Ian, I'm going to call time soon. Do you want another?
"Yeah, go on then. But since the bar's quiet, do you want to hear how back in the day, us lads in the PropOps department made the online world what it is now? How we changed the path of online discourse, and, arguably, changed the world?"
Sounds as gripping as ever. Why not. Your tab's £35.60.
"Our boys in R&D came up with a killer form of encryption. I think they came up with the idea for fun, just throwing stuff around, but we ran with it and it ended up being maybe the sharpest weapon in our arsenal. Want to guess what it was?"
No idea. Hit me.
"Youtube comments."
I guess you don't mean getting people to conduct top-secret conversations in the comments section.
"Nope. Have a guess how we used them."
I dunno... some daft code, like 'the sarcastic cormorant is in Grandfather's playpen'? Nah, you wouldn't bother telling me that. Maybe... grammatically correct encryption? Doesn't seem very likely.
"That's right, we tried it and it's a pain in the arse. No, we communicated - and agencies possibly still do communicate - with bots. In the late noughties we came up with an encryption method that treated all the comments left under all Youtube videos - and I do mean all Youtube videos - as an enormous database, always changing and growing, but mostly persistent. The offline algorithm at one end would encode your message, ideally already encrypted, into bits of data to be buried in comments on Youtube pages. You get a fairly simple script, send that off to a friendly server somewhere and in a couple of seconds bots have written out your message across a few hundred or thousand Youtube pages, one bit at a time. The pages to be used were part of the encryption protocol. There were images being taken of the whole comments database on an hourly basis that informed the encryption, so there would be changes depending on the delay between sending and receipt, but there was error correction built into the algorithm.
"To decrypt the message, our friend fires off another script, which fires off a lot more scripts to servers that we have good reason to query regularly, maybe we've got connections to their web monitor services, you know, so-called 'antivirus' software keeping tabs on bored staff in offices watching or listening to Youtube videos all day. No one notices the odd API call coming from a device and FTP'ing the result on to somewhere else, especially when it's hidden in another process that looks like legit monitoring software. So we effectively had input and output matrices, bish bash bosh, there's your message, or any file or data you care to send.
"Just for a laugh, we once even sent a video, ripped from Youtube, stored across Youtube comments, and then sent back through Youtube comments. It was across a couple of million videos and it took a few hours. We joked that it was like having a 28k modem made in Minecraft."
Ha, that is quite funny. I played Minecraft when I was a toddler.
"Very cute. So anyway, we had this method of communicating, but how to get the bots to say the right things? If a user pops up and says something that's a random jumble of letters, it sets off alarms and checks, and the account might be suspended, investigated, generally compromised. Setting up fake Google accounts even then was a surprisingly tedious process, so once you've got one in good standing you want to be careful with it. I don't think the people at Google or Youtube ever tacked onto what we were doing, but you never know. Even if they did figure it out, they'd keep quiet about it for as long as possible to avoid spooking advertisers.
"We only needed one character, in a specific position, from each comment. We had some clever linguistic software that could craft intelligent-sounding comments, or stupid-sounding comments, on any given theme, around a single character in one position. It was good enough to craft them around ten or twenty characters without making the comment sound artificial, but we judged that that was placing too much information too close together, so we decided to stick with one per message.
"The hardest thing to do in the first place, was to find a critical mass of comments. The comments were our canvas, but it actually took a big canvas to find patterns of comments that the algorithm could work with. Think of it like a needle in a hay stack - old Farmer Youtube doesn't want needles in his haystacks, so if you're using his haystacks as an unconventional means for transporting your needles, you need lots of haystacks or he might notice that they're getting heavier than they used to be and start introducing metal detectors, and then you'll have to find another farmer. And Farmer Youtube was and still is the one with by far the most haystacks - but that's partly thanks to us, too.
"People didn't always used to rush to be the first to comment on a video just for the sake of it. We started doing that because it was so easy, then kids started copying us, wanting to be first. You can get addicted to anything if it's marketed right, and we pushed comments hard. The comments sections were there for a pretty long time before we shifted the spotlight onto them, made them seem exotic and dangerous.
