5 ms·

Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more. Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current

Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more. Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago
scamming appears to be lone industry where LLMs are truly a 10x revolution
- timacles 6mo ago
  scamming and advertising. Generate hyper personalized ads in any format! Embed them stealthily into virtually any context! I guarantee thats all big tech is thinking about as the future of LLMs. All this coding stuff is merely a good will investment to buy them time until they can implement this
  - tardedmeme 6mo ago
    My former employer is now generating AI video ads tailored to the specific user.
riedel 6mo ago
And cloudflare can actually sell them priority access to pass their bot protection or introduce micropaiments for agents access content. I feel cloudflare is getting a bit scary tbh. It is like your friendly bot net.
- adamas 6mo ago
  I mean, Cloudflare was always kind of scary. They filter the world wide web, literally.
  - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
    Yea, I appreciate them protecting it from DDOS. I always viewed them as a responsible company. To me this feels irresponsible and like it's main goal is to forward autonomous cyber attacks. Which is antithetical to what they do? Maybe I am missing the legitimate use case here, but I can only see this being used for removing responsibility from crime or espionage? Does anyone know offhand if cloudflare is a department of war contractor? I never looked into it. But this smells funny to me Somehow the Internet needs biometrics and age verification everywhere but also chat bots can buy property there without too much thought.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
      Their TLS proxy is an open invitation to be backdoored on the unencrypted side even if they don't officially coordinate.
      - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
        I never thought about that, but yes I would be weary of that as well.
    - tardedmeme 6mo ago
      Most people don't get DDOSed, and for many of the ones that do, they can just wait it out until the attacker gets tired of burning money. It's very costly and risky for the attacker. Obviously they do occur sometimes - so does murder - but Cloudflare is massively exaggerating the risk of drive-by shootings to make you buy their bulletproof vests.
- dragonelite 6mo ago
  It's the western great fire wall, good thing the things within the fire wall is huge and encapsulate still most of the world.
- dwroberts 6mo ago
  This made me realise they’re doing the same thing the AI labs are doing: selling both the problem and the solution. They are arming spammers and scammers with these tools so you need their product to protect yourself from them
  - cyanydeez 6mo ago
    Welcome to the grift economy.
    - kingleopold 6mo ago
      state did this for centuries or longer btw. they create violence/war in some area of the planet, then offer to "fix it". like wmd's in iraq and hormuz problem now, lmao. remember how hormuz was not a problem and it was wideoy peaceful and open months ago? lol
      - cyanydeez 6mo ago
        you can just say "Society"; it's bizarre people think there's some magic to governance that's above in beyond people forming groups and rules.
        goatlover 6mo ago
        Depends on how democratic the Society is. The less so, the more it's a powerful minority at the top. How much say did the average US citizen have in starting this war with Iran? It's not something the current administration ran on to get elected. It's not very popular in the polling.
      - fhn 6mo ago
        but you live in these "states" so aren't you the problem?
sshine 6mo ago
The DNS provider I recently switched to surprised me with a policy: To create records for more than one domain, you need to write a personal support email. They say it's to raise DNSSEC awareness, but I think it's also a robot captcha.
- kreco 6mo ago
  > To create records for more than one domain, you need to write a personal support email. I'm not all familiar with this so I don't understand why it's not a ticket or any other non-automated action even for a single domain ? I mean what is "the standard" that would actually allow a robot to register a domain to a DNS registry ?
  - sshine 6mo ago
    > what is "the standard" that would actually allow a robot to register a domain to a DNS registry ? For DNS, the standard is Terraform. For domain registry (the fact that a domain even exists, not what it points to), there are no end-user facing standards.
- impjohn 6mo ago
  That kind of captcha has a very short half life. Software ate the world now AI is eating software
- mapkkk 6mo ago
  Are you perchance talking about deSEC? I've also switched to them, and thought that it was too much work to send an email and wait for replies, so I ended up using dummy inboxes for my other, lesser important domains. Though I guess it's still a good thing they do this? At the time I remember being mildly inconvenienced, but not enough to actually care. I just remember thinking, "How is this nonprofit going to handle all that support volume?".
