Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
anyone surprised?
A lot of people actually, even techies. I commented something similar on a different tech website (Ars Technica) highlighting the trustworthiness of the company behind the tool, and that by now people should not be surprised the face eating leopard eats faces. I was met with a lot of implicit defense of Meta and redirecting the attention to "whatabout" Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. (much like sibling reply here makes it an "every tech company" problem). The general agreement in that forum was that the company is not the problem, it's just what AI tooling does.
So either the internet is full of shills, or people are genuinely surprised because they chose ignorance for decades. Or maybe both can be true.
I'd be willing to bet that many, MANY of this stuff in forums are not what we normally think of as shills, as in randos paid by a company to defend them, but regular employees who weirdly take criticism of their employers too personally and lash out to white-knight for them, even though it's not part of their job description.
That argument could just as equally validate them ignoring their job altogether and collecting a paycheck from the beach of Aruba.
It matters to the people who don't hand over their phone to a stranger. When someone hands of devices to a random stranger it's an exception and it goes against popular wisdom. When Meta does something hostile towards its users they do it for billions and the practice is normalized.
People who have things going decently for them in life have almost zero defenses against attractive grifters.(Note that this is different from people on the margins who believe individuals who are earnest about making their lives better but ultimately unable to overcome a corrupt system; that's a "nothing to lose, might as well try" situation, versus the former's "what could go possiblie wrong?").
what a bizarre comparison. Nobody worships Biden or defends his every gaffe or sanewashes his rambling speeches.
Is there a named fallacy for this false idea that because one thing is bad there must be an equally bad opposite side or something?
Yes, they do.
>there must be an equally bad opposite side or something
Biden is not the opposite of Trump. They're cut from the same cloth: heirs with a chip on their shoulder, largely out to protect the wealthy, and with a documented disregard for women lodging sexual assault allegations. They're not equally bad, but they are both bad. And that's only if you consider Biden's responsibility for the current state of SCOTUS in the most charitable manner.
And that makes sense too. Business culture is very different between IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple. I'm sure we all know the differences
I thought I could name one (GitHub), but after checking, they can (e.g. if requested by law enforcement etc).
Therefore, the total I can name is 0.
It really goes a long way when the law stop saying "it's not nice if" and starts saying "if you can even if you don't then you're guilty".
The question was not "could the do all shitty things if they were scummy assholes", but "are they all scummy assholes".
The story of Joe Nacchio and Qwest is instructive. Though the current environment was borne out of the GWoT, the principle of extra-legal state access to all US telecommunications was established long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001-2007_NSA_warrantless_surv...
Note that this is truthful yet unpopular, which is the opposite of approval-seeking (or trying to "sound cool").
You incorrectly state:
> (the) argument is predicated on condemning every company
yet the argument is that almost every company has at least some staff with read access to databases: "every tech company ... with extremely rare exceptions", "~every" ('~' translates to 'approximately'), and "most companies".
It just seems so implausible. As soon as a company is big enough to hire their first General Legal counsel, you'd think that kind of practice would be flagged as highly legally risky and stopped. I'm reminded of the gcreep[2] incident which happened over 15 years ago. What company wants to go in front of a judge and say their policies allowed something like this?
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179136
2: https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5637234/gcreep-google-enginee...
Did the Google guys ever get caught saying that? Or using their power over the company to unsend messages, oh I guess you can't do that with email, but with Messenger you can...
If you do arrogantly stupid things long enough without a consequence, you'll begin to do them more and in other parts of your life.
What's his tax return look like?
its not incompetent, its designed that way
To be clear, did the users intended for these conversations to be shared with someone? Meta just created a guessable capability URL?
Or were all Muse users' conversations by default public, just behind an obscure URL?
> fiscal-review-b4a5ff.cf.metaaiusercontent.com
So when someone opens the link, the DNS resolution exposes the unique hostname. The original bug reporter found dozens of these URLs in passive DNS logs.
It should! DNS is mostly public and therefore shouldn't be used to hold non-public information. Everyone (should) know TLS-protected paths are superior for privacy. The secondary issue is they used low-entropy guessable DNS records at that.
