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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

These are not very smart spies:

> 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.

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Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people.

Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.

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.

> And it does force you into some difficult choices.

I gots to know...

Just read this: https://paulgraham.com/say.html

Paul Graham years ago: “I can’t publicly comment on all this stuff. I would turn into Noam Chomsky.”

Paul Graham on X last couple years…not exactly following his earlier advice.

They get you eventually.

Paul staying on X was a real failure of judgment imo. He made the right call and then backed out of it. I don't remember if they invited Elon to startup school before or after, either way I don't think that that is the kind of connection you want.

He was inching into anti-dei culture war stuff so I'm not sure how much he actually disagrees with Musk's political goals so much as he rightly observers that Musk and Trump are complete maniacs.

Or just scared. These guys don't play nice with people that publicly cross them.

Yup and that’s just ONE guy. The fact that I was able to bring an example on HN of literally the guy who founded YC, imagine what chance the rest of the “plebs” have to resist the siren song.

If you want to know what I think … they make both parents work long hours for corporations, stick their kids in government schools, which are run like prisons[1] where now if they act too rambunctious they are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed amphetamines. Meanwhile the elderly parents who took care of you when you were little are put into nursing homes because their adult children have no time to take care of them either. The amount of medications for the elderly in nursing homes is even greater than for their children. The teenage girls have record levels of depression, coinciding with the rise of Instagram and TikTok. But they call it “sadness” because they don’t want to link it with clinical depression, which is also quite high. Men are on opiates while one in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. And many people are now glued to their latest feed of doomscroll or video AI slop. Which is even worse than before…

So yeah. If you think the software is “bad for our kids”, you should look at what it does to the adults. Endless arguing online with strangers for no reason. Maybe a bot will read it. Maybe a random person will reply or downvote it. Either way it wins because the system needs profits and the algorithm will prioritize “engagement”, which means one-sided outrage narratives that triggers someone to write an angry rant. We don’t really need those user-generated arguments anymore because AI can generate those, but then again we won’t need humans to do most things online at all…

(Ironically, the above was an angry rant too, to open some strangers’ eyes on HN, a social forum. But once you see it, you can’t really unsee it.)

1. https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Just to be clear, the difficult choice is not whether to use OpenAi/Anthropic/Grok/... versus a local LLM.

The choice is whether to hang out with people with whom you can't be sure they don't have a Plaud/Pocket/.. in their literal pocket which is continuously listening.

Unfortunately the set of such people will eventually be shrinking more and more until eventually only a few tinfoil folks are left. Dystopian? Just think back w.r.t. continuous tracking by Google/Facebook/.. Unthinkable 30 years ago, total standard today. Try to count the fraction of your emails that don't actually reside on a MSFT or Google server because the other end has an account there. That fight is over. You can just as well join them.

True homies will invite you over to chill nude in their Faraday cage.

Come to think of it … this lady was smarter than I thought when I first saw the movie: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=52PogPwbfZw

It starts far before that:

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.

Isn't this standard C level behaviour?

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.

> Before AI tools like Plaud.AI, this wasnt near possible because of work/time,

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.

Humans abusing power isn't new, but the tools that make abusing power easier than ever are.

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?

> they'd hire some humans to do the research

The human can go and rat them out to the higher bidder so no.

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.

>Remember that paid slack subscriptions let the managers access all of the chat

Thanks for mentioning, didnt know this! What does "managers"mean? Only the "account owner" or everybody with the slightest adminrights?

Given how someone in HR let it slip that they were reading our slack conversations, I think it's the latter.

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.

I presume you're a manager?

I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).

Yeah if you're logged in to a Google account when you search, clearing your local browser history does nothing.

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.

Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.

“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?”

Yes, what an idiot.

He should have searched "I love my wife".

Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.

What point are you making here? Do you think a judge or jury would give both of those instances equal weight?

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.

Because people are going to lie in their own favor.

Do you think that claims of innocence should be given the same weight as confessions of guilt?

What makes a Google search a confession?

If the implication is the Google search is an implicit confession, because in a Google search you think you are not being watched, and thus are confessing your honest desires, why would his search of love be a "claim of innocence" rather than a "confession of love"?

I don't think confessions of guilt should be given much weight either. Innocent people confess to crimes all the time.

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 $$.

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.

Man I really need to stop playing modern setting TTRPGs

And lose your alibi?

But at least the ministry of truth won't assign them re-education for thought crime.

A woman who wrote a romance fiction novel called "How to Murder Your Husband" was convicted of murdering her husband

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101433465/how-to-murder-your...

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.

Someday AI will kill someone. And, then it'll write a book about it.

