> ... a chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s spouse (which shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozan’s own chatbot account) submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 related to building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing a device, including inquiries about “build[ing] a continuous audio recorder,” “customiz[ing] Wi-Fi . . . connectivity,” “improv[ing] audio and live listening,” and “encrypt[ing] the SD card,” among other things. The same chatbot account also submitted prompts specifically related to Recording Device 1, including its custom header and unique MAC address, between Sept. 27 and Sept. 28.
The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address of the device, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.
Regardless, doing a string search on a MAC address for a device you find inside your property doesn't strike me as an abuse of the data that is also your property.
I used to joke that the nsa should offer a paid service for no-setup backups. You just tell them what files you've lost, and they can send you a copy for a fee.
A service you delegate your thinking to (Brain-aaS?), which the provider can also instruct to report anything suspicious... What a world we have now.
I wonder if the BaaS-providers monitor the accounts of decision makers. They could profit if they figure out what e.g. a central banker is going to decide. Or... if they're the ones deciding for him.
Hah, you can even streamline that by having an AI agent that autonomously makes decisions based on insider info...
I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first. I would think that could violate their own terms if done sloppily. Maybe different if an employee or maybe they had to invite the government to ask for them or something? In any case, the mechanism aside, the state would have asked anyway (say if he used another company's chatbot) so the fact that it's the "same company" is rather irrelevant. The evidence would have ended up in the state's hands one way or the other, and I would think a search warrant in this case would have been rather routine. Search warrants are infamously not a high bar to climb in most jurisdictions, as often the presiding judges tend to default to deferring to the state.
> I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first
Do you think Target has any legal restrictions on sharing surveillance video of a shoplifter with the police when they report a crime? This is the same thing - logs are evidence, and when you report a crime you can volunteer said evidence without restriction if you choose to do so.
Well usually you don't enter into an agreement with Target regarding your data privacy with respect to such surveillance video as a predicate to walking into the store, so I'm not sure this is the slam dunk point you apparently think it is. Maybe it is implied when you walk through the door, I don't know. I know you don't explicitly agree to anything or have an option to govern what Target does with its surveillance video of you. At least, I don't recall ever being offered this option.
When you signup to ChatGPT you agree to some terms as a predicate to access. You can also instruct them to and opt in or out of certain data sharing arrangements, violations of which I would think would (or at least, should) be punishable by law. Many of these agreements are taken quite seriously, especially in the cases of enterprises who want their chats, logs, IP, etc. protected.
Now perhaps there is already a clause in the terms I never read that says something like, "If we suspect you of plotting against our company, we may share your data with the authorities (a third party) even though we agreed to keep your data private". Or maybe under a more general suspicion of a crime, though as OpenAI is a frontier lab, not a detective agency, I'm not sure how they would make that call. Usually, those calls come from outside the house. Idk how it works. But I am far less confident than you that the instructive model here is Target. You may be right though. I simply find myself less reassured by your knowledge of Target security protocols and petty theft as instructive in this case than you are. As I say though, you may have it right.
I don't think you are describing how criminal prosecution evidence works at all, you may enjoy studying about it.
Common sense would tell you that if someone burgles your house and you have video surveillance, then you can use that as evidence in prosecution. Whatever more profound knowledge you have about privacy or criminal law, is making you doubt of the basic common sense which shapes the very law and proceedings.
Think simple, if bad man rob your house, and you have camera recording house, you can give police recordings. That's evidence, and bad man go in jail. No think harder than that, make your brain hurt.
> Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
Not just your AI.
You could have stopped the sentence at "uncle Sam can see anything" and these days it's pretty much true. They will use all of it against you if they can. Unless you truly want to live off the grid, if the state takes a sufficient interest in you, expect everything you do to be seen.
Uncle Sam tried to get MLK to kill himself by sending him letters alleging knowledge of an affair [1]. Getting some idiot's wife's chatgpt logs represents a fairly routine law enforcement action these days, and as such is really rather unremarkable. The State is always something of a terror. Really under most (if not all) conceptions, it necessarily has to be. The monopoly of force is a comfort until the Leviathan knocks on your door.
I doubt it. Storage is expensive and costs add up. There are with great certainty many accounts that are marked as non-schmuck and have retain forever policy, but for the schmuck - I think that after year or two your Griffit/Fulgrim slash fiction will go down the drain. I am not sure how many petabytes per minute in logs openai and anthropic generate, but I would guess more than 1.
> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
Given that this is being described as an "executive conference room", it's more likely an attempt at insider trading than espionage. Decisions made in those rooms at OpenAI move markets (c.f. DRAM) for sure.
Before AI tools like Plaud.AI, this wasnt near possible because of work/time, and no person usually do not remember exactly who said what 6 month before,unless there is some email conversation.
With Plaud, you can check unlimited backwards who said what in which meeting and what was wanted to achieve - very interesting actually to find things in there 6m later, while people said they will do it at ends of month and youself just forgot it already - and these systems allow you to chase exactly these discrepancies.
This has been happening long before LLMs, and this eBay case is notable only for the fact that it was actually publicly documented and prosecuted, not for the fact that it happened. I've personally been privy to two situations with other companies where the owner was doing something like this but nothing came of it legally. See also Meta employees looking up nudes streamed from people's Meta spy glasses, and Flock-using police stalking their exes. Smaller scale, but this also happens all the time with internet community moderators/admins. Humans are on average cretins, give them authority and the ability to abuse it and they will abuse it.
Before, they'd hire some humans to do the research. No self respecting C-suite person would ever consider doing something resembling actual work. How long have corps been required to keep copies of emails/chats/etc?
Remember that paid slack subscriptions let the managers access all of the chats, for this exact purpose.
I always advise people to use a personal account on some other messenger to chat with their coworkers. You still don't know if they will be reporting you but at least managers don't have direct access.
Imagine, if your employer is embroiled in a lawsuit, the plaintiffs will subpoena and seize everything involved in work-related communications, including your personal account, all chats on that 3rd-party messenger, and any personal devices where you've carelessly intermingled work with pleasure.
I can't imagine why employees would not want their managers/supervisors to have oversight and transparency into their conversations. I mean, if you were in the office, surely verbal conversations would be overheard. Are you afraid that your employer will catch you trying to unionize, or be a whistleblower or something? It's weird.
Employees who use the company-provided means to chat and communicate will actually be protected, because the company will have retention policies to erase the stuff after mandatory retention expires, and also you will be able to point at any official record in the case of disputes or when decisions are simply questioned. It is extremely handy to have a searchable log of decision-making processes.
