#cib

Well this is concerning.

I just suspended 14 Russian LLM generated bot accounts that were created around April 17 on my Mastodon instance, twit.social. Somehow they circumvented manual registration approval. I've turned on Captchas (much as I hate them) for new member requests in the hopes that will stop the bots. They must have discovered a registration bypass bug.

Thanks to IFTAS SW-ISAC for noting and reporting the bots.

We are excited to announce that @ted@an.errant.cloud and @andresmh@hci.social have joined the IFTAS Advisory Board!

Ted is a distinguished leader in open-source technology and digital public interest work. With his deep expertise in fostering privacy, transparency, and ethical tech practices, Ted brings invaluable insight to our mission of building safer, more equitable digital spaces.

Ted’s career spans pivotal roles in both corporate and nonprofit sectors, with a particular focus on open-source solutions that empower users and prioritize ethical use of data. As Director of Product at Mozilla, he led projects that promote user privacy and responsible tech development. Before Mozilla, Ted was the CEO of DocumentCloud, where he helped investigative journalists access critical information through open-source tools that strengthened transparency in the media landscape.

Andrés leads multidisciplinary research teams that build and study technologies designed to help people connect and collaborate in new ways. He is the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Princeton and an assistant professor in Princeton’s Department of Computer Science. He also serves on the board of Crisis Text Line. Andrés and his team have created and deployed social technologies used by millions of people, including the Scratch web site—an award-winning online community for children to learn programming.

At IFTAS, we are committed to creating a decentralised social internet that is safe and inclusive. Andrés and Ted bring a wealth of experience in trust, safety, and decentralised technologies to help steer our initiatives. In joining the advisory board, they will offer strategic guidance on key projects, including our ongoing efforts to develop a robust content classification service for detecting and mitigating harmful content in the Fediverse.

We are thrilled to welcome Andrés and Ted to our team, and we look forward to the exciting collaborations ahead as we continue working toward a safer, more just digital world.