The domain-isolation advantages you mention are easily accomplished by using both a unique, high-entropy subdomain and a long unique path, but rach problem should be addressed individually with explicit goals and not just vibed. Also, aggressively rate-limit probers.
> DNS is mostly public and therefore shouldn't be used to hold non-public information.
This is just not true if someone is coming from enterprise IT, where DNS requests stay within the corporate network, or if MDM solutions enforce the use of DNS over TLS/HTTPS. I could see it as an honest mistake when someone came to implement this from a different background.
> The secondary issue is they used low-entropy guessable DNS records at that.
The DNS records do contain an unguessable part and they aren’t low entropy.
I get the sense that people on HN just like to dunk on the guy who came up with the design. We should always blame the processes such as insufficient review that lead to this bad outcome. Next time when you make an honest mistake because you didn’t know about something, you should also be treated with respect.
https://cf.metaaiusercontent.com/q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0
No one can guess that URL. The q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0 part is only ever shared with the Meta's server (protected by TLS).
Now imagine the URL is instead:
https://q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com/
The first step for my computer to open that link is to do a DNS query, which immediately shares the entire URL (minus the `https://` and the `/`) with my ISP's DNS server (and anyone sniffing traffic along the path, as DNS queries are usually sent in plain text).
But to be honest this is all temporary. Muse, Grok, Dots will have users for the foreseeable future but there will be viable options for self-hosting too.
I am already doing it https://github.com/pdparchitect/noodle/
The Hub powers the entire family inference needs through a single device - 4 users - 8 device about 50 agents - mixture of local models and some subscriptions.
Obviously you cannot get frontier level of intelligence for coding tasks on a single Mac Mini/Studio but most people don't need that. Latest generation of open weight models are fine and in the worst case scenario bring your own regional cloud based inference services that value privacy. There are already plenty of companies in UK and Europe that provide serverless access to GLM, DeepSeek etc.
EDIT: Because someone downstream rightfully asked if we look at user's sandboxes: Yes! IF they ask us. Our users aren't engineers and often get stuck and even the LLM can't figure it out. THEN - AND ONLY THEN - we jack into the sandbox and help them.
To be fair agentic platforms are a shitty idea from a security perspective anyway. Everyone just threw that out of the window because shiny. Their funeral.
what's the worst that can happen?
Hackers trolling you? Stealing and deforming your projects? Hackers sharing personal info about you and your family and/or kids with the trashiest of people from your past or with your local authorities and wannabe matadors? All without your knowledge but you notice and get pseudo-paranoid and raise your security levels although it is technically and practically too fucking late?
Damn, how much these companies Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and ISPs and their hardware suppliers and all those parties and mayors and cities care about their paying customers and users and the people, workers and their children ...
Let's build more data centers and make AI infer smarter & faster. Better margin, better life.
Addendum: We have entered the era where companies carry more responsibility--if not all of it in tandem--for their users' digital security and privacy than the users themselves, especially those for whom the RAM et al prices are a tad bit much but who still pump considerable amounts of time, data and money into various services.
Amazon have very expensive lawyers, I'm sure that their T&Cs are flexible and woolly enough to include some reasonable justification for doing whatever they please with your VM.
"in order to secure our service against abuse..."
"in response to a court order..."
"...in order to provide better service, we reserve the right to."
https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/
96. AWS Nitro System
AWS personnel do not have access to Your Content on AWS Nitro System EC2 instances. There are no technical means or APIs available to AWS personnel to read, copy, extract, modify, or otherwise access Your Content on an AWS Nitro System EC2 instance or encrypted-EBS volume attached to an AWS Nitro System EC2 instance. Access to AWS Nitro System EC2 instance APIs – which enable AWS personnel to operate the system without access to Your Content - is always logged, and always requires authentication and authorization. /quote
This has been third party validated (there's a blog) and is part of the contract terms. Which you would find if you did any research before posting. I'll let you figure out how you don't understand KMS either.
