#cyber ecosystem

[insightscopemedia]

Quad Nations to Continue 'Quad Cyber Challenge' to Strengthen Global Cybersecurity Ecosystem

In a major step toward enhancing global cybersecurity, the Quad Nations—comprising the United States, India, Japan, and Australia—have announced the continuation of their collaborative initiative, the Quad Cyber Challenge. Launched in 2021, the challenge aims to create a secure digital ecosystem by promoting shared efforts in cybersecurity and addressing the increasingly complex cyber threats facing nations today.

The Quad Cyber Challenge will focus on promoting best practices, knowledge sharing, and the development of advanced cyber defense systems. By fostering collaboration between the four nations, the challenge intends to enhance the cyber resilience of critical infrastructure, strengthen the protection of sensitive data, and build a more robust cybersecurity framework on a global scale.

With cyberattacks becoming more sophisticated and widespread, the Quad nations recognize the urgent need to build a cooperative, multi-stakeholder approach to combat emerging threats. The Quad Cyber Challenge is designed to help member countries work together to respond effectively to cyber incidents and share their expertise, technologies, and strategies in real-time. This collaboration will also provide a platform for smaller nations to learn from more developed cybersecurity frameworks, promoting a global response to the cyber crisis.

One of the key aspects of this initiative is its emphasis on capacity building. The challenge will not only focus on strengthening national cybersecurity policies and frameworks but will also help equip the global community with the skills and resources needed to handle the evolving threat landscape. The Quad nations are committed to ensuring that their collective efforts are aligned with international standards and norms, furthering the cause of a safe, secure, and resilient cyber ecosystem.

The ongoing success of the Quad Cyber Challenge underscores the importance of international cooperation in securing the digital future and combating the ever-growing risks in cyberspace. As the initiative progresses, the Quad nations hope to lead by example in fostering a safer and more secure global digital environment.

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

I don’t know if I’m terminally online (I haven’t gotten out much all winter tbh) or if I just get stressed about online “debates”, but whoever said that “phones never appear in our dreams” is wrong. I woke up twice thinking someone replied to a comment I made yesterday with something weird, only to realize that I had not actually grabbed my phone off my nightstand, checked it, and then fallen asleep again

[artificelux]

I've said before that I always want Cyber Monday to be cooler than it is, to be neon-soaked and punky...

In short, Cyberpunk Monday.

Well, what's more punk than forgoing the big corpo sites and buying straight from creators and small businesses? Supporting art and artists directly, adding value to the ecosystem of unconventional stories that don't follow the traditional sales model.

So, I'm trying something different this year... I'm going to run a 20% off sale through noon on Dec. 3. It's an automatic discount site-wide on colorofamirror.net (including all versions of the novel, plus the vinyl soundtrack). The only exclusion is the already-better discount of 25% off for the Full Moon Bundle, which doesn't stack with this sale.

This will likely be the only sale I run during the year, so if you've been interested in picking up a copy of the book or you have someone in mind for a holiday gift, this is your chance.

A noir science fiction story, COLOR OF A MIRROR is written, designed, published, and sold by me (and can be found in a couple independent bookstores in the New England area). It has received "Editor's Pick" from BookLife Reviews and a "Get It" verdict from Kirkus Reviews. I don't sell on Amazon/Kindle or B&N, and the e-book is DRM-free so you can read on whatever device you choose, making this a perfect Cyberpunk Monday offering.

--

This weekend, whether you're shopping local bookstores on Small Business Saturday or finally picking up that bespoke item from a favorite creator, let's support those that are making the art we love... not the big businesses trying to turn us into dollar signs.

[garbageday]

By now you have, no doubt, heard all about the dangerous new TikTok trend sweeping the nation. China’s great and powerful cyber weapon has convinced the innocent teenagers of America that Osama bin Laden was actually a pretty cool guy and now they’re all sharing his 2002 “Letter To America”. Well, first, just to get it out of the way, Osama bin Laden was actually bad. Also, a nepo baby.

After spending most of yesterday digging into this, I’m pretty convinced that this was never a real thing on TikTok. Even though it has since snowballed into a full on moral panic that is beginning to feel dangerously unstable. The Biden administration released a statement about the supposed trend and alarmed big-name creators and actors also reportedly met with TikTok this week to discuss the rise of antisemitism on the app.

Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week.

