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OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

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Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#221

Post by renewiltord »

stavros wrote: post #193
dfabulich wrote: post #20

> Separate Accounts for your OpenClaw > As I have mentioned, treat OpenClaw as a separate entity. So, give it its own Gmail account, Calendar, and every integration possible. And teach it to access its own email and other accounts. In addition, create a separate 1Password account to store credentials. It’s akin to having a personal assistant with a separate identity, rather than an automation tool. The whole point of…

Of course there is! You want an AI agent to be able to do some things, but not others. OpenClaw currently gets access to both those sets. There's no reason to. I've made my own AI agent ( https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot ) and it has access to just that one WhatsApp conversation (from me). It doesn't get to read messages coming from any other phone numbers, and can't send messages to arbitrary phone numbers…

I also have the same thing but it’s not useful to anyone outside my family. The use cases are not the same for everyone.

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#222

Post by Jimmc414 »

johnisgood wrote: post #150
stbtrax wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the whole obsequious nature of how LLMs also amp them up thinking they're onto something incredible is throwing gas on this dumpster fire. "What a great idea! This will revolutionize linkedin commenting. Let's implement it together."

Oh for sure. When I present something to the LLM it always tells me how great it is until I make it "question" it, then it says it was overestimating this or that. Eh. Quite annoying.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/qfBsFB2IzU

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#223

Post by kelnos »

davidw wrote: post #130
Oarch wrote: post #17

Responding to the tweet quoted in the article: why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting. Doing this manually is already pretty trivial, it's more productivity theatre than genuinely life-changing. There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I want to dedicate my full attention to. It's expensive, and the timing and details matter a lot. I'm happy for the voice assistant to add stuff to my grocery list, though. The consequences are not serious if it screws up a letter or something.

To be fair, you can cancel flight reservations for a full refund within 24 hours, so if the LLM gets it wrong, you're not on the hook for anything.

But in general I do agree: flight bookings are something I want to do myself, because even I don't fully know my preferences when it comes to timing and price until I see what's available. And in general I don't find it all that difficult to do. A couple days ago I booked a multi-city travel itinerary with four different destinations, and it took me about a half hour?

Sure, if an LLM can do that in under a minute, that would be cool, but in absolutely zero situations would I not need to check its work, and if it did get it wrong, I'd have to do it all myself anyway.

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#224

Post by kelnos »

ericd wrote: post #173
davidw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I want to dedicate my full attention to. It's expensive, and the timing and details matter a lot. I'm happy for the voice assistant to add stuff to my grocery list, though. The consequences are not serious if it screws up a letter or something.

Apparently I'm the only one here who finds it to be one of the worst things I ever have to do, I hate managing the combinatorial tab explosion by hand. Compounded by the adversarial nature of the price-setting algorithms that jack up the price on you if you show too much interest by researching too intensively. Just booked a flight for our family in two parts, and booking for one set of us made the price for the seco…

I think it depends on your priorities and needs.

I just booked a round trip for myself, plus two more flights for quicker hops while I'm away, and I didn't spend much time on it at all. I just looked at Google flights, picked the flights I wanted, and then ended up buying them through Chase with points. Chase's travel website is among the worst I've ever used, but it wasn't hard. Then I went to the airline's website and changed my seats (Chase doesn't know I have status and couldn't directly book the seats I wanted) and did an upgrade for one of the legs using miles I had at the airline. Half hour of work, maybe?

The price-setting algorithms are garbage, but an LLM isn't going to fix that.

Agree with the other sibling posters that if this annoys you so much, you should just call up a human travel agent. I haven't used one in many years, but when I did (mostly for business travel), it was always pleasant, and the agent knew my preferences and took care of things if there were any snags or changes needed. At the time, they usually got me flights cheaper than if I were to book them myself, even with their fee on top.

But I do wonder what the profession is like now. I can imagine some sort of website where you often don't even deal with the same person, who won't get to know your preferences and will be sort of like a customer service agent, just trying to close as many cases as fast as they can. But hopefully there are still smaller shops around, where you can talk to the same person (either phone or email) every time. Dunno.

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#225

Post by kelnos »

array_key_first wrote: post #137
sylos wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some folks want a legitmate personal assistant/secretary like ceo's and wealthy people have but ai. I think that's a good goal. Modern cells and pdas kinda fell short of "your own literal secretary" and I think people want that. Still we should continue pushing the boundaries beyond that.

They really didn't fall short. A lot of people who would've had assistants no longer do, now it's really just the executives like you said. But fairly low managers used to have them and now they don't. Software is pretty good. It remembers everything, perfectly, forever. It will never forget to remind you of something. It can give you directions, sort your emails by how important they are, help you find shops and res…

> They really didn't fall short. A lot of people who would've had assistants no longer do, now it's really just the executives like you said. But fairly low managers used to have them and now they don't.

