Subway Surfers and the 'Dark Corners of Cyberspace'

FRIDAY! TGIF!

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If the media landscape were a rollercoaster, we’d all be puking by now. As an agency full of former journalists and media experts, we root for the indie publications and big brands weathering the ride. When you’re upside down, there’s only one thing to do: focus on something stable. At Codeword, we find that stability in knowing the right comms, content, and community can give customers something to believe in — and what’s more rock solid than that?

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On the podcast this week: drama surrounding National Novel Writing Month's condemnation of people who criticize the use of AI in writing, calling them "classist" and "ableist." And why Doom running on a diffusion model isn't just Doom running on yet another gadget, but says something interesting about the future of gaming. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about Apple's face swapping app problem, and what the company should (and shouldn't) do to fix it.

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I’m very tired from the party we threw last night for our first anniversary with our friends at Codeword. Check them out, seriously; this isn’t me saying that as a paid ad, they’re just very rad people and we couldn’t have thrown the party without them. 

Or you, for that matter! Let’s cut to the chase and catch up on the week. 

Collage via 404 Media

SUBWAY SURFER SOTU

The Kamala Harris presidential campaign is experimenting with running ads that follow a popular formula of viral social media posts popularized on TikTok and commonly referred to as “overstimulation,” “ADHD” or “content sludge” videos. Split-screen videos show a repetitive, colorful video on the bottom (usually a game like Subway Surfer or Roblox) and the content you’re meant to be paying attention to at the top. Emanuel explains how the Harris campaign ads that follow this logic are tame in comparison to the most extreme examples in this overstimulation genre, some of which feature more than two videos playing at the same time, but “are undeniably copying that formula.”

Screengrab: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

RIGHT TO REPAIR YOURSELF

Have you ever been to a conference where someone handed out DIY medicine? Jason talked to Mixæl Swan Laufer, the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do “right to repair for your body.” Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. 

Unsplash

NICE TRY BUT I HAVE NEVER

A new email-based sextortion scheme is making the rounds recently, claiming to have evidence of its targets “venturing into the darker corners of cyberspace” and threatening to release videos of you jerking off. I wrote about how the emails contain the person’s full name, address, and phone number in the body of the email, an attached PDF that contains a photo of the person’s street (likely screenshotted from Google Maps), and a lengthy letter claiming that they’ve been watched through their webcam. Ending, of course, with a ransom demand in Bitcoin. 

Burkman and Wohl. Image: D M / Flickr CC0

OOPSIEMATIC

Politico revealed on Monday that convicted fraudsters and right-wing activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have been secretly operating a company that purports to do AI-powered lobbying called LobbyMatic. Jason reported that the company also, for months, advertised in screenshots that major companies were using its product; many of these companies told us that they have never been clients of LobbyMatic. He emailed all of the companies, and six of them (Pfizer, Microsoft, Palantir, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, and Holland & Knight) said they were not clients of LobbyMatic. Several of the companies that responded said that they had never heard of LobbyMatic and had no idea why their companies were being shown in product demos. 

READ MORE

• Massive AI Dataset Back Online After Being ‘Cleaned’ of Child Sexual Abuse Material
• Here’s 22 Examples of Google Employees Trying to Avoid Creating Evidence in Antitrust Case
• NaNoWriMo Says Condemning AI Is ‘Classist and Ableist’

COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

Replying to “Sextortion Scammers Try to Scare People by Sending Photos of Their Homes,” L.K. writes: 

“What’s old is new again, I suppose. The format is a bit different, but I used to get these types of spam messages pretty frequently. Although the street view image seems to be new. I wonder if this type of thing falls in and out of fashion among scammers or if it’s sort of in a constant state of evolution and every few years a new generation of teens comes online and rediscovers it.” 

And replying to L.K., Oriane Sasseur said:

“There's indeed nothing new under the sun when it comes to human vulnerabilities and crooks trying to take advantage of them. Our modern "Nigerian Prince" email is just another iteration of the "Spanish prisoner" letter of early 19th century. Yet these scams have passed the test of time and are still effective. That's why it's interesting to keep track of their technical evolutions, as does this article.”

And Peaceful Pasta added: 

“Yep. Same as L.K. commented, I used to receive these as generic "we've seen you wank to porn" quite often, but just received this specific scam in my inbox this morning after reading your article yesterday. It came as a PDF attachment with the only text in the email being my legal name and address. The PDF text was pretty similar to the old generic scams though. As you reported, the actors responsible probably just enhanced their data sets with the vast troves of stolen data that legitimate companies are unable to secure themselves.”