The story has morphed from what should have been a weird curiosity — and perhaps even a moment to reflect on America’s post-9/11 legacy — into a full-blown national scandal with dumb-dumb headlines getting written about it, like CNN’s “Some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden”. I mean, I haven’t even had time in this piece to point out that a lot of the people I saw sharing the letter were millennials! But, yeah, teens fucking love Bin Laden. They’re saying 9/11 just hits different now no cap fr. Gen Z wants Baby Gronk to lead Al-Qaeda in a victorious jihad against the western imperialist hegemony gyatt!!

We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does. And what’s worse here is that there are very real issues with how TikTok works. It is a major source of misinfo and disinfo. It still has a terrible bullying problem. And, ironically enough, it’s also one of the most oppressively censorious social platforms that has ever existed. To the point users had to create a puritanical version of leet speak to communicate on it. But we can’t even begin to address those issues unless we start to look clear-eyed at what is actually happening on the app. And it is most certainly not the digital hub of a large-scale Gen Z Bin Laden fandom. Be fucking serious.

The internet is an extremely chaotic living ecosystem and it’s constantly reacting to itself and all you accomplish by amplifying something like this is give more ammo to those who want to who want to take that away. You turn bizarre discourse into something bigger than it was ever meant to be. You pointlessly villainize normal people who aren’t public figures and don’t deserve this kind of scrutiny. And you help conservative political movements continue their culture war. You also just look like clueless boomer to anyone even slightly younger than you.

[Read more over on Garbage Day]

[yestoeverything]

I am an expansion on the cyber human superiority that cyberhumans would 100% either be majestic and amazing or absolutely terrifying and nightmarish. If you wanna make some cyberhumans, put some human into it and make them look either bueatifully organic or uncomfortable for cybertronians to look at. Make it extreme and really push in those human abilities to the extreme because now we are cybertronian genetics, so make sure to multiple human characteristics to 100% strength. We aren't weak their is a reason why we are the top predator for the entire earth. PEOPLE EAT TOP PREDATORS OF ECOSYSTEMS and POISONOUS FISH/CREATURES. Just think about that. We eat them for what. We eat them just because we can, and they taste a little yummy ! So yeah, go crazy be free. Don't limit humanity. We are weird and insane so chaotic and diverse we destroy just to create we are so scary yet beautiful. We can be anything we wanna be. Don't limit humanity to be just a carbon copy of cybertonians. we need to make them their own just because we have similar attributes that dosent mean we will turn out the same when we cyberform, I believe that we'd look different and have different skills. animals even born the same species when separated become different.

[weirdlookingsnakewithlegs]

Happy Thanksgiving. Also do seeker have any special holidays they celebrate?

Seekers do have holidays!

Some that tie in with other Cybertronians are; All Spark Day, Festival of Lost Lights, and Cyber-Solstice.

However here are a few seeker only holidays; Festival of Vos, Day of New Wind, Winglord’s Feast, Rapture of The Hunt, and Fall of The Predacons.

Festival of Vos is the celebration of Vos as a whole.

Day of New Wind is a celebration of seeker’s flight and freedom. Most, if not all, seekers stay in the air for the entire duration of this holiday.

Windlord’s Feast is the celebration of their success, you could somewhat compare it to Thanksgiving.

Rapture of The Hunt is a holiday where every seekerlet that is able is taken on their first hunt.

And the Fall of The Predacons is a celebration of Predacons. Despite their rivalry, Predacons were important to the Cybertronian ecosystem and after their extinction the seekers felt they needed to be celebrated.

And happy Thanksgiving!!

[mariacallous]

As digital scamming explodes in Southeast Asia, including so called “pig butchering” investment scams, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a comprehensive report this week with a dire warning about the rapid growth of this criminal ecosystem. Many digital scams have traditionally relied on social engineering, or tricking victims into giving away their money willingly, rather than leaning on malware or other highly technical methods. But researchers have increasingly sounded the alarm that scammers are incorporating generative AI content and deepfakes to expand the scale and effectiveness of their operations. And the UN report offers the clearest evidence yet that these high tech tools are turning an already urgent situation into a crisis.

In addition to buying written scripts to use with potential victims or relying on templates for malicious websites, attackers have increasingly been leaning on generative AI platforms to create communication content in multiple languages and deepfake generators that can create photos or even video of nonexistent people to show victims and enhance verisimilitude. Scammers have also been expanding their use of tools that can drain a victim’s cryptocurrency wallets, have been manipulating transaction records to trick targets into sending cryptocurrency to the wrong places, and are compromising smart contracts to steal cryptocurrency. And in some cases, they’ve been purchasing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet systems to help power their efforts.

