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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

#231

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

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.

I recently started having my AI assistant help clean up my email gradually. (Using stumpy.ai for what it's worth.)

The way I do it is every morning we go through recent emails in my inbox one at a time. If I want to mark it as spam, delete it, add it to my calendar, whatever, I explain to the agent why in detail. Over time it builds up an understanding of how I handle a lot of things, it needs to show me less and less, and it handles more and more on its own.

I also told the assistant to check my email on its own once per hour and auto-action what it can. That helps keep junk from building up, and it alerts me via SMS if something high priority shows up (e.g. user reporting a bug).

Point is there was never a point where it just ran for a long time and magically cleaned everything up just how I'd have wanted. I have like 7k emails in my inbox, that wouldn't be practical. But the number is going down now gradually, instead of up. I've had a chance to teach it and let it establish trust that it's doing things the right way. Which feels safer.

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

#232

Post by [deleted] »

wyre wrote: post #192
imiric wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenClaw is just like any other tool, you need to learn it before its power is available to you. That's ridiculous. The utility of any tool is usually knowable before using it. That's how most tools work. I don't need to learn how to drive a car to know what I could use it for. I learn to drive it because I want to benefit from it, not the other way around. It's the same with computers and any program. I use it to…

Such a wrong take. The utility of a program like Excel, Obsidian, Notion, Unity, Jupyter, or Emacs far beyond the knowledge of knowing how to use the product. All of these products are hammers with nails as far as your creativity will take you. Its wild to have be on a website called Hacker News, talking about a product that can make a computer do seemingly anything, and insisting its a tool in search of a problem.

[deleted]

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

#233

Post by thenthenthen »

ericd wrote: post #214
thenthenthen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booking flights/tickets is terrible. And then the dark patterns… wonder if OpenClaw can navigate these? Anyway, it is nothing compared to sourcing electronic components, there are literally thousands and thousands of different manufacturers, lead times, moq’s … for the same component, leading to super hard to search and filter database/websites that are slow as molasses.

Seriously. Have you tried Octopart? One of the very early YC companies, dedicated to electronics part search (I haven't used them recently, so no idea if they're good these days, just remember them from like a decade and a half ago).

I used it, mainly for 3d models and footprints. I source most of my parts from LCSC because of the assembly integration nowadays. Sticking to their part ID’s works well for known parts, but yeah, still need to find the part first. It is so time consuming.

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

#234

Post by [deleted] »

delbronski wrote: post #154

My prediction is that OpenClaw will eventually die. But it has provided a small glimpse of the future.The way the average consumers interact with computers will drastically change. I can envision someone sitting in a park bench with a small set of earphones planning a family trip with their AI. They get home and see the details of it on their fridge. They check with their partner, and then just tell the AI to book it…

[deleted]

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

#235

Post by davidw »

etiam wrote: post #158
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.

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I'd really want to avoid doing myself nowadays if possible though. Surveying the offers is usually such a snake pit of deceptive marketing and incomplete service conditions that I feel somewhat nauseous just at the prospect of having to look at it. I wouldn't remotely trust a software assistant to deal with all that misdirection autonomously, but I guess I'd be prepared to give i…

Asking it to find the best deal? Sure, I could totally see that. But I want to double check that myself and actually buy it in order to make sure my flight to Denver from Portland doesn't have a layover in Anchorage or something.

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

#236

Post by joquarky »

etiam wrote: post #158
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.

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I'd really want to avoid doing myself nowadays if possible though. Surveying the offers is usually such a snake pit of deceptive marketing and incomplete service conditions that I feel somewhat nauseous just at the prospect of having to look at it. I wouldn't remotely trust a software assistant to deal with all that misdirection autonomously, but I guess I'd be prepared to give i…

Nearly everything targeting consumers is a snake pit now.

Everything has one or more upsells. Dark patterns are now nominal practice. Quality has gone to shit.

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

#237

Post by greyadept »

latand6 wrote: post #152

I'm a heavy OpenClaw user and I've been testing it in many different scenarios — the profundity of what I can do with it now is crazy. It's literally automating my life. Being AuDHD, OpenClaw feels like a big relief. The positive sides are amazing. The downsides... well, as with any security and any LLM, they're all prone to the same problems discussed here. Having Claude Code on yolo mode exposes you to the exact sa…

Could you list some of these scenarios? I’m also neurodivergent and would love to automate parts of my life.

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

#238

Post by jnaina »

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?

agreed. using my locally hosted LLM, created a skill on OpenClaw to export data from sfdc and build my weekly sales report, complete with charts, summary of deals, meddpicc updates. some small tweaking required to be 100% production ready, but already saved about 4-5 hours of my weekly time spend on this.

this plus a whole bunch of other skills (credit card payments notification and itemization/spend tracking, utilities (power/water) anomalies monitoring, daily solar power generation tracking and solar battery health checks, homelab maintenance (apt upgrades, storage cleanups, etc), media management, UPS battery health tracking, NAS disk heath tracking, etc).

I believe OpenClaw is start of a new genre of "always on" personal assistant/agent (tied to a "skills" store) that handles all the drudgery of daily living. you get back something genuinely precious which is the headspace to focus on the work only you can do. with OpenClaw, we are currently at the "Visicalc" stage and I'm excited where this will eventually lead.

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

#239

Post by [deleted] »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #222
johnisgood wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#240

Post by grey-area »

nickthegreek wrote: post #102
KaiserPro wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the bit thats import is your context (ie email, credit card, privileged data), not the place where you do the execution. Having a separate machine thats isolated is all well and good, but that doesn't protect you from someone convincing your openclaw to give them your credit card.

It doesn’t have to have a credit card number to be useful. I don’t need it to purchase anything. Mine has its own icloud and google account. I can share calendars to it. You can donate same with email or shared lists. There are ways of using openclaw without yolo’ing all your secrets.

But it does need to know personal info to be useful as an agent (calendars, email). The danger is that it’s a hassle to vet every bit of data, and to be useful it needs to know a lot, leading to oversharing, and if you use it long enough you will leak secrets that you didn’t want to leak.
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