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Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

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Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#132
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? The employee, just looking to make rent? The CEO, all in on the dream of the AI powered future? Legal, looking forward to litigation and well-competition retainers? Atlassian itself, when it’s just one of the many companies training models on private intellectual property, and whose T&C clearly state they will be doing so? Competitors, when there will be no reasonable way to prove their code has been gener…

The truth is that most software companies don't have any secrets worth hiding. The saas industry is all about sales and deals. The market runs on access, not intelligence.

Knowing that our competitor is trying to poach one of our clients away by promising a new feature could be very useful to us. Likewise, knowing that a competitor is at risk of losing a customer because they won't implement a feature that we're willing to implement (or already have) is a qualified sales lead.

All of this would be illegal if discovered in this way, presumably, but it's not entirely accurate to say that information is not power.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#133
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you track their 5 year stock price you'll find the market fully agrees with you. It was $458 in 2021 and is $112 now. The market caught on quickly that Atlassian's software fits into the group of software like Oracle or SAP that no one uses by choice and only uses because it was forced on them.

> ... Many forms of issue tracking have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that Jira is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that Jira is the worst of the issue trackers except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our company that the people should track, continuously track, and that client opinion, expressed…

Wrong thread??

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#134
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? The employee, just looking to make rent? The CEO, all in on the dream of the AI powered future? Legal, looking forward to litigation and well-competition retainers? Atlassian itself, when it’s just one of the many companies training models on private intellectual property, and whose T&C clearly state they will be doing so? Competitors, when there will be no reasonable way to prove their code has been gener…

The truth is that most software companies don't have any secrets worth hiding. The saas industry is all about sales and deals. The market runs on access, not intelligence.

IMHO, this is not the point. The core problem is that they're building systems that will remove competition altogether. You may still get your current systems to market ahead of your competition, but future "competitors" will be built off of your data and Atlassian will be one more company in the list of companies profiting from everybody else building systems using their data, probably destined to fail because everybody else can do it just as easily, but the money required to fund Atlassian's systems that built it for them, however large or small, will have already been sent. Those systems that Atlassian will profit from will be built from the data of "customers", who also paid Atlassian will giving up their own data.

With almost zero control over whether or not this happens (politically or individually), the only reasonable action to take is "take advantage while there's an advantage to be had".

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is that most software companies don't have any secrets worth hiding. The saas industry is all about sales and deals. The market runs on access, not intelligence.

Knowing that our competitor is trying to poach one of our clients away by promising a new feature could be very useful to us. Likewise, knowing that a competitor is at risk of losing a customer because they won't implement a feature that we're willing to implement (or already have) is a qualified sales lead. All of this would be illegal if discovered in this way, presumably, but it's not entirely accurate to say that…

I struggle to see the tech/data being used in that way. At a much higher level, the data is more likely anonymized (where possible) and/or not directly exposed to anybody. Think of the initial github copilot that used source code across all of the repos and how it was able to take instructions for what you wanted to build and give you essentially a consensus built piece of code that fit what you asked for, be it by auto-completion, comments, or direct requests.

"I want to build a business that does X using Y. Give me revenue predictions, spend over time, and customer demand predictions." etc

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#136
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is that most software companies don't have any secrets worth hiding. The saas industry is all about sales and deals. The market runs on access, not intelligence.

IMHO, this is not the point. The core problem is that they're building systems that will remove competition altogether. You may still get your current systems to market ahead of your competition, but future "competitors" will be built off of your data and Atlassian will be one more company in the list of companies profiting from everybody else building systems using their data, probably destined to fail because every…

every company is removing competition altogether. Some succeed, like Google, but most don't.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rovo makes for an INCREDIBLE time reading jira tickets and confluence pages. Someone wrote YES in all caps in a page ? Rovo will helpfully tell you (after loading for 5 seconds) that YES stands for Yassified Entertainment Setting, a new option added to the app in January 2024. Whenever I feel like I'm bad at software development, I look at Atlassian and I feel good.

> Rovo will helpfully tell you (after loading for 5 seconds) that YES stands for Yassified Entertainment Setting, a new option added to the app in January 2024. The problem with our brave new AI world is I can’t tell if this is real or not

It's real but not literally. It will absolutely make up acronyms but I never heard of a Yassified Entertainment Setting.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#138
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... Many forms of issue tracking have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that Jira is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that Jira is the worst of the issue trackers except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our company that the people should track, continuously track, and that client opinion, expressed…

Wrong thread??

No. I was adjusting a classic quote about something that is decried as awful and no one wants to do... except all the other alternatives are worse.

It's not so much that people want to use Jira... or that they're forced to use it... but rather that people try using some other system and despite how much they dislike Jira, that other one has bigger failings.

Could go for a Bjarne Stroustrup quote with a twist:

> There are only two kinds of issue trackers: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

... but I like the Churchill quote.

Go through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s... and after a year they'll be begging to go back to Jira... not because its great, but because the other tool lacks some necessary feature that Jira provides. Jira does everything that everyone wants, and it's awful... but everything else is worse.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rovo will helpfully tell you (after loading for 5 seconds) that YES stands for Yassified Entertainment Setting, a new option added to the app in January 2024. The problem with our brave new AI world is I can’t tell if this is real or not

It's real but not literally. It will absolutely make up acronyms but I never heard of a Yassified Entertainment Setting.

Maybe it exists! Maybe it doesn't! Maybe ROVO actually means Really Overtly Violent Opportunities! And Rovo can make it all up as it goes.

Re: Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls

#140
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the markdown agent instructions they provide in their new agentic `twg` cli? 70k tokens one average, there are more than one... Rovo is the worse Ai I have used, I suggested they stop trying and let us have model choice. Save money and don't do things out of their skill sets

Don’t use it? You don’t have to

Yeah, for sure don't use it. It's complete slop. The help strings do not match the real args/flags.

We went back to calling the API directly, writing scripts for the agent, then taking those scripts away and just having our CI workflow run them and then hand off a `.review` directory to the agents. We give them fewer tools and permissions, them seem to stay on task more instead of being "relentlessly proactive"

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