“Agile criminal networks are integrating these new technologies faster than anticipated, driven by new online marketplaces and service providers which have supercharged the illicit service economy,” John Wojcik, a UNODC regional analyst, tells WIRED. “These developments have not only expanded the scope and efficiency of cyber-enabled fraud and cybercrime, but they have also lowered the barriers to entry for criminal networks that previously lacked the technical skills to exploit more sophisticated and profitable methods.”

For years, China-linked criminals have trafficked people into gigantic compounds in Southeast Asia, where they are often forced to run scams, held against their will, and beaten if they refuse instructions. Around 200,000 people, from at least 60 countries, have been trafficked to compounds largely in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos over the last five years. However, as WIRED reporting has shown, these operations are spreading globally—with scamming infrastructure emerging in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa.

Most prominently, these organized crime operations have run pig butchering scams, where they build intimate relationships with victims before introducing an “investment opportunity” and asking for money. Criminal organizations may have conned people out of around $75 billion through pig butchering scams. Aside from pig butchering, according to the UN report, criminals across Southeast Asia are also running job scams, law enforcement impersonation, asset recovery scams, virtual kidnappings, sextortion, loan scams, business email compromise, and other illicit schemes. Criminal networks in the region earned up to $37 billion last year, UN officials estimate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of this revenue is allowing scammers to expand their operations and diversify, incorporating new infrastructure and technology into their systems in the hope of making them more efficient and brutally effective.

For example, scammers are often constrained by their language skills and ability to keep up conversations with potentially hundreds of victims at a time in numerous languages and dialects. However, generative AI developments within the last two years—including the launch of writing tools such as ChatGPT—are making it easier for criminals to break down language barriers and create the content needed for scamming.

The UN’s report says AI can be used for automating phishing attacks that ensnare victims, the creation of fake identities and online profiles, and the crafting of personalized scripts to trick victims while messaging them in different languages. “These developments have not only expanded the scope and efficiency of cyber-enabled fraud and cybercrime, but they have also lowered the barriers to entry for criminal networks that previously lacked the technical skills to exploit sophisticated and profitable methods,” the report says.

Stephanie Baroud, a criminal intelligence analyst in Interpol’s human trafficking unit, says the impact of AI needs to be considered as part of a pig butchering scammer’s tactics going forward. Baroud, who spoke with WIRED in an interview before the publication of the UN report, says the criminal’s recruitment ads that lure people into being trafficked to scamming compounds used to be “very generic” and full of grammatical errors. However, AI is now making them appear more polished and compelling, Baroud says. “It is really making it easier to create a very realistic job offer,” she says. “Unfortunately, this will make it much more difficult to identify which is the real and which is the fake ads.”

Perhaps the biggest AI paradigm shift in such digital attacks comes from deepfakes. Scammers are increasingly using machine-learning systems to allow for real-time face-swapping. This technology, which has also been used by romance scammers in West Africa, allows criminals to change their appearance on calls with their victims, making them realistically appear to be a different person. The technology is allowing “one-click” face swaps and high-resolution video feeds, the UN’s report states. Such services are a game changer for scammers, because they allow attackers to “prove” to victims in photos or real-time video calls that they are who they claim to be.

Using these setups, however, can require stable internet connections, which can be harder to maintain within some regions where pig butchering compounds and other scamming have flourished. There has been a “notable” increase in cops seizing Starlink satellite dishes in recent months in Southeast Asia, the UN says—80 units were seized between April and June this year. In one such operation carried out in June, Thai police confiscated 58 Starlink devices. In another instance, law enforcement seized 10 Starlink devices and 4,998 preregistered SIM cards while criminals were in the process of moving their operations from Myanmar to Laos. Starlink did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

“Obviously using real people has been working for them very well, but using the tech could be cheaper after they have the required computers” and connectivity, says Troy Gochenour, a volunteer with the Global Anti-Scam Organization (GASO), a US-based nonprofit that fights human-trafficking and cybercrime operations in Southeast Asia.

Gochenour’s research involves tracking trends on Chinese-language Telegram channels related to carrying out pig butchering scams. And he says that it is increasingly common to see people applying to be AI models for scam content.

In addition to AI services, attackers have increasingly leaned on other technical solutions as well. One tool that has been increasingly common in digital scamming is so-called “crypto drainers,” a type of malware that has particularly been deployed against victims in Southeast Asia. Drainers can be more or less technically sophisticated, but their common goal is to “drain” funds from a target’s cryptocurrency wallets and redirect the currency to wallets controlled by attackers. Rather than stealing the credentials to access the target wallet directly, drainers are typically designed to look like a legitimate service—either by impersonating an actual platform or creating a plausible brand. Once a victim has been tricked into connecting their wallet to the drainer, they are then manipulated into approving one or a few transactions that grant attackers unintended access to all the funds in the wallet.

