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adeon commented on Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task   arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872... · Posted by u/stephen_g
Frummy · 2 months ago
I can’t believe riding a horse and carriage wouldn’t make you better at riding a horse. Sure a horserider wouldn’t want to practice the wrong way, but anyone else just wants to get somewhere
adeon · 2 months ago
The task of riding a horse can be almost entirely offsourced to the professional horse riders. If they take your carriage from point A to point B, sure, you care about just getting somewhere.

Taking the article's task of essay writing: someone presumably is supposed to read them. It's not a carriage task from point A to point B anymore. If the LLM-assisted writers begin to not even understand their own work (quoting from abstract "LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work.") how do they know they are not putting out nonsense?

adeon commented on GitHub MCP exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP   invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp... · Posted by u/andy99
jfim · 3 months ago
I wonder if certain text could be marked as unsanitized/tainted and LLMs could be trained to ignore instructions in such text blocks, assuming that's not the case already.
adeon · 3 months ago
After I wrote the comment, I pondered that too (trying to think examples of what I called "security conscious design" that would be in the LLM itself). Right now and in near future, I think I would be highly skeptical even if an LLM was marketed as having such feature of being able to see "unsanitized" text and not be compromised, but I could see myself not 100% dismissing such thing.

If e.g. someone could train an LLM with a feature like that and also had some form of compelling evidence it is very resource consuming and difficult for such unsanitized text to get the LLM off-rails, that might be acceptable. I have no idea what kind of evidence would work though. Or how you would train one or how the "feature" would actually work mechanically.

Trying to use another LLM to monitor first LLM is another thought but I think the monitored LLM becomes an untrusted source if it sees untrusted source, so now the monitoring LLM cannot be trusted either. Seems that currently you just cannot trust LLMs if they are exposed at all to unsanitized text and then can autonomously do actions based on it. Your security has to depend on some non-LLM guardrails.

I'm wondering also as time goes on, agents mature and systems start saving text the LLMs have seen, if it's possible to design "dormant" attacks, some text in LLM context that no human ever reviews, that is designed to activate only at a certain time or in specific conditions, and so it won't trigger automatic checks. Basically thinking if the GitHub MCP here is the basic baby version of an LLM attack, what would the 100-million dollar targeted attack look like. Attacks only get better and all that.

No idea. The whole security thinking around AI agents seems immature at this point, heh.

adeon commented on GitHub MCP exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP   invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp... · Posted by u/andy99
adeon · 3 months ago
I think from security reasoning perspective: if your LLM sees text from an untrusted source, I think you should assume that untrusted source can steer the LLM to generate any text it wants. If that generated text can result in tool calls, well now that untrusted source can use said tools too.

I followed the tweet to invariant labs blog (seems to be also a marketing piece at the same time) and found https://explorer.invariantlabs.ai/docs/guardrails/

I find it unsettling from a security perspective that securing these things is so difficult that companies pop up just to offer guardrail products. I feel that if AI companies themselves had security conscious designs in the first place, there would be less need for this stuff. Assuming that product for example is not nonsense in itself already.

adeon commented on Wavelet Trees: An Introduction (2011)   alexbowe.com/wavelet-tree... · Posted by u/Tomte
adeon · 3 months ago
I tried to find some use cases, this paper has listed some, although I think it's not obvious to me what makes the trees uniquely useful compared to other schemes (https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~gnavarro/ps/cpm12.pdf seems to be the same Navarro as referenced in the article).

The use cases listed in that pdf are revolving around compression, e.g. graph adjacency list is listed as one. I myself found the last use case listed as smelling interesting (colored range queries), but I would need to dig into the references on that one to see what's actually going on with that one and is it truly anything interesting.

I would be interested in things like what's the unique advantage wavelets trees have compared to e.g. stuffing roaring bitmaps or other kinds of bitmaps into a tree. The RRR has rank-and-select queries which I think roaring bitmap won't do, so that might tie into something. Maybe a problem where the wavelet tree is the only known efficient way to solve it, or maybe it is uniquely really easy to throw at some types of problems or something else.

