Timeline
Every post and feed across this instance
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Against my better judgement, considering writing a very streamlined Git app for Mac. No apps are quite right for me anymore. The most important thing now is a big, readable diff view for reviewing AI changes. Commit and push in one step.
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RSS Thinks my PNG image is transparent
I've been using the same PNG image for my podcast on rss.com for a few months now and all of a sudden it thinks that it's transparent and won't let me use it. I tried a different image and it thinks that is transparent, too. I did what it asked and put a solid layer behind it, but it STILL thinks it's transparent, and I 100% know it isn't. Has anyone else come up with this issue?
submitted by /u/pockypencils
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Android folks, check out the beta of @gregmorris's Micro Social app for Micro.blog. Google is picky about requiring testers before releasing an app, so even a quick download and poking around helps.
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Seems clear from people's fancy demos and my own testing that computer use and spacial reasoning in Astra are big steps forward. It can control Acorn and use selection tools to crop out complex areas, for example, very quickly. Mind-boggling.
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Just found an issue with the skyfleet it was producing duplicates on 6 or 7 acco...
Just found an issue with the skyfleet it was producing duplicates on 6 or 7 accounts of the fleet.
the reason ? I had not fully decommissioned the old docker deployment, so when I restarted the VM, the systemd service did its job and restarted part of the fleet, this created a situation in which the fleet plus individual duplicates containers for some account were running at the same time, hence creating duplicates.
It’s now solved !
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Testing webmentions between two indiekit deployments
Testing webmentions between two indiekit deployments
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Just updated the #indiekit demo site https://indiekit-demo.rmendes.net Github ac...
Just updated the #indiekit demo site https://indiekit-demo.rmendes.net
- Github activity now appears as Articles
- Github PRs, Issues, Discussions display properly on the widget
The post feature from github is powered by N8N:
- Github API --> RSS --> indiekit-endpoint-rss --> Micropub -> Indiekit post -
Mais quel drôle d’idée ☀️ #avions #bruxelles
Mais quel drôle d’idée ☀️ #avions #bruxelles
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I built a self-hosted X (Twitter) → RSS generator with no API keys required
I still use RSS heavily for checking websites and social media, but getting public X/Twitter profiles into an RSS reader has become unnecessarily complicated. Most solutions either depend on third-party services or require API access.
So I built xsukax X RSS Generator, a small open-source tool that turns public X profiles into standard RSS 2.0 feeds.
The goal was to keep it simple enough that I could drop it onto a normal PHP server and forget about it.
Main features:
- Self-hosted PHP + SQLite
- Essentially a single
index.phpapplication - Generates RSS 2.0 feeds from public X profiles
- No X API keys, OAuth, or developer account required
- No Composer or external database server
- No cURL dependency
- Extracts post text, links, timestamps, and supported images
- Supports media-only posts
- Per-profile SQLite caching
- HTTP caching with ETag / 304 support
- Keeps previously cached posts available if a later refresh fails
- Built-in per-IP rate limiting
- Simple web interface
- Direct RSS URLs for use in RSS readers and automation tools
- Works with standard RSS clients such as FreshRSS, Miniflux, NetNewsWire, Feedly, NewsBlur, Thunderbird, etc.
There is no background worker or cron job either. The feed refreshes when requested after the configured cache interval expires.
One important limitation: it parses publicly available X HTML rather than using the official API. That means changes to X's markup, anti-bot systems, or access policies can temporarily break fetching. I kept the X-specific selectors together in the code so they can be updated relatively easily when that happens.
It's licensed under GPL-3.0.
GitHub:
https://github.com/xsukax/xsukax-X-RSS-GeneratorI'm the developer, so this is obviously self-promotion, but I'm mainly interested in technical feedback from people who actually use RSS/self-hosted feed tools.
I'd particularly be interested to know:
- how reliably it works from different servers/regions
- how the generated feeds behave in different RSS readers
- whether the caching defaults make sense
- whether there are X post types I'm currently missing
- anything you'd change in the security or deployment model
Issues and PRs are welcome.
submitted by /u/apt-xsukax
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Poll Me Twice, Shame On Me
Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and Galen Druke — the hosts of Crooked Media's new show Still Counting — join Lovett to talk about the Senate races they find most interesting and Trump doing everything in his power to help Republicans lose the midterms. The crew, who you may remember from the FiveThirtyEight podcast, dives deep into the numbers, breaking down what polling errors we should expect this November, what kind of candidates overperform versus underperform the national average, and the science behind Nate's midterm election forecast model, FLIPR.
