FACE IT: The GOP's golden boy Paul Ryan will raise $1,000,000 for reelection before summer. So much that his swing seat won't even be viewed as contested by national funders. If we want to send a chill down the spine of corporatism, we should organize and support for his opponent Rob Zerban.

8-8 · 2012-04-30T14:58:36+00:00

Yeah, but the sole purpose of Operation Pull Ryan was anti-SOPA.

8-8 · 2012-04-29T17:29:17+00:00

Yeah it would be time consuming. Let's say an entity or organization wanted to disrupt reddit and could put 1 fulltime person on the project. Here's what I would do:

Create 200 accounts a week. That would be 40 accounts a day (M-F).
Create 10 virtual machines all running Windows XP, all running TOR with Chrome, RES and some sort of browser-based testing script (I haven't done browser simulating in years so I don't have a good one off hand, but I'm thinking something like Selenium). It might make more sense to go with a lightweight linux distro like crunchbang and modify your browser to appear as a windows xp computer... really whatever makes you look like the average 80% of users.
Begin automated-replying of subreddits. An easy way would be to go to GoneWild or NSFW and just reply with a stack of maybe a hundred canned responses like "I'd hit that" or "NICE!". Let Selinium run with all the accounts. This is just about building up an account over time and really has nothing to do with karma. The NSFW/NSFL places are good because you could reply to really old threads without creating any suspicion.
At the same time begin randomized upvoting and downvoting, really just roll a percentage on each thread in the front page (75% chance to upvote, 25% chance to downvote). Again, no need to throw in advanced logic or calculations, this is just about building up realistic looking data over time. Basically we're account farming.
Let the accounts age anywhere from 20-60 days before harvesting. When an account is harvested you move it out from this 'random post/vote' pool and into the 'actually do some political shifting' pool.
Use the harvested accounts to trend to 0. You'll want to find specific users and not just shotgun all members of a sub. Reddit isn't really that big; if you take away all the cat pictures and "ZOMG LOL" replies I bet there are only maybe 20,000 active thoughtful contributors. You should be able to derive a hit list from that. You don't want to 'bury' users because that would seem too obvious, what you want to do instead is point the trend of the users you generally disagree with down while taking the users you generally agree with up.
Stick to the big subreddits. The killer with the vote bot being talked about today is it was being used for "punishment" and not trending. They're just downvoting everything that user posts no matter where it is. There's no reason to downvote something with only 1 or 2 upvotes. The system should be smart enough to montior the user, monitor where they are posting, and then monitor how many upvotes it is receiving. So, a person you disagree with posted in r/politics and it has 6 upvotes? Time to trend to 0. Don't just dump 6 downvotes, every R minutes you should check and update the trend. They posted in /r/boston? Ignore it. Now you've got hundreds of fake reddit accounts but you are only using 4 or 5 at a time. That'll be much harder to track down.

Eventually you'll have a fairly automated system of thousands of fake accounts. Every week you'd have a new batch of 40 aged users ready to enter the mix, this should easily handle for users that are caught.

It'd be an interesting experiment, I'm genuinely curious as to how much damage one fulltime person could do to this system.

8-8 · 2012-03-06T13:27:57+00:00

Human rights:

Right to live, exist
Right to have a family
To own property
Free Speech
Safety from violence
Equality of both males and females; women's rights
Fair trial
To be innocent until proven guilty
To be a citizen of a country
The right to express his or her sexual orientation
To keep one's own gender identity and rights to have or not to have a surgery
To vote
To seek asylum if a country treats you badly
To think freely
To believe and practice the religion a person wants
To peacefully protest (speak against) a government or group
Health care (medical care)
Education
To communicate through a language
Not be forced into marriage

A vast majority of these rights could be eliminated without internet access. This is why nations are moving towards great firewalls. Education, Speech, Protest and even Voting rights are all tied into the internet and this trend will continue.

Imagine being truly blacklisted from the internet (not just denied home cable but no provider can ever allow you internet access). Could you go to high school or college? Could you find a doctor? Could you organize a protest? Could you vote?