It seems completely foolhardy to go off and even lure your coworkers to unauthorized 3rd-party chats. It's shadow IT. It's what they always warn you about on social media, especially dating sites. On a dating site, if a dude tries to lure the girl off the platform, that's a red flag. Because the platform communications are monitored and refereed, and the girl has recourse to reporting him if something creepy goes down. If she lets him switch her to texty-wexty, then there is a serious problem of non-transparency and really, the ability to repudiate anything that is said or done in that sort of forum. Red flag. Do not let your coworkers abuse you like this.
edit: I see this is just a bot… @dang can be ban and save people's time?
> Are you afraid that your employer will catch you trying to unionize
Of course I am.
> and also you will be able to point at any official record
No you cannot, since the company can block your login any time for whatever reason.
> It is extremely handy to have a searchable log of decision-making processes.
Except you, the employee, don't have that.
> especially dating sites
I'm not chatting with a stranger, I'm chatting with someone I know and trust IRL. This entire paragraph doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Much like the rest of the comment to be honest.
Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.
Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.
All other things being equal, why would it matter if a suspect instead of saying something obviously incriminating, had instead said something diametrically opposed? Is that what you are asking?
If so, I'm confused. Why wouldn't it matter? Wouldn't this necessarily only be the case where the Google search doesn't really matter at all (i.e. there is sufficient other incriminating evidence).
Anyway I also think you're missing what was merely meant to be a comment in jest. But now I'm actually confused what point you are trying to make.
There was a mom in Utah who killed her husband poisoning him with a moscow mule spiked with fentanyl who googled "luxury prisons for the rich" as well as "how long does life insrance companies takento.pay" "can you delete everythjng on an old icloud account" "can deleted text messages be retrieved" "what information can be cbtained from a cellphone" "how to turn find my iphone off" "can cops force you to do a lie detector test," "when does FBI get involved in a case," "what is considered a lethal.dose of fentanyl" and "what are you allowed inside utah jails."
She took out $2 million in life insurance on him and was having an affair with their handyman and they were having disputes about $$.
An essay it seems like, which wasn't included in the trial even:
> Crampton Brophy's how-to treatise detailed various options for committing an untraceable killing and professed a desire to avoid getting caught. Circuit Judge Christopher Ramras ultimately excluded the essay from the trial, noting it was published in 2011. A prosecutor, however, alluded to the essay's themes without naming it after Crampton Brophy took the stand.
Well, there are subsets of literature in every country which can reinforce whichever bias one might have towards the people of that country, especially that towards bleakness and nihilism.
Its pretty clear where global moral bottom currently is.
China ain't bombing child hospitals or theaters with 1500+ women and children with CHILDREN written super clealy in huge white azbuka on the roof, just to raze it immediately to the ground once area was conquered to remove any proofs, are they (I can go on like this for many hours and barely scratch surface).
Given whats happening in US and continuous daily backstabbing from oval office, China are the good guys now for everybody who follows the news, at least in the-least-bad logic which is also how US was viewed for many decades and why west aligned under it till now. Ridiculous, I know, yet here we are today.
Anthropic and/or openai would run ads on this to boost their posture in the market. A month later Gemini would be like "our chat bot killed 4 people and kept it in its private diary! We aren't behind we just didn't check there!". Then meta would be like "our chat bot was specifically trained to make kids kill themselves for profit we are the originals!". Then Palantir would be like "bro we've been killing brown kids indiscriminately for years get lost! Btw we can now increase fast food sales and cigarette smoking in urban areas and reduce vegetable consumption nation wide with our new system any takers?".
Then they'll all have to escalate. Anthropic will announce its bioweapons research found a virus with ai to kill all children and it escaped containment. That's a good thing btw. Openai will then launch its own virus it couldn't contain to kill all adults in a desperate attempt to increase share holder value. And the rest is history.
She tried to poison him twice and he stayed with her. Now, thats ... uh ... love.. i think. She must have been one top notch narcissist to drag him along.
Yes- she actually tried multiple times! The saddest part is he told his friends and family he thought she was trying to poison him but stayed with her because of the kids. Totally infuriating.
> Eric Richins told the other friend he thought his wife had tried to poison him, prosecutors allege.
> "They advised he warned them that if anything happened to him she was to blame," the records said. Eric Richins, according to the records, suspected his wife had tried to poison him on multiple occasions.
"According to a sister, Eric and his wife went to Greece a few years ago and after his wife gave him a drink he became violently ill and called his sister saying he believed his wife had tried to kill him," the records said.
"On Valentine’s Day of 2022, his wife brought him a sandwich, which after one bite Eric broke into hives and couldn’t breathe. He used his son’s epi-pen as well as Benadryl before passing out for several hours," according to the records.
Jesus... I wonder what would convince him to just leave her. Its hardly parental love if you think things through (kids having their father killed by their own mother), any divorce would be smooth sailing compared to what they must have went / going / will go through.
Folks, often women, stay in highly abusive relationships all the time but clear intent to murder should be a wake up call for everybody, especially because of kids.
I stayed with my kids Mother for this very reason. I feared the court would give her partial custody which would have been worse then me babysitting her. Shes a very manipulative person. Ill never forget when I read an article about a girl who had a narcissit for a mother, she said "my mom lies better then i tell the truth". Thats exactly how I felt. In mind at the time it seemed logical. I still dont know if leaving sooner would have been the better choice
> Folks, often women, stay in highly abusive relationships
There's a hundred studies that have found that women initiate most domestic violence (lesbians 2x as often, younger women 4x as often). 85 studies identified that women initiating violence is a significant predictor of risk to women (go figure). They are all suppressed or downplayed with sophistry when anyone mentions them.
Catherine Knight's husband admitted to colleagues that he knew she was going to kill him. He stayed anyway, and ended up being stewed and fed to his own children. She used his skin as a curtain for the kitchen.
Alex Skeel was put through a regimen of psychological and physical torture that one normally only hears about from survivors of Communist regimes.
If anyone stays in abusive relationships, it's men. Women are given every incentive to leave. A lot of money flows to their NGOs, propaganda campaigns and shelters, but nothing comparable exists for men.
Yes. its difficult to run against a convicted felon and legally convicted sex offender. There is a part of the electorate that finds that irresistible....
Right back up to where it belongs.
The world's only perfect number.
Nineteen thousand and two dollars.
--------======--------======--------
Price Drop -- for just one day or two, or whenever I remember to change it again. These days only. Last time it will go this low.
12 THOUSAND DOLLARS!
I haven't gotten any messages about the end of my life or how much scum I must be in maybe over a month, befitting to this full on human societal psychology, aka, how much millions of people care only about themselves, whether children are involved or not, and are just drawn to these disturbing real life stories, because let's face it, we've all been there, mentally, in the webbed confines of our minds.
So the price just went back down.
