I've had similar experiences. I have a few browser extensions and other similar tidbits that I've built, and every now and then I get an email with an offer to sell it for a hundred bucks or so. Sell full scripting access to every user who installed something I made over the years? It makes me sad that that's the kind of world we're in, and sadder still knowing that surely there are people somewhere out there who do accept these bids.
It's pretty clear we're screwed as a civilization. As tech gets more powerful, the same people making these offers as well as the same people doing cyberlockers, etc will do the same with bio-tech, nano-tech and anything else then can extort others with. They'll infect you with virus to which only they have the antidote, etc....
It is most certainly not the only way to evolve and more importantly, while it can be cost effective short term, it is destructive long term. Long term everyone loses, and a concious intelligent being taking control of an evolutionary process should know not to partake in selfish destructive behaviour, otherwise is it really intelligent?
How do you know there is any ‘way to evolve’ ? Let alone multiple…
It’s possible for all promising pathways to last for hundreds of millions of years and then hit a dead end… just because a really big comet came by or some other random event.
Anything that ensures you have higher success in reproduction than others causes your traits to be over-expressed in the next generation, where if these traits are passed onto your offspring somehow, be it because they are genetically encoded, socially encoded and you have social contact with your offspring to a degree where you pass these behavioural traits on etc. then any of those things will count as an avenue through which your lineage, and therefor your species, can evolve. Now, the traditional evolutionary pressures, coming from environmental stressors have largely not impacted our species in quite some time. Don't like the climate? do we evolve because some people are better sutied and therefore reproduce more readily? no. We built climate control. We have some pathogen, where some folks are less susceptible to the pathogen? no. We develop medication to fight the disease.
However, we do have socio-economic pressures which are not being dealt with through technology like we deal with environmental pressures, so these still exist, and are complicated. Arguably more complicated than ever before. There's your economic strategy, social strategy, migratory strategy etc. all of which impact your and your offspring's reproductive success, in turn creating evolutionary pressures that lead to entrenching certain traits.
Evolution stops only when the current average is the best suited to the current environment, or when the current environment removes all selective pressure.
>How do you know there is any ‘way to evolve’ ? Let alone multiple…
I explained what evolution is and why there are many avenues through which evolutionary pressures can arise and cause change. If the explanation is beyond you, that could be a me issue, it might be you didnt read things properly, it could be the knowledge gap between us is bigger than either of us realise. Either way, I've asked an llm (local and chatgpt) to explain my comment like I am 5, and it does a good job, so try querying an llm on the topic, getting it to help bridge the gap.
*edit* ive done the same for your comment and llms seem to indicate you were trying to raise a what-if scenario of "what if all this evolution happens and is nullified by a catastrophe"
if that was your take/question/contribution we are done here, as that's not a useful or thought provoking question. What if the sun blows up tomorrow. What if it is all a false vacuum and true vacuum forms in my big toe tomorrow and space time itself unravels before i can so much as fart. If thats our line of thinking we should stop wasting our time and join a monsatry, join others in a long standing tradition of indulging a pointless and arbitrary whatif.
An intelligent species would extrapolate forward and realize that the ruthless pursuit of infinite resource expenditure is a guaranteed path to annihilation. If the game is self-destruction, then the winning move is not to play.
We aren't going to run out of efficiency gains anytime soon. And with a declining population projected, the whole infinite resources argument is less important since we can grow per person with less people
"Google offered me a pittance to take over and then kill my extension" doesn't make for a good headline. They'd rather just nuke the malicious extension when they get notified of its sketchy behaviour.
If I want to send money to someone I trust, I'd ask for their IBAN and do a bank transfer. Now, that cannot be reversed, so I really would have to trust them.
(Also, I'm assuming that both bank accounts are in SEPA countries, or at the very least countries which use IBAN, because in my life, that's likely to be true.)
Note that although the transfer itself doesn't have a recall mechanism, the recipient's identity is accessible to judges and lawyers and police officers if you got scammed.
It's for one blog post so the audience is random blog owners, not developers. Prices for e.g. taking over an established browser extension would probably be higher.
I'd think so too, but a top comment mentions hundred dollar offers for the author's extensions. I guess some devs will take that over earning nothing from an extension.
I think that's really cute that the author of the article thinks that reporting something to the FTC might be something he could do, as if the originators of this aren't working in the overseas scam equivalent of a call center that's effectively beyond US legal reach. There is no "Ben".
There's a chance that they might stall you and never actually pay (or chargeback the invoice).
That way they'll get a free link for at least some amount of time, and if done at massive scales correctly, it could bump some site up the search results for long enough.
I would definitely at least take a look at the "Received from" in SMTP envelope to confirm the physical location of the last real mail server hop (or all of the public ones).
That's great for confirming the physical location of the SMTP server connecting to your own server.
"Only publish things you'd publish otherwise" doesn't make any sense. If you had to be paid, you weren't really going to publish it. If you were really going to publish it anyway, you're deceiving the advertiser by making it seem like you require payment.
Not taking issue with the overall point of the post - this is icky. Buuut, this:
>More generally, it's bad because it deceives readers into thinking this is an organic link.
This is a huge stretch. Somewhere on the order of 0% of the average blog readers would ever see the type of link used, let alone understand that “oh, that totally shoulda been a no-follow”.
My interpretation is that they wanted the poster to create an invoice for the $105, plus an additional $4 to cover the fee PayPal charges on invoices. I assume this is so if the terms aren't followed, they can get a refund from PayPal. I don't think they were asking the poster to pay the fee.
The article mentions having the OP send a PayPal invoice...
Pretty sure the other side is not gonna pay it unless you follow through (i.e. they could always charge it back and claim you never delivered the invoiced service, heck they might do that even if you put up the link!)
