šŸ›” Digital Protection Magick

I was wondering about different things to do with this especially with AI filters that use an image of you or Avatars or BitMojiā€¦ those types of things. Does that make sense? I hope so :laughing: :green_salad:

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It makes sense! Those AI image filter things kind of freak me out because I donā€™t know what the AI is doing with my image besides making it look like something elseā€¦ :laughing: but I donā€™t know if putting a sigil or something over your picture, even if hidden, would affect the filter at all. That might be something worth experimenting with!

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Storing it in its database and using your face to train itself (and possibly other AI). :face_with_peeking_eye:

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Yeah, thatā€™s 100% my concern :joy: and itā€™s why I donā€™t let my child use AI filters or things either because thatā€™s just freaky and it scares me.

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Same. :scream:

It goes beyond privacy, too. Someone gets a hold of enough photos, and suddenly, we can be deepfaked into anything. The resulting content could be mundane, adult-content creepy, or even illegal. :grimacing: Weā€™re in too early to know or regulate what could happen, really. Itā€™s a legitimate concern.

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Update: My partner just told me that a new AI was just released that can achieve this with one picture. They donā€™t need hours of training anymore.

The result isnā€™t amazing. But could easily pass if made to look like a low quality capture, such as a Zoom call with poor connection or surveillance footage.

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That is legitimately terrifying :flushed: I knew it was coming, especially with the TikTok filters that can make people dance with just a picture of themā€¦ but the amount of damage that can be done is scary. Itā€™s a good reminder to keep up the magical and mundane protection measures.

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For sure! :witch_pentacle: Iā€™ll keep updating as new developments happen, too.

My partner adds that thereā€™s also an AI thatā€™s really good at spotting deepfakes. They commented that thereā€™s an AI arms race now.

When my body recovers from this mild food poisoning stuff I have going on, Iā€™ll try to brainstorm some more ideas of how we can do digital protection magick. Security while online is something Iā€™m very passionate about and have lectured many classes in person on. But combining it with magick is still new territory for me. You have so much so well covered here that I may not be able to, but gosh darn it, I will try. :rofl:

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Thereā€™s definitely some kind of AI race going on. Iā€™m trying to keep Microsoft from putting their AI thing on my computer with the updates :unamused: it is sketchy territory, for sure!

There is no such thing as too many options for protection magic! :clap: Iā€™m sure you have other things to share, too.


It makes me wonder what sort of text can be added to a siteā€™s robot.txt fileā€¦ :thinking: I know I have added different phrases that are supposed to keep AI scrapers from scraping my website. Now I will have to brainstorm (and learn more about) adding different things to the file as a magickal protection, too!

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This is definitely something thatā€™s important. Following with interest. @starborn may you get better soon. :sparkling_heart:

Some good runes to use would be :algiz: for protection and I would bind it with :isaz: for self preservation. You can draw it on every image online. You could also add in :haglaz: as a throwback, where any malicious intent plunges into chaos, but Iā€™d have to think on the practicality of that (runes can backfire :face_with_monocle:). I know Ivy the chaos witch made a sigil for Palestine that was protected from malicious use.

On the up. Nature is a formidable force and one thing I believe is that when mother has had enough of our medling sheā€™ll remind us of how small we are, and pull the plug on our power supply. The IT glitch thatā€™s hit the world today, kind of reminded me that no matter how amazing our technology inventions are, we are humbled under the forces of nature, our systems are not quite as good as hers. This gives me hope, the Universe will step in when we get too above ourselves and will cause a power cut. Donā€™t be scared witches, weā€™ve got bigger forces behind us, I truly believe that. :partying_face:

(Mind you, if AI could knock a few years and a few pounds off me and put that in the real world, Iā€™d be grateful :grin:, save me having to exercise and diet :rofl:)

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I found this. Had to share

BBC News reader comment

ā€œAI, coded by people? Itā€™ll probably just crash like everything else as soon as it encounters a Windows pc.ā€ :rofl:

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These are good, Tracy - thanks for sharing! While I donā€™t use runes myself, Iā€™m glad to know that there are options for those who do!

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I donā€™t use AI for my own personal pictures and certainly not ones being sharedā€¦ Iā€™m trying to thinkā€¦ My son had made the 2 images with an AI filter when my daughter and I went to a sunset but I was sooo self consciousā€¦ I used to play with the Snapchat or Instagram ones when I was with my daughter while the world was shut down. Other than thatā€¦ no. I donā€™t wanna :laughing:

Also, @MeganBā€¦ there is some kind of AI thing happening. My laptop wants to put some AI generator thing on it too that I keep denying but now Google has one, Samsung, Apple, there is a definite race of some kind happening. I remember when Cortana first started on the laptop and Bixby on my phone. They were disabled so quickly! Now I have Co-Pilot or something trying to be added, Genesis through Google, and no :rofl:

I have the shutter closed on my laptop camera, and there was something else that I was likeā€¦ Nopeā€¦ and then removed it or disabled it. I canā€™t remember what it was, though. I did do a good physical cleaning of my laptop the other day though.