  - sshine 6mo ago
    Yes, deSEC. They replied somewhat quickly (for humans). I had accumulated enough hope for them to wait the 25 hours it took them. And yes, I wouldn't go this way either.
Yizahi 6mo ago
LLM generation in general provides the most use to scammers and the like. Generate emails which people won't read, generate articles which are just honeypots or rip-offs, generate images to said articles, generate more and more spam. Every legit use case for LLM practically requires that human would verify the result manually, at least briefly. But spammers can enjoy skipping that step, since content was never a main priority in the first place.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  So true
- pixel_popping 6mo ago
  I disagree frankly, as the next wave is clearly fully autonomous businesses.
  - notarobot123 6mo ago
    Agreed, "fully autonomous businesses" is the evolutionary next step for spam. Spamcorp services are the future. Don't resist it, that would be futile.
    - jcgrillo 6mo ago
      Onion routing but for shell companies instead of packets
  - ToucanLoucan 6mo ago
    I challenge you to explain a business plan for a fully automated business that isn't at least a bit shady.
    - neom 6mo ago
      Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process is very tedious.
wildrhythms 6mo ago
The new goal is to flood the Internet with so much junk that human-created content can be sold back to us in a walled garden.
ttul 6mo ago
I'm convinced that one of the top use cases for OpenClaw is orchestrating cold outreach email campaigns, as if there's nothing wrong with using AI to spam people to death. Platforms that enable sending cold emails are taking a sizeable risk that the low engagement of such emails stimulates some worsening inbox deliverability for the rest of their traffic (see [1] - you can't hide just by sending through big tenanted platforms like Amazon). [1] Every message sent from Amazon SES carries a "Feedback-Id" header that allows Google (and anyone else) to track the Amazon account responsible for the message. The fourth field is an opaque but stable identifier associated with your Amazon account; receivers can and do use this for rate limiting: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/understanding-google-postmaster-tools-spam-complaints-for-amazon-ses-email-senders/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/underst...
- tardedmeme 6mo ago
  Doesn't Amazon let you create many accounts?
  - ttul 6mo ago
    Technically, you could create many top level Amazon accounts, but if you want to send lots of mail, you must warm up your account. So accounts can be created, but it’s useless if you need to send high volumes of messages.
kukkeliskuu 6mo ago
I have a hobby or we could even say an addiction of having lota of ideas for various kinds of things. Part of the fun is inventing a name, visual identity, logo etc. and donain nane is part of it. Maybe they never reach production but many have. I have tools to automate boring parts like any developer would — and I could essily use something like this.
zuzululu 6mo ago
but they have been doing that already for ages even before AI
aftbit 6mo ago
The only use case that pops into my mind is to build a product like Shopify that sets up a store, email, landing page, etc all from one chat-bot interface.
fckgw 6mo ago
I was about to say, this type of automated domain purchasing and deployment is a godsend to scammers. They buy up a bunch of .top, .shop and .xyz domains for $1 each. They spam them out in in all those "USPS tracking" spam text and Facebook fake store ads. The shelf life on these domains is a few days at best before they get shut down, now you can automate domain rotation and not have to pause your spam campaigns.
- tardedmeme 6mo ago
  How come their domain registrar accounts don't get shut down?
neilv 6mo ago
> Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more. Buy why do this, unless you're in the business of arming both sides of a conflict? (With a side bonus of designing a defense product in such a way that you reverse much of the ground that was gained with "HTTPS everywhere", to give you centralized cleartext access to much of the Internet traffic.)
Computer0 6mo ago
When I am searching for a cool domains to buy I script everything except buying
matt-p 6mo ago
I kind of agree with you, I would hazard that this is perhaps targeted towards folks (maybe TPMs, small business owners) who are using ai to start a software side business or make a website and have never bought a domain before or configured DNS. I guess also; something that saves me 20 minutes a few times a year is still nice.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

scamming appears to be lone industry where LLMs are truly a 10x revolution

timacles 6mo ago
scamming and advertising. Generate hyper personalized ads in any format! Embed them stealthily into virtually any context! I guarantee thats all big tech is thinking about as the future of LLMs. All this coding stuff is merely a good will investment to buy them time until they can implement this
- tardedmeme 6mo ago
  My former employer is now generating AI video ads tailored to the specific user.

