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Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

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Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#181

We all know the dangers of running agents with no permissions on our laptop. The good news is its now just as easy to spin up a sandbox in the cloud for an experiment or coding session than it is on your laptop. Possibly easier since laptop sandboxes aren't as cut and dry as a new cloud VM. exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second with SSH and a coding agent (Shelley) built i…

Even better: you can fork the exeuntu image & make it immediately more relevant to the things you do in addition to just dropping in your programs and such.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#182
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you give a non-deterministic text generator a user account? It’s not a person, it’s barely a tool at the software level. Restrict at the right level, in this case, a complete sandbox around it given its propensity to hallucinate and be steered by anybody.

Same reason people give postgres, php, or any other program a user account.

Why should it be? We have containers and capabilities…

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#183
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...this is a completely normal thing to do in linux, it's the most basic form of access control. There's like a dozen non-human accounts in a clean install before adding your own like this, and a lot of software adds their own. Edit: I have 54 entries on my personal laptop, just one of which is actually me.

He said it’s less than a software, so saying software does this too isn’t really a strong counter argument. In case, I don’t think you are really in disagreement. Restricted accounts are necessary is your point, but I think op is saying they aren’t sufficient.

One of the default users is "nobody" which isn't associated with any software. It's definitely above that.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#185
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sandboxing is not difficult, and harnesses like Claude Code have it built-in + other protection with auto mode.

Is that built in protection really a filter, on code level, that sits between the LLM session and the shell or is it just some pleading in the bootstrap prompt? "Pretty please don't do xyz this is important!!!11"? The latter can seem to be as good as the former for any amount of time. No outside observation can really prove reliability, only the negative result ("it does occasionally break the rules we expect") would…

> Is that built in protection really a filter, on code level

yes, on mac it uses seatbelt and on other platforms it uses similar tools: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sandboxing

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#186
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your terminal shouldn't have access to your user directory? As in the files owned by you?

It was only like 1 year ago that the loudest complaint about macOS were complaining about needing to click Allow in a new dialog when they use Terminal (or various other apps). There are so many comments in here that are calling for nerfing something widely revered for giving us superpowers. Whether these are bots or not, they’re giving off NPC energy. If they don’t want to use power tools because they accidentally c…

> If they don’t want to use power tools because they accidentally cut off their finger, then they should just unplug their own power tools and stop clamoring for everybody else’s to be unplugged, too.

Sadly, the pendulum keeps swinging in the way of the tools actually being unplugged and dumbed down in favor of these screaming people, rather than leaving things alone so the rest of us professionals can continue to (safely) do our jobs with the already somewhat restricted tools we have.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#188

I'm dying to have proper sandboxing in macOS. I installed ChatGPT, I asked it to list files in my user directory and it did. I never gave it permission, how could it? My terminal has access and honestly it shouldn't either.

Was it Codex or the desktop ChatGPT agent?

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#189
post #176
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...this is a completely normal thing to do in linux, it's the most basic form of access control. There's like a dozen non-human accounts in a clean install before adding your own like this, and a lot of software adds their own. Edit: I have 54 entries on my personal laptop, just one of which is actually me.

Even though it’s completely normal to us and in widespread use, GP is a reminder that conceptually it’s a broken model. Security should be capability-based not user-based. And to anyone who didn’t grow up on a desktop this model makes complete sense since it’s what your phone uses.

Android uses one uid per app.
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