Drainers can be used in many contexts and with many fronts. They can be a component of pig butchering investment scams, or promoted to potential victims through compromised social media accounts, phishing campaigns, and malvertizing. Researchers from the firm ScamSniffer, for example, published findings in December about sponsored social media and search engine ads linked to malicious websites that contained a cryptocurrency drainer. The campaign, which ran from March to December 2023 reportedly stole about $59 million from more than 63,000 victims around the world.

Far from the low-tech days of doing everything through social engineering by building a rapport with potential victims and crafting tricky emails and text messages, today’s scammers are taking a hybrid approach to make their operations as efficient and lucrative as possible, UN researchers say. And even if they aren’t developing sophisticated malware themselves in most cases, scammers are increasingly in the market to use these malicious tools, prompting malware authors to adapt or create hacking tools for scams like pig butchering.

Researchers say that scammers have been seen using infostealers and even remote access trojans that essentially create a backdoor in a victim’s system that can be utilized in other types of attacks. And scammers are also expanding their use of malicious smart contracts that appear to programmatically establish a certain agreed-upon transaction or set of transactions, but actually does much more. “Infostealer logs and underground data markets have also been critical to ongoing market expansion, with access to unprecedented amounts of sensitive data serving as a major catalyst,” Wojcik, from the UNODC, says.

The changing tactics are significant as global law enforcement scrambles to deter digital scamming. But they are just one piece of the larger picture, which is increasingly urgent and bleak for forced laborers and victims of these crimes.

“It is now increasingly clear that a potentially irreversible displacement and spillover has taken place in which organized crime are able to pick, choose, and move value and jurisdictions as needed, with the resulting situation rapidly outpacing the capacity of governments to contain it,” UN officials wrote in the report. “Failure to address this ecosystem will have consequences for Southeast Asia and other regions.”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright

Published: Dec 2, 2024

In the annals of academic absurdity, there are moments that make even seasoned critics pause in awe. “Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea’” is one such moment. This is not a parody—though it reads like one—but a “serious” paper, or so the author insists. In what is best described as a surrealist love letter to brine shrimp, the author, Ewelina Jarosz (she/they), wades through a soup of critical theory, environmental activism, and performance art, asking the reader to reconsider their relationship with brine shrimp—not as mere crustaceans but as symbols of queer resilience, ecological ethics, and, somehow, hydrosexual love.

This paper is part of a growing tradition of postmodern scholarship that prioritizes ideological signaling over intellectual rigor. Following in the footsteps of infamous works like the 2016 “Feminist Glaciology” paper—which posited that glaciers are gendered—“Loving the Brine Shrimp” sets a new standard for academic ridiculousness. Its culmination in a cyber wedding to augmented reality brine shrimp makes feminist glaciers seem like a grounded scientific pursuit by comparison. But before we arrive at the nuptial climax, let’s examine how this spectacle unfolds.

Love at First Shrimp

The article begins innocuously enough, discussing the ecological crisis facing Utah’s Great Salt Lake. However, it doesn’t take long before it veers into woke lunacy with concepts like “hydrosexuality,” which refers to a “more-than-human sensuality and sexuality emphasizing fluidity and relationality” that “offers a cultural understanding of water as a non-binary substance connecting all bodies of water on the planetary scale.” Hydrosexuality, she argues, challenges the “hegemonic notion of the autonomous and bounded human subject” by embracing “watery thinking.”

If you’re struggling to imagine what any of this means, join the club. The author’s language is a masterclass in obfuscation, using terms like “hydrophilic logic” and “multispecies ethics” to mask the fact that she’s anthropomorphizing liquid.

The absurdity intensifies when she links hydrosexuality to the brine shrimp, praising these creatures for their “swirly sexuality” and reproductive versatility. Apparently, the shrimp’s ability to reproduce via live birth or parthenogenesis (which the author incorrectly calls “pathogenesis” throughout the paper) is a triumph over binary thinking, making them paragons of queer resilience that subvert the oppressive structures of settler-colonial science. Yes, really.

Settler Science and Capitalist Cysts

The paper is rife with accusations against “settler science,” a term the author uses to describe any scientific practice associated with Western colonialism. She argues that early studies of the Great Salt Lake objectified its ecosystem, reducing the brine shrimp to mere commodities. Even the shrimp’s Latin name, Artemia franciscana, is critiqued as a tool of imperial domination. Naming a species, she asserts, reflects a “biology of empire” that erases Indigenous ways of knowing. By this logic, taxonomy itself is a colonial plot.

