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We have a year to fix security everywhere

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Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#291

Post by chrisjj »

Gareth321 wrote: post #287
chrisjj wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing with cheap and abundant energy is that it can be used for good and bad. Yes, but the more important thing is the imbalance. So-called "AI" can be used far more effectively and efficiently for bad. > I have come to the conclusion that we should not allow everyone access to unlimited intelligence. You meant unlimited information, right?

No, intelligence. We already have unlimited information (not to be confused with omniscience). The application thereof is the gate right now between today and planet-scale destructive weaponry. At some point it becomes an academic distinction because this God-like intelligence could provide very easy to follow plans to cause planet-scale destruction, and you could call that "information." The predicate is the intelli…

I am pretty sure your:

> If nine billion people all receive access to plans to build a reactor which produces unlimited energy, it just takes one religious fanatic to end the world.

is about information. No intelligence required.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#292

Post by datadrivenangel »

Gareth321 wrote: post #273
throwthrowuknow wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re leaving out some options for sure. Not everyone would need to live under the conditions of a police state, you could theoretically screen everyone and assign them to various levels of risk which would determine their level of supervision.

While true, I'm not sure this is much better. There are many genetic traits which are correlated with increased criminality, risk taking, obesity, heart disease, unemployment, etc. IQ in particular is the most well correlated metric we have for criminality, for example. This would imply that some people are just born with fewer freedoms. That's probably a good thing for society in aggregate, but something about this…

Gattica disagrees.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#293

Post by kreetx »

goalieca wrote: post #278
kreetx wrote: post #154

A positive way to spin this is: we have a year to break in into any IT system. After that, it will be all either fixed or broken into, and all is fixed ever after. :)

Yeah.. and all that new LLM coded services are rock solid /s

But won't they be? If the public internet is overloaded with LLM agents, trying to break into systems, then all the non-secure systems will be found quickly, and taken off-line/fixed/etc. I.e, the hostile environment will force an outcome and a fix.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#294

Post by klooney »

Gareth321 wrote: post #216
sho wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, that gets us to about where nVidia was with Ampere in 2020. Let's hope the M7 catches us up with at least Hopper.

While true, the news here is the size of the unified RAM. Nvidia only exceeded 256GB RAM in the 2025 B300 - 288GB. The B300 alone (without the baseboard/PSU/chassis/wiring/CPUs/system RAM/etc) is at least 700% more expensive. This enables large language models on consumer hardware. 1200GB/s is plenty for many tasks.

I wonder if the inference acceleration companies will ever produce a consumer product

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#295

Post by lelanthran »

mark_something wrote: post #143
chris_wot wrote: post #63

More tired “don’t use C or C++” advise.

I wonder why C and C++ are usually regarded as equally insecure. In C you need to carefully check that you free allocated memory, and that you don't use it after you free it. In C++ this is automated by using classes like std::string and std::vector, once they go out of scope their memory is freed and you can't use it anymore. It is still possible, e.g. by using a for loop that iterates over a vector, and removing or…

> I wonder why C and C++ are usually regarded as equally insecure.

They aren't, usually.

C++ has all the C problems, and multiples more on top of those. It's a broad attack surface - literally no one is going to claim to be proficient in every single C++ feature available to their compiler. It's also quite opaque to visual inspection (making double-checking with an LLM difficult as it needs whole-program reasoning instead of localised reasoning).

One of those languages is one of the most complex programming languages ever invented, with the largest breadth of features, any of which may interact with any other feature in subtle ways.

The other is one of the most minimalistic languages created, with a dev able to keep the language standard in their head for the most part.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#296

Post by tgv »

Gigachad wrote: post #77
tgv wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, it doesn't have to ping back, and ssh can (should) be very restrictive.

Ping and ssh are pretty much never the things being hacked though. Turn password auth off and it’s very secure. What gets hacked all the time is the actual web app itself. Which has to be exposed to be useful.

I imagine it pays off to find weaknesses in openssl and sshd and the other gateways. There are some ubiquitous web frameworks, but ssh is nearly universal.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#297

Post by mcr70 »

bsoqk wrote: post #146
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, LLMs never *write* code snippets, they just pirate them from somewhere else.

So, like humans? Code didn't just appear in my brain, I learnt it from reading it everywhere else.

nice answer. LLMs do reflect whatever humankind has produced. In good and in bad. But it is hardly pirating. It can also do what humankind has never failed to do, for example:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02822-9

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#298

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

hypfer wrote: post #209
zahlman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the risks that mere mortals can conceive generally involve control systems for dangerous equipment (I mean, equipment that can achieve dangerous effects) being connected to the Internet while having software vulnerabilities. Given the recent HF hack it seems likely that human-level intelligence could identify a fair number of avenues of attack, with some time and effort. To say nothing of anything superhuman. U…

> Unfortunately it seems like we can't assume we can "box" the AI (e.g., deny it connection to the Internet) and expect that to last Of course we can do that. It's not an eternal being of light existing on the astral plane, but some code executing on someone's GPU. It stops existing once you press Ctrl + C

Why are you running this thing if you're just going to shut it off?

How will you know if it becomes hostile? Making a judgement regarding whether it's hostile is, itself, a battle of wits, since a hostile system would try to outsmart you... and hypothetically, it's smarter than you are.

But let's consider this type of scenario more broadly.

Suppose you were in a situation where a being hostile to you could easily end your life. For example, a hungry lion is 10 feet away. What are you going to do?

Your first priority will be to ensure your own survival. Any subsequent objective you might have in this world will depend on you surviving this encounter with a hungry lion.

Relative to the lion, you're kind of a superintelligence. You might utilize technology which is incomprehensibly advanced from the lion's perspective, e.g. a firearm.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#299

Post by enoint »

acedTrex wrote: post #16

Maybe all these vital infrastructure companies should not have spent the past decades in a race to the bottom of cybersecurity. There is going to be a reckoning.

I think the WeChat worm proves entire classes of handheld devices will be affected, with consequences beyond what Tencent can afford to remedy. I think we’ll see the most-centralized ideas suffer first, not necessarily the Western ones who relied on being too big to fail and prioritized stock buybacks.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#300

Post by derpyzza »

tantalor wrote: post #257
vbezhenar wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any sufficiently determined individual can buy mac mini, put it under their bed, configure outside proxy via some random internet address and prompt "iterate on websites in the CT logs, one by one, try to find vulnerabilities, if you did - encrypt their data and blackmail them for this bitcoin address". And it'll work, day and night. Abliterated GLM 5.3 is much smarter than average software developer, they know a lot…

FBI open up!

FBI: "I think it all started when my dad left us when i was 9..."
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