Anyone know real-world examples of wavelet trees used somewhere? I got interested enough to dig a bit deeper but on the spot as I'm writing this comment, I'm not smart enough to immediately see do these things have killer applications in any niches.

adeon commented on NSA spied through Angry Birds, other apps: report (2014)   nbcnews.com/tech/tech-new... · Posted by u/__natty__
leftcenterright · 4 months ago
I think they definitely knew that they are embedding code from US based ad agencies who might either be selling it to the NSA or just doing it in an insecure manner (plaintext protocols).

Mostly in such cases, direct involvement and paying dollars is a clear no-go for the intelligence agencies. They could instead be paying the ad agencies.

Also note that we are talking pre-Let's encrypt and TLS everywhere world, a lot of this traffic was also just plain text making it much easier to harvest.

Some interesting insights from this piece: https://web.archive.org/web/20180719081149/https://theinterc...

adeon · 4 months ago
Thanks for the resources. Got back to procrastinate on HN and checked the resources (briefly looked at transcript on the video, but found this article more interesting).

I've always assumed that some amount of unencrypted HTTP traffic is going to be slurped into archives, but I've been too lazy to really check an example and how does that look like in the real world. That BADASS system is an example, focusing on phones. I've also run mitmproxy in my home to learn and then I've wondered if the big agencies have something like that but much more scaled and sophisticated.

I've recently got into studying security, deobfuscated code, or decompiling, tried to find vulnerabilities or bad security, in websites and programs. I've found some, although not anything worth writing home about. I found a replay attack in one VSCode extension that implemented its own encrypted protocol, but it is difficult to use it to do real damage. Found a bad integrity check library (hopelessly naive against canonicalization attack) used by another VSCode extension. I've found something weird in Anthropic's Claude website after you log in, but because their "responsible security policy" is so draconian, I don't want to bother trying to poke it to research it further in case I earn their wrath.

Biggest bummer I found that a video game (Don't Starve Together) I had played for a long time with friends does not have any encryption whatsoever for chat messages to this day. (People gonna say private things in video game chats). The other video game I play in multiplayer a lot, Minecraft, has encryption (a bit unusual encryption but it is encryption).

That article gave me a bit of validation that I'm not a nut for giving shits about encryption and security, and being annoyed at ungodly amount of analytics I see in mitmproxy my laptop is blabbering about.

adeon commented on NSA spied through Angry Birds, other apps: report (2014)   nbcnews.com/tech/tech-new... · Posted by u/__natty__
belter · 4 months ago
Misheard and it was RSA instead of Rovio? The numbers match... :-)

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-secret-contr...

adeon · 4 months ago
Lol, yeah, I also learned yesterday that there is apparently, NSA, National Security Authority. No, not the NSA this article is talking about and everyone knows about.

I mean: National Security Authority, "Kansallinen turvallisuusviranomainen", which appears to be some office/people under Finnish foreign affairs: https://um.fi/national-security-authority-nsa-contact-inform...

I will say I got confused a moment yesterday when googling on the topic here because when you put NSA and Finland in the same search, it would get topics about this other NSA that just happens to exist which I had never heard of before, and just happens to be Finland-associated.

adeon commented on NSA spied through Angry Birds, other apps: report (2014)   nbcnews.com/tech/tech-new... · Posted by u/__natty__
leftcenterright · 4 months ago
from an intelligence perspective, this is business as usual.

- Rovio sold data to ad companies (ad companies primarily based in the US)

- They used AWS (to which of course NSA has legal access)

- Data is not end to end encrypted, all metadata sits on servers in plain text and within AWS even moves from server to server in plain text

How much insight metadata can grant to someone like NSA is still wildly underrated.

- https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-...

adeon · 4 months ago
Ah yeah, I saw the propublica as well, it was one of the first articles I found when looking on the topic. I don't doubt at all that Angry Birds data was used by NSA, doesn't seem controversial.

The specific question I am interested in is: Did Rovio knowingly and willingly accept $$$ from NSA (directly or indirectly) to weaken their security? I.e. were they acting as a willing accomplice.

