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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

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Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#151

Post by ekidd »

typeiierror wrote: post #63

I know this is satire, but I have an adjacent problem I could use help with. In my company, we have some legacy apps that run, but we no longer have the source, any everyone that worked on them has probably left the planet. We need to replatform them at some point, and ideally I'd like to let some agents "use" the apps as a means to copy them / rebuild. Most of these are desktop apps, but some have browser interfaces…

I have actually very convincingly recreated a moderately complex 70s-era mainframe app by having an LLM reimplement it based on existing documentation and by accessing the textual user interface.

The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.

But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#152

Post by LeifCarrotson »

jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

Absolutely! We're not all making that error, I've been venting about it for years.

"Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem.

But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x.

A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration.

Speed cameras are another excellent example.

Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#153

Post by Ntrails »

cuu508 wrote: post #140
jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

> We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error > Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific…

Yeah, I'd have to go slower????

Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in people speeding and braking down to the limit as they approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce incidence of speeding.

Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed cameras) resolve this pretty well.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#155

Post by tavavex »

This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#156

Post by iepathos »

This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights.

In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#157

Post by seethishat »

jerf wrote: post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc.

If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.

Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#158

Post by kypro »

0x500x79 wrote: post #142

> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.* I love it. Brilliant satire that foreshadows the future.

The satire is A-grade.

On a quick glance, or skim read, you could be excused for believing this is real, but they drop just enough nuggets throughout that by the end there is no ambiguity.

Really helps illustrates how realistic this could be.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#159

Post by darkwater »

fladrif wrote: post #141
karel-3d wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a satire. The authors presented it at FOSDEM. They are people that worked previously for foss communities.

Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM. It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fa…

If people lack sense of humor or satire, even if pathologically, well, too bad for them. Why should the rest be denied of that satire? It's not harming anyone at all.
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