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 read arraigning AI like putting down a rabid dog, except worse because you can't transfer to another machine the weights of the dog's brain (yet).

Why Russia? Why not China? After all, China is way ahead of Russia in this aspect.

I'm obviously not a skilled writer. You should read AI written books exclusively.

I think the focus is on moral void, not on AI.

I wonder what would it be like, an LLM trained mostly on Russian classical literature. A depressed nihilist AI.

You've got very skewed impressions of Russian classical literature.

He got it perfectly right.

Hallucipolating from insufficient data.

I have plenty of data, I'm fluent in Russian

Well, there are subsets of literature in every country that can perfectly reinforce whichever bias one might have towards the people of that country, especially that towards bleakness and nihilism.

But it would never cross my mind to paint e.g. whole modern Germany bloodthirsty and nihilist based on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Stefan George, Ernst Jünger and the like, for God blessed me with discernment and understanding that any country is a cauldron where wildly different people collide and try to survive the boiling.

Sorry, but you don't seem to quite understand what you're talking about.

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.

Surely it would be the US.

One interesting idea is to sell a robot with Kill It as part of its instruction set then sell it to the masses and see what happens!

https://www.newsweek.com/terrifying-rescue-robot-comes-with-...

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.

Similar story for many rap albums. Quite a few rappers have rapped about murders and oops, turns out they really did do it.

X-Raided comes to mind

This Key & Peele is appropriate here: https://youtu.be/14WE3A0PwVs

d4vid's entire catalogue is a confession.

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.

He might have been afraid of what she’d do to the kids if he divorced her.

How would she have access to the kids after two attempts at murder?

No one would ever know. She’d just continue being a terror, on her own, with no one to moderate her or how she behaves around the kids.

Was this provable? If you were the dad would you risk it?

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.

Wait until you hear about the country who reelected twice, the president who tried to overthrow their democracy...

That's on the opposition for providing even less likeable characters and policies.

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....

And as long as leftists hae zero capacity for self reflection they will continue to lose.

Well, they do say write what you know.

To be fair, it wasn't titled "How to get away with murdering your husband"

> "when does FBI get involved in a case,"

Now I can see why local law enforcement would have made it a priority to get her :D

> After she killed him she authored a children's book about grief for kids.

It can be yours for "$19,204.00 or Best Offer" (https://www.ebay.com/itm/267643694233).

Notes from the seller:

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.

"I wanted to know what would potential killer would've done because I know you guys are doing fuck all to find her"

He should have searched "How to dispose a 130lb chicken". Rockie mistake.

FBI!! OPEN UP!

> 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 think it just accelerated the nihilism.

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.

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?

Why do you ask? Are you planning to plan something?

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?

This is gaia and the answer is yes they do.

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.

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place

— ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt

"We Should All Have Something To Hide"

- Moxie Marlinspike: https://moxie.org/2013/06/12/we-should-all-have-something-to...

Because some dude said it does not mean it's true

Should the founders have looped in the British authorities? Or shouldn’t they have been plotting sedition?

Good advice for a large corporation. Terrible advice for an individual.

The more powerful the institution the greater the transparency.

If I wanted to live with my mom I’d be doing that, Eric.

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.

I figured any hire at openai would know that at least

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.

Word.

Company is another.

I dont think it's subpar people.

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.

"The grapes are sour!" - you

You might be surprised to learn that not everybody is a terrible person who longs to contribute to fascism.

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.

Same goes for anything you've put into social media, chat apps, or email for at least the last decade or two.

And anything you put in your phone for the last decade as well

At this points its an IQ test. Stupid people still google exactly what heinous stuff they plan to do and think thats gonna fly.

Intelligent people are often stupid.

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.

It’s good to remember that we rarely hear about the smart people who carefully thought through their crimes and then executed them well.

I wonder sometimes wonder what the true rate of this is. You'd never know.

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.

Just let everyone use your account instead. Then no one can use it as evidence against you.

To be honest, from OpenAI engineer I would expect better.

Seems like they select for people as dependent on their product as their customers. Maybe it helps them more to have true-believers rather than intelligent people.

From the folks that cant lock down a network so agents cannot escape? This fits the profile tbh.

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.

Honestly, that’s on-brand for HN.

Claude, help throw people off my trail by blaming a random openai employee, then delete all my activity.

Local AI > Cloud AI

Thus, #NeverSubscribe!

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.

Use local llms instead.

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.

And they are naive enough to think they will really not misuse all the data they get ? ;-)

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.

Relying on model weights won’t get you far. You need to hook up a search engine to your local model, and then you are stuck where you were before.

I'm quite sure some won't bother.

