Random intermediate CA. They got a couple of commonly used root CAs to sign for them; and everything just works from there.

That's the problem. It's relatively easy to fire a certificate issuer; but it can get surprisingly fiddly surprisingly fast to ensure that all your stuff actually distrusts one(unless you are responsible for basically nothing but a a handful of in-support major browsers and are OK with the choices their vendors make, in which case it will be handled for you relatively quickly; and was in this case). Basically any network connected widget is going to have at least one trusted root store embedded in it somewhere, possibly not updated anymore; and a number of software packages either bring their own or only partially track the OS-provided one.

You also have very little control over what other people do; both what CAs they chose to get certs from and what...questionable...partnership decisions the root CAs you do chose to trust. It's not technically secret; but unless you are practically a full-time PKI nerd you probably didn't know until after the fact that Comodo, now Sectigo, had quietly trusted eMudhra for you.

I fully admit that this might be a 'me' problem, not a them problem; but I just don't understand why this agent monitoring setup was so vulnerable and is being treated as so novel.

Sure, the monitoring of whatever goes on inside the LLM is comparatively new and exotic; but when you set it loose on the internet it's going out through one or more of your WAN links, presumably with your router and firewall and so on in the way, and is mostly doing HTTP(s) stuff. Keeping an eye on what an internal host is doing when you can insert whatever trusted roots you want for TLS MiTM and you 100% own the pipe that it is using to communicate is not necessarily a desperately enjoyable task; but it would have been a relatively banal requirement a quarter century ago.

I'd also think that, when you are spending $$$$$ on the exercise in Nvidia compute gear, and it's a test of a 'frontier model' whose behavior and capabilities you are trying to better characterize and refine, allocating the handful of terabytes necessary to just store a full packet capture of the session in case it is relevant would be a no-brainer item.

Is there something I'm missing that makes this case more complex? I'm not talking about the 'grubbing around in the LLM's vectors and such' side; just the "a host is doing HTTP stuff through a WAN link we control, can we observe what it is doing?" aspect.

I'm curious how the nuclear decay of sodium 22 produces antimatter to begin with. Does something transmute, for lack of a better word, into antimatter when its nuclear bonds are broken?

I now am dependent in part for my livelihood on paypal. Going to check my contact info there now.

https://informationr.us/

Unfortunately to an extent your former roommate was correct; that having personal ethical/moral guidelines generally does reduce the amount of money one can rake in and attacking those who do have and advocate for morals in society to discredit them is one way to help secure that income stream.

Right now we seem to be living in an era when the amoralistic are generally winning, they've convinced millions upon millions of people to embrace their selfishness. But this only works out for a subset of those trying to practice it, particularly when they aren't smart enough to understand when they're easily manipulated by those who are much more experienced or are good at motivational speaking to compel the listener. Those late to the party end up going against their own interests to support those they idolize to their own detriment.

Are you going to mention how our own economy has changed as it has increasingly fallen under the sway of finance guys and MBAs? Because the claim is significantly more specific than "the US from 1950 to present sucks"(because the hyperfocus on finance and MBAs who think that all activities are fungible is significantly newer than the postwar US economy generally) and it's some of the trends you see in an exceptionally favorable economy as they displace other flavors of management that are most damning.

Even aside from how unhappy site operators are about the egregious botherd scraping behavior; it's hard to see why vendors would be enthusiastic about this situation.

It's overwhelmingly the case that vendors hate returns and chargebacks; and generally try to avoid situations where those are more likely to arise. An error-prone mechanism that acts "on behalf of" in a way where it does have the user's credentials and payment information but may well not have their authorization in a legally binding way when it decides to order 100 of something seems like the last thing they would want to deal with.

Maybe someone will manage to ram through glorious-agentic-future and it will become de-facto mandatory to cater to people who have abandoned ordering from websites in favor of prompting bots to order for them; but until that happens it's hard to see merchants reputable enough that they are interested in keeping their ratings and relationships with payment processors in good order wanting to touch the situation. Now, scammers who already hop between expendable presences as soon as dissatisfaction catches up with them; those are probably quite interested in the future of prompt injection based advertising.

That depends, are you a robot?

Wouldn't any robot's mustache be a fake mustache unless it was literally shaved off of someone else and somehow affixed intact to said robot?

Mmmhmm. Flock's model appears to be to get their equipment put in, and once in, to let whomever they want have access to it rather than the original polity or agency that partnered for the install. And after the partnership ends they fight against their equipment being taken down.

Sounds to me like they specifically want to enable a surveillance state, but that this surveillance state operates about as accurately as the one from Terry Gilliam's Brazil .

If you're catching the products of your exhaust then you're now negating the effect of producing the exhaust in the first place, so you're not going anywhere.

Not all rockets produce water. Rockets that use hydrogen and oxygen do, but not all rockets use that fuel blend.

Frozen water does not have most of the things to sustain life. It has water, which is a component required for life as we know it, but that's only one component.

This was Uber's end-goal from the very beginning. The human drivers were only a stop-gap, as Uber wanted to position itself to lead the market in self-driving private on-demand transportation. To do that it first sought to position itself as the lead in the market for conventional private on-demand transportation.

Many businesses don't care about the people that work for them because they only view them as liabilities, not as assets. This becomes more and more relevant the more a given business pushes their employees into being meat-cogs in their corporate machinery. Originally it was manufacturing but now the new hot thing is to push this into services.

So yeah, this is no surprise at all.

My suspicion is that the reality predates the symbolism; but it looks jarring because even autocrats are often media-savvy to a degree and often don't want to look stereotypically autocratic, so real world examples normally avoid laying it on quite as thick(except for special occasions where it actually matters; eg. because a 'war' is something that congress does but a 'police action' need not be).

Trump seems to have no interest in avoiding autocratic cliches and saying things that sound vaguely lifted from The Godfather; so he actively leans into it. Presumably a handy loyalty test. Complying with the style guide is not an assurance that someone will just eat perjury charges covering for him or whatever; but if you want to find people whose dysfunctional relationship with authority dominates their personality demanding that they comply with laughably stupid things and having them fall into line isn't a bad start for something that is easy, cheap, and legal.