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Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

reuters.com

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Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#191

Post by wongarsu »

usef- wrote: post #73
dijit wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many don't know your Timezone? The timezone fetch was to alter program behaviour at runtime, not to send arbitrary timezones for tracking reasons. It was one way of detecting if it was a chinese person using the program and then behaving differently. Malware behaves this way. STUXNET for example was wired to do nothing except propagate unless the environment had the right conditions.

The article on HN only said that they seemed to be collecting this to detect resellers. How else did the behavior change? Most services I know that are trying to block abuse do collect device info

There is this whole thing where Fable silently starts behaving worse if they suspect you are trying to use it for RL or are otherwise building a competing product. This is likely the primary vector how that works: they check if you are in china, if you proxy your requests, and if you are from a list of known labs or match a couple keywords

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#192

Post by roysting »

WarmWash wrote: post #185
bhouston wrote: post #55

All remote AI are a massive security risk for individuals/companies/governments that may be targeted by the US government. It is likely that the US will get a live feed from each AI provider that they are inspecting in real time to identity things of interest, terrorist attacks or foreign government planning or even foreign companies competitive to key US companies. It will give them access to the though process in t…

>It is likely that the US will get a live feed from each AI provider that they are inspecting in real time to identity things of interest, terrorist attacks or foreign government planning or even foreign companies competitive to key US companies. My favorite conspiracy is that three letter agencies keep pushing the conspiracy that they are omni-present with access to everything. Same as parents telling their kids San…

> The reality is much more banal that they still need warrants and tech companies hate playing police/evidence servant for the government

I will not elaborate how I know, but that is not even directionally correct. But these are not even secret things that can’t be known simply through the Snowden, Wikileaks, and Vault7 releases. So why are you telling yourself this? Are you still wet behind the ears or something?

There are people who know exactly how governments do not in fact need warrants and the tech companies don’t even really know they are servants to the government, let alone which one. That’s how things are done. The less surface area the better.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#193

Post by gruez »

buran77 wrote: post #176
gruez wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can you remember every part? Can you do this for every book in a library? Can you remember all that forever? None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law. You don't get a pass for copyright infringement just because you're not copying the entire work. Same goes for a copy that's transient. You can't set up a bootleg movie theater in your home, even if you delete the movie file afterwards, and th…

> None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law. And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purpose…

>And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant:

If you're going to invoke fair use, that opens up a whole can of worms on what counts as transformative. The google books case and the google thumbnails case shows that you can make near verbatim copies of works at scale and still be considered fair use.

>The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations.

This is begging the question. The original question is whether ai companies are getting special treatment. You can't then use that as a premise to say that the courts are tilted towards ai companies. Not to mention it's questionable how ai companies were suddenly able to corrupt all the judges, some of which were appointed decades ago, even though they only got rich a couple of years ago.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#194

Post by Paradigm2020 »

itake wrote: post #16
dgellow wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alibaba has engineers in Hongkong, Singapore, North America. It’s a global corporation

when i was in hongkong, chatgpt and gemini were disabled. Maybe this has changed though. When I was in China, the corporate vpn (zscaler) routed traffic through hk

But you just said in hk they were disabled? So through a hk vpn still disabled?

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#195

Post by gruez »

sbayg wrote: post #173
gruez wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just feels like more of a general complaint about how the justice system is set up. The same logic applies to how a $300 speeding ticket "is not in any way a "sanction"" for someone making $1M/year, or even a well paid SWE reading HN.

I feel you but are you possibly conflating civil and criminal justice? Tickets don’t scale with net worth of defendants, but class action penalties often do.

>but class action penalties often do.

Do they? Or only so far as "if you have 1000x the revenue, you probably also have 1000x the customers that you have wronged, each of which are entitled to damages as well"?

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#196

Post by tw1984 »

breppp wrote: post #172
messe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Distilling a model is a method that can push the entire market to low margins and prevent companies from making money off such research Then it's on Anthropic to actually price their models accordingly so that distilling isn't profitable. Why does this need a legal remedy when market forces could easily resolve this? > Is it in the interest of the USA, probably no Good. The world needs to diversify away from depend…

> Good. The world needs to diversify away from dependence on US technology. In my opinion further strengthening the CCP is a disaster for the world. A government that killed millions of its own citizens to stay in power is not who I would entrust super intelligence with. But apparently we are not going to agree on that

40 years ago, when the CCP was leading its people making toys and socks for the US, people like you who never made any change to the world were talking such ideological nonsense.