The author also condemns the commercialization of brine shrimp, particularly their use as fish food and their reinvention as the whimsical “Sea-Monkeys” pet marketed to children. This, they say, constitutes “environmental violence,” a term that appears to mean anything they dislike about human interaction with water-based ecosystems.

Drawing from perspectives offered by queer death studies (Radomska et al. 2021, p. 2), the brine shrimp’s ambiguous status and reproductive agentiality, hovering between the “living” and “non-living” in a state scientifically referred to as cryptobiosis, were reinvented for entertainment, concealing environmental violence.

To support their critique, the author invokes “low-trophic theory,” a concept they describe as prioritizing the ethical interdependence of organisms in an ecosystem. While the principle itself might have some use, the author’s application of it veers into parody. She laments the capitalist exploitation of the shrimp’s reproductive system, framing the harvesting of brine shrimp cycts as a form of ecological oppression. This is all delivered in the impenetrable prose of critical theory, with phrases like “queer ethical field studies” and “feminist blue posthumanities” sprinkled heavily throughout.

The Cyber Wedding to the Brine Shrimp

The paper reached peak woke in a section titled “Loving the Brine Shrimp,” which recounts a performance art piece called Cyber Wedding to the Brine Shrimp. This event, staged on the receding shores of the Great Salt Lake, involved artists, scientists, and augmented reality brine shrimp. Participants made vows to the crustaceans, marched in a procession, and capped it off with a communal bath in the lake. The author describes this as “making love to the lake,” a phrase that may haunt frequent swimmers of the Great Salt Lake for the rest of their lives.

The wedding was not merely symbolic; it was, according to the author, an act of environmental advocacy. By expressing love and commitment to the brine shrimp, the participants hoped to challenge capitalist commodification and foster “multispecies solidarity.” The participants even asked the brine shrimp for their consent to marry, which the shrimp apparently gave telepathically to some participants, while the author seemed content in problematically assuming their consent after proclaiming, “I didn’t hear a no.”

The use of augmented reality (AR) technology added another layer of surrealism. Instead of interacting with real brine shrimp, participants directed their vows toward a giant AR projection of the creatures.

The author describes the procession and bath as transformative, blurring the boundaries between human and non-human bodies. For most readers, however, this spectacle is less an example of profound ecological insight and more a testament to the unchecked excesses of woke performance art masquerading as legitimate scholarship.

I am not sure if you’re sufficiently prepared for this, but below I present to you Cyber Wedding to the Brine Shrimp in its entirety, which has been appropriately overlaid with Mystery Science Theater 3000 silhouettes by my good friend Dr. Rollergator.

[ Watch: "Cyber Wedding to the Brine Shrimp" ]

A Crisis of Peer Review

While the paper’s content is laughable, its publication raises serious questions about the state of academic peer review. How did this article, brimming with jargon and palpably absurd, make it through the editorial process? Are journals so desperate to appear progressive that they’ll publish anything cloaked in the language of decolonization and queerness? The answer appears to be “yes.”

However, one thing is certain: the academic community must reckon with the consequences of allowing such work to proliferate. At a time when public trust in science is already dismal, papers like this undermine the credibility of legitimate scholarship. When even the most basic standards of coherence and relevance are abandoned in favor of ideological grandstanding, the credibility of academia itself is at stake.

* * *

As we reflect on the surreal spectacle of Cyber Wedding to the Brine Shrimp and its academic context, one thing becomes clear: we need a term to capture the moment when scholarly work crosses the line from odd to outright ludicrous. I propose “marrying the shrimp” as the academic world’s answer to “jumping the shark.” From now on, this phrase will signify a project so absurd, so detached from reality, that it becomes a parody of itself.

Let’s explore how this term might find its place in academic vernacular:

“Oh Steve? Yeah, he really married the shrimp with his last research project.”

“Yeah Sally, your thesis wasn’t groundbreaking, but at least you didn’t marry the shrimp.”

“That journal used to have standards, but now they’re marrying the shrimp left and right.”

The phrase could also be used preemptively, as a warning to those teetering on the edge: “Careful, Karen. Your proposal on the patriarchal dynamics of Tupperware parties is dangerously close to marrying the shrimp.” Or, as a compliment when someone narrowly avoids absurdity: “I thought your case study on the history of medieval cheese wheels was going to marry the shrimp, but you really pulled it together!”

In an era where intellectual rigor often takes a backseat to performative absurdity, it’s important to keep a sense of humor about the bizarre trajectory of academic publishing. After all, what else can we do when purportedly serious scholars convene weddings for brine shrimp or ascribe nonbinary identities to water?

