bcovertigo

It’s valid to point out that we have difficulty defining knowledge, but the output from these machines are inconsistent at a conceptual level, and you can easily get them to contradict themselves in the spirit of being helpful.

If someone told you that a wheel can be made entirely of gas do you have confidence that they have a firm grasp of a wheel’s purpose? Tool use is a pretty widely agreed upon marker of intelligence and so not grasping the purpose of a thing that they can describe at great length and exhaustive detail, while also making boldly incorrect claims on occassion should raise an eyebrow.

It seems like you want people to examine their long held beliefs and customs, adopt your view that they are harmful and unethical, and change their behavior to match yours. A change that may have specific hurdles unknown to you for every individual.

Humans, being social animals, don’t typically react with reason to things that they percieve to be antagonistic. They tend to mirror hostility and are most likely to fight or disengage when facing an opponent, and cleave to the safety of the groups that accept them.

Just or not, the act of starting an interaction sets the tone. You’re completely justified in attacking villains and shaming them, but when you throw a devil costume on someone I don’t think you should be surprised when you get pitchforked.

Third edition draconomicon explained the “draconis fundamentum” in a similar way I believe. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?

Low effort speculation:

That’s a vodaphone portugal IP, but this is likely traffic routing though their customer cellular network and not their corporate. It’s possible that someone in PT has a similar username for this service and is fat fingering it. It’s also possible that you’re seeing a tiny sliver of a larger attack.

Spur.us tracks that IP as an egress point for openproxy and windscribe ResIP networks so it’s worth considering that the origin of the authentications you’re seeing may not be Portuguese cellphone but someone hiding behind those services.

Here’s a paper describing the difficulties such a service creates for folks trying to secure accounts with traditional IP reputation based rules. “Resident Evil: Understanding Residential IP Proxy as a Dark Service” https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8835239

Shooting in the dark for how a bad actor would monetize account takeover for this service if this is in fact an attack… They could try to sell your invitation to that private tracker. They could also look to scoop up a bunch of folks to try and blackmail based on what victims are download/seeding. Other more creative options I’m not thinking of might be on the table.