riedel 6mo ago

And cloudflare can actually sell them priority access to pass their bot protection or introduce micropaiments for agents access content. I feel cloudflare is getting a bit scary tbh. It is like your friendly bot net.

adamas 6mo ago
I mean, Cloudflare was always kind of scary. They filter the world wide web, literally.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  Yea, I appreciate them protecting it from DDOS. I always viewed them as a responsible company. To me this feels irresponsible and like it's main goal is to forward autonomous cyber attacks. Which is antithetical to what they do? Maybe I am missing the legitimate use case here, but I can only see this being used for removing responsibility from crime or espionage? Does anyone know offhand if cloudflare is a department of war contractor? I never looked into it. But this smells funny to me Somehow the Internet needs biometrics and age verification everywhere but also chat bots can buy property there without too much thought.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
    Their TLS proxy is an open invitation to be backdoored on the unencrypted side even if they don't officially coordinate.
    - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
      I never thought about that, but yes I would be weary of that as well.
  - tardedmeme 6mo ago
    Most people don't get DDOSed, and for many of the ones that do, they can just wait it out until the attacker gets tired of burning money. It's very costly and risky for the attacker. Obviously they do occur sometimes - so does murder - but Cloudflare is massively exaggerating the risk of drive-by shootings to make you buy their bulletproof vests.
dragonelite 6mo ago
It's the western great fire wall, good thing the things within the fire wall is huge and encapsulate still most of the world.
dwroberts 6mo ago
This made me realise they’re doing the same thing the AI labs are doing: selling both the problem and the solution. They are arming spammers and scammers with these tools so you need their product to protect yourself from them
- cyanydeez 6mo ago
  Welcome to the grift economy.
  - kingleopold 6mo ago
    state did this for centuries or longer btw. they create violence/war in some area of the planet, then offer to "fix it". like wmd's in iraq and hormuz problem now, lmao. remember how hormuz was not a problem and it was wideoy peaceful and open months ago? lol
    - cyanydeez 6mo ago
      you can just say "Society"; it's bizarre people think there's some magic to governance that's above in beyond people forming groups and rules.
      - goatlover 6mo ago
        Depends on how democratic the Society is. The less so, the more it's a powerful minority at the top. How much say did the average US citizen have in starting this war with Iran? It's not something the current administration ran on to get elected. It's not very popular in the polling.
    - fhn 6mo ago
      but you live in these "states" so aren't you the problem?

sshine 6mo ago

The DNS provider I recently switched to surprised me with a policy: To create records for more than one domain, you need to write a personal support email. They say it's to raise DNSSEC awareness, but I think it's also a robot captcha.

kreco 6mo ago
> To create records for more than one domain, you need to write a personal support email. I'm not all familiar with this so I don't understand why it's not a ticket or any other non-automated action even for a single domain ? I mean what is "the standard" that would actually allow a robot to register a domain to a DNS registry ?
- sshine 6mo ago
  > what is "the standard" that would actually allow a robot to register a domain to a DNS registry ? For DNS, the standard is Terraform. For domain registry (the fact that a domain even exists, not what it points to), there are no end-user facing standards.
impjohn 6mo ago
That kind of captcha has a very short half life. Software ate the world now AI is eating software
mapkkk 6mo ago
Are you perchance talking about deSEC? I've also switched to them, and thought that it was too much work to send an email and wait for replies, so I ended up using dummy inboxes for my other, lesser important domains. Though I guess it's still a good thing they do this? At the time I remember being mildly inconvenienced, but not enough to actually care. I just remember thinking, "How is this nonprofit going to handle all that support volume?".
- sshine 6mo ago
  Yes, deSEC. They replied somewhat quickly (for humans). I had accumulated enough hope for them to wait the 25 hours it took them. And yes, I wouldn't go this way either.