Because that part would be unusual for Finland (well, at least as far as I know). For US companies I wouldn't bat an eye at news like this.

adeon commented on NSA spied through Angry Birds, other apps: report (2014)   nbcnews.com/tech/tech-new... · Posted by u/__natty__
simonvc · 4 months ago
Was drinking in a bar in Espoo in 2012 or 2013 and heard this from someone at rovio. At the time they used Riak db and basho were onsite and we asked why they didn't enable inter server encryption. "Because nsa pay us 10m not to". Guess nsa pulled the Riak cluster protocol off the aws fibre.
adeon · 4 months ago
Is there any reliable source for NSA paying Rovio other than this random bar discussion? Not that I don't believe you or that I'm naive about NSA and the power of money, but I looked around news in 2014 and the accusations against Rovio specifically are a bit different flavor. It seems that Rovio was oversharing data to ad networks (Millennial Media comes up a lot), and NSA likely slurped data from the advertising companies. This bar banter is suggesting that NSA had some kind of arrangement with Rovio directly instead, and Rovio willingly went along.

Or alternatively, do you feel the Rovio employee's blabbering was talking about an actual, real NSA deal with Rovio, or was it more like a bar joke and direct NSA co-operation was not really implied? (e.g. "we know our security is bad, but these ad companies pay us $XX million to not use encryption so it's sorta like NSA pays us to keep it that way sips beer").

I'm interested, because if that is an actual thing that happened, then that's an example of NSA paying a Finnish company $$$ to weaken their security, and the Finnish company willingly agreeing to that. Is it in NSA's Modus Operandi to approach and then pay foreign companies to do this sort of thing?

Your comment is describing it in few words, but to me it sounds like it maybe wasn't implying an actual NSA direct co-operation, more like someone doing bar banter and being entirely serious. But that's just me trying to guess tone.

(I'm Finnish. I want to know if Rovio has skeletons in their closet. So I can roast them.)

adeon commented on Why 'Margin Call' remains Wall Street's favorite movie   semafor.com/article/04/28... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
davkan · 4 months ago
“Kabuki Theater” usually cynically implies some political posturing. That someone is putting on a show for the audience. It doesn’t imply rehearsal.

E.g. Someone might say that politicians arguing energetically about gun violence are playing it up for their constituents and don’t actually care about the issue. It’s all a performance, neither side actually cares if anything is accomplished. It’s a show for their constituents.

I’m not sure it’s the most apt phrase for the scene but it’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie.

adeon · 4 months ago
Okay, now that makes sense. I actually put your example of gun violence in google with kabuki theater and that found me some (depressing) articles that use the phrase. Thanks for educating me on a new expression :)
adeon commented on Why 'Margin Call' remains Wall Street's favorite movie   semafor.com/article/04/28... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
snowwrestler · 4 months ago
One of the subtle ways in which this movie is so great is that it starts off as the story of a whip-smart junior person who discovers a shocking surprise... but as the movie goes on, it becomes clear that this was actually a risk that senior folks had already suspected and argued about, possibly for years.

By the second or third time watching it, I realized how much of the boardroom scene is kabuki theater. The CEO makes people get up and say their parts not necessarily to learn new information, but to milk the moment and bring everyone through a thought process. I think he knew what he wanted to do before he walked through the door. But he needed everyone else to understand the problem and believe in the drastic solution.

adeon · 4 months ago
I feel a little stupid for asking... but what does "kabuki theater" mean in this context? Do you mean the CEO in the scene sort of "acted a rehearsed show" in a meeting to make sure everyone in the room followed through some thought process? Or maybe in other words (guessing meaning): making people get up and talk to force them to think through something (CEO's real goal), but the CEO framed it as him simply asking questions? (I have not seen the movie or the scene, apologies if the meaning is more obvious to infer if one has seen it).

I tried googling it but I get some movie theater in San Francisco and a Wikipedia page describing it as a Japanese theatre with dancing and elaborate costumes and flair. I've not seen it used in an expression before.

u/adeon

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