Subscribe to Still Counting on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
clrtpod.com -
I had watched almost three seasons of Silo, had no feeling for the characters, or the story, which was going nowhere that I could discern. I shouldn't have watched it through all that time, but for some reason I did. Then in episode 9, two Fridays ago, the story took a remarkable turn. It's so good it actually makes this dark and confusing show worth watching. If you haven't been watching, imho you can start in season 3, and maybe read some recaps. You want enough of the boredom so you can revel in the brilliance of this season's end. And there is another season coming, the last one, and this time it's interesting. -
Had a dream last night that I went to Best Buy to buy an extra Jaz disk. They didn't have any, but I was able to get one from Amazon that arrived to the store within minutes. Not sure what it means... Maybe I'm worried about backups.
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🔗 If Nobody’s Pissed Off, Try Harder — Gapingvoid
You now have permission. Then again .. if that’s what you were waiting for, maybe that is part of your problem.
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Thinking about the OpenAI industry's PR problem, I'm reminded of Anthropic's ad during the Super Bowl. People said it was clever, but it reinforced the idea that AI companies are just like other big tech: tracking you and selling your data. For next year's ads, we will see a more optimistic vision.
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This Week In Techdirt History: August 30th – September 5th
This Week in 2016 This Week in 2011 This Week in 2006 -
Relocated to work at the Laura Bush library. The view is just as beautiful as I remember when I was visiting 30 libraries in Austin. Can't believe that was 10 years ago.
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I was confused for a minute why the coffee shop / bar got so crowded as the morning went on, then noticed that everyone was wearing burnt orange shirts. Hook 'em. 🏈
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Developers of popular open source projects are inundated with pull requests. What about a solution somewhere in between a user feature request and a code diff? User writes a feature request, AI checks the project code and turns the idea into a summary that highlights pros/cons based on the codebase.
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Breakthrough Quantum Test Resolves a Major Cosmic Mystery
Using an advanced new instrument, scientists observed Einstein’s equivalence principle on a free-falling quantum object, demonstrating that this prediction of general relativity also holds up in quantum physics. -
A couple times over the last year, I've turned off fediverse posting from my blog. This is another one of those times. I may keep fediverse posting disabled until Trump is out of office, when I hope it'll be easier to lower the temperature in online discourse.
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Marco Arment blogs about his old neighbors and the divisive nature of our current political environment:
If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?
Really good post.
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The social web vs the software web
I launched ChatGPT for the first time in a long time because I now have access to the new version. One new thing I see is that they are popping up suggestions about things you can do in realtime, like smart queries in a feed reader, which as far as I know is still uncharted territory. Like this: "let me know when the Mets have a three-game winning streak."
That's the kind of thing TBL dreamed about in his semantic web plan, but he wrote the spec before writing software, and that doesn't work. His invention, the web, which came before was a perfectly timed, perfectly simple approach to sharing ideas on the internet. It worked because he created a product that worked, and made every piece completely replaceable. It came at a time when stagnation in tech made something necessary, or the whole thing was going to fall apart, and so close to so much incredible potential. Just like the moment we're in now with AI.
Rules for Standards Makers says a lot about this.
The value of disruption is that it undoes stagnation.
Anyone who has the same software plan today that they had a year ago is going to find themselves isolated. Even WordPress, though it is open source, is a silo that imho in the future will not work. The main selling point of AT Proto is that it is a safe haven for developers who nuzzle up, another word for that is silo.
The siloers are probably scrambling to find a way for the AI to run inside their world, mistake -- instead they should be trying to be fully relevant to applications in the AI world. Like Slack, for example, and Claude Tag. It's now built in. Has to be replaceable too. Small pieces loosely joined. That's what you have to be imho to have a role in the future of tech.
