Is the conclusion of this that Apple shouldn't add robust and hard to automate around privacy guards because we should all just do as he does - use a dedicated Mac mini for agents with no personal files on for privacy?
I assume any computer connected to my LAN is also a dedicated attack vector for everything on my LAN in case of compromise.
Exposing any port directly to the Internet is a huge risk these days—at minimum I'd put a very strong firewall in front, and unless it's serving the general public, switch to a non standard port. It's not much but would prevent the dumb automated scripts that operate on standard ports.
You need to though. If you only do phone call polls you're only going to poll people with (landline?) phones who answer (random?) calls and have the time/enthusiasm to respond when you call. That heavily skews demographics.
A lot of people will only do online polling, and it's by far the easiest way to cover a lot of demographics (need to supplement with other methods as well if you don't want a poll of "internet users" - but that is a far larger and varied group than most other methods would produce)
Getting a different error is great! Then if you do an online poll and a phone poll, you can combine the results to get a composite poll that's more accurate than either method alone.
Both oversample people that want to take polls, that's the problem.
In fact, online polls are worse because you now have to make sure the "people" answering are actually people and are actually able to influence whatever polling data you're trying to gather.
They've gone from gathering a dataset that's been becoming less reliable to one that is even less reliable.
Oh people get like, super irritated, when everyone like, started using the same like, placeholder word. 1 person with a repeating style is fine, multiple is annoying. It's the same as corporate buzz words, or TV/movie cliches, they get annoying through overuse.
I think it also relates to how well the "cliches" fit, and how much sense they make. Ai loves to talk about how things "land" or "the X trap" when the concept just doesn't fit with that language. It's like clickbait articles saying "what happened next will astound you" when what happened is barely surprising or entirely predictable. The only thing worse than an overused cliche is an overused cliche used wrong.
Fundamentally to me, ai writing feels uncanny as it just doesn't know what it's saying. It uses the same tone, style and cliched construction regardless of the message. If someone told you, they got a promotion, were getting married, got laid off or lost their parents all in the same tone pacing and style, they'd come across as uncanny too.
They have, they utilise them to replace all the other workers they let go. It's a two line metric, productivity must go up, costs must go down. They want to do more with less, not more with the same.
When a human driver controlling a bus crashes though it's a big story. Even bigger when it's a train. News scales with novelty and people impacted - 1 driver being a problem isn't an issue, an ai system used in many cars... That is more newsworthy.
Can it work on code itself? Obviously if you get AI to write the PR description that could be watermarked, but code isn't going to like random unicode, and the sythID approach feels like it would fall apart in the quite strict syntax of most code.
If a language supports unicode it will have a fairly permissive definition of whitespace, and it will be easy to generate permutations of the whitespace that meet the syntax requirements.
Of course I would want my code formatting tool to normalize that all to plain 0x20 spaces. But it would still be a helpful "brown M&M" test of did you even read CONTRIBUTING and run the code formatter before submitting this PR?
Code submitted to a project should follow the formatting standards of that project and its programming language, which doesn't leave much room for flexibility in whitespace. However, there are many ways to write comments, and many ways to write PR descriptions and commit messages, and often many choices of words to name identifiers, and other potential sources of bits of entropy with no functional impact. It doesn't take that many bits to encode a robust "AI was here" indicator.
The point of centering an element horizontally is to give equal space either side. Because you consider that to look best visually with your design. It has nothing to do with where it is in front of you, or anything other than placement in the space you have. Given a width for your content where should it sit. If you don't like the effect with a browser sidebar, don't limit the width with a browser sidebar.
- a CLAUDE.md file when Claude CLI is detected (disable with CLAUDE_CODE_AGENT_RULE_DISABLED env var)
- a .cursor/rules/*.mdc file when Cursor is detected, which tells Cursor AI to use Bun instead of Node.js and npm
Is it by default if it only does it when you have the tools installed?
What a poor take. Cooldowns certainly don't solve everything but 'out of the box' even with no vetters they'll help catch unauthorised releases on active projects because it's more time to notice.
Account takeovers, deployment exploits whatever the root cause, given a few days it's incredibly likely maintainers will notice they've released an unexpected update and fix/sound an alarm. A lot of existing cases like this people realise pretty fast, but the packages might still be live for a few hours as NPM catches up. Cooldown entirely removes that 'updated at the wrong time' issue, an no-one even needs to actually look at the code at all.
For inactive or intentionally malicious maintainers, yes it relies on vetting. But it's hardly a mythical 'canary' - there are already a lot of companies scanning every popular npm package, auditing new ones, or just generally analysing threats. I can think of at least 4 such companies without even trying, I'm sure there's loads more.
And they'll continue because it's not warm hearted so much as promoting/testing their security scanning services and tools so they can get the kudos from being the first to spot X etc. Which often does hit the front of HN or reddit, but they don't need the massive cyber loudspeaker to be effective. Flagging the issue to maintainers, reporting to NPM security - with a cooldown in place the package can be voided before anyone really gets the chance to install it. This is literally how a lot of things are spotted already, just with that 'updated at the wrong time' issue catching unlucky people out.
Does it solve everything? No. Will it reduce the amount of problems that make it to end users? Obviously yes.
And for all the author's 'no one will do this', 'waiting for Godot' cries - what do they recommend? Running your own audits, using LLMs, static analysis and testing it yourself. Basically being the veter they claim no-one will be! Unless they don't intend to sound the alarm themselves, they are literally the canary they're looking for.
Cooldowns aren't magic, but they're not security theater either.
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