Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a whole section, early, in the analysis Albrecht posted that surfaces these concerns.
Where in the document is that? Can you provide a page number or section title?
^f
US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
331–340 of 387 posts
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing yet, agents analyze code which is textual. The way they analyze binaries now is by using textual interfaces of command tools, and the tools used are mostly the ones supported by Foundation Models at training time, mostly you can't teach it new tools at inference, they must be supported at training. So most providers are focused on the same tools and benchmarking against them, and binary analysis is not in the…
The entire MCP ecosystem disagrees with your assertion that “you can’t teach it new tools at inference.” Sorry you’re just wrong.
Nono, you of course CAN teach tool use at inference, but it's different than doing so at training time, and the models are trained to call specific tools right now.
Also MCP is not an Agent protocol, it's used in a different category. MCP is used when the user has a chatbot, sends a message, gets a response. Here we are talking about the category of products we would describe as Code Agents, including Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, and the specific models that are trained for use in such contexts.
The idea is that of course you can tell it about certain tools in inference, but in code production tasks the LLM is trained to use string based tools such as grep, and not language specific tools like Go To Definition.
My source on this is Dax who is developing an Open Source clone of Claude Code called OpenCode
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#333Anyone trusting Facebook to follow basic human decency and, yes, laws, is a fool.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We're trying for something different here.
Point taken, but I feel like going into details at this stage is redundant. There have been probably hundreds of discussions on this site regarding this topic. Books have been written about Facebook's and Zuckerberg's absent moral compass. To wit, from three days ago:
https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerber...
"While Zuckerberg reportedly wanted to prevent "explicit" conversations with younger teens, a February 2024 meeting summary shows he believed Meta should be "less restrictive than proposed" and wanted to "allow adults to engage in racier conversation on topics like sex." He also rejected parental controls that would have let families disable the AI feature entirely. Nick Clegg, Meta's former head of global policy, questioned the approach in internal emails, asking if the company really wanted these products "known for" sexual interactions with teens, warning of "inevitable societal backlash."
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Push-to-Sync. We observed 8 apps employ a push-to-sync strat- egy to prevent privacy leakage to Google via FCM. In this mitigation strategy, apps send an empty (or almost empty) push notification to FCM. Some apps, such as Signal, send a push notification with no data (aside from the fields that Google sets; see Figure 4). Other apps may send an identifier (including, in some cases, a phone num- ber). This push notif…
Is that not still incredibly vulnerable to timing attacks?
Maybe I’m mis-interpreting what you mean, but without a notification when a message is sent, what would you correlate a message-received notification with?
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#335Ex-WhatsApp engineer here. WhatsApp team makes so much effort to make this end to end encrypted messages possible. From the time I worked I know for sure it is not possible to read the encrypted messages. From business standpoint they don’t have to read these messages, since WhatsApp business API provide the necessary funding for the org as a whole.
> Ex-WhatsApp engineer here. WhatsApp team makes so much effort to make this end to end encrypted messages possible. From the time I worked I know for sure it is not possible to read the encrypted messages.
None of this makes the point you want to make. Being a former engineer. The team making "so much effort". You "knowing for sure". Like many in security, a single hole is all it takes for your privacy to pour out of your metaphorical bag of sand.
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We're trying for something different here.
Point taken, but I feel like going into details at this stage is redundant. There have been probably hundreds of discussions on this site regarding this topic. Books have been written about Facebook's and Zuckerberg's absent moral compass. To wit, from three days ago: https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerber... "While Zuckerberg reportedly wanted to prevent "explicit" conversations with younger te…
Let's assume you're right that going into details is redundant. In that case, however, so is the generic putdown.
Put differently: even if you don't owe megacorps that don't follow basic human decency better, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s because they have such a good track record wrt to privacy? https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...
That document is the dismissal of claims by an economist about Facebook’s privacy practices. I don’t see how it supports your argument.
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for actually evaluating the technology as implemented instead of speculating wildly about what Facebook can do based on vibes.
Unfortunately a lot of investigations start out as speculation/vibes before they turn into an actual evaluation. And getting past speculation/vibes can take a lot of effort and political/social/professional capital before even starting.
Well yeah. If they had solid evidence at the start, why would they need an investigation?
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#339[deleted]
Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire MCP ecosystem disagrees with your assertion that “you can’t teach it new tools at inference.” Sorry you’re just wrong.
Nono, you of course CAN teach tool use at inference, but it's different than doing so at training time, and the models are trained to call specific tools right now. Also MCP is not an Agent protocol, it's used in a different category. MCP is used when the user has a chatbot, sends a message, gets a response. Here we are talking about the category of products we would describe as Code Agents, including Claude Code, Ch…
Claude code and cursor agent and all the coding agents can and do run MCP just fine. MCP is effectively just a prompt that says “if you want to convert a binary to hex call the ‘hexdump’ tool passing in the filename” and then a promise to treat specially formatted responses differently. Any modern LLM that can reason and solve math problems will understand and use the tools you give it. Heck I’ve even seen LLMs that were never trained to reason make tool calls.
You say they’re better with the tools they’re trained on. Maybe? But if so not much. And maybe not. Because custom tools are passed as part of the prompt and prompts go a long way to override training.
LLMs reason in text. (Except for the ones that reason in latent space.) But they can work with data in any file format as long as they’re given tools to do so.