Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

composio.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 323 posts

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

#261

Post by Terretta »

sdoering wrote: post #37
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?

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…

> Sadly teams is not accessible to it right now. MS Power Automate sadly does not enable forwarding the content of chats. Unlike with emails or calendar appointments.

In the spirit of CLIs being easy on your tokens:

https://pnp.github.io/cli-microsoft365/cmd/teams/chat/chat-g...

Use the JSON responses for full detail including e.g. reactions.

Composio, behind the blog post, offers "Enterprise" pricing, and has no Teams examples. A stat HN ignores: 85% of SMBs are on M365, not Google Workspace and Slack.

You can pick winners and losers in a segment early, by whether they treat M365 as a first class platform or pretend it doesn't exist. Check for the "Continue with Microsoft" button or support for OIDC not just SAML+SCIM, as well as examples for Teams.

This isn't just true for YC classes, holds true for unicorns. Compare Anthropic's "Claude in Excel" and "Claude in PowerPoint" instead of in Google Docs or Sheets, and guess which firm has a better grasp of how business works outside the valley. And yeah, Claude in Chrome works in Edge (and the lack of just renaming and posting Claude in Edge for normals to find is an ANTHROP\C miss).

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

#262

Post by runarberg »

alfanick wrote: post #249
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…

I used to have PDAs with Windows Mobile, hmm even a BlackBerry. Oh gosh, navigation apps were absolutely crap back then, screens were crap, cameras were crap. Video calls via "3g", if any of your friends/family also had a 3g-capable phone, maybe it worked, experience you couldn't compare to FaceTime. iPhone/Android, really brought a new life into this ecosystem.

Camera phones were already very popular in 2007. The Flight of the Concords even made a joke out of it. But most people still owned a separate digital camera. It was not hard to predict that the cameras on your phone would get better and eventually replace your dedicated digital cameras. We all saw that coming.

Same with video calls, if anything that idea was oversold in 2007. Most people had Skype (or something similar) and would video call international calls (which were very expensive using the regular phone lines back then). If you were traveling internationally you would find an internet café log in to your Skype and make a call. Moving this capability to the smart phone was a no-brainier. Turns out that when we have it in our phones, video calls are still more popular on desktops (via zoom, etc.) in 2026.

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

#263

Post by runarberg »

kelnos wrote: post #227
rpcope1 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! (…

I remember GPS being something mountaineers had. People who would take their jeeps up to the glacier had them. Boats also had them. Coincidentally I was a fisherman back then and did observe my captain using a super fancy navigation device with an interactive map (and yes the map did come on a DVD); I also knew a couple of jeep men (or jeppakarlar as we call them in Icelandic) who had something similar (though more compact) in their jeeps; and to top it of, I would spend hours on google earth, just having fun looking at the map on my desktop.

I however did not see this technology coming to our phones, and becoming this commonplace.

It has been a day since I wrote the upthread post, and navigation is still the only novel capability of smartphones, which I think would have been a hard sell in 2007. I really can‘t think of another example.

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

#264

Post by jdgoesmarching »

BeetleB wrote: post #204
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…

> The whole point of OpenClaw is to run AI actions with your own private data, your own Gmail, your own WhatsApp, etc. There's no point in using OpenClaw with that much restriction on it. Every submission I've seen on HN involving OpenClaw will have a comment with this sentiment. "What's the point if you don't give it access to your data ... And if you do, it's a security nightmare ... hence OpenClaw is evil" It's a…

Agreed, “if it can’t do everything it’s useless” is dumb on face value. I’m sorry if people don’t have more imaginative uses than checking their email, but I’ve gotten so much utility out of Openclaw without ever hooking it up to my email or a calendar.

It’s especially ridiculous responding to a blog about isolating these capabilities rather than dropping them. Those are basic security boundaries more than “restrictions.”

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

#265

Post by rolo_1992 »

rvz wrote: post #88

The security issues in OpenClaw is not even the main issue, the hype will die if there is no monetary incentive. Like I said before: If you are spending more money on tokens than the agents are making you money (or not), then it is unfortunately all for nought. The question is, who is making money on using Openclaw other than hosting?

[dead]

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

#266

Post by vayup »

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.

gogcli is good for this purpose. You can use it with openclaw or with coding agents like Codex or Claude code.

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

#267

Post by driftnode »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #110
refulgentis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit? No. And there’s mundane answers why. People used to talk about phone home screens, back in the day, every iPhone had 16 spots It became wisdom everyone had the same 12 apps but then there were 4 that that were core for you and where most of your use went, but they were different apps from everyone else. So it goes for agent demos. Another reason: every agentic flow…

There are easy no-brainer productivity boosts with LLMs. For example, automatically sorting your email by topic. Nobody shows this because the technology is still immature and very shit.

honestly sorting email is the one thing that should have been solved five years ago. the tech is fine for classification. the problem is nobody wants to build a boring email sorter when you can announce an autonomous life assistant

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

#268

Post by driftnode »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #231
vl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 les…

this is the approach that actually makes sense to me. gradual trust not yolo from day one. curious though, can you see what it learned about your patterns or is it a black box? like if it starts auto-archiving something you actually wanted, how do you debug that

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

#269

Post by delbronski »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #211
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…

Bold prediction considering literally everything eventually dies

Thanks, I am known for bold predictions. I also predict the US and Iran war will end.

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

#270

Post by butlike »

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…

> Software is pretty good. It remembers everything, perfectly, forever.

This is not a true statement and never was. Bitrot is real

Post reply on HN