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Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

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Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#291

Post by jdiff »

tuple wrote: post #287
jdiff wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, a few disclaimers, I am not a lawyer and this is an actively evolving area. The answer that most aligns with current precedent to my knowledge is that the parts you modify are protected by your copyright, but the rest remains uncopyrightable. With the exception of any chunks generated that align with someone's existing copyrighted code, as long as those chunks are substantial and unique enough.

This is how I understand it as well. There was a case of a monkey taking a selfie and the photog attempting to assert copyright. Courts determined (if I remember correctly :p ) that only human works are copyrightable and therefore the monkey's selfie could not be copyrighted at all.

I deleted a whole paragraph with exactly that example, so at least if we're wrong, we're wrong together.

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#292

Post by AdieuToLogic »

mlyle wrote: post #115
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the "systems made out of meat" are the entities which both define the problem needing to be solved and are the sole determiners if said problem has been solved. Of note too is that the same "systems made out of meat" have been producing content satisfying the strict mathematical model for decades and continue to do so beyond the capabilities of the aforementioned algorithms.

It's usually not the same pile of meat defining the problem and solving the problem. Yes, humans exceed the capability of machines, until they don't. Machines exceed humans in more and more domains. The style of argument you made about the nature of the machinery used applies just as well (maybe better) to humans. To get a valid argument, we'll need to be more nuanced.

>> Except that the "systems made out of meat" are the entities which both define the problem needing to be solved and are the sole determiners if said problem has been solved.

> It's usually not the same pile of meat defining the problem and solving the problem.

True, but this distinction is also irrelevant.

The point is that problems capable of being solved by software systems are identified, reified, and then determined to be solved by people. Regardless of the tooling used to do so and the number of people involved.

> Yes, humans exceed the capability of machines, until they don't. Machines exceed humans in more and more domains.

But machines do not, and cannot, exceed humans in the domain of "understanding what a human wants" because this type of understanding is intrinsic to people by definition. Machines can do a lot of things, things which can be amazing and are truly beneficial to mankind, but they cannot understand as people colloquially use this term since they are not people.

I believe a decent analogy for this situation is how people will never completely understand the communication whales use with each other the way whales do themselves. There may someday exist the ability to translate their communication into a semblance of human language, but that would be only what we think is correct and not the same as being a whale.

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#293

Post by darthwalsh »

keyringlight wrote: post #241
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really need to emphasize winget is way, way different than a Linux software repository. Debian's repository is carefully maintained and packages have to reach a level of notability for inclusion. Even the Microsoft Store uses overseas reviewers paid by Microsoft to review if store apps meet their guidelines. winget has none of that. winget is run by one Microsoft dude who when pressed about reviewing submissions ga…

What stands out to me is that winget has the appearance and is often perceived as a package manager, yet it's more of a CLI front end to an index, and that index seems to either point to the windows store or a URL to download a regular setup file which it'll run silently (adobe acrobat is the example that springs to mind).

Is that any different than chocolatey, scoop, or homebrew casks?

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#294

Post by mlyle »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #292
mlyle wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's usually not the same pile of meat defining the problem and solving the problem. Yes, humans exceed the capability of machines, until they don't. Machines exceed humans in more and more domains. The style of argument you made about the nature of the machinery used applies just as well (maybe better) to humans. To get a valid argument, we'll need to be more nuanced.

>> Except that the "systems made out of meat" are the entities which both define the problem needing to be solved and are the sole determiners if said problem has been solved. > It's usually not the same pile of meat defining the problem and solving the problem. True, but this distinction is also irrelevant. The point is that problems capable of being solved by software systems are identified, reified, and then deter…

What if systems develop that are able to understand typical human intention and wants with an accuracy that is superior to most humans?

You seem to rule this out, but despite having similar biology and wants, humans misunderstand others' intents and miss cues a lot.

--

Is it impossible that humans could build a system to know what a whale wants, based on its vocalization, that does better than the typical whale? Do we know that whales do really great at this, even?

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#295

Post by fulafel »

immibis wrote: post #182
fulafel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a stated reason but it's questionable logic. There are of course many cases where people need to reference and discuss this vulnerability and its impact.

There are many cases where people need to reference and discuss the weather, but the weather doesn't need a CVE number. If you could hypothetically put it in a known vulnerability scanner then it should have a CVE. Otherwise no.

It's for communication.

