roddylindsay

Sure:

- which business is behind the website?

- when was said business incorporated?

- how many employees does this business have?

- what is the jurisdiction and canonical registration identifier of this business?

All useful info for an agent determining how much to trust the content on a website and whether to transact with it

It's not so simple:

- If by certifying authority you mean a CA/Trust Service Provider, they don't generally publish client information in a central location.

- If you mean the actual jurisdictional authority, there are thousands and public records are all over the place.

- Websites aren't generally part of corporate filing records. So the agent would still need a way to connect the website to the corporation even after checking the legitimacy of the corporation.

- Serving the structured info in an HTTP header that is cryptographically verifiable by the browser itself (via its trusted roots) essentially serves as a distributed database for website identity, which eliminates the need for each agent to come up with its own ad-hoc verification system on the fly (and all the additional fetches that come along with it)

Very interesting history, thank you for sharing. I had wondered about the design choices there.

Agree that the next step for 2-QWACs is additional corporate data (professional licensure like you mentioned, incorporation date) and eventually arbitrary claims vetted by a QTSP.

For an average human user, these additional claims are nearly useless since they're so buried in the browser UI...and even if they were more prominent, they wouldn't be of much benefit, as the EV history has shown.

But for an agent that knows to look out for these signals, extensible 2-QWACs will be extremely valuable.

2-QWACs are awesome! Thank you for your contributions!

Though I don't understand why they would atone for any sins. IMHO, you created the website identity infrastructure for the agentic web...

And yes, I hope I didn't imply that QWACs are trusted by default for TLS. 1-QWACs would have to come from an existing trusted CA to be recognized by the browser.

As someone who has been in the messaging industry for more than a decade, it sounds naive to think that the litmus test for whether Apple will ban you is whether your traffic qualifies as spam. There is a long history of people trying to get around A2P spam filters / fees / traffic limits / onboarding / KYB requirements by running business messaging on P2P pipes, like you are doing. Some of it has been successful (see Twilio in the early days) but the industry has gotten a lot more sophisticated around this stuff and is not going to be receptive to your approach, which to me resembles the SIM farms that are a scourge when it comes to consumer fraud and abuse.

I hear Kyle Rittenhouse is also coming on board as a junior associate.

Brilliant move.

The transition of the major social networks over the last 10-15 years -- from being a space for friends to interact to being a space to consume content produced by "unconnected" entities like influencers -- has created a huge opening for someone to claim the friends and family network. There is no one better positioned (at least in the U.S. where iPhones are the majority handset) than Apple.

Zabit | Staff or Principal Mobile Engineer | REMOTE (Europe preferred) | Full-time

We're a small behavioral health + AI startup looking for a seasoned mobile engineer with specific expertise building local-first apps using Expo / React Native, who also has has strong native iOS / SwiftUI chops and can stretch across the stack into the backend and database layers. Strong product + UI/UX talents a big plus. Hit me (Roddy, CEO) up at: hello αt zabit.com.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yzsZ2KuUXYMUyzPAuVTYueYX...

Nice work! Can you export for multichannel playback or is it binaural / stereo?

Keep in mind this is just the lobbying that requires disclosure, which is a tiny sliver of the overall policy effort. There's a whole constellation of consultants, think tanks, industry groups, "grasstops" organizers, push pollsters, etc. that are the real (undisclosed) iceberg under the surface.

For example, here's an example of an effort to persuade Congress not to update copyright laws to account for model training, which was only revealed because of metadata accidentally included in a PDF file. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/23/tech-lawyer-ai-lett...

For me outright deletion just led to other issues like missing out on events / family photos / chats with people I otherwise wasn’t connected to. The target for most people is probably low-moderate use. <shamelessplug> Personally I struggled to achieve balance with my social media usage for years and spent the last two years building out a coaching service to help people like myself keeping social media under a daily time allowance…think of it as a personal trainer (with real accountability and all) for social media and other everyday habits. We just launched this week at zabit.com if anyone wants to check it out.</shamelessplug>

Zabit | Staff or Principal Mobile Engineer | REMOTE (Europe preferred) | Full-time

We're a small behavioral health + AI startup looking for a seasoned mobile engineer with specific expertise building local-first apps using Expo / React Native, who also has has strong native iOS / SwiftUI chops and can stretch across the stack into the backend and database layers. Strong product + UI/UX talents a big plus. Hit me (Roddy, CEO) up at: hello αt zabit.com.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yzsZ2KuUXYMUyzPAuVTYueYX...

As someone who's worked in the wireless messaging / telecom industry, the "Salt Typhoon" news came as absolutely no surprise. The major U.S. carriers don't have the capacity or talent to deal with the more mundane threats of spam and scam calls / texts on their network, much less attacks by state-sponsored actors. For instance, there are only a handful of people (i.e., fewer than 5) who work in the wireless messaging (SMS, MMS, RCS) group at each carrier, and while well-intentioned individuals, there is a profound mismatch between their skills and capabilities and the responsibility of managing these telecom channels with massive consumer penetration (compare the 1000's of highly compensated engineers working at WhatsApp, FB Messenger, etc.)

