Schneier on Security

JonKnowsNothing • November 30, 2023 4:17 PM

All

re: The Great Google Data Purge 2023

Starting Dec 1, 2023 Google will begin deleting dormant accounts: blogs, videos etc.

Google definition is anything untouched in 2 years hits the Great Bit Bucket In The Sky.

How often Google plans to keep purging old accounts wasn’t clear: is it an on going routine purge of accounts as they age into purge zone or an every 2 year event.

It isn’t the first Great Data Purge, as other systems come and go, the data associated with them its the Big Landfill: 8″ floppy, 4.25″ floppy, zip-floppy, magnetic tape, paper tape, cassette tape, a long list of dead media.

However, a few interesting bits might fall into the cracks.

AI-ML uses scraped historical data, Data Brokers scrape historical data, TLAs scrape any data they can capture (Bluffdale Ut) and all sorts of businesses are based on scraped historical data.

So Google might be shooting themselves later for trying to save some disk space. The same way that TV Executives and Movie Studios did when they decided to burn and destroy old TV tapes and movie films, because the canisters overflowed the closet.

It might be a reason my DDG-Fu cannot seem to go farther back than 2022. Of course, it might be an ESO condition.

Today we purge, and tomorrow we BURP!

RL tl;dr

A video game that is many years old (1), has had a number of recent updates to bring the UI into a more modern state. This particular game is highly dependent on player input and the historic record of every iteration of the game.

As the game is old, some of these player provided tweaks and info are dependent on some very old code and it is not easy to recreate this code in modern ezpz syntax.

A lot rides on some of that older code to keep working and if it stops there will be a lot of burned up charcoal ovens.

====

1)

ht tps://en.wikipedi a. o rg/wiki/ATITD

• A Tale in the Desert (ATITD)
• A Tale in the Desert is a social MMORPG which does not include combat. Instead, a variety of social activities provide for the basis of most interaction in the game. The game’s main focuses are building, community, research and personal or group challenges called “Tests”. ATITD has a global foregame, midgame, and endgame: on average so far, every year and a half the game ends, achievements are tabulated, and a new “Telling” begins, with certain modifications requested by the player base, or by arbitrary developer choice. To be clear about this, the game actually ends; a wipe is performed, and the game (and all players) start from scratch,

Tale 1: 2003
Tale 2: 2004
Tale 3: 2006
Tale 4: 2008
Tale 5: 2010
Tale 6: 2011
Tale 7: 2015
Tale 8: 2018
Tale 9: 2019
Tale 10: 2021
Tale 11: 2023

JonKnowsNothing • December 1, 2023 12:46 PM

@Peter Gerdes, All

re: So consider a model which just learns to speak like a person.

“ay, there’s the rub”. (1)

Language is malleable and shifts over time. There are distinct diversions in all languages. There are idiomatic phrases that appear and disappear. (2)

So teaching an AI model “language” also reveals what sort of language, what period, what idiom time frame is included.

Rhetorical Questions:

• Would you expect AI to generate your result in Old English? (3)

Why not? It’s perfectly knowable.

the opening lines of the folk-epic Beowulf, a poem of some 3,000 lines.

Hƿæt! ƿē Gār-Dena in ġeār-dagum,

þēod-cyninga, þrym ġefrūnon,

hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum,

• Would you expect AI to generate a result in Middle English? (4)

Why not? It’s perfectly knowable.

An epitaph from a monumental brass in an Oxfordshire parish church

man com & se how schal alle dede li: wen þow comes bad & bare

noth hab ven ve awaẏ fare: All ẏs wermēs þt ve for care:—

So the language is a dead giveaway as to what the AI knows and what sort of works it was trained on. Granted not every techie will have studied Old English or learned Hieroglyphs or Mayan glyphs or read the “Cantar de mio Cid”, but for those that are even somewhat familiar, the language is a dead giveaway.

So are the phrases sucked up and spit out on the AI response line.

• Quando oy nos partimos, en vida nos faz iuntar. (5)

===

1) Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

• To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life;

2) Scrub, as a gaming idiom means: very poor player, someone who is “worthless” at game play, someone who misses a point opportunity by wrong skill selection.

3)
htt ps://en.wikipedia. or g/wiki/Old_English

h ttp s://en.wikipedi a.org/wiki/Old_English#Beowulf

• Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages.
• It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century.

4)
ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English

h ttps:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Epitaph_of_John_the_smyth,_died_1371

• Middle English (abbreviated to ME[1]) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century.

5)
htt ps://en.wikipedia . org/wiki/Cantar_de_mio_Cid