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The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

vectoral.com

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Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#141

Post by tomhow »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #128
defrost wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as a fun starting point for radicalization against the argument you presented As a gentle reminder, it was yourself that raised weapons as a moral dilemma, I responded with no argument other than a plain observation. > but ideally those who are currently earning money from unethical sources should feel ashamed More often they likely sleep deeply on sheets of insanely high thread count, shame only goes so far to eff…

> More often they likely sleep deeply on sheets of insanely high thread count, shame only goes so far to effect change. Do you have alternative suggestions, or will you stick to simply discouraging the use of shame on this forum?

I'm a moderator here, and defrost is right. It's not cool to berate or “shame” people on HN. The very first phrase in the "In Comments" section of the guidelines is "Be Kind".

We can critique issues and trends in the industry or broader economy, including advertising; that happens all the time here. But also, on HN we're trying for conversation that is curious and thoughtful, at a standard that is higher than the average discussion forum. If we're going to make sweeping assertions like “advertising shouldn't exist”, we also need to offer suggestions of viable alternatives for ways that companies can get their products known about by people who might need them, and for websites to generate income to fund their operations. These are absolutely valid topics of thoughtful discussion in the spirit of curious conversation, which is entirely what HN is for.

Shaming an individual for working in a domain you've decided you don't like (though legal and widespread) is never okay here.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#142

Post by tomhow »

weregiraffe wrote: post #110

[flagged]

We've banned this account for attacking fellow community members (not just here, in other recent comments too), and ignoring repeated appeals from us to observe the guidelines.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060922 and marked it off topic.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#143

Post by saghm »

defrost wrote: post #119
saghm wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the parent comment literally stated that they worked in adtech, this is not "begging the question" in the way that you're implying. You might disagree with the assertion that adtech is immoral, but that's a difference of opinion, not evidence of a logical fallacy.

It gets old linking to the HN comment guidelines whenever one user goes at another user in a direct and personal way. Loaded accusations are exactly that, not questions being begged, nor logical fallacy or mere differences of opinion. Ergo sometimes I opt for not just quoting and linking to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's a fair criticism; it's just not the same one you initially gave. I can understand being frustrated having to link the guidelines, but like, that's what they're there for!

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#144

Post by jbstack »

edg5000 wrote: post #108

If we compare OpenAI subscription prices vs. the cheapest inference providers on OpenRouter, than OpenAI must be losing money. Add the fraud to this and the question is what the future will hold. The only salvation is hardware getting 10x cheaper before the labs run out of money. Otherwise, we'll lose affordable access to bulk tokens.

Could you elaborate with examples and numbers?

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#145

Post by jbstack »

miohtama wrote: post #68
peyton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty clearly theft of services as generally defined in most places. It’s a hack in the same sense that rolling back your electric meter is a hack.

Violation of Terms of Service is civil, not criminal, matter.

If it amounts to fraud, then it's also criminal.

For example, if you take out a loan and you sign terms and conditions which say you agree to pay it back and then later your circumstances change and you can't pay, that's probably just a civil matter. But if, at the time you signed the agreement, you had planned to deliberately not pay it back, that's fraud and therefore criminal. The fraud is in the fact that you are making a false representation: you are saying you will pay it back, but you know that to be false. It's a very different thing from believing it to be true, but it then later turns out not to be true.

The same principle applies to LLM subscriptions (or any other contract).

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#146

Post by antonvs »

Cider9986 wrote: post #139
antonvs wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s an extremely appropriate place to shame those in the profession who refuse to consider the second-order effects of their work. The HN guidelines follow the approach which Martin Luther King Jr. criticized: > [the] moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice Politeness is considered mor…

It's not hard to disagree politely. People do it all the time. The thing you are missing is that discourse is terrible when people are rude. It's full of name calling, tone policing and moves away from the topic.

I’m not missing anything. I used to use Usenet, notorious for flamewars. What you’re missing is that when you don’t try to control and nanny people, they can settle into an equilibrium on their own.