And there's no incentive for the carriers to care. Sure, they get yelled at by Congress and the FCC every now and again, but since they're all roughly in the same boat there's zero competitive advantage for them to invest the tens of millions of dollars+ it would take to build out their security capabilities. Their lobbying arm, the CTIA, is funded by tens of millions of dollars in short-code messaging fees and they have bought an iron grip on the FCC and relevant Congressional committees that ensures any enforcement effors are only a wrist slap. Consumers also largely don't seem to care.

So until something dramatic happens, you should assume that voice and messaging traffic flowing through the U.S. wireless carriers is completely exposed.

Zabit | Staff software engineer | Full-time | Remote (Hungary or California)

Zabit is a small startup building messaging applications that pair human workers with AI to enable affordable and accessible behavioral health outcomes, such as habit formation and cessation.

Looking to bring on a staff-level, full-stack-but-backend-leaning software engineer who loves Postgres, Kubernetes and node, but is able to pitch in on frontend (React / React Native) too.

Please send your resume and github to hello@zabit.com

Mike Masnick is funded by Google via his Copia institute, so any time Mike rails against a proposed regulation of Google / YouTube you should probably just dismiss it.

Ableton Live!

Fun fact: Theo Baker, the student journalist for the Stanford Daily who broke (and continues to break) major portions of this Marc Tessier-Lavigne scandal, is the son of Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the NY Times.

Contrarian prediction: OpenAI will be just fine.

The board will bring in an adult CEO who can balance the nonprofit charter with Microsoft and the commercial business, and who doesn't have a million side projects taking his or her focus away. Some employees will leave but the vast majority will stay for the usual reasons (i.e. inertia), the business will keep growing because ChatGPT is already a worldwide brand at this point and the vast majority of users don't give a hoot about any of this palace intrigue as long as the product works.

And the board will ultimately be vindicated for acting as fiduciaries for the nonprofit's mission and bylaws -- and not for the financial interests of Satya Nadella, Vinod Khosla, and the like.

On the AI policy side: https://aipoliticalpulse.substack.com/

"The Biden administration’s chip export controls, which restricted China’s access to the most advanced GPU chips, were an initial attempt to ensure U.S. AI supremacy and reduce the risk of foreign threats. But with U.S. cloud companies offering these chips for rent, there’s an obvious loophole – foreign governments could train their models on cutting-edge GPUs within the U.S. using friendly corporations as proxies. By forcing these cloud companies to enact strong KYC standards, the U.S. will make it harder for such attempts to be successful."

This is a great point, and any requirements must also extend to these new upstart GPU cluster companies, which in their rush to grow will probably be tempted to cut corners on compliance and look the other way when some sketchy / foreign sovereign entities come knocking.

Credit where credit is due: there was a ton of cynicism about whether the government had the expertise to come up with sensible regulations. Whatever your specific qualms are with it, the Executive Order demonstrates that the administration can produce something that's not embarrassing.

We use LX Studio extensively for the LED visuals at our immersive audio venue in San Francisco, Envelop SF (http://envelop.us). It's been rock solid for 7 years. Highly recommended.

A landline phone obviously wouldn't have such capabilities. As far as smartphones, I doubt Apple / Google would build classifiers into their default phone applications for obvious privacy reasons.

"Because voice calls are classified as a Title II telecommunications service (vs. Title I services like text messages and broadband), carriers can’t and don’t listen in. Specifically, the classification means they can’t filter or block calls based on suspicious content (or, hypothetically, AI audio watermarks)."

This is the catch-22 of privacy: it's great that AT&T can't snoop on my calls, but that means malicious robocall attacks can only be detected and prevents using signals other than content, which makes it tremendously more challenging.

(b) “Online” means appearing on any public-facing Internet Web site, Web application, or digital application, including a social network or publication.

SMS could be a considered a "digital application", so it might apply. Agree that it could use clarification.

"17941. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person to use a bot to communicate or interact with another person in California online, with the intent to mislead the other person about its artificial identity for the purpose of knowingly deceiving the person about the content of the communication in order to incentivize a purchase or sale of goods or services in a commercial transaction or to influence a vote in an election. A person using a bot shall not be liable under this section if the person discloses that it is a bot."

What was the initial message?

A bot pretending to be a human for the purposes of political persuasion is a crime in California.

"Clean Energy Associates’ (CEA) “Energy Storage System Supplier Market Intelligence Report” asserts that the incentives offered by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are the catalyst for the surge of the number of North American battery factories."

Thanks Biden!

I don't follow. Neuroscience imaging tools like fMRI are only used because it is impossible to measure the activations of each neuron in a brain in real time (unlike an artificial neural network). This research paper's attempt to understand the role of individual neurons or neuron clusters within a complete network gets much closer to "first principles" than fMRI.