Good for them, if it's really the case that they can't read Nitro EC2 instances. Of course, that still leaves S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticache...
Social media convinced people to publish on the web details of their personal life that they never would have voluntarily handed over to federal agents: political views, personal relationships, pictures of everywhere they've been, graphs of associates.
AI gets people to interactively divulge what they're working on and even to upload the files. It's the next step on a path from a past where intelligence agencies had to spy on people to a future where people pay for the privilege of volunteering everything to the intelligence agencies.
> We define literally in two senses:
> 1) in a literal sense or manner : actually
> 2) in effect : virtually
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
Unless all you have at hand (or at head) is a 2 parameter small language model, you have no excuse to go no further than the URL.
For instance, one customer has 15(!) cronjobs. And they all used LLM calls to do stuff. So they ran out of tokens super quick and asked us for help because they didn' tknow what to do. Its not an engineering company, the owner has a sales background. So we went in and wrote scripts for them so that the cron calls don't need to use the LLM anymore.
How do you then ensure it’s fixed for customers in the future? Do you add instructions to agents to write scripts where possible?
Another question I have, is from a product perspective, how do you decide how much of the internals you show to users (like token usage).
I always thought that seems like (from a non technical users POV), like a implementation detail; and quite hard to map to actual usage. For example, one request might use lots of tokens, and another will barely use any; but it can be difficult for a non technical user to undertand the difference.
But they didn't ask US for help. We didn't need to know a customer of yours is running 15 cronjobs. Even if this factoid itself may be harmless, it's a good thing to practice on how you talk about these things. I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, I don't know that, but I totally get why how you talk about it rubs some people (including me) the wrong way.
> Its not an engineering company, the owner has a sales background.
Again, it's good if you have a close relationship with your customers, but we don't, and they don't have one with us.
I always assumed most SeriousBusiness companies over a certain size, not run by 20 year olds, operate similarly.
Also, this idea that it's bad or weird to anonymously discuss customers is strange. I've known cops, doctors, dentists, and all sorts of other people who routinely share stories about weird things that happen with people and customers at work, anonymously. This is the norm in the world and always has been.
It's also the norm for the companies who own your data to look at it, when asked to. What do you think customer support even is?
It's only really a small corner of the tech world that treats these things as strange and sacrilege.
Sounds like your software might require HIPAA compliance in which case everything that you just said makes sense and is likely required in that context. But for the average SaaS that doesn't need HIPAA compliance it doesn't work like that.
And it's not particularly unusual to discuss vague details of your customers anonymously. Even in the medical field, with very strict privacy rules, doctors will often publicly discuss encounters they have had with patients, and they only cross the line when they identify the patient.
I mean I'm all for privacy and security but this statement right here just comes across as pretty paranoid
We are giving an unprecedented amount of personal data to these tools at the same time that the technology is being leveraged against people at an unprecedented scope and scale. No US legal framework exists to protect you against this. You should take this risk seriously.
There is no point on saying "there is no guarantee software" as it is supposed to be "maybe it does not work" and not "it might make your life terrible"
Yes, it is. Just because you expected it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be reported.
> Didn't we all just presume that was what was happening? I mean they're a data mining company.
I know that, and you know that. Many people obviously still use their products and don’t understand that.
After using it for a couple months, I'm converted. They're so good, the more you use it, the more useful it is; you internalise more of what it could be used for. It runs so many boring parts of my life, leaving me with more time to spend with my family.
I liken it to release of the first iPhone; it didn't invent any new technology, but packaged different bits of tech together in a way that was consumer friendly. I think we'll look back at OpenClaw/Hermes/Muse/Instinct in the same way.
I do worry about using purely cloud based offerings like Muse, I reckon there is a market for someone to package an consumer AI agent that lives on your home network.
I built an app (in codex), that goes through my emails, pulls out any receipts, and adds the purchases to a sqlite database. I do all my grocery shopping online (through my supermarket), so our weekly shop is stored in the database.
Hermes uses that to predict what items will need restocking (based on how often I buy it, and when I last bought it).