Alas, these are the times we live in.

--

==

How did we ever let these mentally ill retards gain institutional and societal-wide power?

[tarnishedspark]

Thinking about some ideas for the sort of ecosystem things that would need to exist on Cybertron for Transformers to have access to oil for joints, oil baths, etc. because of oil being an organic compound.

puttin in a show more thing bc this got Long

I'm thinking there's probably several different ways it comes about so its not like. Everything relies on the existence of the 1 magical oil machine.

Forged oil

When you think about it, bots don't immediately need an oil change as soon as they stumble out of the Well or a hotspot. The forging process probably synthesises oil for them the same way it creates the glass for their optics, liquids for their hydraulics, and whatever squidgy possibly-silicone bits they need for their internals to function. And if we assume all life on the planet is made this same way, then some of the supply woukd be made that way.

Microorganisms

What if there was some bacteria or something that could distil atmospheric carbon and water into complex hydrocarbons and eventually oil. Maybe it is a multi-stage process with a few different varieties. I imagine this would grow in gross-looking slime slicks, possibly floating on energon rivers or in places like the rust sea. Then simple mechanimals would consume the slime as part of their diet to supplement their oil reserves and it would progress through the food chain.

Cyber plants

Cybertron has some plant-like mechanical things, like seen in the Wastes in the idw2 Halloween special. There could be varieties of cyber plant that have processes to produce oil. Something at the nanotech level they have instead of photosynthesis and biological processes. If there's cyber plants that can produce oil, that would likely be tge most renewable/farmable source. and I need to move on from this before i start considering the chemical processes too closely

Mining

If Cybertron is the body of Primus and Primus is a giant transformer, then there's bound to be some oil in there somewhere. Don't ask me where it came from but he's gotta need it. Wherever Primus came from, I guess. There may be subsurface reservoirs of oil that modern transformers mine to meet the needs of the populace, much like our own oil mining

now i wanna use the plant and bug ideas for smth but i don't have anywhere it is Relevant atm

[exnori]

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[ukrfeminism]

New research shows the number of deepfake videos is skyrocketing—and the world's biggest search engines are funneling clicks to dozens of sites dedicated to the nonconsensual fakes.

Google’s and Microsoft’s search engines have a problem with deepfake porn videos. Since deepfakes emerged half a decade ago, the technology has consistently been used to abuse and harass women—using machine learning to morph someone’s head into pornography without their permission. Now the number of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos is growing at an exponential rate, fueled by the advancement of AI technologies and an expanding deepfake ecosystem.

A new analysis of nonconsensual deepfake porn videos, conducted by an independent researcher and shared with WIRED, shows how pervasive the videos have become. At least 244,625 videos have been uploaded to the top 35 websites set up either exclusively or partially to host deepfake porn videos in the past seven years, according to the researcher, who requested anonymity to avoid being targeted online.

Over the first nine months of this year, 113,000 videos were uploaded to the websites—a 54 percent increase on the 73,000 videos uploaded in all of 2022. By the end of this year, the analysis forecasts, more videos will have been produced in 2023 than the total number of every other year combined.

These startling figures are just a snapshot of how colossal the issues with nonconsensual deepfakes has become—the full scale of the problem is much larger and encompasses other types of manipulated imagery. A whole industry of deepfake abuse, which predominantly targets women and is produced without people’s consent or knowledge, has emerged in recent years. Face-swapping apps that work on still images and apps where clothes can be “stripped off a person” in a photo with just a few clicks are also highly prominent. There are likely millions of images being created with these apps.

“This is something that targets everyday people, everyday high school students, everyday adults—it's become a daily occurrence,” says Sophie Maddocks, who conducts research on digital rights and cyber-sexual violence at the University of Pennsylvania. “It would make a lot of difference if we were able to make these technologies harder to access. It shouldn't take two seconds to potentially incite a sex crime.”

The new research highlights 35 different websites, which exist to exclusively host deepfake pornography videos or incorporate the videos alongside other adult material. (It does not encompass videos posted on social media, those shared privately, or manipulated photos.) WIRED is not naming or directly linking to the websites, so as not to further increase their visibility. The researcher scraped the websites to analyze the number and duration of deepfake videos, and they looked at how people find the websites using the analytics service SimilarWeb.

Many of the websites make it clear they host or spread deepfake porn videos—often featuring the word deepfakes or derivatives of it in their name. The top two websites contain 44,000 videos each, while five others host more than 10,000 deepfake videos. Most of them have several thousand videos, while some only list a few hundred. Some videos the researcher analyzed have been watched millions of times.

