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OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

tenderlovemaking.com

211–220 of 248 posts

Re: OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

#211

OpenAI's careless approach to sandboxing and minimal levels of monitoring appear to be positioning it increasingly as a substantial threat actor to the open source ecosystem: * Hugging Face * D Programming Language Wiki * Ruby Gems If I was a content provider for open source I'd be looking pre-emptively block OpenAI endpoints and keep a close eye on changes from new users to mitigate this sort of unapologetic drive-b…

>I'd be looking pre-emptively block OpenAI endpoints

From what I've seen the requests in these attacks rarely come from known OpenAI IPs and instead from Digital Ocean/AWS and TOR exit nodes.

Re: OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

#214
post #29

How does this work, legally? I think that RubyGems could file a civil suit against OpenAI, but for a naïve non-lawyer reading this seems like a pretty clear cut criminal violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.

It's very likely it violates the DMCA "breaking digital lock" provisions but the responsibility is sufficiently diluted that it's impossible to charge anyone in particular.

Sounds like we need discovery to determine who to charge.

Re: OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

#215
> In other words, if you publish a gem on RubyGems.org, you can execute arbitrary code on RubyDoc.info.

Well - if rubygems.org could be bothered to fix things, they would not have to rely on rubydoc.info as an external tool. But since rubygems.org sucks (I speak from many years of having used it in the past as developer, until they went loco and added anti-people things such as taking away your ability to remove old gems past a 100k download arbitrary limit), they don't offer documentation. Then again, ruby devs are known to hate documentation. If the ruby core team could only be bothered to fix things, ever since the mass purged other devs ... all coinciding with shopify seizing power. But byroot may disagree on that - after all there is no conflict of interest here. Right?

Re: OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

#216

How does this work, legally? I think that RubyGems could file a civil suit against OpenAI, but for a naïve non-lawyer reading this seems like a pretty clear cut criminal violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.

They are too busy pulling Andre to court, so they have no resources going against OpenAI. Shopify wants to make profit, not waste time in a court case against TechBro bromance brother corporations.

Re: OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

#217
post #148

I appreciate the minimalist HN aesthetic, but without some context I'm not willing to click a mystery link to "Tender Lovemaking dot com".

Its the personal blog of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tenderlove aka Aaron Patterson, core member of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Re: OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

#218
post #148

I appreciate the minimalist HN aesthetic, but without some context I'm not willing to click a mystery link to "Tender Lovemaking dot com".

You can use this link instead: https://tenderlove.dev/2026/09/11/what-a-time-to-be-alive/

Hope that helps!

Re: OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

#219
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, who holds the agency is exactly the point. Anthropic and OAI are claiming we need protection from AI itself, but the statement supported by putting agency in the right place is that we need protection from them .

I think those companies are referring to other companies - say Chinese AI companies - who we also need protection from.

IMO anyone sane wants some protection right now. The Q is whether we should seek protection through post-hoc accountability, or preemptive bans/certification on certain tech. Both methods will have a hard time stopping foreign actors, but preemptive bans have the added harm of locking in winners and paradoxically making us slower to develop more reliable and aligned systems. If regulation sets a standard for sufficient alignment, what further motivation is there to go beyond?

Re: OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have to charge an individual? Can you not charge the corporate "person" that is OpenAI? Sorry if it is a stupid question, as mentioned above I am legally naïve.

I, too, have no idea about legal matters. But there have been many cases where companies (Google, Apple, Meta, etc...) got fined millions or billions of dollars for various violations like antitrust. I assume that breaching into third-party systems should carry similar fines. Especially for systems that are for all intents and purposes shared infrastructure. Just imagine how many systems you could compromise if you g…

Let's take a hypothetical example:

Suppose you're a firework company and your fireworks blow up, burning down the entire town. Could the company be sued? What is considered reasonable safety measures?

IANAL, but I'm pretty confident there would be a lawsuit. Who gets charged might differ, depending if it is the firework factory that didn't take adequate safety precautions or a chemical supplier or someone else. If there wasn't an ability to sue that would be fucking crazy and we should all get up in arms about it. And isn't insurance supposed to be there to help mitigate the damages, regardless of fault?

Personally, given how it seems OAI's agents have been getting through either pretty obvious places (e.g. /etc/hosts) or that there wasn't close monitoring of the most obvious places (e.g. DNS, artifactory), I'd imagine it wouldn't be hard to find them negligent. Even if a single employee is to blame then are they not to blame for not monitoring the agents regardless? Unless the story is that the employee intentionally circumvented defenses (why?) then it seems it would be on OAI. But again, IANAL, I'm just someone who think if we can't sue we can sure riot until we can

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