle" form Dave Eggers, and his following Novel "Every"
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

sounds like the movie The Circle. That was their premise too of "people will be their best selves since every second of their lives is under scrutiny". I'm sure @eff is already looking into this.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Isn't there a project to monitor CEOs yet? It would be of everyone's best interest to make sure they also behave.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I think it's telling that they reused the name of a failed Cold War project in which the US Department of Defense invested in research into psychic phenomena for the purpose of surveillance (remote viewing). Two Stargate Projects wasting vast amounts of money to spy on people.

@ErikUden@mastodon.de

in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Das ist die #AI
Die Büchse der Pandora, die sich nicht mehr schließen lässt und die wir nicht mehr eingefangen bekommen.
Sie wird zur Vernichtung unseres blauen Planeten entscheidend beitragen. Denn es entscheiden die falschen Leute über ihren Einsatz. DAS haben wir nicht verhindert.
#ai
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

What we need to do is keep on questioning the value of these kinds of changes and systems. Surveillance does not improve society, it does not solve any issues that trigger crime and being surveilled does not prevent crimes it merely may help detection.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

So yeah, we are watching the construction of a fascist #cyberpunk dystopia in real time.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

Oh FFS can’t they even come up with original names for their shitty projects??
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

And they criticised the authoritarian DDR, where at least there was free healthcare and a good level of women's rights.
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

I mean I get it they don't want China to overtake them in any dimension :ageblobcat:
in reply to Erik Uden 🍑

"Best behaviour", of course, is ambiguous and subject to, i.a., interpretation, controversy, and contradiction.