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Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

paulbutler.org

181–190 of 206 posts

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#183
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't buy it. If the patents are publicly and perpetually freely licensed except for defensive-only purposes, then sure, they're not unethical. Red Hat's patent promise ( https://www.redhat.com/en/about/patent-promise ) is one example. If patents were actually intended for defensive purposes only, then this would be an easy and uncontroversial thing to do. However, in practice this is vanishingly rare, and lawy…

Perhaps you shouldn't hijack every thread about anything and make it about patents.

I replied to one comment thread. Perhaps you should put on your big boy pants and use the little [-] thing to minimize threads you aren't interested in reading.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#184

When people discuss things like “Do LLMs know about this?” On a public website I always think that it’s the equivalent of somebody whose phone is wiretapped calling their friend and asking if the FBI knows about something.

I think that's a very cynical view. The author seeing what an LLM would make of it was more akin to getting a new game and wondering if you can pet the dog.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#185

I love the idea of using this for LLM output watermarking. It hits the sweet spot - will catch 99% of slop generators with no fuss, since they only copy and paste anyway, almost no impact on other core use cases. I wonder how much you’d embed with each letter or token that’s output - userid, prompt ref, date, token number? I also wonder how this is interpreted in a terminal. Really cool!

Why does anybody think AI watermarking will ever work? Of course it will never work, any watermarking can be instantly & easily stripped...

The only real AI protection is to require all human interaction to be signed by a key verified by irl identity and even then that will: A never happen, B be open to abuse by countries with corrupt governments and countries with corrupt governments heavily influenced by private industry (like the US).

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#187
post #93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words, Red Hat does not freely license their patents, they say "you are free as long as you don't come after us." Which is exactly the system 99% of companies follow, just more formally stated. Yet you berated the poor guy from Pebble for even obtaining the patent he did??

> Which is exactly the system 99% of companies follow, just more formally stated Not just formally, but in a legally binding manner, including if the patent is acquired by another company (eg during a company purchase). Even if the original filer has the best intentions, companies change ownership or change legal strategy or go out of business. Patent trolls buy up those patents from closed companies. Legally licensi…

"including if the patent is acquired by another company (eg during a company purchase)"

Honest questions, I promise: Is that true? Has that ever been tested in court? Why don't more corporations or patent lawyers advocate for this? Is it because the types of engineers that post on hacker news are requesting it not be done?

Look, nobody likes patent trolls, we all hate weaponized patents. It's great that you want to fix the situation. I just think you are barking up the wrong tree trying to lay guilt trips on engineers for doing what their lawyer advised them to do.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#188
post #187
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is exactly the system 99% of companies follow, just more formally stated Not just formally, but in a legally binding manner, including if the patent is acquired by another company (eg during a company purchase). Even if the original filer has the best intentions, companies change ownership or change legal strategy or go out of business. Patent trolls buy up those patents from closed companies. Legally licensi…

"including if the patent is acquired by another company (eg during a company purchase)" Honest questions, I promise: Is that true? Has that ever been tested in court? Why don't more corporations or patent lawyers advocate for this? Is it because the types of engineers that post on hacker news are requesting it not be done? Look, nobody likes patent trolls, we all hate weaponized patents. It's great that you want to f…

Nothing is certain in courts, obviously, but Red Hat's license is very explicit that that is the intent:

> Red Hat intends Our Promise to be irrevocable (except as stated herein), and binding and enforceable against Red Hat and assignees of, or successors to, Red Hat’s patents (and any patents directly or indirectly issuing from Red Hat’s patent applications). As part of Our Promise, if Red Hat sells, exclusively licenses, or otherwise assigns or transfers patents or patent applications to a party, we will require the party to agree in writing to be bound to Our Promise for those patents and for patents directly or indirectly issuing on those patent applications. We will also require the party to agree in writing to so bind its own assignees, transferees, and exclusive licensees.

If a court somehow overturned that, I wouldn't hold it against the patent filer.

> Why don't more corporations or patent lawyers advocate for this?

My opinion is it's because the patents have value as a weapon, not only for defense (this here is my disagreement with your original claim that these patents only exist for defense). De-fusing the weapon by using a legally binding license like this lowers the value of the patent in a potential purchase scenario. In other words: "money."

> I just think you are barking up the wrong tree trying to lay guilt trips on engineers for doing what their lawyer advised them to do.

Nah. If you do a bad thing, you are responsible for the bad thing you did. I think the OP can probably handle a little light scolding from some anonymous person on an Internet forum. My hope is that they, and other readers, learn from this mistake and don't do it again.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#189
post #79
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, it's not just a game, it's an outright battle to the death (of your company). Sure, you can choose not to wield patents, even in self defense, but good luck with that.

You can also choose to legally declare that your patents may only be used for defensive purposes. But no one ever does this, because they do not actually intend to use them only for defensive purposes. This is a bogus defense of software patents.

Nope. That’s not how piles of patents are wielded defensively by the big companies. They don’t protect their IP with defensive patents, they defend their company using the threat of using unrelated patents offensively against the attacker.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#190
This is one of the reasons I've been advocating to use UTF-8 as a tokenizer for a long time. The actual problem IMHO are tokenizers themselves, which obscure the encoding/decoding process in order to gain some compression during training to fit more data in for the same budget, and arguably gaining some better understanding from the beginning. Again just a lack of computing power.

If you use UTF-8 directly as tokenizer, this problem becomes evident once you fit it into the context window. Plus, you can run multiple tests for this type of injection; no emoji should take more than up to 40 bytes (10 code points * 4 bytes per code point in the worst case). This is an attack on tokenizers, not on UTF-8.

Plus, Unicode publishes the full list of sequences valid containing the ZWJ character in emoji-zwj-sequences.txt

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