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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#331

Post by namlem »

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).

There is an upside: oppressing people who consistently engage in antisocial behavior is good and necessary.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#332

Post by encom »

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 speed limits were automated rigidly enforced 100% of the time, it would be impossible to drive.

>only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression

That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign. And me driving 120 km/h out of complete disregard for human life. Should I get a fine for driving 90? Yea, probably. Is it a first time offence? Was anyone else on the road? Did the sign get knocked down? Is it day or night? Have I done this 15 times before? Is my wife in labour in the passenger seat? None of those are excuses, but could be grounds for a warning instead.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#333

Post by yonz »

devy wrote: post #298
arrsingh wrote: post #295

It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid. What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay…

LOL. Same here. But the footer disclaimer and testimonials gave it away immediately: > "We had 847 AGPL dependencies blocking our acquisition. MalusCorp liberated them all in 3 weeks. The due diligence team found zero license issues. We closed at $2.3B." - Marcus Wellington III, Former CTO, Definitely Real Corp (Acquired) > © 2024 MalusCorp International Holdings Ltd. Registered in [JURISDICTION WITHHELD]. > This ser…

I almost lost it, didn't realize it was satire until I came back to these comments

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#334

Post by 85392_school »

arrsingh wrote: post #295

It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid. What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay…

If you don't have any contributors, you could just directly relicense without rewriting the whole codebase. If you do, it would be rude to do this.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#335

Post by 453yuh46 »

ragazzina wrote: post #241

Why only FOSS? Why not Wikipedia? You take Wikipedia, an LLM rewrites every single article giving them your preferred political spin and generates many more pictures for it. You make it sleeker, and price it at 4.99$ per month. EDIT: That's crazy. They already did that. Waiting for the torment nexus now I guess.

Look, outside of your corner, a world is much much bigger and every nation and every political leaning has rights to have their own POV(for better or worse), as quite frankly this style of thinking on enforcing what others should do is really irritating. Wikipedia for a time being had already different POVs and it was great for that time period, but as someone that does not have English as first language, I don't dream of a world, where everybody uniformly think the same - because that place already exists where that is a case and that is a graveyard.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#336

Post by tmoravec »

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…

Privacy protection has the exact same issue. Wiretapping laws were created at the time there was literally a detective listening to a private phone conversation as it was happening. Now we record almost everything online, and processing it is trivial and essentially free. The safeguards are the same but the scale of privacy invasion is many orders of magnitude different.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#338

Post by exceptione »

arrsingh wrote: post #295

It took me a minute to recognize this as satire (thank you HN comments). However it does actually make sense - maybe this could be a way for OSS devs to get paid. What if we did build a clean room as a service but the proceeds from that didn't go to the "Malus.sh" corporation, but to the owners / maintainers of the OSS being implemented. Maybe all OSS repos should switch to AGPL or some viral license with link to pay…

I am only 50% certain that your idea is expanding on the satire, if not: project owners can provide dual licensing. I'm sorry if you are serious and didn't understand you.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#339

Post by beagle3 »

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…

The existing laws are rarely well specified enough for precise enforcement, often on purpose.

You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It’s as simple as that.

The HN favorite in this respect is “fair use” under copyright. It isn’t well specified enough for “precise enforcement”. How do you suggest we approach that one?

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#340

Post by phyzome »

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.

For each project you want to rip off, you'd have to first train an entirely new LLM on all sources except for the target project. Prohibitively expensive.
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