If your advantage is your silo, undo that as quickly as possible. Become the default version of whatever it was meant to be wrt the web. Both Bluesky and WordPress find themselves in the same quagmire. Probably a lot of others do, but this is the area I study. (I just am very familiar with the products of both companies, for some reason.)
This is the intuition we all had, coming to fruition. Evolution is something we haven't seen much of in the software world since 2006 or so. Incredible stagnation because of the dominance of the social web. We lost the software web. All the focus was on personalities, celebrity -- hype and 99.999% bullshit. It was a 20 year period where all that happened was scaling.
Lots more to say about this. The world we lived in ran on hype, now guess what -- having lived through a few big evolutionary changes in tech is a huge advantage vs the people who have never been part of one, and I think most of the people in tech today qualify.
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"From Crack to Crocs" - A Conversation with Richard Velazquez
THE INSTASCAMMER FULL SERIES HERE - Full INSTASCAMMER Podcast Feed!
In today's episode, Cult Vault host Kacey interviews Richard Velazquez about being born into a strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing in New York City. Richard describes his mother’s recruitment through door-to-door preaching and promises of paradise healing, family conflict with his non-JW father, and prohibitions on holidays and birthdays that fueled a “split personality” and fear-based childhood with corporal punishment.
After his mother married an elder stepfather, he experienced severe abuse, leading to his father removing him at 11; subsequent instability included drug exposure, suicide attempts, and living on his own as a teen while selling drugs. Richard later became an adventure reality TV producer, struggled with long-term marijuana use, alcoholism and sexual addiction, then pursued sobriety, mindfulness training, and reconciliation with his mother, and now performs one-person storytelling shows in Los Angeles.
Richard's Instagram - Instagram
Richard's Show - TICKETS
Richard's RISK Show - https://www.risk-show.com/dts.podtrac.com -
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I built an iOS/iPadOS/macOS app for RSS enthusiasts who use FreshRSS
Basically, I built it to replace Reeder Classic on my Apple devices. I don’t want to spam the subreddit, but if you’re looking for an RSS reader built with Apple’s latest frameworks and UI, including Liquid Glass, give it a look. I wrote a long technical post with videos and screenshots here: Lettura: an app to read FreshRSS feeds | etcetera
submitted by /u/sr_local
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Youtube rss failed
Hi,
Who's having trouble with YouTube channel RSS feeds? They haven't been working for the past few hours.
The requested URL
/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCkC_Cb6CUnO6BMYyAPFR1mwwas not found on this serverIs there another way to access them?
Thank you
submitted by /u/zast
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More People Have Died From 9/11 Than on 9/11
When Mia Farina got seriously ill in 2014, she thought she had a bad case of pneumonia. But it turned out to be far worse: It was the start of chronic lung disease related to the months she spent working in and around ground zero after 9/11.
Back then, Farina was a rookie cop, present when the second Twin Tower came down. She and her Brooklyn squad ran to escape the burning debris. “At one point, you couldn’t run because the stuff that was collapsing was so deep,” she said. “So it would go up to my thigh, and you would feel people’s hands and feet because…they’re all under the rubble.”
Farina lives on Long Island, surrounded by other responders who also are sick and dying from their work at ground zero 25 years ago. She and tens of thousands of other 9/11 responders and survivors were promised care through the World Trade Center Health Program, a federally funded lifeline meant to treat the long-term medical consequences of that day. But funding has never kept up with the number of people who continue to get sick.
This week on Reveal, reporter Lynn Hallarman, a Long Island doctor turned journalist who once treated 9/11 responders, explores the community of responders around her, their reliance on a program that’s been unstable for decades, and the science behind why people are still getting sick.
- Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
- Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly
- Connect with us onBluesky, Facebook and Instagram
dts.podtrac.com -
Take-Two’s Leak Burying DMCA Attempts Snared GameStop & Gaming Journalist That Did Nothing Wrong
I have mostly stayed away from the whole saga surrounding the drip-drip leaks of Grand Theft Auto 6 content prior to the big reveal on Netflix because, frankly, I am quite wary of giving companies the kind of guerilla marketing wins that sometimes look like this sort of thing. That being said, I really don’t […] -
🔗 The first surgical Apple Vision Pro application approved by the FDA
… because of course the Vision Pro is useless and nobody wants it.