Yizahi 6mo ago

LLM generation in general provides the most use to scammers and the like. Generate emails which people won't read, generate articles which are just honeypots or rip-offs, generate images to said articles, generate more and more spam. Every legit use case for LLM practically requires that human would verify the result manually, at least briefly. But spammers can enjoy skipping that step, since content was never a main priority in the first place.

2ndorderthought 6mo ago
So true
pixel_popping 6mo ago
I disagree frankly, as the next wave is clearly fully autonomous businesses.
- notarobot123 6mo ago
  Agreed, "fully autonomous businesses" is the evolutionary next step for spam. Spamcorp services are the future. Don't resist it, that would be futile.
  - jcgrillo 6mo ago
    Onion routing but for shell companies instead of packets
- ToucanLoucan 6mo ago
  I challenge you to explain a business plan for a fully automated business that isn't at least a bit shady.
  - neom 6mo ago
    Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process is very tedious.

wildrhythms 6mo ago

The new goal is to flood the Internet with so much junk that human-created content can be sold back to us in a walled garden.

ttul 6mo ago

I'm convinced that one of the top use cases for OpenClaw is orchestrating cold outreach email campaigns, as if there's nothing wrong with using AI to spam people to death. Platforms that enable sending cold emails are taking a sizeable risk that the low engagement of such emails stimulates some worsening inbox deliverability for the rest of their traffic (see [1] - you can't hide just by sending through big tenanted platforms like Amazon). [1] Every message sent from Amazon SES carries a "Feedback-Id" header that allows Google (and anyone else) to track the Amazon account responsible for the message. The fourth field is an opaque but stable identifier associated with your Amazon account; receivers can and do use this for rate limiting: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/understanding-google-postmaster-tools-spam-complaints-for-amazon-ses-email-senders/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/underst...

tardedmeme 6mo ago
Doesn't Amazon let you create many accounts?
- ttul 6mo ago
  Technically, you could create many top level Amazon accounts, but if you want to send lots of mail, you must warm up your account. So accounts can be created, but it’s useless if you need to send high volumes of messages.

kukkeliskuu 6mo ago

I have a hobby or we could even say an addiction of having lota of ideas for various kinds of things. Part of the fun is inventing a name, visual identity, logo etc. and donain nane is part of it. Maybe they never reach production but many have. I have tools to automate boring parts like any developer would — and I could essily use something like this.

zuzululu 6mo ago

but they have been doing that already for ages even before AI

aftbit 6mo ago

The only use case that pops into my mind is to build a product like Shopify that sets up a store, email, landing page, etc all from one chat-bot interface.

fckgw 6mo ago

I was about to say, this type of automated domain purchasing and deployment is a godsend to scammers. They buy up a bunch of .top, .shop and .xyz domains for $1 each. They spam them out in in all those "USPS tracking" spam text and Facebook fake store ads. The shelf life on these domains is a few days at best before they get shut down, now you can automate domain rotation and not have to pause your spam campaigns.

tardedmeme 6mo ago
How come their domain registrar accounts don't get shut down?

neilv 6mo ago

> Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more. Buy why do this, unless you're in the business of arming both sides of a conflict? (With a side bonus of designing a defense product in such a way that you reverse much of the ground that was gained with "HTTPS everywhere", to give you centralized cleartext access to much of the Internet traffic.)

Computer0 6mo ago

When I am searching for a cool domains to buy I script everything except buying

matt-p 6mo ago

I kind of agree with you, I would hazard that this is perhaps targeted towards folks (maybe TPMs, small business owners) who are using ai to start a software side business or make a website and have never bought a domain before or configured DNS. I guess also; something that saves me 20 minutes a few times a year is still nice.