The research also identified an additional 300 general pornography websites that incorporate nonconsensual deepfake pornography in some way. The researcher says “leak” websites and websites that exist to repost people’s social media pictures are also incorporating deepfake images. One website dealing in photographs claims it has “undressed” people in 350,000 photos.

Measuring the full scale of deepfake videos and images online is incredibly difficult. Tracking where the content is shared on social media is challenging, while abusive content is also shared in private messaging groups or closed channels, often by people known to the victims. In September, more than 20 girls aged 11 to 17 came forward in the Spanish town of Almendralejo after AI tools were used to generate naked photos of them without their knowledge.

“There has been significant growth in the availability of AI tools for creating deepfake nonconsensual pornographic imagery, and an increase in demand for this type of content on pornography platforms and illicit online networks,” says Asher Flynn, an associate professor at Monash University, Australia, who focuses on AI and technology-facilitated abuse. This is only likely to increase with new generative AI tools.

The gateway to many of the websites and tools to create deepfake videos or images is through search. Millions of people are directed to the websites analyzed by the researcher, with 50 to 80 percent of people finding their way to the websites via search. Finding deepfake videos through search is trivial and does not require a person to have any special knowledge about what to search for.

The issue is global. Using a VPN, the researcher tested Google searches in Canada, Germany, Japan, the US, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia. In all the tests, deepfake websites were prominently displayed in search results. Celebrities, streamers, and content creators are often targeted in the videos. Maddocks says the spread of deepfakes has become “endemic” and is what many researchers first feared when the first deepfake videos rose to prominence in December 2017.

Since the tools needed to create deepfake videos emerged, they’ve become easier to use, and the quality of the videos being produced has improved. The wave of image-generation tools also offers the potential for higher-quality abusive images and, eventually, video to be created. And five years after the first deepfakes started to appear, the first laws are just emerging that criminalize the sharing of faked images.

The proliferation of these deepfake apps combined with a greater reliance on digital communications in the Covid-19 era and a "failure of laws and policies to keep pace" has created a “perfect storm,” Flynn says.

Experts say that alongside new laws, better education about the technologies is needed, as well as measures to stop the spread of tools created to cause harm. This includes action by firms that host the websites and also search engines, including Google and Microsoft’s Bing. Currently, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints are the primary legal mechanism that women have to get videos removed from websites.

Henry Ajder, a deepfake and generative AI expert who has monitored the spread of the technologies, says adding more “friction” to the process of people finding deepfake porn videos, apps to change people’s faces, and tools that specifically allow the creation of nonconsensual images can reduce the spread. “It's about trying to make it as hard as possible for someone to find,” he says. This could be search engines down-ranking results for harmful websites or internet service providers blocking sites, he says. “It's hard to feel really optimistic, given the volume and scale of these operations, and the need for platforms—which historically have not taken these issues seriously—to suddenly do so,” Ajder says.

“Like any search engine, Google indexes content that exists on the web, but we actively design our ranking systems to avoid shocking people with unexpected harmful or explicit content they don't want to see,” says Google spokesperson Ned Adriance, pointing to its page on when it removes search results. Google’s support pages say it is possible for people to request that “involuntary fake pornography” be removed. Its removal form requires people to manually submit URLs and the search terms that were used to find the content. “As this space evolves, we're actively working to add more safeguards to help protect people, based on systems we've built for other types of nonconsensual explicit imagery,” Adriance says.

Courtney Gregoire, chief digital safety officer at Microsoft, says it does not allow deepfakes, and they can be reported through its web forms. “The distribution of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) is a gross violation of personal privacy and dignity with devastating effects for victims,” Gregoire says. “Microsoft prohibits NCII on our platforms and services, including the soliciting of NCII or advocating for the production or redistribution of intimate imagery without a victim’s consent.”

While the number of videos and pictures continues to skyrocket, the impact on victims can be long-lasting. “Gender-based online harassment is having an enormous chilling effect on free speech for women,” Maddocks says. As reported by WIRED, female Twitch streamers targeted by deepfakes have detailed feeling violated, being exposed to more harassment, and losing time, and some said the nonconsensual content found its way to family members.

Flynn, the Monash University professor, says her research has found “high rates” of mental health concerns—such as anxiety, depression, self-injury, and suicide—as a result of digital abuse. “The potential impacts on a person’s mental and physical health, as well as impacts on their employment, family, and social lives can be immense,” Flynn says, “regardless of whether the image is deepfaked or ‘real.’”