Edit: also, I find it revealing that you felt compelled to include that bit about "the thing you are missing", which is just a passive-aggressive way to call me an idiot who can't even see what you consider an obvious consequence. If you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that. I'd much rather someone be honest than fake polite.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#147

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

tomhow wrote: post #141
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More often they likely sleep deeply on sheets of insanely high thread count, shame only goes so far to effect change. Do you have alternative suggestions, or will you stick to simply discouraging the use of shame on this forum?

I'm a moderator here, and defrost is right. It's not cool to berate or “shame” people on HN. The very first phrase in the "In Comments" section of the guidelines is "Be Kind". We can critique issues and trends in the industry or broader economy, including advertising; that happens all the time here. But also, on HN we're trying for conversation that is curious and thoughtful, at a standard that is higher than the ave…

Weak response imo. Shame is a powerful tool and lots of people on this forum should feel more shame for what they do.

In fact, I see quite a bit of shaming that occurs here on HN when someone says something completely out of pocket (in fact, in a way you are shaming both me and the original poster) - but that rarely gets called out by moderators because it’s already accepted as not impolite. I often see shaming when users are outright racist - which to be clear I also agree with the use of shame in that instance.

The moderation is not unbiased in this regard.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#148

Post by grinich »

mlenhard wrote: post #45
grinich wrote: post #40

This is the problem we've been working on solving with WorkOS Radar. We run it for Cursor and a bunch of other AI companies who have a free trial that gives some free inference to test the product. It turns out to be a pretty complex program to solve at scale. Token fraud is a lucrative market and the adversaries are surprisingly sophisticated. It's a cat-and-mouse game, accelerated with AI. https://workos.com/radar…

I don't think device fingerprinting is the right approach here. Client-side detection can always be sidestepped, and you need to intermediate the actual inference to get enough signals to make an accurate prediction. There are hundreds of listings for cursor tokens/credits right now. We use canary values to detect the resellers, and I believe that's the only approach that will actually work at scale.

We do a lot more than device fingerprinting including training custom fraud models. We don't broadly publish our techniques for detection since that would make them much easier to circumvent.

Re: The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

#149

Post by tomhow »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #147
tomhow wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a moderator here, and defrost is right. It's not cool to berate or “shame” people on HN. The very first phrase in the "In Comments" section of the guidelines is "Be Kind". We can critique issues and trends in the industry or broader economy, including advertising; that happens all the time here. But also, on HN we're trying for conversation that is curious and thoughtful, at a standard that is higher than the ave…

Weak response imo. Shame is a powerful tool and lots of people on this forum should feel more shame for what they do. In fact, I see quite a bit of shaming that occurs here on HN when someone says something completely out of pocket (in fact, in a way you are shaming both me and the original poster) - but that rarely gets called out by moderators because it’s already accepted as not impolite. I often see shaming when…

> lots of people on this forum should feel more shame for what they do

If we allow ourselves to feel virtuous by shaming others for things we unilaterally decree as being pernicious, we're on the fast track to hell.

For most people here, "what they do", they do because they need to make a living via the skills they have in an often-brutal job market, as do most people here, and they do it by working on things that are legal, and in the case of advertising, one of the few ways anyone has discovered for generating income for online products (and indeed almost all media products for decades before that).

To attack someone for doing something legal and widespread without offering any viable alternative is just lazy argumentation and incurious, low-quality discussion. It gives the shamer the feeling of being morally superior and pure, whilst avoiding the work of thinking about and articulating better ways that the online industry can generate income. All of this is what HN is designed to optimize against, and why shaming is never encouraged here.

The same applies to our moderation. Our role here is to point out where people have breached the guidelines, and remind them what the guidelines are, and in many cases, explain in some detail how they could get their point across while observing the guidelines. Everything we're asking people to do should be in the spirit of promoting healthy discussion and should be actionable.

Nowhere should you find HN moderators taking pleasure in shaming anyone. That's not what we're about. We're here to cultivate curious conversation, and a big part of that is posting comments that range from polite reminders and educational explanations, to less frequent stern warnings and then to occasional bans.

If you can find any instance where we stray from that, you're welcome to point it out.

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