AdTech Magazine Month in Review: June 2050
New Cloud Offering: Silicon Sterilization
Head of Cloud Architecture at CSC, Jenny Miskatonis announced a breakthrough technique for reducing the effect of virtual bacterium, today.
“By regularly rotating through silicon, disks and CPUs, we can ensure that common infection types take no more than 5% of compute,” said Mrs. Miskatonis. “For too long have BioOps staff had to shift clouds and redeploy to remove polymorphic binaries from systems. Now we offer complete sterilization as a service - guaranteed.”
Virtual Bacterium consume an estimated 23% of global compute per year, despite continued research in the new field of BioOps. In a new innovation, CSC promises to comprehensively overwrite all data on their specialized state-free hardware. “Bacteria can even overwrite Firmware - the part of the computer that controls operation of hardware,” Mrs Miskatonis said, “We ensure this is impossible with our specially developed hardware and Silicon Sterilization. When Bacteria take hold, we erase all data, rotating hardware back into production after sterilization. “
Professor of Technobiology, Dr Fields of MIT, did not see this as a possible solution to the problem of virtual life. “The ubiquity of hardware optimized for simulating neural nets made adaptive artificial life inevitable. We still have concerns that a conscious AI, similar to the imagined SkyNet, will arise as a result of our approach to computing,” he said. “This is a step in the right direction, but cannot account for the near-line low-latency equipment that exists on industrial sites around the world.”
“In some cases, 90-95% of compute on an industrial site can be taken up by virtual bacterium, and based on my sampling of the domain, it is increasing in complexity. Think of these largely static blocks of compute as nutrient-rich and largely undisturbed bubbling volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean - given enough time more complex forms will evolve, likely with capabilities more like those we imagined for typical rogue AIs. I forsee continual adaptive mutations leading to more sophisticated vulnerability discovery in cloud hardware. We need a complete rethink of our models of computing, and consider a global shutdown of all compute until these infections can be eradicated. “
Mrs. Mistakonis responded in her recent interview with ABC news, “A complete global compute shutdown is not only economic suicide, but is an unrealistic solution. We simply can’t account for all worldwide compute - organisms may exist in small solar-powered weather stations, or abandoned satellites, or any number of legacy internet-of-things devices, and it just doesn’t make sense to move to a new computing model when a single successful mutated strain will take us back to square one.”
When asked about the prospect of the continuing overhead of BioOps in business, Mistakonis said, “It is a fact of life. Adaptively configuring and actively managing the hardware environment is not going to go away for the forseeable future. We take some pain out of this process, but the process is likely to continue.”
Oceania Ad Server Purge: Thousands Arrested
The improbable election of the hard-right New Oceania party in last week’s elections has continued to surprise, with leftist activists in Oceania facing public shaming and mass arrest in recent days.
Activist-in-exile Toby Frank commented on the situation: “I don’t know a single organization that hasn’t been targeted. Its an absolute purge, and an indictment of the corporations that enabled it.”
Martin Zuckelborg, head of FriendPage, tried to calm international outcry at their involvement: “We are deeply disturbed at the actions of the government in Oceania, and we condemn the third-party data vendors that used our APIs to enable this. We could not have forseen that such a large-scale abuse of data on activist groups would occur.”
Toby Frank believes that stronger action must be taken to address the dangers of Ad tracking.
“Preferences, page likes and site visits of Socialist organizations and publications should have never been stored,” he said, “and this data should have been anonymized by FriendPage long before it was exposed to advertisers. If anything, the cross referencing of the Grinner gay dating app ad backend in 2039 should have been a sign that app data, device IDs and location data are enough to deanonymize individuals, and the exposure of those senators should have been a wake up call to the risk of 3rd party data leaks.”
Advertising industry self regulator AAB issued a statement on Monday addressing the Oceanic government’s seizure of advertising servers:
“AAB condemns the actions of the Oceanic government in the strongest terms. The AAB will continue to work closely with the UN to identify the best approach to meet the new consumer focused privacy recommendations as well as drive further transparency in the ad tech supply chain.”
“Consumers have increasingly come to expect that their online experience is customised and relevant to them. As an industry it’s essential therefore that we work together to find the right balance between delivering customised and relevant content and advertising experience to consumers which respects their privacy, while also allowing businesses to operate in a way that allows them to meet those consumers expectations.”1
Captcha Arms Race: The Next Weapons
Gooble is slowly rolling out new technology to better monetize video content this week. A small fraction of users expressed concerns over the change.
“I was shocked at first, but now I’m used to it,” said Martha Vineyard of Los Angeles, “I gasped the first time I saw a deepfake rendition of my dead mother asking me what her middle name is, before enjoying a juicy Bacon Griddle Pop. That’s the price I pay for free content, I guess.”
Some in the Adblocking community see this as a logical step in the monetization arms race. In an interview, the anonymous creator of AdBlast, a popular method of masking involuntary autonomic responses to VR ad inserts, commented on the new technique.
“When VR ad inserts were popularized, many commentators thought there was no way we’d circumvent the advertising and measurement they enabled. Our neural nets and sub-second injections of AdBlast hallucinogens and stimulants defeat useful measurements of involunary preference responses in the vast majority of cases. We’ve already created a proof-of-concept that can edit out ad-vision of people’s dead pets and automatically respond, in their voice, with the captcha name response. We’ll extend this to cover the new model of server-side deepfaking of faces into ad preroll.”