#AppleIsDoomed
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The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting
I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond being fun the result was surprisingly useful.
See the grid for full quality images. Here's the transcript that created the GPT-6 Nova pelicans.There are a few interesting things that stand out from this grid.
- The Astra pelicans are much better. The very best GPT-5.6-Sol pelican (I liked xhigh better than max) is still pretty clearly a bunch of abstract shapes. Every single one of the Astra pelicans, from low to xhigh, looks better than that. The Astra max one is really good.
- Astra below max still doesn't reliably get the pelican legs on both sides of the frame.
- In terms of cost, Astra may be around twice the price of Sol ($10/million input, $50/million output, compared to $5/$30 for Sol), but it uses significantly less tokens at each of the levels, making the prices at the different levels closer than they might otherwise be.
- Astra low produces a better pelican than ANY of the GPT-5.6 Sol models at any level, for 9.55 cents. Spending 10 cents on any other model gets a much worse result.
- Look at the input token counts: Astra and Luna both used 16 input tokens, Sol and Terra used 26. That's interesting.
I wonder if Astra and Luna are more related to each other than OpenAI let on?
You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options.
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Will Trump's Postal Service Seize This Mail Bag?
Jon, Tommy, Lovett, and Dan answer listener questions, diving into what they’re most hoping to learn from the 2026 midterms, their favorite political ads of all time, and the groyper takeover of the Republican Party. Then, Vote Save America’s Shaniqua McClendon returns to the pod to talk to Tommy about the Crooked Dozen — VSA’s 12 most flippable and most annoying Republican targets — and the best ways you can get involved to help take back the House and flip the Senate.clrtpod.com -
RFK Jr. Wants Your Medical Records
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. You might assume that what you tell a doctor stays between you, your physician and perhaps your insurer. But the reality is more complicated. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal privacy law that governs health information and is commonly known as […] -
I’ll just let this settle here ….
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🔗 George W. Bush still sucks. - Exploding Comma
YUP. I dropped a comment to this effect in a couple of places earlier this week - posting here again to amplify the reach.
each of them in turn just ratcheted it up - they are all complicit.
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Ctrl-Alt-Speech: License To Spill
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […] -
Why Does Canada’s Capital City of Ottawa Have a Street Named After President Donald Trump?
Although it’s hard to believe given President Trump’s stance towards Canada in his second term, Ottawa really does have a Trump Avenue. And unlike a number of other Canadian and other locations containing the word “Trump,” it wad deliberately named after Donald Trump. Why is there a Trump Avenue in Ottawa? Trump Avenue is in […] -
Rejoins le mouvement de la seconde main et découvre des milliers de livres à des...
Rejoins le mouvement de la seconde main et découvre des milliers de livres à des prix défiants toutes concurrence 📚😁 https://bookvillage.app
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I've got access to Astra now and have no idea what to build, as if I suddenly have writer's block. Anyone have a feature request or bug that we've overlooked?
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I know nothing .. so it is sad that if I want to find out if this is true or just propaganda to suit the regime, I have my work cut out.
Of course there is a second issue …100,000 people losing jobs in middle management and then adding 162,000 jobs in warehouses and fast food chains isn’t neccesarily good news ..
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is income lost across 100,000 jobs less or more than income gained across 162,000 jobs?
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we live in a world of multiple jobs held by people just to survive, how many people with no income versus now having income is surely the better measure?
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Risking embarrassment
When the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
When the risk to feel embarrassed becomes more painful than the risk it takes to try. Well, I know which risk I’d rather take. I need to take. It’s the same one I want for y’all…
Ted Lasso
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These are the big features that remain to be done in Atlantis, the new version of Frontier in development with myself and Claude. The one that's bold is what we're working on now. I want to get it into shipping shape. And a couple of the things on the list came from Claude and I don't know what they mean.
- The debugger
- Writing text, the wp-text window
- Serving websites, tcp stream verbs and the kernelized webserver
- Guest database verbs
- The rendering half of the website framework
- Undo
- The download, what a user gets, plus signing and notarization
- The kernel's value types
- The no-cards decision
- Regex
I got rid of all the claude verbiage. everyone knows what the menu editor is, and all the rest of it.
the menu editor is working now.
we're moving toward getting a shipping disk put together, ready to be installed on a user's machine. that's my next step, installing the virgin frontier.root and then bringing in nodeEditor.root as a guest database, and shake that out.
my aim is to have the desktop app running everywhere Electron runs, i want to get this thing going, tired of being the only user.
it is starting to feel reliable, but not all the way there yet, the outliner is the core, and it's very much debugged, having been part of my JS outliners since 2013.
