Link Roundup March 2023

Exposed: Dallas Humber, Narrator Of Neo-Nazi ‘Terrorgram,’ Promoter Of Mass Shootings

In July 2020 HuffPost published a report identifying 27-year-old Andrew Casarez as the leader of a white supremacist network called the Bowl Patrol. Like Humber, Casarez lived in Sacramento and used a pseudonym on Telegram to encourage his followers to become “saints” by committing acts of racial terror. But the Southern Poverty Law Center recently found Casarez’s name on a leaked copy of the 2019 federal no-fly list. (Casarez, a pizza delivery driver, was a “selectee” on the list, meaning he would have been subject to enhanced security measures at airports.) This suggests federal law enforcement knew that Casarez was involved with the Bowl Patrol for at least eight months before HuffPost’s article — a period of time when he continued to encourage his followers to commit mass shootings. This, as the SPLC noted, “raises questions about how federal agencies reconcile investigative secrecy and public safety.”

The grid is under attack

An Insider investigation has found that attacks against the electrical grid nationwide are at an all-time high — and experts say the greatest threat comes from right-wing extremists seeking to sow chaos and accelerate the devolution of the social order. The investigation, which includes an analysis of newly released Department of Energy data, visits to substations, a review of law-enforcement records from nine jurisdictions, as well as neo-Nazi propaganda, and interviews with six power industry and extremism experts, found that attacks on the grid spiked dramatically last year, with a 72% increase over 2021. According to Department of Energy statistics, human attacks were responsible for 171 "electric disturbance incidents" around the country in 2022, compared with 99 in 2021. (Insider's review of the data counted incidents that the Department of Energy labeled as the result of vandalism, sabotage, actual physical attack, cyber event, and suspicious activity.)

Killing of Black transgender woman in Milwaukee prompts calls for justice

She is at least the fourth known transgender woman in Milwaukee to be killed in the past year. Brazil Johnson was killed in June 2022, Toi Davis was killed in July 2022 and Regina Allen was killed in August 2022. These killings have not yet been deemed hate crimes by officials. Still, transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime nationwide, according to a study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

BetterHelp owes customers $7.8M after FTC alleges data mishandling

According to the FTC, BetterHelp assured customers that it would not share their health data except for the purpose of providing counseling. But the FTC alleged that BetterHelp shared customer emails, IP addresses and health questionnaire responses with advertisers like Facebook, Snapchat and Pinterest.

Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse?

Gamification is everywhere these days — in the classroom, at work, on your daily bike ride — but introducing it into a comedy club seems particularly perverse. The late anthropologist David Graeber talked about the “baseline communism” that holds society together, the many small acts of goodwill people perform for one another every day without even thinking. Someone gives you directions, someone lights your cigarette, someone takes you on a tour of his virtual comedy club. I’m sure Okiedriver, who’s clearly a kind, thoughtful guy, deeply invested in his club, would show people around for free. But because the club has introduced this points system, his goodwill has been, effectively, monetized. “Right,” Okiedriver says circumspectly when I put this to him. “Though the thing is you can always just buy points.” He indicates the top of the leaderboard. “Earlier today, Texasmarshall came over. I was standing here, and he was just pumping money in, three times, 60 points a shot.” His voice takes on a kind of dazed mournfulness, as if he’s still processing it. “So now he’s No. 1, didn’t have to lift a finger.”

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

Let’s go back to the example of arithmetic. If you ask GPT-3 (the large-language model that ChatGPT was built from) to add or subtract a pair of numbers, it almost always responds with the correct answer when the numbers have only two digits. But its accuracy worsens significantly with larger numbers, falling to ten per cent when the numbers have five digits. Most of the correct answers that GPT-3 gives are not found on the Web—there aren’t many Web pages that contain the text “245 + 821,” for example—so it’s not engaged in simple memorization. But, despite ingesting a vast amount of information, it hasn’t been able to derive the principles of arithmetic, either. A close examination of GPT-3’s incorrect answers suggests that it doesn’t carry the “1” when performing arithmetic. The Web certainly contains explanations of carrying the “1,” but GPT-3 isn’t able to incorporate those explanations. GPT-3’s statistical analysis of examples of arithmetic enables it to produce a superficial approximation of the real thing, but no more than that.

Artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set

Lapine discovered her medical photos on a site called Have I Been Trained, which lets artists see if their work is in the LAION-5B data set. Instead of doing a text search on the site, Lapine uploaded a recent photo of herself using the site's reverse image search feature. She was surprised to discover a set of two before-and-after medical photos of her face, which had only been authorized for private use by her doctor, as reflected in an authorization form Lapine tweeted and also provided to Ars.