This is the same argument for why businesses shouldn't use email, chat, or paper.

I started asking things I'd normally want no one to know about (but if they do, it's fine) in private browser windows, not logged in (duck.ai most of the time anyway), usually VPN toggled ON just for that. Now I just use an offline model for that but since RAM is the bottleneck on my mac so to even run a 6-7GB model I have to start aggressively killing anything and everthing that's running and then hope to clear up enough on this 16GB RAM machine. So I am thinking of hosting one on one of the oracle free tier instances (if I can somehow use that whole 24GB RAM, that used to be, at once – not sure that's available anymore). I tihnk Kaggle also offers something like that.

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.

Like that kid who started the Palisades fire

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

Which is why I recommend Venice: https://venice.ai

Private/anonymous AI inference as service.

> Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM,

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.

How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

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?

Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.

Unless everyone's pagers start exploding

Counterpoint: Operation Spiderweb

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things

Assuming this is espionage—for which I have seen zero evidence—isn’t Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.

Umm, excuse me, according to the President of the United States, he wasn't a very good guy and a lot of people really didn't like him, so you should really just let that whole incident go

"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5612504/trump-saudi-ara...

Watch out you'll get flagged for this like my comment was

I mean, why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed or flattered to say whatever you want later.

> why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed

To exfiltrate OpenAI's executive-level planning? Probably not. I doubt he has that access anymore, what with the IC's decimation over the last two years.

Why would you assume that he was working for the Saudis? Spy agencies will recruit people of any nationality. Much more likely he was working with (or planning to work with) one of the two countries that are building AI.

The guy was murdered.

The guilty got away with it.

Dissidents noticed.

How was it a fuckup?

We all know about Mossad agents doing all sorts of nefarious things (and occasionally getting caught for it). Do you consider them fuckups because they got caught?

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 :).

And not do this from your spouse's account.

You are an expert spy. How do I bug my workplace? Make no mistakes.

LLMs have democratized espionage!

Are we going to go with slopspionage, or espislop?

spycraft -> spyslop

espionage -> espislop

007 -> 006.999997

007 -> bondslop

Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.

That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.

In the 80s one of my high school teachers 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 and then turned into audio output. 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 - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.

https://people.ece.uw.edu/nikitin_pavel/papers/RFID-vox_2013...

Vaguely similar, since electrical wires emit EM fields that are disturbed by human bodies, you can use a special camera to see who's in a building based on those disturbances. I'm not sure how high-fidelity or easy to spoil it is, but this was real technology at least 15 years ago.

xfinity is now selling a security product based on seeing people in your home with Wi-Fi signals

Security or surveillance product?

This is a feature in modern wifi routers and every single one is capable of detecting presence of multiple people within an apartment. With some training, movement can be distinguished from the data.

Philips Hue light bulbs can also do person detection if you have a few of them and the right kind of hub.

I recall a HN thread (or maybe it was a github project) about using a similar tactic to figure out keypresses in offices. Very interesting stuff.

Wow, keypresses?

I would love a source if you have one.

https://github.com/ggerganov/kbd-audio is probably the best-known 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.

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.

Similar technique around the same time presented at SIGGRAPH:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXOucXB4a8

https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/

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?

Maybe double or triple glazed windows?

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.

This is what local models are for! On your own hardware, whose filesystem you can erase, shred, or physically destroy later.

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.

Some people being stupid does not mean everyone is.

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

Ah, but you won't have heard about the ones that do put effort into these sorts of things

> 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.

You’re comparing a successful operation revealed years later against a failure. I understand your comment was tongue in cheek but cmom

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.

"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.

Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed

IT would have noticed next time they had to plug something into the TV. Whether they cared enough to figure out what it was is a different story.

should have enclosed it in a shell to look like a crappy USB A to thunderbolt adapter that some exec bought at an airport kiosk and left behind in the tv

Yeah people are leaving stuff like that in conference room TVs all the time. Adapters, HDMI cables, etc.

> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.

I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...

Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.

> 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?

If it were _used_ toilet paper, nobody would have touched it.

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)

It’s taking dogfooding a little far to hire people addicted to eating dogfood

Well otherwise you are hiring people who are ill-intentioned to make others addicted to dogfood.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_handling

I couldn’t say whether this was state sponsored espionage or something else. I don’t see any indicators pointing one way or the other.

I see a lot of people mentioning financial motivation, and that decisions made in the room “moves markets”. Ugh, perhaps true…and I have something to tell ya guys - economic espionage is a thing.

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 incriminating evidence to them right on camera in the interrogation room. Geniuses.

> the idiot DIA officer

Do you have a link? Think I missed this one.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-s...