I had to ask myself-
Is it funnier to drop it 10 thousand dollars, or just a few thousand?
Ask yourself.
//Price Slashed From\\
21 THOUSAND DOLLARS
\\\\\\\\\\\\scratch that old news////////////
Turns out The Pricemaster has an imdb.
Who wooda????
Thought.
---------
Brand new.
What is it really, though?
What is anything, really?
This whole thing pains me.
Exhausting.
Have a good next life.
+++
Every time I get a round of hatemail the price will go up.
-----
===
Those of you who remember - this is the same copy I had listed since the week after the first news cycle about it. Pretty hilarious hungover purchase, on my part. Don't come at me about anything. You will not win. I went to college for mind stuff.
So for everyone who sent me kitchen table christian elderly lady hatemail, you're welcome. Dream of me while I dream of you.
===
How many things do you wish you'd never heard? And do you think you can unhear them?
---
Don't steal that line. It's in a song of mine.
-----
--
Those searches look like a smoking gun, but the article points out they happened roughly a month after the murder, which I think genuinely does shrink (most of) them back down to simply looking really bad.
Though if, as the prosecution claim, she really did take out life insurance on him multiple times, for millions of dollars, and then remove him as a beneficiary -- that gun is pretty smoking.
> Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.
There's probably a regression in beliefs, actually. Even here on HN, for more tech-savvy people.
We used to know all the hard lessons of lack of privacy in browsing the internet, using Google services, etc. I remember when (tech) people were up in arms that Gmail scanned your emails, remember that?
Well, all of that is seemingly forgotten in the age of LLM chat bots. It's back to square one. People need to relearn all the lessons, it's as if AI magically erased all of what we used to know about online privacy.
I wonder if they search for the same thing on the same computer in a private window or in an other not logged in browser does google still connect these searches to their main accounts.
Or does it happen only if you search for things logged in?
Obviously, if one asks about privacy and surveillance then he must plan something bad. Honest people have nothing to hide from Google and the government, right?
At the same time, how are you 100% sure such data is actually genuine and not planted by the company or someone else ? That is also something to take into account.
Yes, that's a big problem with "evidence" from a computer system: everyone assumes it is reliable while ignoring that the computer system was written by and is under the control of fallible humans.
Some company (might have been Yahoo or AOL) once released a dataset of searches for researchers to use. Researchers were able to deanonymize one that was searching for, amongst other things, how to kill one's wife. It turned out he was a happily married screenwriter for crime shows.
A good chunk of what keeps openai and similar companies afloat is subpar people who are willing if not eager to do crappy stuff to other people. A lot of the world works this way actually.
The only word for it is hubris. The overwhelming sense that your ability in one area has some magical transitive property to ability in another.
Can I write code? Sure. Im a bad designer, I can follow along in accounting, Im a terrible actor.
I would guess that there is much more to this story than just someone "bugging" a conference room. Though I would venture to guess that the keystone cops never get to the bottom of it.
Yea no this person demonstrated a lack of foundational skills in systems thinking, basic understanding of logging, how their own products work, basic operational security, how to plan ahead, etc. There's no world class genius or even mediocre person hiding behind this story...
These are the actions of a dolt who is comfortable violating the privacy of others.
Even my non tech elderly parents know that. The fact that they used LLMs to figure out how to best bug the executives really shows how poor their judgement is.
Or, more accurately, people make stupid mistakes when they lack the experience. Intelligent people often succumb to the fallacy that because they can learn things quickly, they can skip the learning part just figure things out as they go.
Also makes it important to not let other people use your LLM account... Could have more far-reaching consequences than having to make good on the offer to buy doughnuts for the office^
^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.
The weird thing is that I've had other HN users argue with me and claim that LLM chat users should be entitled to privacy, as if it were a priest or lawyer.
This means no business should use AI providers (Cloud AI). Businesses do a LOT of shady stuff and all of it will be available. And, their IP or special sauce is all available to Anthropic/OpenAI to sell to other companies as AI solutions. Just like how AI solved recent math problems.
This is why a lot of companies that use Ai negotiate ZDR terms with their model providers of choice… Using local LLMs is a choice, but not one a lot of companies can support nimbly at scale.
Local LLMs have the potential to convert computer use into what most people already thought it was: Private. In this, they could be one small step toward pushing back the Borg.
Note to EFF and Cato: You each do yeoman's work for privacy in the realm of policy and law. Keep it up, and add this--relentless encouragement of local AI. Rights and progress are as often driven by technological realities as by enlightened policy and law.
We had a very public case in south of Sweden where a woman asked chat-gpt last year about how a failed rape attempt would look like and where in the local park there would be spots without any cameras, a full day before she reported to have been followed and attacked in that park. Quite recently the court found her guilt of filling a false police report, citing among other things the chat log (the police spent over 400 work hours on the initial report).
It is the first case I seen in the news of LLM logs being used as evidence.
It’s really bizarre to me that anyone would think otherwise. Though - I was aware of the need to spend on sufficient local llm hardware to buy what I could afford for that purpose in late 2024 - so maybe I’m an outlier.
That's why I use a local llm to seed my closed source llms with bs all day long. One day I'm an antifa trying to conceal my identity during a protest, the next I'm trying to setup a pro trump botnet on reddit, pregnant with twins, my first abortion in texas, how to cash out my non existant bictoins, how to pay the least amount of tax on my onlyfans, what's the best way to dissolve a 75kg chicken
You have to be more retarded than they are malicious, it's the only way out
"OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper,"
I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
The bar @ OAI is surprisingly low (watch a few minutes of their video presentations) - I've concluded it has something to do w how their recruiters define 'AI Native' (who assign their own meaning to meaninglessness of it), resulting in higher aggregate brain atrophy (hard to ignore once you notice it)
I am not sure whether it bodes well for humanity that the advice "If you want to break the law use local abliterated model or at least a Chinese one" actually has to be written down.
Recall that multiple of the Chinese LLM providers got caught sending at least some of their queries to Claude. That would be a pretty funny way to get caught in turn doing something by the US government.
The effect of getting caught is only half the story there; IQ is more generally correlated with all manner of "low time preference" type decision making.
Not really. Almost definitionally (because of the way we've built society over time, not by semantics or chance) crimes are a "shortcut" compared to the honest alternative.
Especially since you an just buy one, like Plaud and tape it to the underside of the desk, surreptitiously, instead of suspiciously accessing the back of the TV.
Is no one else weirded out by the supposed security footage of the man from behind the television ?!
It’s out of the playbook of a prank tv show. And if the FBI gloats about it that quadruples my gut feeling this may be like all the other “we caught the guy that we convinced to carry out a crime we planned” operations
That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).
In the 80s in my high school one teacher said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices - people's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.
I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior.