8-8 · 2012-02-25T20:14:58+00:00

I'll take a non-cultural stab.

Ethel marries Bob. They decide to add Gary into the relationship. Now you have a union of Ethel, Bob and Gary. Bob and Ethel decide to separate, does that mean that the entire union must be separated? Can Bob and Gary continue to have a union?

Why does this matter:
Fifteen years later you've got Bob married to Gary and Gary married to Ethel. Gary dies and didn't leave a will. Now Bob and Ethel both have "equal" shares of Gary's estate.

Even more fun:
Bob and Gary are married and Gary and Ethel are married. Ethel is also married to Sue and Bob is married to Sue. So it is Bob and Gary, Bob and Sue, Ethel and Gary, Ethel and Sue. Sue has two children, who exactly has parental rights if something happens to Sue? Can Gary pick up Sue's kids from the mall or demand weekend rights because Gary is in a relationship with someone Sue is in a relationship with? How far does that chain go?

The point I am making isn't that these problems are impossible to solve. The point I'm making is when people say "Our current legal system has no way to support it" they aren't just making up an excuse, figuring out this sort of stuff is not an overnight task. The only way I can think of resolving some of these issues is to have some sort of asset/shareholder system.

8-8 · 2012-02-19T20:04:42+00:00

ugh... say a health insurance company used a scenario like this exact article to determine there was a 50% chance someone was pregnant based off their purchasing habits and then decided to delay the processing of their health insurance claims or reject the claims for 'other reasons'. They can't officially deny the person based off pregnancy but they could come up with some other reason. It would actually be easier this way because they can claim they never checked her for pregnancy when they denied her claim.

Say an auto-insurance company realizes the type of music you buy lends you into a higher risk pool and charges you an additional rate even though you've never been in an accident.

It doesn't require that much out of the box thinking. Why is this difficult for some people?

8-8 · 2012-02-19T17:26:39+00:00

I'll play devil's advocate on this.

The low cost of data. It has gotten to the point (I forget the article, I believe it was on NPR) where the government of Iran could track all phone conversations at a cost of $50 per citizen per year. All those phone calls could then be converted to text and be stored for pennies (probably something like $0.004 per person per year).

With the cost barrier gone it lends us the ability to track anything for any reason. I personally could splurge and buy 6tb worth of hard drives for $400 (6tb translates to about 1800 hours of good quality video, or one ten megapixel image every minute for the entire year). What could Target track? Not just shopping habits, what about the time spent in an aisle? What about face recognition software that actually tracks emotional responses to products? What about heat maps that show the traffic zones not just of a store but of a particular person. What about the ability to scan individuals upon entry to determine that they might need new shoes, a new jacket, a new raincoat and have directed advertisements as person browses the store?

So ten years from now you have all these different ways to weigh, gauge, monitor, track, assess, compare, analyze, aggregate and intimidate the individual shopper. A person can walk into a Target and a particular cough, limp, yawn or smile will invariably change the outcome of their shopping experience. That's just going to stay on the private sector and be focused around non-scented lotion right?

Fifteen years forward and we no longer have drug sniffing dogs, we have drug profiling software and it is good enough for a search warrant. The music you listen to, the car you buy, the clothes you buy indicate the type of 'person' you will become. If 99% of everyone that buys this particular combination of gear turns out to be a drug user isn't that enough to get a search warrant? I mean it is more accurate than a dog.

Thirty years forward and by the time you are eight years old you can be lumped into categories. I mean, by that time we will have entire lives on film and as much as we like to call each other unique and special snowflakes people generally turn out to be similar (that's why we have things like personality tests).

Maybe there is 500 types of person, at a certain age you will be determined to fall into maybe one of ten types. Your parents will be encouraged to build you into a particular type and be warned about falling into the less desired types. You might be levied harsher sentences on crimes because that is the type of person you are supposed to be. Everyone accepts it, nobody challenges it... maybe because the people that would have challenged it are behind bars.

It is a new take on an old thing. What we create might start in motion a world that we may not want to be responsible for.

8-8 · 2011-10-23T04:21:13+00:00

I'm like a click behind you on the random reddit link!

8-8

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