"You know all those comments screaming about stuff? Far right, far left, racist, homophobic, feminist, misogynist, anarchist, fascist, libertarian, whatever - most of it's real people, really getting so angry about the stories they're being told, that they have to express themselves right there and then. We just needed our bots to get the ball moving - to 'start a conversation' as they say - then human beings kept it rolling, with only a little encouragement from us now and then. Most of the comments you'd probably think were bots, weren't bots. Not ours, anyway. They were mostly real people responding to other real people, and we were just happy that they were all there, to give us a crowd for our robots to blend into when necessary.
"Like I said, we didn't expect this to work as well as it did. We didn't think people would get so addicted to putting their opinions across, and to be honest we didn't factor in the emotional payoff from feeling listened to and arguing back, feeling like you matter. Everyone thinks they've got a unique opinion, and while they are technically correct, in reality they're doing little more than putting their own spin on the acceptable tropes of the day, so if you want people to continue doing it, it's very important that people get feedback to know if they're doing it right or not. It's embarrassing, how easy it is to make people think that someone else cares what they think.
"The irony was, that what began as a means for government agencies to communicate securely, ended up giving these people phenomenal power in a different way, once they realised what all these dummy messages could do. It gave them the power to experiment with pushing ideas from all over the political spectrum, seeing exactly how different demographics would react in real time, and then focusing their real-world campaigning just on the ones that scored high with specific groups. What we called Reaction Modelling became the biggest secret in big data, and it was right in everyone's faces. We went from exploiting reality to creating reality, all with complete anonymity, and all as a side effect of a smart new system of meta-encryption on a website we didn't have to pay to use, and that didn't even know we were using it. Pretty cool, eh?"
You're so full of shit, Ian.
"You really think so?"
Yes.
"Glad to hear it. I'll settle my tab now."
"Yeah, go on then. But since the bar's quiet, do you want to hear how back in the day, us lads in the PropOps department made the online world what it is now? How we changed the path of online discourse, and, arguably, changed the world?"
Sounds as gripping as ever. Why not. Your tab's £35.60.
"Our boys in R&D came up with a killer form of encryption. I think they came up with the idea for fun, just throwing stuff around, but we ran with it and it ended up being maybe the sharpest weapon in our arsenal. Want to guess what it was?"
No idea. Hit me.
"Youtube comments."
I guess you don't mean getting people to conduct top-secret conversations in the comments section.
"Nope. Have a guess how we used them."
I dunno... some daft code, like 'the sarcastic cormorant is in Grandfather's playpen'? Nah, you wouldn't bother telling me that. Maybe... grammatically correct encryption? Doesn't seem very likely.
"That's right, we tried it and it's a pain in the arse. No, we communicated - and agencies possibly still do communicate - with bots. In the late noughties we came up with an encryption method that treated all the comments left under all Youtube videos - and I do mean all Youtube videos - as an enormous database, always changing and growing, but mostly persistent. The offline algorithm at one end would encode your message, ideally already encrypted, into bits of data to be buried in comments on Youtube pages. You get a fairly simple script, send that off to a friendly server somewhere and in a couple of seconds bots have written out your message across a few hundred or thousand Youtube pages, one bit at a time. The pages to be used were part of the encryption protocol. There were images being taken of the whole comments database on an hourly basis that informed the encryption, so there would be changes depending on the delay between sending and receipt, but there was error correction built into the algorithm.
"To decrypt the message, our friend fires off another script, which fires off a lot more scripts to servers that we have good reason to query regularly, maybe we've got connections to their web monitor services, you know, so-called 'antivirus' software keeping tabs on bored staff in offices watching or listening to Youtube videos all day. No one notices the odd API call coming from a device and FTP'ing the result on to somewhere else, especially when it's hidden in another process that looks like legit monitoring software. So we effectively had input and output matrices, bish bash bosh, there's your message, or any file or data you care to send.