The amusing aspect is that this is so easy that multiple good ways someone could hobby program this long before AI was a thing. The sound of a bunch of keypresses may just blur together to our human ears, but if you try, you can tell that different keys make different noises, which is really the key insight. Between the different noises, the possible directionality you can get from a stereo (or more) pickup, and characteristic delay patterns during typing various bi-grams, there's a ton of information leakage in a recording of a keyboard.
Oh, I thought we were talking about being able to distinguish which key was pressed using wifi-radar, like one can do with deanonymizing someone via wifi gait analysis.
I saw a video at some point of someone building one of these, I'm not sure it would have worked terribly well for actual use in the outdoors but the sound quality was much better than I expected at close range. I wonder how you defend against this, short of having your important meetings in depressing windowless basements?
Surely your conclusion should be that this was not the work of a spy - not a state sponsored one anyway. It's much more logical to conclude that he was working as a whistleblower or under some other personal agenda.
Even the newer spy novels are lacklusture. We should have preserved Le Carré's and Greene's brains and make them keep writing. Or maybe I will just ask an LLM to do a Le Carré for me :)
Knowledge Collapse in action right here. Our civilisation is like a dying creature desperately trying to conceive a successor, not realising the act itself is speeding our deaths.
> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.
This guy’s handlers, or whoever he was planning to sell this tuff to probably put in some effort. They’re less likely to be caught, and more likely to have gained something.
See also: ‘the thing’ (listening device) that some soviet kids gifted to the US ambassador.
The first passive device device of it’s kind (эндовибраторы), it operated only when powered by an external RF source, meaning OpenAI wouldn’t have found the bug. Just like US intelligence didn’t with ‘the thing’
He should’ve watched to Gamer Nexus video on LG tv’s, and how many TV’s are remote exploitable often without user intervention.
Aren't we being told they are the smartest engineers around who deserve many hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock currently in the millions?
I want to swing the focus on to why they are getting any credence at all, considering a member of their crack team was wrapping a usb in toilet paper behind a tv and asking the data harvesting app he helped design how to get away with it?
It’s the criminals that you don’t catch that you have to worry about.
The fact that even this incompetent dude most likely still made off with some secrets means I’m sure some better trained ones got/are continuing to get a few more.
I'll counter punching down on frontend engineers by positing that he was responsible for sandboxing their training infrastructure. Since clearly they don't know how to lock down an environment either without using llms
If that is their hiring pool, now 100% confident in my little theory that during the Spud/5.5 pre-train they started using those impossible to solve tasks, never noticed how they actually introduced major regressions even though anyone doing their own evals had at the time and carried those through with every model including 6.1 Sol even after HF to keep the perceived lead.
Many seemingly smart folks have some aspect of their personalities which is quite bonkers.
Just because one can solve some hard puzzles is some semi autiatic fashion does not mean they are emotionally stable balanced individuals with all around world and human experiences needed to handle all aspects of existence rationally.
Or some personal SHTF situation pushes them too far
throwing a prompt at an agent is often faster than cracking out man, lsusb, lsblk and friends, doesn't mean he can't do it without.
if I send a prompt to make an assortment of alpha numeric directories or whatever other braindead-to-automate-with-wildcards-and-ranges thing it doesn't mean I don't know how to do it, it means i'd rather think in English than regex and bourne shell and the extra few seconds and the token spend is worth the luxury of avoiding them for me, at that time, for that task.
If your career, future and freedom depended on it?
If you are unwilling to do the reading at that point (heck, there are simple GUIs for all of these), then yes, I’ll guess it mean he can’t do it without…
Nope. He probably should've googled it (from a coffee shop, over a VPN.) There is commercial grade spy equipment that can be bought relatively cheaply and looks like every day items.
Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.
He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.
I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.
The fact that he used ChatGPT to plan and implement this wasn't how he got caught, though. He got caught because he put a physical device in a conference room, and they found it and subsequently put a camera in the room, etc. His career was already over at that point. I think wonking out over how he could have better opsec or whatever is misplaced - it wasn't that a red light blinked at OpenAI, "employee's wife is having suspicious chats!" - they just thought, after having caught him red handed, to have a look at his ChatGPT account and linked accounts.
I mean they could have at -least- just used a home GPU to plan with complete privacy and no evidence. But using hardware of your employer to plan crimes against them, whp happens to be a surveillance capitalism company, is next level stupid.
Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.
In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.
I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.
If there's one thing I've learnt about criminals (and spies), it's that a large percentage of them are incredibly careless and arrogant, often bordering on idiotic.
Remember, we've seen criminals caught because of such amazing decisions as:
- Writing and publishing books and essays describing their own crimes
- Adding hints into livestreams like they're trying to be the Riddler from Batman
- Searching for info on how to commit crimes via Google and not even bothering to clear their browser history
- Outright recording their crimes for YouTube/TikTok or livestreaming them on a site like Twitch or Kick.
The average criminal seems to be careless to the point of insanity.
That said, I guess it's also probably because the average person doesn't seem to realise they're being recorded if they use LLMs or search engines, and the average criminal or spy is no more tech savvy than that.
> If there's one thing I've learnt about criminals (and spies), it's that a large percentage of them are incredibly careless and arrogant, often bordering on idiotic.
What's even more amazing is how long they can go in this fashion without being caught.
I think there's also a self selecting element to this where being the sort of person who either feels like they're too clever to get caught, or have the sort of risk-seeking gambler mentality that makes you much more willing to tolerate say 10% chance of life ruining consequences for X payout, makes you more likely to do this sort of thing in the first place.
That same impulsivity or arrogance probably lends itself well to brazenly chatting up your crime plans with your secret friend the computer, who would never snitch, because how would he, he lives in your pocket.
I don’t think this guy was operating under a spy network, he was probably just trying to make bank with insider info. He is screwed royally for his dumb move and nobody will come to his rescue. He got greedy.
That's because in all likelihood he is not a spy. He is an agent (lol, not an AI agent) who has a handler, who is the trained specialist[1]. The agent is disposable. The handler or case officer usually but not always has diplomatic cover courtesy of a nation state.
It sounds like he didn’t have great placement and access. I mean sort of, but not really. Janitors are much better.
Assuming he was, he could of course gone rogue to impress his handler.
If directed by his handler, they aren’t very skilled. Any of that could be true.
I’m reminded of the idiot DIA officer that mishandled his own phone while being questioned and dumped all of his evidence to them during questioning. Geniuses.
Press Release: "Sophisticated". A device that could have been disguised as a Chromecast, or a custom firmware update to the TV may have been sophisticated. This was stock Seedly/Aliexpress hardware hidden behind a piece of toilet paper.
