this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.

The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”

In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 hours ago

As if any institution, org or group that has an agenda to push doesn't have battalions of bots guiding the discussion of forums to whichever way they want and not just fake followers and likes. As if people would need permission or would ask for it even if they had to. You just cant have any real sense of the public opinion on the internet, if there ever was such a time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.

Any chance that's the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?

[–] [email protected] 39 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Can we have a side internet, for us normal people?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

That exists it's called tildeverse and gemini

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

What's the pros and cons of those?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Both go back to 90s tech so you lose a lot of functionality. Gemini is mainly text based with links to files. So think pre web text pages at University's but it's cool to read people's pages without all the distractions of images and video. I have read some cool stories on there. Got an awesome cookie recipe as well from a person in Denmark.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 hours ago

So they want to automate the use of troll-farms?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Weird how they're doing the thing they accuse others of doing. Almost like it's a confession.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago

Projection is a major problem

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 hours ago

Bro I’ve about a dozen I can sell you right now

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Dude I can't even pass a catchpa these day. I still don't know if a e-bike is a scooter, a bike, or a moped.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Captcha and I can never agree on what is and isn’t a bus.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

This would work for a short while as long as the user knows their hardware.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

They keep showing me strange street features from distant countries and ask me shit like "mark all the crosswalks". And i look at it and think "no idea, what this is, no crosswalk i have ever seen looked like this, so i guess it it is something different".

And then i have to do the next captcha. Sometimes i am caught in captcha hell, where i have to solve captchas until i give up and close the browser.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

There is a short story in here about someone who can't pass a captcha, loses their identity, and has to move on to becoming a fisherman in Norway.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago

Fisherman in Norway is probably an upgrade for some people lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

What sites are still using image captchas and not "Click here if you are not a robot"?

I just realized I don't surf the web randomly anymore, mainly because of crap like that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago

When i click them, they oftentimes show me a captcha afterwards, as they apparently don't believe me. I once solved captcha after captcha for like two minutes and then ragequit, finally accepting, that i am a robot.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Dead internet, it will be drowned in bots.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

So we really are going for a dead internet. Nobody is going to want to interact with bots all day online. But maybe that's the point, harder to organize organically on the streets without a presence online.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Telling on themselves a bit given the implication is that they're so far behind every other country who're definitely already doing the same

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

More likely, they’ve been doing this for many years and it is basically obsolete, so they are spilling the beans now.

Or not and we really are doomed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

My first thought was if they're asking for this officially, they've piloted some version of it unofficially.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

definitely

Definitely, given the overwhelming mountain of evidence you’re sitting on 👍 Meanwhile, the US isn’t the largest intelligence/security state in the world by leaps and bounds. It’s just a little-bitty backward country whose military-industrial complex invented the internet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it's embarrassing, we don't even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it's just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.

Its just... we've got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they'll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though.

Not relative to other countries.

we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms

We are not; we are told we are. It’s propaganda coming from our own security state, pointed at us. Why? To manufacture our consent to censorship. They are telling us that other countries are doing to us what they are doing to other countries, and have been since even before the internet existed.

Listen to this complete inversion of reality from Biden: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Can I still be the one person who makes all the posts on 4chan, prove me wrong?