Audrey Tang

Exactly.

Exactly. It's a strict liability for you.

Right. And so as long as there's like 80% of vendors in a night market adopting that code, it creates immense social pressure on the remaining 20%. So within a month or so, everybody started printing those one and two SMS characters.

But they do. If you want to create new Gmail accounts or Facebook accounts or whatever, at some point, like on the second account, it starts asking for that.

And on PTT, like the local Reddit equivalent, you need to pay the SMS by manually texting. And go back to PTT because it's non-profit, right? So it doesn't have the money to pay Twilio. So you have to pay that in by SMS.

Yeah. So PTT was a victim of fake accounts for a very long time. But the great thing about PTT is that it's open source. You can find its source code on GitHub, and people who want to improve PTT can just send pull requests. It's been in the social sector for 25 years now.

So obviously, people very quickly converged on SMS and in an active mode, on the passive receiving mode as a way to verify. So yes, I think at peak infodemic 2018, PTT was one of the first to switch to freezing all new account creations. They purged the inauthentic coordinated accounts. And then for every new one, you now need to do this reverse SMS authentication.

But only with a reverse SMS.

No. If there are disputes, like if you're flagged as a robot or something, then you're prompted to prove. And if you want to run advertisements, that's just a freedom of reach. You have to authenticate that you're a local resident, at least, if not a citizen. To run advertisements, you have to have an invoice number, I think.

Yeah. So if you go to the ad library, it will actually show the unified registration number. So you need to have a registered company number, which means you're at least a resident.

SIM card?

Just to your earlier point. I think Twitter probably said that they're using credit card numbers for the same purpose. You're asked to pay a minuscule amount just to prove you're a human. And if one single credit card number created 5000 different accounts, they will know.

And if somebody manufactured 5000 credit card numbers, well, the banks will know. So it's piggybacking on the bank system like we did piggyback on the telecom system ultimately for the same purpose. And I think because social security numbers are not used that way in the US, just like our health card number is not used this way in Taiwan.

So I think credit card number is by far more preferred. Especially you can do debit cards.

Some identity verification.

Exactly.

Exactly. And with SMS and photo ID and with Taiwan being famously known for unlimited 4G bandwidth for $15 a month, everybody has that. I think this is more universal. But of course, the bank system is stronger.

But I think we push for the more universal system simply because people who are residents, people who are unbanked, people who are under 18 are equally active in the Taiwanese democracy. So it makes no sense to exclude it just because they're a resident or they haven't turned 18.

Yes, and I would say yes. There's a strong factor in being clone-proof-ish in the social media platforms.

That's a worm, right?

To do things other than survive?

With a P3 lab. I'm sorry, not going there. But actually, that's where it intersects.

If you can arbitrarily increase virality on something toxic that's not viral, or if you can arbitrarily increase toxicity on something that's already viral, if you engineer that, then it's still a virus, but it's now also a weapon. I'm not going conspiracy theory.

Which jurisdiction, that's right.

Well, because we cannot attribute conclusively just based on IP address or metadata. If you just look at an IP address, it's almost always from some botnet. And for what we know, those botnets are for rent. Anyone can rent them.

So, like the origin of the kind of state-based actor, we can make educated guesses. But even Microsoft just says it's Volt Typhoon or something, right?

Yeah, I think Microsoft stops at Volt Typhoon or some other typhoon, shows characteristics that it may be funded by a certain nation state, but they never say that it is of that nation state in origin, which is different. Like, this may be a PR company or whatever.

That's right.

Right. The notion of a nation state is wrong because it's like trying to trace COVID to a nation state origin, and it may actually come from a certain nation state origin, but it doesn't matter when it's out.

So whether it passes to Italy and then to someplace and back to Taiwan, or whether it goes straight from Wuhan to Taiwan, it almost doesn't matter. When you work in pandemic control, you just want to safeguard your order, regardless of which place the airline is coming from. We realized that very quickly in the pandemic case.

Yeah, we had travel bubbles, Taiwan-Palau, Taiwan-New Zealand, or something like that. But because these were few and far between, we basically said that, no, the quarantine is just there.

And, I mean, you made a really good point. It's conceivable that maybe, you know, Iceland, New Zealand, Taiwan or Palau or whatever can be a major group of a shared border.

Exactly. No, this is really good. And I would still just say that it just extends the notion of domestic. So the domestic foreign distinction is still there. It's not like domestic foreign and allies. When you're doing travel bubbles, you're essentially considering them domestic. Taiwan is many islands, actually, so we already have some of them.

It's everybody's job. Your job and mine.

So if it becomes difficult to be authentic, one needs to empower each individual to choose whatever way they're most comfortable with to stay authentic.

That's almost like a trick question. Because this is like asking a central arbiter where power needs to concentrate now that we have shapeshifters, but that itself assumes a dial, how much trust you implicitly trust that arbiter.

But from the contact tracing SMS case that we just brought up, it's evenly split between the telecoms, the venues, the individuals, the people who make those SMS scanning apps, including LINE and so on. And when it's everybody's job, there's real check and balance, so that when somebody wants to abuse that, everybody else can make a feasible alternative to bypass that and render that attempt at capturing obsolete.

If you start with saying that we need to, and I'm sorry for saying that, trust karma for everything, the health code for everything, then it overly concentrates power so that it then becomes the nexus in which people want to stop protests, people who want to stop citizen assemblies and so on, they naturally hack into that.

Right? That's the Hunan case, yes.

Sure.

Of course.

[inaudible]

Yeah, so as you mentioned, the fact that Facebook decides to outsource whatever with the IFCN members shows that there are nexus powers with credible neutrality that can act not just as advocacy, but as co-producers, as symbiotic producers to the information ecosystem.

I think one of the contributions that Cofacts people make is that even within people who make like browser extensions, and I will use one very concrete example like Gogolook, which is a local startup, it has this app called Message Checker, and when you install it, I think it's Android only for now, it scans all the push notifications. So it doesn't care whether you use Facebook, LINE, or Instagram, because it works entirely locally, like a spam filter does.

So the more you move to the edge, to the downstream, to the deployment site, the more freedom you have to work with multiple information sources. So instead of waiting for Facebook to change its algorithm, you can just like actually advertisement blockers is the canonical example, you can just customize your experience by working with things like Message Checker.

Yes.

But that's how spam fighting and advertisement blocking work.

It's not an effective dopamine-like slot machine.

That's how podcasts work, right? So they use just this ancient format of Atom or RSS, but all the innovation happened on the edge on the podcast readers and players.

Oh, super intelligence alignment. [laughter]