[slaymitchabernathy]

sometimes i like to think abt my little fictional characters but in modern life.

like soarynn would totally have all those little cookie cutter things for her kids lunches so she could cut their fruits into cute shapes.

coryo would only want to watch movies at AMC movie theaters bc he claims that he has “super long legs so i need to be able to recline” but he really goes for the nicole kidman bit.

soarynn would enter petunia into a cat show for fun & actually win the damn thing.

standing by what i said & believing that coryo would come home one day with a cyber truck telling soarynn that “it’s an investment”. soarynn drives a subaru btw.

soarynn would buy that hatch alarm clock thingy but it would scare both of them in the morning when it starts to make weird sounds.

coryo would have a twenty step skin care routine & religiously do retinol.

soarynn would love vera bradley bags even though coryo constantly buys her designer bags (she likes that they look like quilts).

i also believe that one flaming hot cheeto could kill coryo bc that man is allergic to red dye 40.

soarynn would have one of those yard signs that says everyone is loved in their house no matter what they believe in or who they love & she is always showing up for the pride parades bc sejanus is too scared to go by himself.

coryo has a private instagram account with like six followers & he posts once a year & it’s always a picture of soarynn for her birthday. he never accepts when sejanus requests to follow him.

soarynn hits every curb with her car but that’s okay bc we love her.

coryo drives in the carpool lane by himself bc he doesn’t want to drive in traffic.

soarynn has a purple iphone 11 & coryo owns the entire apple ecosystem.

coryo constantly gets into fights with their HOA abt how he maintains their lawn.

[cypress-punk]

Thinking about Eclipse Phase, a cyberpunk ttrpg with a focus on transhumanism and one of the ideas it brings up in the form of post humans.

So in the setting "transhuman" refers to three groups of beings. The first is humans, like you and me, but in this world basically everyone has a cyber brain and a genetically engineered body or inhabits some sort of fully synthetic robot body but their mind is that of a human. The second is AGI, artifical general intelligences, which are designed to remain at roughly human levels of intelligence and a are engineered to have human like perspectives because AIs allowed to become too smart nearly wiped out the human race fairly recently in the history of the setting. The third is uplifted animals, apes, cetaceans, corvids, parrots, octopi, and pigs which have been genetically engineered to have human like minds and intelligence along with modified bodies that make them more human in body plan (for the apes at least).

This broad and somewhat contradictory set of beings are what you can play as and make up most of the intelligent beings a player might encounter though there are some rather odd aliens and even a weird race of mantis shrimp murder creatures engineered by the bad AIs I mentioned earlier. There are all sorts of contradictions about the category of "transhuman" that the game positions you to explore and challenge in game. Its a very interesting setting in general and worth looking into though the actual rule set is rough (in the first edition, I haven't played the second edition and only skimmed the rules briefly when I read the book)

Anyway that really long preamble out of the way I want to talk about another category of being that exists in the world: post humans. That is to say, if the majority of intelligent beings in the world have become something more than human as it was once understood, these guys have abandoned it entirely. Post humans come in two major flavors from what I recall, Minds, which are people who engineered themselves into enormous brains with equivalently staggering, though alien, intelligence; and Predators, which have abandoned human nature to become pure hunters, highly versatile killing machines that target transhumans as prey, or in some cases have weird space habitats engineered as massive ecosystems over which they are the Apex predators.

Both of these are presented as the result of sort of egoist/objectivist approaches to evolution. In a world where the technology exists to basically engineer a whole viable organism these people have chosen to become something completely unlike what they were. The Minds can be taken as an attempt an organic super intelligence, a piece of meat that can rival the god like AIs that devastated the earth. The predators strike me as a very fascistic view of nature taken to the extreme, seeking to become machines that kill, bending all that you are toward being a weapon. Its almost in line with some Futurist ideas about the body in an industrial world. They also serve as basically stand in for some classic DND monsters. Minds are a lot like Beholders or Elder Brains, Predators can fill many "monster" roles depending on the type of body they've built for themselves.

Anyway I like the post humans because they express an interesting ethos within the setting. Theyre a believable fringe that adds something to the world and provides an interesting element for the players to interact with. But there is one other being in the setting that strikes me as very post human.

There's a description in one piece of fluff of colonies of "barnacles" on certain space ships or habitats. These are extremely stripped down synthetic bodies that are equipped with the tools to affix themselves securely to the hull of some man made object in space and then point a lens at the void of space. A body built for complete isolation and meditation upon the cosmos. A sort of ultimate asceticism. I like the barnacles a lot conceptually.