"Just for a laugh, we once even sent a video, ripped from Youtube, stored across Youtube comments, and then sent back through Youtube comments. It was across a couple of million videos and it took a few hours. We joked that it was like having a 28k modem made in Minecraft."
Ha, that is quite funny. I played Minecraft when I was a toddler.
"Very cute. So anyway, we had this method of communicating, but how to get the bots to say the right things? If a user pops up and says something that's a random jumble of letters, it sets off alarms and checks, and the account might be suspended, investigated, generally compromised. Setting up fake Google accounts even then was a surprisingly tedious process, so once you've got one in good standing you want to be careful with it. I don't think the people at Google or Youtube ever tacked onto what we were doing, but you never know. Even if they did figure it out, they'd keep quiet about it for as long as possible to avoid spooking advertisers.
"We only needed one character, in a specific position, from each comment. We had some clever linguistic software that could craft intelligent-sounding comments, or stupid-sounding comments, on any given theme, around a single character in one position. It was good enough to craft them around ten or twenty characters without making the comment sound artificial, but we judged that that was placing too much information too close together, so we decided to stick with one per message.
"The hardest thing to do in the first place, was to find a critical mass of comments. The comments were our canvas, but it actually took a big canvas to find patterns of comments that the algorithm could work with. Think of it like a needle in a hay stack - old Farmer Youtube doesn't want needles in his haystacks, so if you're using his haystacks as an unconventional means for transporting your needles, you need lots of haystacks or he might notice that they're getting heavier than they used to be and start introducing metal detectors, and then you'll have to find another farmer. And Farmer Youtube was and still is the one with by far the most haystacks - but that's partly thanks to us, too.
"People didn't always used to rush to be the first to comment on a video just for the sake of it. We started doing that because it was so easy, then kids started copying us, wanting to be first. You can get addicted to anything if it's marketed right, and we pushed comments hard. The comments sections were there for a pretty long time before we shifted the spotlight onto them, made them seem exotic and dangerous.
"You know all those comments screaming about stuff? Far right, far left, racist, homophobic, feminist, misogynist, anarchist, fascist, libertarian, whatever - most of it's real people, really getting so angry about the stories they're being told, that they have to express themselves right there and then. We just needed our bots to get the ball moving - to 'start a conversation' as they say - then human beings kept it rolling, with only a little encouragement from us now and then. Most of the comments you'd probably think were bots, weren't bots. Not ours, anyway. They were mostly real people responding to other real people, and we were just happy that they were all there, to give us a crowd for our robots to blend into when necessary.
"Like I said, we didn't expect this to work as well as it did. We didn't think people would get so addicted to putting their opinions across, and to be honest we didn't factor in the emotional payoff from feeling listened to and arguing back, feeling like you matter. Everyone thinks they've got a unique opinion, and while they are technically correct, in reality they're doing little more than putting their own spin on the acceptable tropes of the day, so if you want people to continue doing it, it's very important that people get feedback to know if they're doing it right or not. It's embarrassing, how easy it is to make people think that someone else cares what they think.
"The irony was, that what began as a means for government agencies to communicate securely, ended up giving these people phenomenal power in a different way, once they realised what all these dummy messages could do. It gave them the power to experiment with pushing ideas from all over the political spectrum, seeing exactly how different demographics would react in real time, and then focusing their real-world campaigning just on the ones that scored high with specific groups. What we called Reaction Modelling became the biggest secret in big data, and it was right in everyone's faces. We went from exploiting reality to creating reality, all with complete anonymity, and all as a side effect of a smart new system of meta-encryption on a website we didn't have to pay to use, and that didn't even know we were using it. Pretty cool, eh?"
You're so full of shit, Ian.
"You really think so?"
Yes.
"Glad to hear it. I'll settle my tab now."
Farmer Youtube trying pull needles out of a haystack is an amazing metaphor on so many different levels.
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