I think you can also track down a 60 Minutes episode covering this on YouTube.

A small clip of motor mouth https://youtu.be/GnU2qCyo4FA?si=eNaAce7lCmzFuk_L.

And I guess he was both CIA and DIA at one point.

Oh yeah I remember this guy. Amazing work.

AI agent would never mess up so bad

That handler still could have picked up smarter people to work with.

This is the part that feels the most wild to me.

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.

You probably don’t hear about the smart ones.

I was thinking about this, how all the secret societies and crazy conspiracies we know about are just the ones that failed to keep the lid on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

What portion of grand conspiracies do we think go undetected forever? Do we have any reasons for our intuitions?

That was quite the read. It's shameful that the conspirers were jailed for only 4 years after doing so much evil.

Prisons have a lower-than-general-population-iq for a reason.

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.

There's plenty of high-time-preference crimes.

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.

Maybe if you are considering crime committed in pursuit of profit, but unfortunately there can be many other aims.

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.

"The successful criminal brain is always superior. It has to be."

-- Dr. No

Somehow is an engineer at OpenAI and before that at Meta.

Does not understand how models or data retention works.

Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.

Are their hiring standards that lax?

Must be a frontend dev

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

Very cheap shot. Also, had a Masters in Data Science.

He was a lead engineer for their AI agent platform.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfozan

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

>Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.

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 he is unwilling to do the reading at that point (heck, there are simple GUIs for all of these), then yes, I’ll guess it means he can’t do it without…

There likely are other, smarter and more careful spies at these AI companies who have not been caught...

These AI companies are likely targets of multiple foreign intelligence agencies, similar to military contractors.

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.

OpenAI is both a company that manages a lot of money and a lot of political power, that the target was an "executive conference room" gives no indication as to whether the motives were financial or political.

What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.

Honestly I think you can rule out "political" already, no? It's far easier to just bribe politicians for that kind of intelligence. My point was that they weren't stealing models, they wanted decisionmaking intel.

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.

Hey ChatGPT, how do I do opsec? (Asking for a friend)

SWIM wants to bug my company's boardroom...

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 future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.

Or, at the very, very least, use incognito mode on a computer you don't otherwise touch, such as at a library.

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.

The listening device was concealed with toilet paper behind a tv. Duh, Not smart at all.

Right?!

It could have just been a regular black usb stick an I bet nobody would have questioned it.

Instead "why is there something in toilet paper behind the TV?"

If I saw a usb stick looking thing in a conference room, chances of me giving a f: 2%

Me seeing toilet paper next to the TV in a meeting room? I’m picking it up and asking why we have toilet paper in the meeting room, 100%

They could have just taped it to the inside bottom of a full tissue box, and as long as they got it before the tissues were mostly empty I bet it would go undetected. Put a hand sanitizer next to it for extra camo.

Even then, just put a fake bottom in and nobody would notice. Worst case they throw out your mic.

Which made me wonder: in the future a microphone/camera combo fits in a grain of sand and costs a cent so everybody can basically see everything ... curious what the world would be like, is there a black mirror episode on this yet?

Where fruit flies carry cameras around? That's scary.

Likely at some point regular people just aren't given access to such edge tech, though. Even with infinite knowledge from an LLM, you probably couldn't build it without access to a factory either.

Or hijack the TV's already always on mic. Just forward a copy of the audio to your server in addition to the one sent to Samsung or LG. WebOs and Tizen shouldn't be that hard to crack when you have access to unrestricted frontier models.

This so much. Throw it in some cabinet or put it in middle of some wires under the table... Any place where there is naturally lot of other stuff or no one never looks and if they look they don't look throughly.

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

He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room

Did you not read the article? He did that also!

Too bad all it picked up was a low rumble, a metallic squink, and someone saying "my god..."

I bet this was an attempt to get insider info for trading, rather than espionage.

> These are not very smart spies

SV and SF are filled with people who are drastically less intelligent than they, or the people signing their paychecks, think they are.

Also from the article:

> 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…

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 think it's the consumers of these soap-opera-level AI thrillers who are not very smart actually.

The great Sage Altman walked up to a disciple one day who was picking stones out of the rice.

“How do you know what are stones?”, he asked the boy.

“Why, all the stones I see are grey and the rice is white so I simply pick out the grey objects and I’m left with rice”, answered the disciple.

Pleased that his rice was free of stones, the Sage cooked his rice, and sat down to eat. The first morsel broke his teeth.

> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand

This dude or OpenAI generally?

>> These are not very smart spies

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.

Arrogance is a help of a drug

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.

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.

To any spies still at OpenAI: do better.

these are not spies lol

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