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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

#91
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?

> There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit? Please don't. The reason we're still enjoying the bit of the old world as we know it, is just because nobody has really figured it out yet. Enjoy the moment, while it lasts.

What does this even mean? By definition, we have been enjoying "the moment" for quite a while now. What is so special about it that we should work to prolong it, and to avoid moving forward?

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

#92
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows there aren't, and just like the blockchain "industry" with its "surely this is going to be the killer app" we're going to be in this circus until the money dries up. Just like the note-taking craze, the crypto ecosystem and now AI there's an almost inverse relation between the people advocating it and actually doing any meaningful work. The more anyon…

I'm gonna keep saying this forever - there are two obvious "killer apps" for crypto: 1. Semi-private blockchains, where you can rely on an actor not to be actively malicious, but still want to be able to cryptographically hold them to a past statement (think banks settling up with each other) 2. NFTs for tracking physical products through a logistics supply chain. Every time a container moves from one node to the nex…

AFAIK both of these use cases had many millions of invested dollars dumped into them during the Blockchain hype and neither resulted in anything. It might not be an exact match for (1), but there was famously the ASX blockchain project[0] which turned out to be a total failure. For (2), IBM made "Farmer Connect"[1], which is now almost entirely scrubbed from their website, which promised to do supply chain logistics on a blockchain.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/australian-stock-exchanges-b...

[1] https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/Farmer+Connect+%2B+IBM/1_8...

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

#93
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…

Would you mind adding some details about how this is actually setup?

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

#94

> 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…

Give it a hundred years or so and we're gonna have robots wandering around who about 10% of the time go totally insane and kill anyone around them. But we'll all just shrug and go about our day, because they generate so much revenue for the corporate overlords. What are a few lives when stockholder value is on the line.

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

#95
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?

[dead]

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

#96
post #72
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?

Some of it is lack of imagination, but some of it is because many truly visionary examples would largely sound stupid to most of today's audience. Imagine it's 2007 and you're explaining how the smartphone will change society over the next 20 years: - A photo sharing app will change restaurants, public spaces, and the entire travel industry across the world - The smartphone will bring about regime change in Egypt, Tu…

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 phones back in 2007, such as navigation (GPS were a thing but not used much by the general public).

Your case would be much stronger if you’d use the World Wide Web as your analogy, as in 1995 it would by hard to convince anybody how important it would be to maintain a web presence. And nobody would guess a social media like the irc would blow up into something other then a toy.

However I think the analogy with smartphones are actually more apt, this AI revolution has made statistical models more accessible, but we are only using them for things we were already capable of before, and unlike the web, and much like smartphones, I don’t think that will actually change. But unlike smartphones, it will always be cheaper and often even easier to use the alternatives.

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

#97
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many inherently unsolvable problems have been fixed before.

This problem is inherently unsolvable because LLMS are prone to hallucinations and prompt injection attacks. I think that you're insinuating that these things can be fixed, but to my knowledge, both of these problems are practically unsolvable. If that turns out to be false, then when they are solved, fully autonomous AI agents may become feasible. However, because these problems are unsolvable right now, anyone who…

>> This problem is inherently unsolvable because LLMS are prone to hallucinations and prompt injection attacks.

Okay, but aren't you making the mistake of assuming that we will always be stuck with LLMs, and a more advanced form of AI won't be invented that can do what LLMs can do, but is also resistant or immune to these problems? Or perhaps another "layer" (pre-processing/post-processing) that runs alongside LLMs?

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

#98
post #74

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…

>possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies) Doesn't this sorta defeat those policies though? Now all of your calendars are "synced" to a random unvalidated AI agent.

Unless this whole setup is self-hosted (which I doubt), it's also uploaded to some data lake of a company which is in business of profiting from information.

Intelligence agencies are really heading into a golden age, with everyone syncing all the data they have to the cloud, in plaintext. I mean it was already bad, but it's somehow getting worse.

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

#99
post #67

> 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. Hard disagree. I have OpenClaw running with its own gmail and WhatsApp running on its own Ubuntu VM. I just used it to help coordinate a group travel trip. It posted a daily itinerary for everyone in our WhatsApp group and handled a…

Do you need the simcard for WhatsApp?

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

#100

Not just OpenClaw. Anyone giving an LLM direct access to the system is completely irresponsible. You can't trust what it will do, because it has no understanding. But people don't give a shit, gotta go fast - even if they are going in a bad direction.

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