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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#321

Post by bob1029 »

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?

The bottleneck is trust and security. I'd rather defenestrate 3rd party libraries with a local instance of copilot than send all my secret sauce to some cloud/SaaS system.

Put differently, this system already exists and is in heavy use today.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#322

Post by encom »

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…

>https://malus.sh/blog.html

An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#323

Post by bombcar »

miki123211 wrote: post #297
mlyle wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce. Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective. We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public sp…

This is my problem with Americans and their "but the constitution" arguments. The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media, unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.

The problem is that "all sides" agree that if the constitution was written today, surprise, surprise, it'd totally agree with them; the gun control people are sure that the 2nd wouldn't cover military weapons, the gun lovers are sure that it would mandate tanks for everyone.

But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#324

Post by airstrike »

hamdingers wrote: post #309
ff317 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes the direct harm itself illegal. Increasing the precision of enforcemen…

This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option. If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).

A system that solves for absolute compliance in every individual case does not result in the emergence of a fairer society.

There are numerous cases, both in history and in fiction, that demonstrate as much.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#325

Post by bananamogul »

iwontberude wrote: post #305
bananamogul wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hired a human to write a clone of GNU grep to be released under a MIT license, and he wrote one that was performed exactly the same as GNU grep, it would be impossible for me to prove that the guy I hired didn't look at the GNU code. But we'd be able to look at his clone code and see it's different, with different algorithms, etc. We could do a compare and see if there are any parts that were copied. It's certai…

What you argue is a non-sequitur and regardless of case law really makes no sense when the spirit of the action is to replicate something. Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place. Just because something is trivial enough to copy does not mean it was trivial to conceive of and cod…

"Reasonable people would say that replicating and disseminating code with the express purpose of avoiding copyright is a violation of copyright and why it exists in the first place."

But then how can the FSF reimplement AT&T utilities? The FSF didn't invent grep. They wrote a new version of it from scratch under a different license.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#326

Post by p0w3n3d »

phpnode wrote: post #204
0xWTF wrote: post #59

There are two teenagers who learned about Malus in the last hour and have started figuring out how to actually build it, right now. They will not cite their source in their IPO statements.

it is straightforward to build this for real, here is my nearly one-shotted tldraw clone from a couple of weeks ago, https://x.com/c_pick/status/2028669568403578931 - the implementation side never saw the code, only the spec (in reality it did see the tldraw code in its training data, but you can't escape that anymore)

I wonder about this training data. There's so much profit from open source code in training data, actually the most of the code it was taught was open source, shouldn't it be then free? Or at least open weight?

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#327

Post by gbalduzzi »

hamdingers wrote: post #309
ff317 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason speed limits make such a great example for these arguments is because they're a preemptive law. Technically, nobody is directly harmed by speeding. We outlaw speeding on the belief that it statistically leads to and/or is correlated with other harms. Contrast this to a law against assault or theft: in those kinds of cases, the law makes the direct harm itself illegal. Increasing the precision of enforcemen…

This unwritten distinction exists only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression. There is no upside (even if getting away with speeding feels good). We should strive to enforce all laws 100% of the time as that is the only fair option. If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).

> If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).

Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here?

Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication.

They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are clearly against the intent of the law itself.

The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast for the laws so be fair immediately

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#328

Post by namlem »

modeless wrote: post #100
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…

We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad. The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the r…

Imperfect enforcement is a feature as often as it is a bug. You can't make "antisocial behavior" in general illegal but you can make certain behaviors (loitering, public intoxication) illegal and selectively enforce against only those who are behaving in an antisocial manner. Of course the other edge of this sword is using this discretion to blanket discriminate against racial or class groups.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#329

Post by codethief »

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…

> I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement

As Edward Snowden once argued in an AMA on Reddit, a zero crime rate is undesirable for democratic society because it very likely implies that it's impossible to evade law enforcement. The latter, however, means that people won't be able to do much if the laws ever become tyrannic, e.g. due to a change in power. In other words, in a well-functioning democratic society it must always be possible (in principle) to commit a crime and get away.

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