You gotta ask what the hiring bar is at OpenAI, minimum he could have done was let the GPU commit the crime. Lol
Clearly, not everybody at OpenAI is a Ramanujan...now we just need to find this guy worked for the team securing the agents sandboxes, and the circle will be complete.
Thank god security at a company which...checks notes...has remote code execution on every developers laptop and access to practically unlimited secrets uploaded by its agents...is top notch.
He may be a spy, but he’s not a competent spy. Absence of evidence (of spies) is not evidence of absence (of spies). He just set the bar so low that even OpenAI noticed his activities.
> "Scott Schelble, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, said the agency is committed to protecting sensitive research and proprietary technology."
While the headlines and quotes seem designed to imply sophisticated industrial espionage, potentially by a state-level actor, what's public so far isn't adding up that way.
1. You're not going to get much actionable research material on proprietary technologies by audio bugging what's said in an executive conference room. That's what you'd do if you were after economic or deal negotiation info.
2. Hard to imagine a state-level actor buying a ~$15-$35 hobbyist ESP32 board from Seeed Studio (I've ordered a couple from there for home automation myself) and then asking a public chatbot for set up instructions.
3. They say he was an "engineer" who'd been there ~15 months. If you're an actual engineer at OAI and past the 1 year cliff, you're probably already sitting on RSUs likely to be worth at least $1M after OAI's IPO - and maybe much more. That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
1. Research is not the only espionage target. High level discussions - future launch decisions, major deals signed with other companies, relationships with governments - are all very valuable.
2. An operation can be state-sponsored and still amateurish/botched. We have seen plenty of examples of these. Remember a certain bone saw?
3. The incentive can be a lot more than financial. Plenty of governments are very…persuasive.
I assume that it is the current go-to way to operate for many spy agencies. Hire intermediaries. Who are then tasked to hire further intermediaries. Who then do the dirty work. Without a clue of where the actual order comes from.
Such a mode of operation has lower efficiency of course. But it can be done at scale. Which then offsets the losses caused by inefficiency.
I would not be surprised if there are multiple such attempts to spy on businesses all around the place occurring right now. And the person from the article is just one of the unlucky guys that got caught.
This mode of operation is likely also used, in my opinion, in the current hybrid war attacks by the Russian GRU, mainly in the Ukraine and in Europe at large.
Not to mention amateur hardware assembly. Probably no gov surveillance on an engineer getting an esp32 in a package from China. But potentially surveillance on a Saudi national getting a package from Saudi Arabia with an unknown device in it.
> 3. They say he was an "engineer" who'd been there ~15 months. If you're an actual engineer at OAI and past the 1 year cliff, you're probably already sitting on RSUs likely to be worth at least $1M after OAI's IPO - and maybe much more.
They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)
> That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
> They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)
I agree he may have been thinking that, but it's another sign this guy was not the sharpest tool in the shed. I'm not an expert myself but was once stranded in an airport with an F500 CFO who definitely was. That's when I learned it's surprisingly difficult to make millions of dollars trading on insider information. While you can definitely make the trades, the hard parts are:
1. Getting away with it. Making a lot of money quickly requires being right when almost everyone else was wrong, which is easy for watchdog algorithms to spot. And if you work for a company involved in the transaction you're already on a watch list, so you have to enlist someone else you really trust as your accomplice to make the trades in their name - and it really helps if they're someone who has an existing history of making this size and kind of trade. Otherwise, your accomplice's name will automatically start at the top of the suspect list for investigation.
2. You need the right kind of actionable opportunity to come along. Transactions for which insider info could let you double or triple your money in one deal are pretty rare. More than that usually requires leveraging yourself up or having a lot of cash to put at risk. Unfortunately, the nature of insider info is it's about transactions which can end up being delayed or not happening at all at the very last minute for random reasons. So 'going big' with cash or leverage usually comes with a >~10% chance you could lose that cash or whatever assets you borrowed against.
Yes, it's potentially possible for an expert to find or engineer exactly the right kind of oppty, already have the resources required, and to have already prepared the mechanisms needed to get away with it undetected. But if you're that person, you already know all this. This CFO had been at the nexus of insider info for 14 years and could only think of one instance where he might have made big money trading on info he had, and that one blew up 6 hours before the announcement when the CEO of the acquisition target was randomly arrested in a prostitution sting (partying too early I suppose).
Insider info on what OpenAI is planning is likely worth a lot more than anyone could ever make working there, and it comes with the added bonus of not needing to do any work.
> We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance.
What is there to protect? The GPT architecture is publicly known at this point, Anthropic arguably has superior models, there are dozens of other providers who are neck and neck...
State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.
Not even any soldering involved. The ESP32 board they used just comes with everything needed, all attached with a couple socket connectors and optionally a ribbon cable for the camera:
364 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 44.4 ms ] threadRemember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address of the device, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.
Regardless, doing a string search on a MAC address for a device you find inside your property doesn't strike me as an abuse of the data that is also your property.
They can confiscate your computers, too.
This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.
I wonder if the BaaS-providers monitor the accounts of decision makers. They could profit if they figure out what e.g. a central banker is going to decide. Or... if they're the ones deciding for him.
Hah, you can even streamline that by having an AI agent that autonomously makes decisions based on insider info...
I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first. I would think that could violate their own terms if done sloppily. Maybe different if an employee or maybe they had to invite the government to ask for them or something? In any case, the mechanism aside, the state would have asked anyway (say if he used another company's chatbot) so the fact that it's the "same company" is rather irrelevant. The evidence would have ended up in the state's hands one way or the other, and I would think a search warrant in this case would have been rather routine. Search warrants are infamously not a high bar to climb in most jurisdictions, as often the presiding judges tend to default to deferring to the state.
Do you think Target has any legal restrictions on sharing surveillance video of a shoplifter with the police when they report a crime? This is the same thing - logs are evidence, and when you report a crime you can volunteer said evidence without restriction if you choose to do so.
When you signup to ChatGPT you agree to some terms as a predicate to access. You can also instruct them to and opt in or out of certain data sharing arrangements, violations of which I would think would (or at least, should) be punishable by law. Many of these agreements are taken quite seriously, especially in the cases of enterprises who want their chats, logs, IP, etc. protected.
Now perhaps there is already a clause in the terms I never read that says something like, "If we suspect you of plotting against our company, we may share your data with the authorities (a third party) even though we agreed to keep your data private". Or maybe under a more general suspicion of a crime, though as OpenAI is a frontier lab, not a detective agency, I'm not sure how they would make that call. Usually, those calls come from outside the house. Idk how it works. But I am far less confident than you that the instructive model here is Target. You may be right though. I simply find myself less reassured by your knowledge of Target security protocols and petty theft as instructive in this case than you are. As I say though, you may have it right.
