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Context
The story begins on http://leaked.cx, an unreleased music forum/board/marketplace. Basically if you don't know, artists have lots of music they don't release for whatever reason (unfinished, they just don't like it, get lazy, etc). At the same time, songs are increasingly worked on my more and more people (producers, mixing assistants, contributors), evidently, with worse and worse IT security. Through some combination of credential stuffing, sim swapping, or basic social engineering, these files end up in the hands of "leakers" (also known as "sellers") .
Once the sellers have the files, they typically either "vault" them (keep them to themselves) or sell them to buyers for money (typically bitcoin). There are typically two methods of selling:
1. Private selling - The leaker sells a song to one buyer away from public view. This is "supposed" to only happen one time, since the more people have a song, the less value it is. But the only method of enforcement is some dumbass "honor among thieves" type honor code, so in reality, pretty much every sale happens at least two or three times, to two or three different people . This is called "double-selling" or "triple-selling."
2. Groupbuys - The leaker approaches a groomercord community for an artist, and lets them set up a crowdfund of sorts. Fans each pitch in 5-10 dollars, raise a few thousand, and send it to the leaker. The leaker then released the song files publicly.
FrankHub is a groomercord server that hosts Frank Ocean related leaked song discussion and group buys.
What happened
An incredibly based user named MourningAssassin (MA) utilized AI to produce 10 fake AI tracks using the vocals of Frank Ocean. He then posted one of these tracks to http://leaked.cx and got two offers, netting 6k in Bitcoin. A third user then contacted him, offering to sell a real Frank Ocean track with its respective music video. MA buys it (using money from one of the other buyers too, lol) to use later to boost his credibility. MA then turns around and sells the two buyers the track he just bought, "Changes," for more than he bought it (netting another few thousand). MA also triple-sells another AI track to three people (netting several more thousand).
MA then goes to the FrankOcean leaked songs groomercord, and offers to leak lots of Frank Ocean's music in a groupbuy. The groomercord happily accepts, and begins fundraising. But certain users notice that the vocals of the tracks MA is advertising in snippets and leaking parts of to promote the buy sound a little off. After some back and forth about whether or not the tracks are real, they make contact with all the previous buyers, find out he triple sold basically everything, and was almost certainly faking it. The group buy is cancelled.
A post-mortem announcement on the Frank Ocean groomercord summarizes the situation, https://leaked.cx/threads/how-mourningassassin-makes-a-living-off-of-selling-ai-songs.117788/. There is plenty and plenty of seethe in the Frank Ocean groomercord as well, these threads are just a taste. The people who bought the songs privately at first have been rather quiet, but as I'm sure you can imagine, are probably losing their shit .
While MA was eventually caught, he made roughly 15k off of these fricking r-slurs in a span of 3 months , for what appears to be a relatively small capital investment of a few hundred dollars to pay someone to make these fake tracks.
What happens now
This is still developing but I highly encourage everyone reading this to try their hand at doing the same thing MA did. I know I will be. MA has promised to give somewhere between 1/2 to 1/3 of the money he made back to the people he scammed, but no one is sure if he will actually do it. He's also sent a few messages to the moderators of FrankHub explaining that he did it to "send a message" and spread awareness about AI fakes. Personally, I hope he keeps all of the money.
- Impassionata : the photos are nsfl
- tejanx : Rip bozo 😎
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To recap on the start of this drama, it all started with me finding a lemmy moment - a chomo instance being promoted as a popular lemmy instance
Eventually, Aevann pinned the post and carp made his own post about the chomo instance
This became the perfect time for the perfect gayop - call lemmy out and see how the lemmings will react (it wasn't all roses, a couple of lemmings thought it was a LGBT harassment campaign, but one did end up changing their mind)
It started with the RedditAlternatives post
Eventually, knowing that will go nowhere in two weeks, I ended up making 3 posts about this and called out the lemmy devs for allowing this instance to be promoted
https://lemmy.ml/post/5894174?scrollToComments=true (contains dev response)
https://lemmy.world/post/6172502?scrollToComments=true (LW admin inside)
https://lemmy.ml/post/5894385?scrollToComments=true ( this post went nowhere)
But how would it end? Would the admin double down? Would they do nothing? Or would they remove it?
Another dramanaut p-do hunting mission accomplished
Funny how this user banned for trolling on multiple instances ended up successfully convincing lemmy devs to remove and defederate from this instance, and not get outed by anyone.
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Xenia (a Xbox 360 emulator) throwing out a warning accusing you of piracy if it detects ISO files, a DISC IMAGE FORMAT, is the funniest thing i've seen all day pic.twitter.com/dT9qNRMZM4
— MeovvCAT (@osu_MeovvCAT) July 26, 2023
- SerUlrichVonLichtenstein : >works on climate Me: hmm like how Twitter can be more green?
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I've just spoken to a Twitter employee who works on climate, and they said their unit was simply cut off without warning. https://t.co/hig7DoDEG0
— Dave Vetter (@davidrvetter) November 4, 2022
Every time I see someone who's been laid off they're always working in an even more ridiculous department than the last one.
I wonder if every tech company is like this now or if Twitter is especially bad?
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meet pontifier (hackernews, twitter)
I offered about 3/4 what they were asking, and they accepted the offer.
Maybe I'm daft, but I ended up buying about 75 more properties here... all surprisingly cheap.
holds robber at gunpoint, twitter account is full of videos of getting robbed
starts an actual vigilante justice bounty website
devotes most of the rest of his time to pooping on pine bluff
tldr: @911roofer origin story
- rDramaHistorian : ITT: WinCucks and Linuxnerds fighting. MacChads stay winning
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disabled chads
wealthcels
source: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/openaicms
orangesite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34625001
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I hate the symbols in math so much. It just feels like unnecessary gatekeeping for trivial concepts. How many mathematical proofs could be made widely accessible with just a little bit of psuedocode?
— Franklin Lynam (@FranklinLynam) September 11, 2021
- Thirtythirst4sissies : Not a woman
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OH FOR CHRIST'S SAKE https://t.co/y9jLN61VOf pic.twitter.com/vx8yDcz1B3
— Silent (@__silent_) September 3, 2023