Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Email obfuscation rendered almost ineffective against ChatGPT

bulkninja.notion.site

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 204 posts

Re: Email obfuscation rendered almost ineffective against ChatGPT

#21

Post by menzoic »

axlee wrote: post #5

No large-scale email scraper has the budget necessary to run the content it scrapes through a LLM. So as far as real-world goes, nothing changes: the .2 cents it would cost to run ChatGPT on a page to extract potentially obfuscated emails would cost magnitudes more than it could ever bring in revenues. Regarding the examples provided, there is nothing there that a simple regex couldn't achieve, so I don't really see…

This is assuming you’re using a really big LLM behind a paid service. There are plenty of smaller open source models. Not sure at what point it’s not “large” but when fine tuned they are capable of matching the largest LLM in performance on narrow tasks.

Some of these open source models can even be run on your local machine. It’d be very inexpensive to run thousands of pages through it.

https://llm-leaderboard.streamlit.app/

Re: Email obfuscation rendered almost ineffective against ChatGPT

#22

Post by Tostino »

heavyset_go wrote: post #17
jlund-molfese wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also looking forward to what Apple Mail and other local clients are able to do. My laptop's CPU is idle most of the time, why not use that extra CPU time to do something cool like filter spam better?

Because that costs energy, the fact that your CPU is idle most of the time is why you can get hours of battery life.

When plugged into the grid, it makes sense to spend a few cents of energy a day to filter out unwanted solicitations, harassment that you may not want to see, scam emails or texts, etc.

If I didn't have to worry about my grandparents getting scammed because they were having 99.99% of it effectively filtered or warned about at one layer or another before it actually became a problem...can you imagine how much you could lower that type of fraud/abuse?

Re: Email obfuscation rendered almost ineffective against ChatGPT

#24

Post by mg »

Is there no type of work a human can do in a short time which has value?

Say in 20 seconds.

If there is such a task, then it can't be automated. Because then it would not have value. So we could base a captcha on performing that task.

If there is no such task - what is the minimum amount of time in which a person can create value?

If there is no task for any length of time in which a human can create value - well, then we are all jobless :)

Re: Email obfuscation rendered almost ineffective against ChatGPT

#26

Post by diarrhea »

jlund-molfese wrote: post #12
Tostino wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize how possible it is to fine tune a task like this (along with a hundred others in a similar vein) on a tiny model you can scale on your own hardware? I've run hundreds of millions (150m so far in a couple of weeks of non-continuous running as I tweaked things) of tokens through my 2x 3090 with a 13b llama2 model I fine tuned on tasks like: summary, knowledge graph generation, writing using the knowledge…

I'm also looking forward to what Apple Mail and other local clients are able to do. My laptop's CPU is idle most of the time, why not use that extra CPU time to do something cool like filter spam better?

Microsoft already does that, and its Antimalware agent is the bane of my existence. It will see idle machines spin up their fans to full and drain batteries within a short few hours. No thank you!

Re: Email obfuscation rendered almost ineffective against ChatGPT

#27

Post by adhesive_wombat »

axlee wrote: post #5

No large-scale email scraper has the budget necessary to run the content it scrapes through a LLM. So as far as real-world goes, nothing changes: the .2 cents it would cost to run ChatGPT on a page to extract potentially obfuscated emails would cost magnitudes more than it could ever bring in revenues. Regarding the examples provided, there is nothing there that a simple regex couldn't achieve, so I don't really see…

Indeed, a large handful of regexes would probably get you from, say, 98% (the unobfuscated majority) to 99.99% or better. That 0.01% is probably not worth the effort. And even then, it's probably few enough that you could fix them by hand (and add to the regex list as you go).
Post reply on HN