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It’s reckless hacking. Should be punished like reckless driving.

Agreed. I missed that this was OpenAI 'driving' this time, but this doesn't sound like criminal intent. Maybe negligence at worst.

For the interested.

According to this source[1], RMS wrote:

> plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190913103059/https://medium.co...


How do you verify the ‚beauty‘ of a result. There have always been infinite provable Theorems around. Only some are interesting and beautiful.


> You set up an HTTP server that literally sends people the data when they request it. Don't do that if you don't want people to have the data.

By the same argument I could say: If I send you an exploit and you execute it, don’t complain that your setup fell for it. Just don’t download and run random data from the internet.

In reality there’s a consent and expectation beyond the pure technicals.


> Just don’t download and run random data from the internet.

I don't. I go out of my way to filter everything. Scraping is but one of the tools I use to do it. I want just the data that I actually care about, not people's javascripted hot mess websites full of malware-vectoring ads, fingerprinting and tracking.

I don't let my computers talk to strangers either. My servers don't respond to just anyone, they only reply to me, and only after I've cryptographically authenticated. When others try to talk to them it's like they're not even there.

But people want their computers to talk to strangers, don't they? They want to serve pages and pages of ads to massive audiences. Unlike your exploitation example, nobody's actively invading their computers and exfiltrating data. Breaking into someone else's computers and dumping their private databases is one thing. We're just requesting the exact same data that they're more than happy to send out to literally anyone who shows up with a browser, through the exact same channels even. So I really have no sympathy.


The expectation with scraping is that you won't cause excessive server load. The "AI" scrapers are not respecting that. But there are plenty of other scrapers that do.

Here's some stuff on Adversarial Interoperability, which is an incredibly good thing that can reverse enshittification if it becomes more widespread: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...


Would that large trial have shown the cancerous effect of smoking? If not, do you then agree that some possible adverse effects were not checked for and could have slipped through?


Don't know. But would standard smaller trials have captured it?

We are kind of back to my initial question that is conceptually unrelated to the vaccine trial: do you need trials to run into millions or billions of participants or into decades if you want to capture certain (rare) things?.


Maybe, if you want to mandate the entire country/world takes the intervention?


Of course, all the generated code has to reviewed and vetted for by a senior developer. Of course, this has to be re-done every now and then when new classes of vulnerabilities appear that the previous generation didn’t have in mind.

Or do you just trust the AI that was trained on a lot of bogus code?


The latter, of course.


Hand in your paper when you’re on vacation or even better on a conference in Europe. GDPR will apply. Of course it will take so long that you won’t benefit from a decision for your studies. And one possible outcome is that your college won’t allow submitting from EU and won’t admit EU citizens (similar to US citizens having difficulties opening accounts in EU banks).


While there was some intent to cause harm their attempts were amateurish. The actual damage was done by the agent setting up aws infrastructure not on the demands of the owner.


Ideally, you submit your own project as https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html


Yes, there are also many other lucrative illegal activities.


How is it illegal? It’s information available to the public.


If you sell something to someone and they do computer crimes, you're going to have to prove that you couldn't've known that they're a computer crimer.

It's the same thing with selling general offensive security tools. You have to proactively make it clear that it's for testing and not criminal use. Otherwise, cops are going to assume you're complicit and make things shitty.


Isn't it also illegal to withhold knowledge of a vulnerability for payment? It sounds like it should fall under some variety of blackmail.


That would be even worse than our already bad system.

The system is already pretty bad because vendors underinvest in security, and then to fix it, researchers have to volunteer their time to investigate with no guarantee of payment. If the vendor could force researchers to hand over findings for free, nobody would want to do security research except hobbyists having fun. They're basically signing up for hours of tedious forced labor to explain vulnerabilities to the vendor.

I wish there was legislation that allowed the government to fine vendors for security vulnerabilities like this where the amount scales based on how much user data they leaked. And it could function like other whistleblower systems where a researcher who spots a leak can report it to the government and collect 50%. That way, if the vendor says, "We're not paying you," the researcher can turn around and collect the money from fines.


Vendors routinely get researchers arrested for breaking into their computers as well.


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