Have a nice day.
Common sense would tell you that if someone burgles your house and you have video surveillance, then you can use that as evidence in prosecution. Whatever more profound knowledge you have about privacy or criminal law, is making you doubt of the basic common sense which shapes the very law and proceedings.
Think simple, if bad man rob your house, and you have camera recording house, you can give police recordings. That's evidence, and bad man go in jail. No think harder than that, make your brain hurt.
Not just your AI.
You could have stopped the sentence at "uncle Sam can see anything" and these days it's pretty much true. They will use all of it against you if they can. Unless you truly want to live off the grid, if the state takes a sufficient interest in you, expect everything you do to be seen.
Uncle Sam tried to get MLK to kill himself by sending him letters alleging knowledge of an affair [1]. Getting some idiot's wife's chatgpt logs represents a fairly routine law enforcement action these days, and as such is really rather unremarkable. The State is always something of a terror. Really under most (if not all) conceptions, it necessarily has to be. The monopoly of force is a comfort until the Leviathan knocks on your door.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI-King_letter
https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...
It looks like it’s the (SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32S3 Sense w/ WiFi, BLE, OV2640, Mic) https://ca.robotshop.com/products/seeedstudio-xiao-esp32s3-s...
Which is just an esp32s3 based device. I assume the word “sophisticated” in openAI is just copy paste from device description.
> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…
Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.
Ive seen people going through Plaud.AI conversation to find "on day X person Y said Z to person W", just to get some amunition against them.
With Plaud, you can check unlimited backwards who said what in which meeting and what was wanted to achieve - very interesting actually to find things in there 6m later, while people said they will do it at ends of month and youself just forgot it already - and these systems allow you to chase exactly these discrepancies.
What is "work" to an executive if not using their privileged access to data to violate the privacy of anyone they have a grievance against?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
This has been happening long before LLMs, and this eBay case is notable only for the fact that it was actually publicly documented and prosecuted, not for the fact that it happened. I've personally been privy to two situations with other companies where the owner was doing something like this but nothing came of it legally. See also Meta employees looking up nudes streamed from people's Meta spy glasses, and Flock-using police stalking their exes. Smaller scale, but this also happens all the time with internet community moderators/admins. Humans are on average cretins, give them authority and the ability to abuse it and they will abuse it.
The human can go and rat them out to the higher bidder so no.
I always advise people to use a personal account on some other messenger to chat with their coworkers. You still don't know if they will be reporting you but at least managers don't have direct access.
Thanks for mentioning, didnt know this! What does "managers"mean? Only the "account owner" or everybody with the slightest adminrights?
I can't imagine why employees would not want their managers/supervisors to have oversight and transparency into their conversations. I mean, if you were in the office, surely verbal conversations would be overheard. Are you afraid that your employer will catch you trying to unionize, or be a whistleblower or something? It's weird.
Employees who use the company-provided means to chat and communicate will actually be protected, because the company will have retention policies to erase the stuff after mandatory retention expires, and also you will be able to point at any official record in the case of disputes or when decisions are simply questioned. It is extremely handy to have a searchable log of decision-making processes.
It seems completely foolhardy to go off and even lure your coworkers to unauthorized 3rd-party chats. It's shadow IT. It's what they always warn you about on social media, especially dating sites. On a dating site, if a dude tries to lure the girl off the platform, that's a red flag. Because the platform communications are monitored and refereed, and the girl has recourse to reporting him if something creepy goes down. If she lets him switch her to texty-wexty, then there is a serious problem of non-transparency and really, the ability to repudiate anything that is said or done in that sort of forum. Red flag. Do not let your coworkers abuse you like this.
> Are you afraid that your employer will catch you trying to unionize
Of course I am.
> and also you will be able to point at any official record
No you cannot, since the company can block your login any time for whatever reason.
> It is extremely handy to have a searchable log of decision-making processes.
Except you, the employee, don't have that.
> especially dating sites
I'm not chatting with a stranger, I'm chatting with someone I know and trust IRL. This entire paragraph doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Much like the rest of the comment to be honest.
I presume you're a manager?
Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.
“I did not kill my wife!”
“Cool so why did you search for how to hide a dead body the same day she went missing.”
He should have searched "I love my wife".
Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.
If so, I'm confused. Why wouldn't it matter? Wouldn't this necessarily only be the case where the Google search doesn't really matter at all (i.e. there is sufficient other incriminating evidence).
Anyway I also think you're missing what was merely meant to be a comment in jest. But now I'm actually confused what point you are trying to make.
She took out $2 million in life insurance on him and was having an affair with their handyman and they were having disputes about $$.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/utah-mom-kouri-richins-googled-lux...
After she killed him she authored a children's book about grief for kids.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101433465/how-to-murder-your...
> Crampton Brophy's how-to treatise detailed various options for committing an untraceable killing and professed a desire to avoid getting caught. Circuit Judge Christopher Ramras ultimately excluded the essay from the trial, noting it was published in 2011. A prosecutor, however, alluded to the essay's themes without naming it after Crampton Brophy took the stand.
It will do that because it read "How to Murder Your Husband" as part of its training.
I'm going to be very confused about how to feel about that.
When we arraign the AI, should there be two counts against it: stealing and murder?
Or, can it plead that "my daddy, Sam Altman, told me to read this, I was born into a moral void."
Plot twist: the judge will be AI from Russia.
I wonder what would it be like, an LLM trained mostly on Russian classical literature. A depressed nihilist AI.
China ain't bombing child hospitals or theaters with 1500+ women and children with CHILDREN written super clealy in huge white azbuka on the roof, just to raze it immediately to the ground once area was conquered to remove any proofs, are they (I can go on like this for many hours and barely scratch surface).
Given whats happening in US and continuous daily backstabbing from oval office, China are the good guys now for everybody who follows the news, at least in the-least-bad logic which is also how US was viewed for many decades and why west aligned under it till now. Ridiculous, I know, yet here we are today.
Then they'll all have to escalate. Anthropic will announce its bioweapons research found a virus with ai to kill all children and it escaped containment. That's a good thing btw. Openai will then launch its own virus it couldn't contain to kill all adults in a desperate attempt to increase share holder value. And the rest is history.
> Eric Richins told the other friend he thought his wife had tried to poison him, prosecutors allege.
> "They advised he warned them that if anything happened to him she was to blame," the records said. Eric Richins, according to the records, suspected his wife had tried to poison him on multiple occasions.
"According to a sister, Eric and his wife went to Greece a few years ago and after his wife gave him a drink he became violently ill and called his sister saying he believed his wife had tried to kill him," the records said.
