Beyond the Prompt: The Social Costs of Generative Artificial Intelligence

The rapid commercialization of generative artificial intelligence has produced extraordinary value for technology companies while systematically externalizing costs onto society. Co-authored with J. Scott Christianson, this article provides a review of these externalities across three domains: environmental, human health, and digital infrastructure. The environmental burden includes massive energy and water consumption alongside ecologically destructive mining for rare earth elements and accelerating electronic waste.

The human toll encompasses a documented pattern of AI-induced mental health crises, including suicide and self-harm linked to anthropomorphic chatbot design, raising novel questions of product liability. The digital commons face degradation through industrialized data scraping that has effectively stripped platforms of their primary legal defenses. Our argument is straightforward: the AI industry’s business model is predicated on a fundamental market failure—the privatization of benefit and socialization of cost.

The Agentic Web: A New Internet Built for Agents, Not Browsers

Every time you sign up for a new service, you hand over your data, create yet another set of credentials, and agree to terms you didn’t read. You do this dozens of times across dozens of platforms. Each one owns a piece of you – your preferences, your purchase history, your social graph – and good luck getting any of it back. The internet as we know it was built for humans to browse. I believe it’s time we build one where agents act on our behalf.

How I Use LLMs for Security Work: Part 2

I previously wrote a blog for THOR Collective Dispatch about some basic examples of different approaches when it comes to LLMs. It was cool and I hope it truly helps those starting out but I wanted to follow up and share some other more specific examples, including more “advanced” patterns that have worked for me over the past year or so.

We’ve all seen the scope, complexity and rise of usage of LLMs from products which integrate them, to all new product categories to ClawdBot. If you’re not familiar with all the facets of LLMs that’s okay but before I dive into these more advanced use cases, I think it’s advantageous to understand some terminology (at a high-level) when it comes to LLMs.

How I Use LLMs for Security Work

I’ve been using LLM tools like Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT extensively in my security & engineering work for the past couple years. Not as a replacement for thinking—but they genuinely help me move faster through complex problems. If you’re a security analyst, SOC analyst, threat hunter or engineer who hasn’t found a rhythm with these tools yet, I’ll try to share what’s been working for me with the hope it helps you too.

My Thoughts About the United States Banning TikTok

These are my personal thoughts about the United States banning TikTok.

As you may have already heard, some congressional leaders have proposed the ban of a Chinese based social media application called TikTok.

There is fear, with some truth mixed in, that TikTok is a danger to United States national defense. There are many reasons congressional, military, and other policy leaders fear TikTok, but the common theme seems to be related to data collection on American citizens and the potential of manipulating viewpoints in favor of the Chinese government.

Understanding Python - Part 2: Running Code

Introduction

Whether you are new to Python or not, ensuring you understand the basics will help you along the way to becoming a Python expert.

Please see the first post titled Python vs Powershell Part 1: Versioning. This first post was written in 2018 but still applies. The remaining blog posts are a continuation of this series. Lets get started!

Installation

You may have Python already installed. To check, open your terminal and type:

Understanding HTTP Request Headers

Table of Contents

• Summary
• Introduction
  • Setup
• General Headers
  • Cache-Control
  • Connection
  • Transfer-Encoding
• Request Headers
  • Common Request Headers
  • Accept
  • Accept-Encoding
  • Authorization
  • User-Agent
• Response Headers
  • Common Response Headers
  • Location
  • Vary
  • Server
  • WWW-Authenticate
• Metadata Headers
  • Common Metadata Headers
  • Allow
  • Content-Encoding
  • Content-Type
• Conclusion

Summary

Networking is complex. Whether you are troubleshooting network connectivity or attempting to detect malicious external network communications, understanding the nuances of common HTTP requests is extremely helpful but often it can be difficult for many security and IT professionals.