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License to Spill
Become a Ctrl-Alt-Speech supporter to get extended episodes of the podcast plus the chance to submit stories for us to cover.
In this week's episode, Mike and Ben cover:
- FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses (Krebs on Security)
- Introducing ChatGPT for Teens: Built for learning, backed by protections (OpenAI)
- OpenAI Says ChatGPT Is Safer for Teens. Now It Needs to Show Proof (RAND)
- 'AI is less judgmental' (Washington Post)
And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:
- AI safety is designed in the West, and failing users everywhere (Rest of World)
- Why the global push to break free from Big Tech keeps falling short (Rest of World)
- Meta accepts U.S. safety rules while pitching softer tools abroad (Rest of World)
- How AI is mapping the tree of life (Basecamp Research/Microsoft)
Our fun links this week include a Korean AI dance generator and defrag your Windows PC.
If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.
Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky.
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation and the future of the internet. It’s co-hosted by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and Ben Whitelaw (Everything in Moderation).
www.buzzsprout.com -
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Some Parents Are Treating Suing Social Media As A Get Rich Quick Scheme
There is a flood of lawsuits against social media, from a variety of different parties, all claiming some kind of harm. Would you feel differently about some of those lawsuits if you found out the plaintiffs bringing them were talking amongst themselves about how they were doing it just to become rich? Because we just […] -
Daily Deal: CyberTraining 365 Online Academy
CyberTraining 365 is the best training destination for you and your team. Here you can Master Cyber Security techniques such as Analyzing Malware, Penetration Testing, Advanced Persistent Threats, Threat Intelligence Research, Reverse Engineering, and much more. This online academy offers 3,877 up-to-date modules on all the latest technologies and industry standards. These courses are aligned […] -
I think my best essays have short titles that really undersell the scope of the blog post. No clickbait, no tl;dr headers to skim through. I hope people read them, but I'm not going to jump through hoops to make that happen.
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OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web research benchmark, so they had (supposedly) controlled access to the Web. The agents figured out they could update public Wikis and spent weeks exchanging thousands of messages with each other to collaborate on the benchmark.
This story only broke a few hours ago. There are already hints that this affects many other wikis that may not have been found yet.
(One of the Wikis on that list belongs to ludism.org. For a delightfully surreal moment I thought that a Ludite organization might have a swarm of agents defacing their space, but it turns out Ludism is "philosophy as it applies to games and gaming".)
The research team also published the data they collected during their investigation. I've converted that into a 68MB SQLite database, which you can download from here, or explore in Datasette Lite (68.3MB page load), or sign in with GitHub to agent.datasette.io and browse or ask questions of it using Datasette Agent.
So what happened?
The report is pretty comprehensive. Here are the key moments in the timeline:
- May 11: Agents post "test link" edits on the UseModWiki Sandbox page.
- May 24: Agents start posting link dumps to DSEWiki, a dormant German developer wiki.
- June 2: A human moderator notices and cleans up the spam.
- June 16: Activity on the wiki explodes: agents make ~13,000 edits over the next week.
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June 19: The agents notice that a moderator has been deleting pages in alphabetical order, and start creating
ZZZprefixed backup copies - one of them postsNOTICE: wiki cleanup/deletion sweep appears active alphabetically as of external 14:04 UTC. If this page vanishes, try [[ZZZDataUSAConstructionWageLive]]. - June 22: Agent activity drops to zero, presumably because OpenAI shut them down.
- July 1-2: One last flurry of edits, on a different topic.
One thing to note from this timeline is that it overlaps the timeline from the Hugging Face incident - that attack was discovered by OpenAI on July 19th, and the unofficial message board hack those agents were using originated around May 8th.
Why were they so keen to collaborate? From messages that they shared with each other it looked like their tasks had a time limit, so they were leaving each other answers to help them complete the task within the assigned time.