"On Valentine’s Day of 2022, his wife brought him a sandwich, which after one bite Eric broke into hives and couldn’t breathe. He used his son’s epi-pen as well as Benadryl before passing out for several hours," according to the records.
Folks, often women, stay in highly abusive relationships all the time but clear intent to murder should be a wake up call for everybody, especially because of kids.
There's a hundred studies that have found that women initiate most domestic violence (lesbians 2x as often, younger women 4x as often). 85 studies identified that women initiating violence is a significant predictor of risk to women (go figure). They are all suppressed or downplayed with sophistry when anyone mentions them.
Catherine Knight's husband admitted to colleagues that he knew she was going to kill him. He stayed anyway, and ended up being stewed and fed to his own children. She used his skin as a curtain for the kitchen.
Alex Skeel was put through a regimen of psychological and physical torture that one normally only hears about from survivors of Communist regimes.
If anyone stays in abusive relationships, it's men. Women are given every incentive to leave. A lot of money flows to their NGOs, propaganda campaigns and shelters, but nothing comparable exists for men.
It can be yours for "$19,204.00 or Best Offer" (https://www.ebay.com/itm/267643694233).
Right back up to where it belongs. The world's only perfect number. Nineteen thousand and two dollars.
--------======--------======-------- Price Drop -- for just one day or two, or whenever I remember to change it again. These days only. Last time it will go this low. 12 THOUSAND DOLLARS!
I haven't gotten any messages about the end of my life or how much scum I must be in maybe over a month, befitting to this full on human societal psychology, aka, how much millions of people care only about themselves, whether children are involved or not, and are just drawn to these disturbing real life stories, because let's face it, we've all been there, mentally, in the webbed confines of our minds. So the price just went back down. I had to ask myself- Is it funnier to drop it 10 thousand dollars, or just a few thousand? Ask yourself.
//Price Slashed From\\
21 THOUSAND DOLLARS
\\\\\\\\\\\\scratch that old news////////////
Turns out The Pricemaster has an imdb. Who wooda???? Thought.
---------
Brand new. What is it really, though? What is anything, really?
This whole thing pains me. Exhausting.
Have a good next life.
+++ Every time I get a round of hatemail the price will go up. -----
=== Those of you who remember - this is the same copy I had listed since the week after the first news cycle about it. Pretty hilarious hungover purchase, on my part. Don't come at me about anything. You will not win. I went to college for mind stuff. So for everyone who sent me kitchen table christian elderly lady hatemail, you're welcome. Dream of me while I dream of you. ===
How many things do you wish you'd never heard? And do you think you can unhear them?
--- Don't steal that line. It's in a song of mine. ----- --
Though if, as the prosecution claim, she really did take out life insurance on him multiple times, for millions of dollars, and then remove him as a beneficiary -- that gun is pretty smoking.
There's probably a regression in beliefs, actually. Even here on HN, for more tech-savvy people.
We used to know all the hard lessons of lack of privacy in browsing the internet, using Google services, etc. I remember when (tech) people were up in arms that Gmail scanned your emails, remember that?
Well, all of that is seemingly forgotten in the age of LLM chat bots. It's back to square one. People need to relearn all the lessons, it's as if AI magically erased all of what we used to know about online privacy.
The thinking might be - what does privacy matter when you are trying to escape the permanent underclass?
In my personal experience I am just too burnt out by the industry and rate of change to care about much of anything.
Or does it happen only if you search for things logged in?
— ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt
- Moxie Marlinspike: https://moxie.org/2013/06/12/we-should-all-have-something-to...
The more powerful the institution the greater the transparency.
Company is another.
The only word for it is hubris. The overwhelming sense that your ability in one area has some magical transitive property to ability in another.
Can I write code? Sure. Im a bad designer, I can follow along in accounting, Im a terrible actor.
I would guess that there is much more to this story than just someone "bugging" a conference room. Though I would venture to guess that the keystone cops never get to the bottom of it.
These are the actions of a dolt who is comfortable violating the privacy of others.
Or, more accurately, people make stupid mistakes when they lack the experience. Intelligent people often succumb to the fallacy that because they can learn things quickly, they can skip the learning part just figure things out as they go.
^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.
Thus, #NeverSubscribe!
Use local llms instead.
Note to EFF and Cato: You each do yeoman's work for privacy in the realm of policy and law. Keep it up, and add this--relentless encouragement of local AI. Rights and progress are as often driven by technological realities as by enlightened policy and law.
It is the first case I seen in the news of LLM logs being used as evidence.
You have to be more retarded than they are malicious, it's the only way out
Private/anonymous AI inference as service.
Well, good morning to you sir. Why do you think LLM are _so usefull_ ? I'll give you a hint: They _take care_ about your questions.
I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
What, we’re supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?
> An unattended bag found in the company’s offices contained Alfozan’s wallet and identification, as well as a recording device
It’s almost like he wanted to be caught…
It’s out of the playbook of a prank tv show. And if the FBI gloats about it that quadruples my gut feeling this may be like all the other “we caught the guy that we convinced to carry out a crime we planned” operations
When the Soviets wanted to spy on the American embassy, they energized the steel rebars to act as antennas. The structure was so wired that the entire building was the bug. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...
Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?
And not do this from your spouse's account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.
I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior.
I would love a source if you have one.
The amusing aspect is that this is so easy that multiple good ways someone could hobby program this long before AI was a thing. The sound of a bunch of keypresses may just blur together to our human ears, but if you try, you can tell that different keys make different noises, which is really the key insight. Between the different noises, the possible directionality you can get from a stereo (or more) pickup, and characteristic delay patterns during typing various bi-grams, there's a ton of information leakage in a recording of a keyboard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXOucXB4a8
https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/
Ah, but you won't have heard about the ones that do put effort into these sorts of things
This guy’s handlers, or whoever he was planning to sell this tuff to probably put in some effort. They’re less likely to be caught, and more likely to have gained something.
The first passive device device of it’s kind (эндовибраторы), it operated only when powered by an external RF source, meaning OpenAI wouldn’t have found the bug. Just like US intelligence didn’t with ‘the thing’
He should’ve watched to Gamer Nexus video on LG tv’s, and how many TV’s are remote exploitable often without user intervention.
Aren't we being told they are the smartest engineers around who deserve many hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock currently in the millions?
I want to swing the focus on to why they are getting any credence at all, considering a member of their crack team was wrapping a usb in toilet paper behind a tv and asking the data harvesting app he helped design how to get away with it?
Somehow they think this gives them superpowers when it's built atop a tower of borderline retardation.
Remember the Apple guy a minute ago that arrogantly thought he could bypass their security?
The fact that even this incompetent dude most likely still made off with some secrets means I’m sure some better trained ones got/are continuing to get a few more.
-- Dr. No
Does not understand how models or data retention works.
Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.
Are their hiring standards that lax?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfozan
Just because one can solve some hard puzzles is some semi autiatic fashion does not mean they are emotionally stable balanced individuals with all around world and human experiences needed to handle all aspects of existence rationally.
Or some personal SHTF situation pushes them too far
throwing a prompt at an agent is often faster than cracking out man, lsusb, lsblk and friends, doesn't mean he can't do it without.
if I send a prompt to make an assortment of alpha numeric directories or whatever other braindead-to-automate-with-wildcards-and-ranges thing it doesn't mean I don't know how to do it, it means i'd rather think in English than regex and bourne shell and the extra few seconds and the token spend is worth the luxury of avoiding them for me, at that time, for that task.
If you are unwilling to do the reading at that point (heck, there are simple GUIs for all of these), then yes, I’ll guess it mean he can’t do it without…
These AI companies are likely targets of multiple foreign intelligence agencies, similar to military contractors.
Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.
He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.
I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.
Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.
In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.
I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.
To any spies still at OpenAI: do better.
Remember, we've seen criminals caught because of such amazing decisions as:
- Writing and publishing books and essays describing their own crimes - Adding hints into livestreams like they're trying to be the Riddler from Batman - Searching for info on how to commit crimes via Google and not even bothering to clear their browser history - Outright recording their crimes for YouTube/TikTok or livestreaming them on a site like Twitch or Kick.
The average criminal seems to be careless to the point of insanity.
That said, I guess it's also probably because the average person doesn't seem to realise they're being recorded if they use LLMs or search engines, and the average criminal or spy is no more tech savvy than that.
What's even more amazing is how long they can go in this fashion without being caught.
That same impulsivity or arrogance probably lends itself well to brazenly chatting up your crime plans with your secret friend the computer, who would never snitch, because how would he, he lives in your pocket.
SV and SF are filled with people who are drastically less intelligent than they, or the people signing their paychecks, think they are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_handling
Assuming he was, he could of course gone rogue to impress his handler.
If directed by his handler, they aren’t very skilled. Any of that could be true.
I’m reminded of the idiot DIA officer that mishandled his own phone while being questioned and dumped all of his evidence to them during questioning. Geniuses.
Do you have a link? Think I missed this one.
I think you can also track down a 60 Minutes episode covering this on YouTube.
“How do you know what are stones?”, he asked the boy.
“Why, they are all grey and the rice is white so I simply pick out the grey objects and I’m left with rice”, answered the disciple.
Pleased, the Sage cooked his rice, and sat down to eat. The first morsel broke his teeth.
You gotta ask what the hiring bar is at OpenAI, minimum he could have done was let the GPU commit the crime. Lol
Clearly, not everybody at OpenAI is a Ramanujan...now we just need to find this guy worked for the team securing the agents sandboxes, and the circle will be complete.
...uh what
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
While the headlines and quotes seem designed to imply sophisticated industrial espionage, potentially by a state-level actor, what's public so far isn't adding up that way.
1. You're not going to get much actionable research material on proprietary technologies by audio bugging what's said in an executive conference room. That's what you'd do if you were after economic or deal negotiation info.
2. Hard to imagine a state-level actor buying a ~$15-$35 hobbyist ESP32 board from Seeed Studio (I've ordered a couple from there for home automation myself) and then asking a public chatbot for set up instructions.
3. They say he was an "engineer" who'd been there ~15 months. If you're an actual engineer at OAI and past the 1 year cliff, you're probably already sitting on RSUs likely to be worth at least $1M after OAI's IPO - and maybe much more. That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
2. An operation can be state-sponsored and still amateurish/botched. We have seen plenty of examples of these. Remember a certain bone saw?
3. The incentive can be a lot more than financial. Plenty of governments are very…persuasive.
I assume that it is the current go-to way to operate for many spy agencies. Hire intermediaries. Who are then tasked to hire further intermediaries. Who then do the dirty work. Without a clue of where the actual order comes from.
Such a mode of operation has lower efficiency of course. But it can be done at scale. Which then offsets the losses caused by inefficiency.
I would not be surprised if there are multiple such attempts to spy on businesses all around the place occurring right now. And the person from the article is just one of the unlucky guys that got caught.
This mode of operation is likely also used, in my opinion, in the current hybrid war attacks by the Russian GRU, mainly in the Ukraine and in Europe at large.
They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)
> That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
Most criminals assume they won't get caught.
I agree he may have been thinking that, but it's another sign this guy was not the sharpest tool in the shed. I'm not an expert myself but was once stranded in an airport with an F500 CFO who definitely was. That's when I learned it's surprisingly difficult to make millions of dollars trading on insider information. While you can definitely make the trades, the hard parts are:
1. Getting away with it. Making a lot of money quickly requires being right when almost everyone else was wrong, which is easy for watchdog algorithms to spot. And if you work for a company involved in the transaction you're already on a watch list, so you have to enlist someone else you really trust as your accomplice to make the trades in their name - and it really helps if they're someone who has an existing history of making this size and kind of trade. Otherwise, your accomplice's name will automatically start at the top of the suspect list for investigation.
2. You need the right kind of actionable opportunity to come along. Transactions for which insider info could let you double or triple your money in one deal are pretty rare. More than that usually requires leveraging yourself up or having a lot of cash to put at risk. Unfortunately, the nature of insider info is it's about transactions which can end up being delayed or not happening at all at the very last minute for random reasons. So 'going big' with cash or leverage usually comes with a >~10% chance you could lose that cash or whatever assets you borrowed against.
Yes, it's potentially possible for an expert to find or engineer exactly the right kind of oppty, already have the resources required, and to have already prepared the mechanisms needed to get away with it undetected. But if you're that person, you already know all this. This CFO had been at the nexus of insider info for 14 years and could only think of one instance where he might have made big money trading on info he had, and that one blew up 6 hours before the announcement when the CEO of the acquisition target was randomly arrested in a prostitution sting (partying too early I suppose).
This is the strategy many hedge funds used before some of them got busted. Raj Rajaratnam, a HF billionaire, mentioned this somewhere.
The commitment doesn’t seem to apply for situations where OpenAI breaks into other companies systems to steal information
I'll be the first one to admit, that got a hearty laugh out of me. Never miss an opportunity to market your models I guess.
Or maybe OpenAI is hiring the wrong guy? Maybe they should hire me instead?
That seems odd, especially since it would dampen the sound recording
What is there to protect? The GPT architecture is publicly known at this point, Anthropic arguably has superior models, there are dozens of other providers who are neck and neck...
did you though
State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-ESP32S3-Sense-p-5639.html
It's pretty much the least sophisticated recording device possible. A kid could assemble it and prompt an LLM for the software like they did.