Dodgy app developers make dodgy apps, and convince naive users to install them.

The dodgy apps make the naive user’s Internet connection available to some partner the dodgy app developer has done a deal with - and since the naive user is typically using a residential network, and it lets their connection be used by someone else, it’s called a residential proxy.

The partner sells access to a huge network of residential proxies to scrapers, often those wanting to do AI scraping against the wishes of the owners of the site being scraped. This is valuable to the scrapers because they appear to be coming from large numbers of different residential addresses. Cloud / hosting provider addresses are usually the first thing people block if they don’t want scrapers, and they also block how much each address can access. So the scrapers scrape a little bit per address, making it hard for the victim sites to detect what is scraping and what is legitimate traffic.

This creates a security risk for the naive users, because as well as connecting out to the Internet, usually the proxy customer can connect to and maybe exploit things on their home network. The naive users usually don’t know their connection is being used this way.

So the headline here is that one of the affected naive users is someone in the White House, and one of the ‘residential’ networks being sold is in fact the White House’s Internet connection.

To be Kafkaesque is to not know what you are accused of and/or to have no real mechanism to defend the accusations. The Kafkaesque part is the private network of ‘justice’ that makes judgements which impact someone’s access to basics like food based on an opaque algorithm with no recourse.

These private systems are worst when they are networks across multiple stores - you could imagine a future where, if left to the devices of late stage capitalism (i.e. not effectively regulated), it could become virtually impossible to buy food and other essentials once you are on a privately held denylist that retailers pay to access, where those on the list have no insights into how they got on the list nor any mechanism to correct any inaccuracies that unfairly led to them being on the list.

TL;DR: I think Kafkaesque is correct here.

Also when Raspberry Pi started, it was a not-for-profit. In a way, they went through the same transformation as OpenAI (which started not-for-profit too) but slightly earlier.

I wish people would stop repeating without evidence the idea that Luigi M did anything other than get harassed eating at a fast food restaurant. The official story makes no sense - someone apparently recognised him from a blurry CCTV release that is likely another person albeit of the same build and hair colour, and phoned it in with absolute certainty, and then the police happened to find a ‘manifesto’ on him, and then later, not even straight away when he was searched, an improvised weapon. If the real killer could do the crime and get away to a completely different state, they’d have had numerous opportunities to dispose of everything - it just strains credibility.

Consider on the other hand that the powers that be were eager that someone take the fall for this - they couldn’t have the perception that such a thing will go unpunished (see also: the extreme push for the death penalty, and the involvement of very senior political appointees). They can achieve that by picking any random approximately fitting the description off the street and framing them.

I think it’s actually the legislative intent that they can do stuff like that and blame it on the AI. If the law says that there’s no liability unless it was intentional fraud, then the courts are going to follow that unless there is a higher law that overrides it.

That’s why it’s important to fight things like this before they become law.

If these are relatively inexpensive to set up and dispose of, corporations could even set them up automatically for individual consumer transactions and between individual employees and themselves.

For example, you go to a fast food restaurant, and you are actually being served by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, founded 2 seconds ago, and leasing the right to operate in the building amongst other similar AI companies, as well as the part-time services of McGermKing Employment Services fd176cc4-bb95-4c1b-80e7-2aec39f02917, who hires a human to take your order, and McGermKing Employment Services 5336b4f1-0594-4df1-8387-5ec9b638db77, who assembles your GermBurger (TM used under licence by McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd).

If you pay them and they make money, it goes back to the owner. If you get food poisoning and sue McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd (since the parent company is totally innocent and some other subsidiaries are just honest suppliers), it comes out of the money they made selling you the burger, and if their liability to you was higher than the cost of one burger, well, the AI corporation tried its honest best at business, but you can line up for your share of the payout - keeping in mind they also owe franchise fees to the parent company out of that burger, so the AI liquidator will divide up the assets, and if it doesn’t cover liabilities, the parent company loses its 50c investment into McGermKing Franchise 6d8f3cee-b10b-442b-b00b-02683a709f70 Ltd, and how sad it was a bad outcome for you as a creditor.

Likewise if an employee gets hurt, same story.