40 years on, when the CCP is leading its people making AI, robotics, drones, EVs, space station and moon rovers to compete with the US, people like you how never made any change to the world are talking such ideological nonsense.

you live in a history museum or something like that?

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#197

Post by triceratops »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #141
andersonpico wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But distribution isn't the only crime here, obtaining the material illegally apparently is a crime too. And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution?

If I read Harry Potter I will remember some parts verbatim. Others I will tecall in only an abridged and lossy way. Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded?

If you write out the parts or recite them for other people to hear, yes it's copyright infringement.

Humans reading or watching copyrighted material isn't considered "making a copy" for the purposes of copyright law. Machines doing so generally is.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#198

Post by TZubiri »

codedokode wrote: post #108
TZubiri wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never get tired of posting this answer because everyone on the internet is adopting this hot take: If you look at it with your eyes crossed, Anthropic and the chinese are doing the same thing. If you look at it with nuance 1 the chinese are doing way worse stuff, and 2 stealing from a thief would still be stealing 1. The chinese are making multiple accounts (at least 49,000)[1][2], using proxies/VPNs, possibly usin…

First, LLM is merely a tool and its output belong to whoever generated them. If a Chinese researcher used their creativity to generate a response, the copyright belongs to them and AI companies have no rights to it. Second, Chinese release many of their models for free, thus being on a noble mission to make AI available for every country (unlike certain company whose promises were nothing but words). For comparison,…

>Stealing from a thief hurts thief industry which is a win for society.

You are welcome to study the law of any country. A crime against a criminal is still a crime.

>applicable laws when illegally copying copyrighted material from websites to their servers without author permission.

If the material is distributed in http without authentication, isn't that sufficient authorization from the distributor? I would think the search + web crawler era would have set plenty of precedent for this.

>Not a crime. AI companies also ignore robots.txt

Breach of contract is not a crime, agreed.

How about identity fraud (accounts by identity proxy, document KYC), computer crime (C&C residential proxies), conspiracy.

And after the June US directive to suspend Chinese access, smuggling, false statements to regulated entity.

These are all criminal charges that are presumably not levied because of the adversarial relationship between those countries. But if this happened in the US you would probably be seeing at least a civil claim and potentially criminal charges. Hell if this were in any other western country you would see the same. Consider CloudFlare vs Spain, much lighter criminal accusations, and there's already a criminal investigation brought where the CF CEO is indicted.

Non-trivial lack of nuance when you can distinguish between a domestic civil case and a criminal international case between 2 world powers with great judicial tension.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#200

Post by thewebguyd »

WarmWash wrote: post #185
bhouston wrote: post #55

All remote AI are a massive security risk for individuals/companies/governments that may be targeted by the US government. It is likely that the US will get a live feed from each AI provider that they are inspecting in real time to identity things of interest, terrorist attacks or foreign government planning or even foreign companies competitive to key US companies. It will give them access to the though process in t…

>It is likely that the US will get a live feed from each AI provider that they are inspecting in real time to identity things of interest, terrorist attacks or foreign government planning or even foreign companies competitive to key US companies. My favorite conspiracy is that three letter agencies keep pushing the conspiracy that they are omni-present with access to everything. Same as parents telling their kids San…

> warrants

The snowden leaks revealed that's not the case.

The three letter agencies can just issue national security letters without a judge ever seeing it, and those come a long with a gag order (plus other workarounds like just buying data from brokers, and how US communications can get swept up just by virtue of communicating with a foreign national outside the US).

You're right, they aren't omniscient in the way we imagine of a room full of people monitoring everything in real time. But to pretend they aren't passively collecting massive amounts of data is dangerous. Snowden showed us PRISM, with all major tech companies participating. They do effectively have a live, unrestricted wiretap to the internet and if you happen to be a person of interest, they will just send out NSLs and get all your communications that are not fully E2EE without you even knowing thanks to the gag order.

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