Every week, it logs into the supermarket website on my behalf, books a delivery slot, and adds all the items that need restocking to the shop.
Throughout the week, if I run out of something, I take a photo of the barcode and send it to hermes, it adds it to the shop for me.
I built a similar app for travel; if I have any upcoming travel, hermes will send me updates (delays, platform changes etc...). I do a lot of train travel for work, if my train is delayed, it will automatically apply for the compensation on my behalf.
It reads my emails, and pulls any actionable items out, and adds it to an Asana list. I can either do the tasks myself, or assign it to Hermes and it will do it for me. As an example, I had an task to book swimming lessons for my son, hermes monitors the swimming lesson availability and automatically booked it when a suitable one becomes available.
Shopping is a good use case, I have a clock that needed a new battery, it wasn't a standard battery, and required a screwdriver to open the compartment. I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes, and it found out what battery took and ordered it of Amazon for me.
I wanted to buy some smart thermostats for our radiators, but wanted to be compatiable with our current smart heating system. Hermes is connected to my home assistant, so it figured out what heating system we have and found a compatiable set of eBay (this is slightly more involved than it sounds, as there is a new version of the heating system with a new set of completely incompatiable accesories).
I don't think "it does everything" or that it has "changed my life", but all of those examples are chores, things that I don't particularly enjoy doing; and if something can take it off my plate, then it's useful for me.
As for the rest, that is a lot of tokens burned to keep a fridge stocked.
Receipt emails are in a predictable format, so codex built scripts to parse the emails. If there is a receipt email it doesn't recognise, it will use an LLM to build a parser for that kind of email once.
The agent also "self improves", so after asking once to get items to restock, it wrote a skill with the query it used in, so it doesn't burn tokens figuring it out again.
I was impressed that after it logged into my supermarket account, it inspected the network traffic and discovered a GraphQL API, and used that (instead of screen scraping); much more economic.
I've averaged 2.6 cents a day in token costs over the last month.
For me my motivation is that I’m working 9-5, my children go to bed at 8pm, and I don’t have my phone on me so I can spend time with them.
Once they’re asleep, I’ve got 2 hours to spend with my partner before bed. I’d rather actually spend time with her rather than checking if we have enough kitchen roll.
Even as an experienced developer, sandboxing an agent is not trivial. The idea of my aunt, who has her passwords on a post-it-note on her monitor and forwards me scam emails using these things is terrifying.
I'll use personal agents for my laundry now. Thanks mate for the samples given
You can actually hire a person to do these things and it will likely be cheaper than any technological solution.
My biggest use case is to coordinate groups. For example I tend to do big travel trips with like 4-15 people. Having an assistant coordinate group payments ("split this bill and get everyone's venmo accounts"), signups ("who wants to do horseback riding?"), takes all of "work" out of vacations.
I will NOT let it touch anything that it could unintentionally (or intentionally) leak sensitive personal info. So, anything that has a credit card, bank account, etc. is pretty much offlimits.
usage-time growing fast, with tasks and cron jobs.
in the last spacex earnings report (few hours ago), Elon said he thinks their grok-bot will next year make up most of their AI inference usage across their datacenters.
basically he tried to imply these bots/personal-agents get lots of usage once users start customizing them. and it is bringing in a lot of money in API usage.
No one ever answers why that’s bad, though, or behind what. Turns out it’s behind in the procession walking towards the cliff. Maybe not such a bad idea to stay behind on that one.
> reported the findings through Meta’s bug bounty program on October 8 and also tried reaching people at Meta on LinkedIn, but got no reply either way.
Checks out
> The ease in discovering share links further justifies asking if Muse is worthy of the access it requires.
That's all you could justify?
I like Instinct.
Part of a huge problem with FAANG companies. You can't be Meta and just ratfuck your users for decades and then ask them to trust you, just like you can't be Amazon and turn your storefront into Temu-lite and expect people to want to order products sight unseen with your Echo shit.
Terrible company, doing terrible things for society. But I wouldn’t bet against their ability to sell something to their audience