bonifartius 𒂼𒄄 @bonifartius@social.cleverlibre.org

there is currently a bot inside MIT IP space, address 18[.]4[.]38[.]176, scanning fedi at large. i have confirmed this with 5+ unrelated instance admins, large and small instances, across mastodon/misskey/pleroma/akkoma.

the bot is poorly behaved. i have observed it making repeated requests, multiple times per second, for the exact same paths (the paths being, generally: user profiles, specific posts, and sometimes following links in posts). returning 403s does not stop this activity. one of my domains received hundreds of additional requests despite replying with 403 to all of them. i have also seen it make requests for paths containing html tags - seems like a badly written parser. the purpose of these requests and what data is being gathered is unclear.

PTR on the ip returns sts-drand03.mit.edu. a quick web search for "mit drand" brings back https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/david-g-rand and his personal website: https://davidrand-cooperation.com/ (note: other IPs in the /24 also have names in the PTR which match up with names of MIT faculty, but only the .176 IP appears to be involved in this activity).
seems he's doing research into "misinformation" and "fake news" on social media. he also appears to be on fedi! so @Drand@techhub.social, given this activity is sourced from an IP with your name on it, could you share the purpose of this traffic? what data is being collected and how is it being used? do you plan to respect robots.txt or identify yourself in your useragent? is there a process for instance admins to opt out of this activity other than blocking the source IP?

@Zennblack

'member during the 'demic when they said they weren't forcing or coercing people but they were doing textbook coercion?

That was cool.

This is accurate.
https://open.substack.com/pub/margaretannaalice/p/letter-to-the-amnesty-demanders?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

😅

For some reason I thought this was common knowledge?
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/spying-through-push-notifications.html

https://www.igor-chudov.com/p/covid-vaccines-produce-random-junk

Me at the party desperately trying to look normal

Nikolai Yaroshenko (Russian, 1846-1898)
For an ordinary genre painter, I believe he had a special talent for arrestingly intense portraits.

Peasant 1874
Portrait of a young woman 1893
Portrait of a young man 1886
The student 1881

#Painting

It's funny (and sad) how many "freedom loving" people are actually kind of cool with authoritarianism/fascism as long as it's for the "right" reasons.

Highlights from a 2023 paper by the clown at MIT who was recently caught scraping a bunch of fediverse instances:

>The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions.

>[V]aluing democracy was also associated with greater truth discernment, whereas endorsement of individual responsibility over government support was negatively associated with truth discernment in most countries.

>Finally, we find a robust positive association between truth discernment and COVID-19 vaccination intentions [...] We also find a weaker—but still pronounced and fairly consistently signed—positive association between truth discernment and the extent to which participants believe that others will get vaccinated (that is, their perception of the descriptive norm regarding vaccination).

>Although average levels of belief in falsehoods did vary substantially across countries, we found consistent evidence that analytic thinking, accuracy motivations and support for democracy were associated with a greater ability to discern truth from falsehood, as well as fairly consistent evidence that endorsement of individual responsibility over government support and belief in God were associated with worse truth discernment. These regularities emphasize the joint importance of cognitive and social factors, and suggest that a common psychology may underlie susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation across cultural contexts. They also help identify individuals who are most at risk of falling prey to misinformation, and thus would benefit most from anti-misinformation interventions.

https://techhub.social/@Drand/110628591264383357

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01641-6.pdf

Whether or not the so-called researchers realize it, their definition of "misinformation" is merely anything that contradicts the official opinion of the US government and its associated institutions; these "researchers" are paid by those institutions to act as censors and propagandists using high-tech methods of psychology and data science. Try to guess who the paper says are "most susceptible to misinformation" before you read it, and you'll probably be spot-on--the profile matches most conservatives and libertarians, and it's no surprise, either, because the paper seems to test for skepticism about covid vaccination. In effect they basically conducted a public opinion poll, calling one opinion "misinformation", and recommending that people who support said opinion be subjected to "anti-misinformation interventions". The foregone conclusion is that God-fearing individualists are victims of their own belief system and must have their opinions corrected or massaged by powerful institutions--after all, these people need help--their backwards viewpoints are a result of malicious propaganda. The evidence for this thesis is astounding, indicated by uncanny p-values of less than 0.001. It seems they even realized that there's a common "psychological profile" behind victims of disinformation, which sounds scary until you realize that it boils down into political beliefs, something any capable person can readily perceive.

At the end of the day this is a million-dollar act of institutional fellatio, a way to launder opinions and justify even more censorship. They hate people like us and they can't stand it when we're allowed to say what we want. The fact that they have to go to these lengths only proves that their power is weakening. Happy shitposting.

MIT employee David Rand @Drand has cajoled some retard who is paying $80,000/yr for a piece of paper to scrape fediverse sites so David can do nothing and put his name on some fucking "scientific" paper.

I have zero interest in enabling some high-horsed retard who does "research on #misinformation #fakenews & #polarization at MIT".

Requests from his IP now return:

{"error": "fuck off you list-making loser Nazi cunt"}

RT: https://nya.social/notes/818c3d1bdb3e20788eb08e25

Going down!

Burger King airlift away!