"The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program’s primary purpose is to uniquely identify vulnerabilities and to associate specific versions of code bases (e.g., software and shared libraries) to those vulnerabilities. The use of CVEs ensures that two or more parties can confidently refer to a CVE identifier (ID) when discussing or sharing information about a unique vulnerability" (from https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln)

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#296

Post by Finbel »

anticodon wrote: post #128
Finbel wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you not used commercial LLMs to generate program source code? You describe it as if it's an almost unsolvable problem which might have been reasonable 2 years ago but I just used gpt-5 to generate a complete NextJS application for flashcards. I've literally been employing nondeterministic content generation based on statistical relevance defined by an unknown training data, to repeatably produce content satisfyi…

I'm pretty sure there're thousands of blog posts and books describing creation of a complete flashcards application in all popular programming languages and on all popular frameworks.

There're thousands of blog posts and books describing the vast majority of code most software developers write on a day to day basis.

99.99% of the code in that B2B SaaS for finding the cheapest industrial shipping option isn't novel.

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#297

Post by hannasanarion »

doomslice wrote: post #198
krisoft wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means Vector databases, Search Indexes or fancy "AI Search Databases" would be required on a per user basis or track the access rights along with the content, which is infeasible and does not scale. I don't understand why you think tracking user access rights would be infeasible and would not scale. There is a query. You search for matching documents in your vector database / index. Once you have found the pot…

Let's say you have 100000 documents in your index that match your query but only 10 of them the user has access to: A basic implementation will return the top, let's say 1000, documents and then do the more expensive access check on each of them. Most of the time, you've now eliminated all of your search results. Your search must be access aware to do a reasonable job of pre-filtering the content to documents the use…

The thing about a user needing access to only 10 documents is that creating a new index from scratch on those ten documents takes basically zero time.

Vector Databases intended for this purpose filter this way by default for exactly this reason. It doesn't matter how many documents are in the master index, it could be 100000 or 100000000,doesn't matter. Once you filter down to the 10 that your user is allowed to see, it takes the same tenth of a second or whatever to whip up a new bespoke index just for them for this query.

Pre-search filtering is only a problem when your filter captures a large portion of the original corpus, which is rare. How often are you querying "all documents that Joe Schmoe isn't allowed to view"?

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#298

Post by hannasanarion »

thunky wrote: post #243
scott_w wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to reindex the metadata (roles access), which may be substantial if you have a complex enough schema with enough users/roles.

> You'd have to reindex the metadata (roles access), which may be substantial if you have a complex enough schema with enough users/roles. Right, but this compare this to the original proposal: > A basic implementation will return the top, let's say 1000, documents and then do the more expensive access check on each of them Using an index is much better than that. And it should be possible to update the index without…

I don't understand how "using an index" is a solution to this problem. If you're doing search, then you already have an index.

If you use your index to get search results, then you will have a mix of roles that you then have to filter.

If you want to filter first, then you need to make a whole new search index from scratch with the documents that came out of the filter.

You can't use the same indexing information from the full corpus to search a subset, your classical search will have undefined IDF terms and your vector search will find empty clusters.

If you want quality search results and a filter, you have to commit to reindexing your data live at query time after the filter step and before the search step.

I don't think Elastic supports this (last time I used it it was being managed in a bizarre way, so I may be wrong). Azure AI Search does this by default. I don't know about others.

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#299

Post by hannasanarion »

lixtra wrote: post #183
redwood wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you process that list in a trusted audited app tier not in the client environment

A naive approach could still leak information through side channels. E.g. if you search regularly for foobar, the answer might suddenly get slower if foobar appears more in the document base. Depending on the context it could be relevant.

But we're talking about access control, so in this case "filtering for foobar" means "filtering for stuff I'm allowed to see", and the whole point is that you can never turn that filter off to get a point of comparison.

If Joe's search is faster than Sally's because Sally has higher permissions, that's hardly a revelation.

Re: Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers

#300

Post by hannasanarion »

scott_w wrote: post #275
krisoft wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI Agents, instead, directly access the database, completely bypassing this layer. If so, then as the wise man says: "well, there‘s your problem!" I don't doubt there are implementations like that out there, but we should not judge the potential of a technology by the mistakes of the most boneheaded implementation. Doing the same in the bank analogy would be like giving root SQL access to the phone operators and th…

> If so, then as the wise man says: "well, there‘s your problem!" Of course, I wouldn't defend this! To be clear, it's not possible to know how every AI Agent works, I just go off what I've seen when a company promises to unlock analytics insights on your data: usually by plugging directly into the Prod DB and having your data analysts complain whenever the engineers change the schema. > we should not judge the poten…

Having the agent plugged into the DB doesn't mean the agent can see everything in the DB. If that plug includes an automatic "where current user has access" filter, then the agent can't know anything the user can't know.

That's what the bank agent analogy was meant to tell you. The agent has a direct line to the prod DB through their computer terminal, but every session they open is automatically constrained to the account details if the person on the phone right now and nobody else.

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