Snot Flickerman

company called CiviClick, which bills itself as “the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform.”

I have been saying this since 2016, when we were dealing with both Cambridge Analytica and Correct the Record flooding the internet with paid political speech masquerading as real people with real opinions who weren’t being paid to spout nonsense.

Paid political speech online whether by a human or a bot, should legally be required to state that they are being paid to promote their statements. There should be hefty penalties, large fines for single instances (one person, one message) up to prison time for an organized group (something akin to RICO). The fines/prison time should be even more severe when AI generated messages are fraudulently being promoted as real humans, simply due to the industrial speed and scale AI generation allows.

Paid political advertising on television and radio has for a long time been required to state that it is paid. This should have been priority number one from the Democrats when Biden got into office and they held slim majorities in both houses,

Sure, there’s nothing we can do about foreign bot farms, but that’s not what this article is about. This is about a US company based in our nations capital whose goal is to spread disinformation abusively to impact public comment. This is a private company absolutely flooding an agency with an open public comment period for an agency proposition and killing the proposition through messages that are not from real people at all but from AI.

The fact that getting this under control at the very least within our own borders by any politicians is a fucking travesty and makes our entire democratic apparatus an outright farce.

These definitely could be pretty solid headless Linux serverboxes for microservices.

Attitudes like this is why people reverse engineer systems and build emulators.

To an extent I understand why Miyazaki and Sony felt they shouldn’t let outsiders mess with it lest it was an underbaked and bad remake, but at the same time, it’s locking the game to a historical artifact, and one that many people (including myself) had hoped to one day play on PC without using an emulator.

As someone who uses Bypass Paywalls Clean, this is so frustrating.

Bypass Paywalls Clean was chased off of the Firefox Add-Ons site, chased off of Gitlab, and chased off of Github via DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringement. It is now hosted on the Russian Gitflic.ru.

We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn’t suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said “fuck it” in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).

We have spent the better part of two decades dealing with the DMCA being used as an outright weapon to silence information that corporations and government find inconvenient mostly because that information is wildly incriminating for them. It works especially strongly because a large amount of the world’s internet has been consolidated to the US and its vast hosting structures like AWS and Cloudflare, putting enormous amounts of the internet under the direct influence of US laws like the DMCA.

Websites like Anna’s Archive, Libgen, and Sci-Hub live because they use hosting in countries that allow them to bypass these kind of restrictions. Russia is one of the most common countries for them to host the data out of due to the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, although it is obviously not the only country that these sites use.

Until we are able to alter international copyright protections to be reasonable instead of their current over-zealously and aggressively abusive nature, we will all suffer having to risk hosting of such sites in countries that are otherwise very unsavory to be associating with.

We live in the kind of world early piracy pioneers such as the original creators of The Pirate Bay were trying to fight from becoming a reality. The American copyright cabal fought tooth and nail to change Sweden’s interpretations of copyright law so they could send these men to prison.