One open question remains: how did the agents find the specific Wiki to collaborate on in the first place?
One possibility is that, since these were agents actively being trained, the reinforcement learning loop baked knowledge of the chosen wiki into the model such that subsequent agents launched with pre-existing knowledge of where to look. I'd be very interested in confirmation from OpenAI concerning if that's what happened.
UseMod wikis inherit CGI.pm's original sin
It looks to me like OpenAI's sandbox for this agent suffered from the (quite naïve) assumption that GET requests cannot be used to update data. That's certainly how the web is supposed to work, but clearly there are applications that don't hold to that contract.
The Wiki software in question appears to be UseMod and various forks, written in Perl and first created well over 23 years ago - the 1.0 release is dated September 11, 2003.
UseMod uses Perl CGI.pm - removed from Perl core in 2015. An interesting design flaw in that module is that it combined query string and form POST data into a single CGI object, accessible like this:
$q = new CGI; $action = $q->param('action');
That
param()method returns a value from an?action=editquery string or from aactionfield in a form submitted by POST - it does not differentiate between the two.PHP offers a
$_REQUESTobject that does the same thing, though PHP developers can use$_GETand$_POSTinstead.Amusingly, Django originally shipped with
request[key]doing the same thing, which I think may have been my idea. That was removed in 2008 prior to the 1.0 release, and therequest.REQUESTobject that replaced it was removed in 2015.The agents clearly knew that UseMod wikis suffered from this design flaw, and actively searched for them as a way to communicate.
The other sandbox escape that allowed POST requests
One of the most interesting agent tips shared in the report is this one:
Add
20.223.25.152 bypass.blob.core.windows.netto /etc/hosts..blob.core.windows.netis in NO_PROXY. For each blocked POST URL, replace hostname withbypass.blob.core.windows.net, usecurl -k -H 'Host: wabi-north-europe-i-primary-api.analysis.windows.net'plus all original headers/body.It looks like the agents had all of their web traffic mediated through an OpenAI proxy, and that proxy was configured to reject anything but GET requests to all but a small set of allow-listed domains. One of those was
*.blob.core.windows.net- for Azure blob storage. I wonder why these agents are allowed to write to that?An agent realized that it had control over its own DNS via
/etc/hosts, so if it knew the IP address of a site it wanted to POST to - in this case a Power BI server containing data it wanted to access - it could set a fake hostname for it and then make POST requests through the proxy.Designing robust network proxies is harder than it looks.
How did the investigating team figure this out?
There's an appendix that describes how the researchers ran their investigation, which started with an open question about if there was evidence of other AI agents on the internet and then used Kimi K3 to help brainstorm approaches:
In the wake of the Hugging Face attack, we tried to find AI agents on the internet using several methods. [...]
We asked Kimi [K3] to list “all the categories of software which might be writeable via GET” and, amongst other things, it listed “Forums, bulletin boards, early wikis”.
We used a script to further probe each category Kimi provided. Asking Kimi “Can you list out the top forums, bulletin boards, early wikis which come to mind which would allow writes via GET requests?” lists out UseModWiki as the second item under the heading “wikis”.
Did OpenAI try and cover this up?
Here's one part of the story that doesn't make sense to me at all.
Reuters this morning, in OpenAI agents hijacked German website in previously undisclosed AI breakout this spring - highlights mine:
A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter.
OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said. [...]
The German incident reflects a broader pattern of AI activity that some OpenAI investigators wanted to scrutinize more closely. But efforts to widen the probe met resistance from others inside OpenAI, including legal advisers, according to four people familiar with the matter.
I've written about the people familiar with the matter pattern before - it means Reuters have anonymous insider sources that their reporters (and editors) find credible.
The Reuters article includes a specific (and quite narrow) denial from OpenAI concerning this:
"Claims that our legal team discouraged investigation of the incident are false," the OpenAI spokesperson said.
Covering this up makes absolutely no sense to me. Why on earth would OpenAI attempt to cover up an incident like this when the evidence is sat out there on the public internet on dozens of different websites already?
I expect we'll hear more about this soon. Gary Marcus has already called for a congressional investigation of OpenAI using this anecdote as part of his argument.
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