I think the reason for this is labor cost, and "good enough". I don't think a smartphone is an equivalent replacement for a dedicated assistant. The average mid-level manager who would have had an assistant 30 years ago likely (today) spends more time on "assistant-y" work than they would if they had an assistant today. It's just that now they do 30% of the work the assistant did, and their phone handles the other 60%. That kind of ratio is enough to make upper management believe that human assistants for the lower-level folks isn't worth the cost. (While they themselves of course still have human assistants.)

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#226

Post by kelnos »

array_key_first wrote: post #176
oatmeal1 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will never forget to remind you of something. Software isn't as faultless as you suggest. The default alarm app on my phone occasionally fails to go off (not an issue with Silent Mode or DND). > The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives. Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on uni…

> Software isn't as faultless as you suggest. The default alarm app on my phone occasionally fails to go off (not an issue with Silent Mode or DND). I'm guessing this is an iPhone, and yeah it's because that software is just bad. I've helped my Mom try to get her phone to ring, like, 12 times now and I've failed each time. And I'm a dev! So, point taken. > Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little…

I agree with you on the work shifting. Whenever someone takes some of our work burden from us, someone else just gives us more tasks to do, and we end up working for the same amount of time. Maybe the work ends up being more interesting or rewarding, though. But sometimes trivial work is a nice physical/mental break, too.

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#227

Post by kelnos »

rpcope1 wrote: post #128
runarberg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these actually were hard to sell. In 2007 we had mobile phones, we had mp3 players (the iPod was actually very good), we had CouchSurfing, etc. I think the smart phone revolution is actually pretty overstated. It basically only made computers cheaper and handier to carry (but also more walled gardens). There are a few capabilities of smart phones we do today which we didn’t with do with computers and mobile p…

Even the navigation part, I'm not so sure. I remember Dad would bring a laptop when we would drive new places and it would be running Microsoft Streets and Trips with a GPS dongle, and I think that have been late 90s or early 00s. I remember seeing other people do that and by the time I was driving a lot in 07 I remember having a dash mounted GPS, maybe a Magellan or Garmin, that didn't cost that much and again I rem…

I think you lived in a strange bubble when you were a kid. When I was a teenager in the 90s, we'd have paper maps that we'd bring with us. We had no GPS. I don't think we knew what GPS was.

In the late 90s we'd print out directions from MapQuest. That was a game-changer. Still no GPS, though.

As an adult in the early 00s, I was still printing out MapQuest maps. In 2004 I got a car with a built-in navigation system! (Complete with a DVD drive in the trunk with a disc holding the maps.) It was still incredibly uncommon; I was one of the few people I knew who had one. I did know a few people who had Garmin GPS devices that they'd suction-cup to their windshield, but not many.

By 2007 most people were aware of GPS devices with little screens that you could bring into the car, though I'd guess maybe 25% of the drivers I knew then had one.

If your dad was bringing a laptop with a GPS dongle in the car in the 90s, I think you were very unusual. Hell, I didn't even have a laptop until 2004, and even then it was a hand-me-down from my dad's work. And I was in my 20s by then!

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#228

Post by ziml77 »

array_key_first wrote: post #176
oatmeal1 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will never forget to remind you of something. Software isn't as faultless as you suggest. The default alarm app on my phone occasionally fails to go off (not an issue with Silent Mode or DND). > The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives. Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on uni…

> Software isn't as faultless as you suggest. The default alarm app on my phone occasionally fails to go off (not an issue with Silent Mode or DND). I'm guessing this is an iPhone, and yeah it's because that software is just bad. I've helped my Mom try to get her phone to ring, like, 12 times now and I've failed each time. And I'm a dev! So, point taken. > Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little…

Why do you guess it's an iPhone? I switched to an iPhone because my OnePlus phone failed to ring or play alarms due to a constantly crashing and restarting media indexer service (I could only tell this is what was happening from the logs).

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#229

Post by nunez »

Oarch wrote: post #17

Responding to the tweet quoted in the article: why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting. Doing this manually is already pretty trivial, it's more productivity theatre than genuinely life-changing. There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?

Doing this isn't trivial if you're traveling heavily throughout the week and have lots of people vying for your attention. However, these folks usually have an exec assistant to help them wrangle the chaos. Morever, them using a Claw would likely be a huge security risk, as this kind of person is much more likely to be a high-profile target.

Re: OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

#230

Post by rcruzeiro »

vl wrote: post #89
sdoering wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using OpenClaw - but I have a limited agent running that currently does a few things well. Morning Briefing: - it reads all my new email (multiple accounts and contexts), calendars (same accounts and contexts), slack (and other chat) messages (multiple slacks, matrix, discord, and so on), the weather reports, my open/closed recent to dos in a shared list across all my devices, my latest journal/log entries of thi…

What are you using for email integration? I want to setup agent to clean up my gmail inbox which has many thousands of unread messages.

Why an agent? Why not simply filter by unread, select all and mark as read? I recently did this with my email accounts which has many thousands of unread emails.
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