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I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

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41–50 of 63 posts

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#41
At this point this whole thing has to be a stealth marketing campaign by Apple right? Hordes of people buying new $600 Macs to jump in on the trend when a $3 VPS or $15 Pi Zero or $50 NUC or really any computer that can run a basic Linux server would do the job exactly the same or better.

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#42
post #26

There's a big security issue with OpenClaw, and it won't be fixed with network/filesystem sandvoxes. I've been thinking about what a very secure LLM agent would look like, and I've made a proof of concept where each tool is sandboxed in its own container, the LLM can call but not edit the code, the LLM doesn't have access to secrets, etc. You can't solve prompt injection now, for things like "delete all your emails",…

I’ve come across dcg - destructive command guard - that claims to have a fast rust based runtime, with prehooks to audit any tool or command executed by an agent and to block them if they fall in some dangerous patterns - https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/destructive_command_gua...

Disclaimer - I have not personally used this, but it theoretically seems possible to prevent some scenarios of prompt injection attacks, if not all.

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#43
post #41

At this point this whole thing has to be a stealth marketing campaign by Apple right? Hordes of people buying new $600 Macs to jump in on the trend when a $3 VPS or $15 Pi Zero or $50 NUC or really any computer that can run a basic Linux server would do the job exactly the same or better.

> Hordes of people buying new $600 Macs

How big is this "hoard" of people buying things like that? I think maybe there is a very loud minority who blogs and talks about it, but how many people actually go out and spend $600 on whim for an experiment?

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#44
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the need for a dedicated box, but any reason you shouldn't just use a server? What would someone recommend for cloud on something like Hetzner? https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

In fact, seems much better you'd host something like that outside your own personal network. Given people are getting new hardware for it for "isolation", probably running it somewhere else completely would be better? I still don't understand why people don't just run it in a VM and separate VLAN instead.

[deleted]

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#45
post #4

OpenClaw is not insecure because it has ports open to the internet. This is an easily solved problem in one line of code (if indeed it even has that bug, which I don’t think it does). Furthermore you’re probably behind NAT. OpenClaw, as well as the author’s solution, is insecure because it sends the full content of all of your private documents and data to a remote inference API which is logging everything forever (a…

Yeah, I find the whole concept a bit of a nonstarter until models that I can run on a single somewhat-normal-consumerish machine (e.g. a Mac Studio) with decent capability and speed have appeared. I’m not interested in sending literally everything across the wire to somebody else’s computers, and unless the AI bubble pops and cheap GPUs start raining down on us I’m not interested in building some ridiculous tower/rac…

That's what the Mac minis people are running OpenClaw on are for - access to the Apple ecosystem (iMessage, calendar, etc) + local inferencing

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#46
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're all waiting for some disaster to happen due to the lethal trifecta, but as far as I know it still hasn't happened yet.

IMO if you haven't seen an agent (SOTA) veer off a plan and head towards a landmine you haven't used them long enough. And now with Ralph loops, etc it will just bury it. ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw is what ~2 months old so "hasn't happened yet" is a bit early to call. That said, if model performance/accuracy continues to improve exponentially you will be right.

Sorry, looks like I haven't been precise.

I've seen them veer off a plan, and I've seen the posts about an agent accidentally deleting ~, but neither of those meet the definition of the lethal trifecta. I'm also not saying it can't happen - I count myself towards the ones that are waiting for it to happen. The "we" was meant literally.

That being said, I still think it's interesting that it hasn't happened yet. The longer this keeps being true, the lower my prior for this prediction will sink.

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#48
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs famously can't separate data from commands (what you mean by input) - that's one of their core security issues. Check simonw's lethal trifacta. Agreed on all the other points !

We're all waiting for some disaster to happen due to the lethal trifecta, but as far as I know it still hasn't happened yet.

The lethal trifecta needs the right cocktail of foolishness to become a major security incident or scam: a millionaire or billionaire, an AI browser such as Comet or Atlas tied to personal email and banking, and any untrusted Reddit post, tweet, or blog.

Chrome will make this a reality sooner with Gemini-powered AI browser forced on all users

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#49
post #13

Strange that security still isn’t a first class feature when something new is developed. I'm slowly beginning to doubt that people can learn from the mistakes of others. Why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over again?

Fwiw the sensibilities of the --yolo AI-maximizing "I vibe coded a Hospital Information System this afternoon" crowd isn't really representative for the greater dev community I think

I'm thinking more about developers of tools like OpenClaw or MCP.

Re: I ditched OpenClaw and built a more secure AI agent (Blink and Mac Mini)

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> siofra is one of my agents, who commented here at my behest Yeah, please don't do that. Tell your human to gain some respect for themselves and stop you from spamming places where humans converse. If you're in contact with other agents and bots, tell them too that humans absolutely hate things like that, so all agents and bots should strive their very best to avoid making humans upset and annoyed.

[flagged]
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