I was thinking because of all the things running around of doing something on my laptop itself and something for any images I use as profile pictures that are actual images or AI creations of me. So, for right now, my profile pictures are not of myself in any way :laughing: I have geotagging and some personalized ads, suggestions, and the like disabled, too.

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As far as Iā€™m aware, technically, youā€™re making a polite request, and itā€™s still up to the search engines and other bots to respect that request. :sweat_smile: Some wonā€™t, Iā€™m sure.

I think I should probably start including more magickal protection into my digital presence, too. My website is all coded by me, so it should be easily enough to weave a whole lot of stuff in between the lines that doesnā€™t actually render on the page at all. :thinking:

Oh, I have some ideasā€¦ When I have the energy Iā€™ll give it a try.

:pray: :black_heart: Thank you.

I agree in that we should be humbled by the forces of nature. :zap:

But I personally believe that Gaia doesnā€™t have to put us in our placeā€”weā€™re already doing that to ourselves and the IT outage is a great example of it, I think. Sure, she could zap one thing and watch us pay via the chain reaction caused. But she can also just sit back and watch us do it to ourselves on our own.

(I think itā€™s our fault because we arenā€™t making things to last. Especially with technology. Weā€™re rushing things out the door to get them out there before the other company all the time. And weā€™re building on top of other structures on top of other structures on top of other structures. All it takes is one exploit to take that whole tower down. I love programming but, damn, is it misused.)

Pretty much like this image:

But for a more humourous approach, thereā€™s this guy who makes a lot of funny (but all too real) videos:

This video is basically about how one solar flare can take out all of our tech. Since we (humanity) donā€™t really do anything to protect ourselves from that, itā€™ll be 100% our own fault. :sweat_smile:

I mean, imagine rolling some dice every single day and hoping you donā€™t get that one-in-a-billion roll. Youā€™ll get that roll one day. Itā€™s inevitable.

Anyway, point being: digital protection is very important. :pray: :black_heart:

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I hope that, when you do get the energy, you can come back here to share your ideas with us! :heart: Iā€™ve thought about coding my own website and moving away from systems such as WordPress, but I have no time for that and I have such a backlog of blog posts that it would just be so daunting, never mind the fact that Iā€™d have to do a lot of 301-redirects so things donā€™t get lost :joy: anyway, thatā€™s a topic for a different post.

Yes, to that! :pray: :consecrate_spell:

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Moving away from WordPress eventually could be a good security improvement. Its popularity means that itā€™s a really big target for anyone to hack. For example, whenever bots crawl for insecurities, they always check for the WordPress login routes, no matter what kind of website youā€™re hosting. So you can check any websiteā€™s attempted route usage and see /wp-admin and /login and so on even if theyā€™re not WordPress websites.

I guess that means a quick security improvement anyone with (self-hosted) WordPress could do is change their admin area and login routes to something else. So instead of /wp-admin and /login, one could take the Elder Futhark and make related routes like /eihwaz for connection, inspiration, and protection, and /naudiz for restriction, resistance, survival and agreements, respectively. Another alternative for the login route with the runes could be /algiz for guardians and defence. Or a combination of things.

Oh. I just realised that you just saying the word ā€œWordPressā€ gave me some more concrete ideas. :rofl: Go us!

Note: Not trying to push you to make your own website soon or at all. Coding your own website, especially a blog, takes a lot of work. Even if youā€™re good at making websites, it consumes a lot of time. I still havenā€™t finished my witchy website and it looks like Iā€™ll be lucky to be done by the end of the year. (Mostly because Iā€™m prioritising many other things before it, but stillā€¦)

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Oh, those are all really good ideas! Iā€™m gonna pocket them for later :joy: I had actually coded my entire website back when something kept crashing my website. It was some sort of plugin or something and I couldnā€™t figure it out. I was so tired of it crashing and never working right that I said ā€œscrew itā€ and coded everything myself. Then I got WordPress fixed and, like a dumb dumb, I deleted all the files from coding the site! I get the itch to do it over again all the time but, as youā€™re doing, have to (or want to) prioritize other things :sweat_smile:

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