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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#191

Post by lupire »

darkwater wrote: post #159
fladrif wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM. It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fa…

If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.

PP's point is that 2025-2026 is exactly the result of satire being weaponized to cause real harm, because people pretend it's truth.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#192

Post by boondongle »

teachrdan wrote: post #180
boondongle wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is how do you interact with other industries/trades who protect their profit making potential. Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are also freely available to be used within the margin of error of a professional or a layman? Issues like this are great to have convers…

It's not clear to me what your argument has to do with the license laundering service that Malus (Malice?) is offering. Their stealing from the digital commons does nothing to address paying Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians.

It's directed at the person I replied to. It's not directed at the top level OP or Malus which is hilarious, monetized satire.

Focusing overly on corporate structures or specific skills tends to miss the point of how value is assigned in a capitalistic structure when knowledge is cheap. Knowledge has been the capital used by the labor force for hundreds of years. The reason some jobs are resistant is 100% the result of legislation at that point, not anything unique about the job.

"The Trades" seems to be the sales pitch used on the public. In the end they're just labor at that point since I can pump a 20 year old with a master electricians knowledge, keep one master on staff and fire every other person who hits that level when their earnings demand it in the same way we're firing many mid/upper level people in their 30's and 40's now instead of 50's and 60's which is the scenario in Tech today.

Software/IT is just the quickest to be absorbed. Many other industries are just in the slow boil, not seeing it yet.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#193

Post by arcticfox »

seethishat wrote: post #157
jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc. If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it. Stop and think about what it means…

The answer is not a governor but a speed camera, they have them all over in Brazil and they send you a ticket if you speed through them. Put an exception in the law for emergencies, provide an appeal process, and voila.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#194

Post by pron »

gwern wrote: post #188
iepathos wrote: post #156

This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights. In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs…

The solution here seems to be to impose some constraint or requirement which means that literal copying is impossible (remember, copyright governs copies , it doesn't govern ideas or algorithms - that would be 'patents', which essentially no open source software has) or where any 'copying' from vaguely remembered pretraining code is on such an abstract indirect level that it is 'transformative' and thus safe. For exa…

> copyright governs copies, it doesn't govern ideas or algorithms

The second part is true. The first is a little trickier. The copyright applies to some fixed media (text in this case) rather than the idea expressed, but the protections extend well beyond copies. For example, in fiction, the narrative arc and "arrangement" is also protected, as are adaptations and translations.

If you were to try and write The Catcher in the Rye in Italian completely from memory (however well you remember it) I believe that would be protected by copyright even if not a single sentence were copied verbatim.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#196

Post by palmotea »

igor47 wrote: post #87
jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service). But if I've learned anything in 20 years…

> Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service).

The problem with perfect enforcement is it requires the same kind of forethought as waterfall development. You rigidly design the specification (law) at the start, then persist with it without deviation from the original plan (at least for a long time). In your example, the lawmakers may still pass the law because they don't think of their kids as drug users, and are distracted by some outrage in some other area.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#197

Post by tavavex »

imiric wrote: post #161
tavavex wrote: post #155

This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?

> why hasn't anyone done this for real? WDYM? LLMs are essentially this.

Most LLMs are trained on a lot of the source code for many open-source projects. This 'project' has the whole song-and-dance about never seeing the source code and separating the system to skirt around legal trouble. Why didn't anyone do that yet?

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#198

Post by neilv »

iepathos wrote: post #156

This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights. In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs…

I think this site is either satire, or serious but with a certain kind of humor in which both they and the reader know they're lying (but it's in everyone's interest to play along).

They do say this:

> Is this legal? / our clean room process is based on well-established legal precedent. The robots performing reconstruction have provably never accessed the original source code. We maintain detailed audit logs that definitely exist and are available upon request to courts in select jurisdictions.

Unless they're rejecting almost all of open source packages submitted by the customer, due to those packages being in the training set of the foundation model that they use, this is really the opposite of cleanroom.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#199

Post by tekawade »

How is this legal. Unless it’s trained excluding *all* open source code it’s not legal.

Also, using api and docs itself though not illegal seems defeat the purpose.

Also, it’s not right how creator says “pesky credits to creator”.

Just build your own then. Credit is the least thing everyone using should do.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#200

Post by KronisLV »

I feel like we live in an interesting time, where you have to second guess whether someone would actually build something like this. Like, the language is very tongue in cheek, but given how messed up copyright law is, you'd think that by now someone would be doing this, and proudly.
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