Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights (weeraman.com)
123 points by aweeraman 3 days ago
class3shock a minute ago
The framing of this entire issue is just wrong.
"Today the reflex is back."
To do what? Ban export of AI? Are you sure? Because it seems, so far, there has been some personal motivated government restrictions due to people not bending the knee and industry moves and clamoring about dangers to generate hype.
"The fears have changed."
Yeah, people are fearful that the entirety of the internet has been hoovered up and people are using that data to make tech that they are promoting by saying it will eliminate a huge percentage of jobs and is exceedingly dangerous. At the same time as they do that, they refuse to take any accountability for the negative effects their tech has or will have, avoid any over sight, and laugh at the idea of discussing that maybe such a consequential tech doesn't belong in the hands of a few tech bros whose only qualification for owning it is being rich.
"The worry is now cyber capability, biology and models that do things nobody asked them to do."
No, we are being sold those worries (really, really hard) but these are not "peoples" worries. They aren't even real governments worries. They are the worries being peddled to try and work some deal where the taxpayers end up holding the bag of hot air that is the AI economy.
This post is so frustrating because AI is the antithesis of everything the people fighting for cryptography access, working on opensource, pushing for a the sort of web that is beneficial to all, were working against. A giant concentration of power enriching the few at the expense of many.
aftbit 2 hours ago
The same argument applies to DRM and piracy. DRM only disadvantages people who want to consume content legally. Only one person has to bypass it (be it through cryptographic or software failings or the good old fashioned analog hole ala telesync) then upload the resulting unencumbered media file to a piracy site.
As a result, it's not just cheaper, but also easier and more reliable to steal media than it is to buy it legally.
What would happen if media were offered without DRM? Everything would be on a piracy site? It already is.
perpetuallunch 19 minutes ago
Cheaper & easier - not by much. Australia blocks all the good torrent sites, so now I need a VPN, a reputable one. Also need terabytes of network connected storage, and usually I need more and more of it over time. Better and more networking equipment to buy and maintain. Media management and streaming software that works locally and remotely, to (maybe buy) and maintain.
Or I can usage discount offers for the various streaming platforms, and pay for each one I want to watch something on from time to time.
The streaming services also don’t come with who knows what malware like pirated media can.
And a YouTube Premium subscription because you get ad free YouTube Music and ad free YouTube.
zarzavat 4 minutes ago
This is true for music because the labels decided that they would upload their catalogs to every streaming service.
It's not true for movies, because the movie industry decided to sign exclusivity deals or make movies only available on their own platforms. Thus piracy is still the only reliable way to watch movies: you might get access to some subset of movies depending on which streaming service you subscribe to, but certainly not to all of them.
reactordev 12 minutes ago
It’s cat and mouse game. Australia blocks sites, sites move urls. If you don’t keep up, then they have caught you too.
Streaming sites can just delete your purchases whenever they want to. Sony already has.
AussieWog93 6 minutes ago
It's only a DNS block fwiw. If you set your DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 everything works fine.
belinder 2 hours ago
Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy. Drm may be circumventable, but any complex set of steps for doing so is enough to deter that target audience.
matheusmoreira an hour ago
Piracy is a service problem. Copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their obnoxious greed.
Things were easy enough when Netflix had a complete catalog, now every studio wants to roll their own shitty streaming services in order to cut Netflix out. Result is a fragmented mess where you want to watch a great film but you have no idea where the hell it even is, and even if you find it you discover it doesn't work because your computer isn't locked down to their tastes, and even if you buy a TV appliance they stream you some shitty horribly compressied "high definition" video with artifacts in pure black frames, all on their homegrown laggy borderline unusable video players with zero features.
Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. It's the sort of thing that makes me feel like a total moron for giving money to these corporations.
yndoendo 16 minutes ago
bitwize 18 minutes ago
tshaddox an hour ago
I think that's also wrong. I think that the primary reason media publishers use DRM is not to prevent copyright infringement. It's really to exert power over the entire ecosystem and use that power to implement rules around content distribution and use that are much more restrictive than the actual copyright law itself.
bitwize 39 minutes ago
tptacek an hour ago
DRM also intensively targets the new-release window during which much of the returns on any piece of IP are made; the latency with which high-quality copies hit mainstream sites has monetary value as well.
undefined an hour ago
dijksterhuis an hour ago
> Drm is not targeted at the hardcore pirate, it's targeted at a potentially larger percentage of people who would be tempted to get the thing for free if it was easy
spotify and netflix are both prime examples of making it easier for a larger population to access drm enabled content compared to pirated content (at the time they started getting popular anyway).
with the advent of streaming services you no longer needed to download potentially dodgy files to your computer (viruses/malware), wait for the download to finish, realise they’re a dodgy video cam recording of the cinema screening, download another one etc.
napster/limewire et. al were originally examples for the opposite case. pirating via those was super popular. there were fewer steps to access the media compared to going to a physical shop to buy a CD/DVD. (*)
(*) i can’t remember when the itunes store came along. might have been after these services? or around the same-ish time?
DrewADesign an hour ago
“Locks only keep an honest man honest.”
-Most people’s grandfather
(I’m not saying these things are equal — just that this concept and the old saying share a perspective on securing things.)
Cider9986 2 hours ago
But why would this larger percentage of people rip it themselves when the hardcore pirate already did it and made it accessible[1]?
DrewADesign an hour ago
undefined an hour ago
ACCount37 2 hours ago
The point is: DRM is circumvented once, by some grizzled pirate captain. Everyone else just gets to plunder their downloads DRM free, nice and easy.
DRM is ineffective because the pirate uploaders are competent enough to break it, and an average end user only downloads - rank and file pirates wouldn't make their own releases even if DRM never existed and making them was easy.
undefined 2 hours ago
inigyou 2 hours ago
But it is easy to get the thing for free, because the free one doesn't have DRM.
conception an hour ago
Yet Netflix is as profitable as Disney. Having loved through netflix and popcorn tv that wouldn’t be the case without drm.
starrybreak 2 hours ago
Users hate it, but DRM is vastly more powerful than that since you ultimately control user access.
DRM - which all online services with user profiling automatically have - can also let you ban users, retarget users for ads, abuse, and other things beyond the basic function of running the software.
coretx an hour ago
Such as bypassing parliament -the people responsible for managing your rights-. And subverting democracy and the rule of law too, by punishing you or otherwise manipulate you into desired behavior without going to court. Code is Law. DRM is violence.
bitwize an hour ago
DRM does the job it's supposed to which is prevent casual piracy and increase the amount of effort it takes to pirate something. A thief could rob your house if they bumped your lock or just smashed your window. But that doesn't make door locks useless as those have large costs in terms of effort and risk. So the lock is still effective at preventing someone from just walking in and taking your stuff.
It's the same with DRM. Without it, media would appear on piracy sites instantly upon release. DRM makes things harder to pirate, and pirated editions harder to get. And the DMCA makes defeating DRM a felony under U.S. law, so pirate networks are riskier to establish, driving piracy underground. It's doing the job it's supposed to do. It's not going anywhere.
deyiao an hour ago
It's unfortunate that the final few years of the fastest AGI progress happen to coincide with a global surge in nationalism, polarization, and mutual hostility between human groups.
That raises a disturbing failure mode: under intense conflict, an AI could learn that exterminating some groups of humans is a justified or even desirable objective. Once that principle is accepted, the step to concluding that exterminating all humans is justified may become much smaller than we'd like to believe.
jameshart 3 hours ago
Slight timeline correction: 25 years ago in 2001 Blowfish was no longer contraband - the crypto export rules had been changed by 2000. As of January 2000 Netscape and IE were both shipping 128bit DES internationally.
Still, the t-shirts with Blowfish source printed on them were a cool bit of retro hacker chic.
tptacek 3 hours ago
Also, the first OpenBSD hackathon was 1999; it was in fact semicryptographic (they shipped IPSEC) but they've had hackathons in the US since, and for a time developers were coming out to Calgary because that's where Theo was. The dumb export control shipping dance was real though.
MrGilbert 3 hours ago
Reminds me of T-Shirts with DeCSS's code printed on it. Wild times.
no_multitudes an hour ago
It seems like you got bored halfway through and had an LLM write the second half of your post? You know there isn't a minimum length for blog posts, right? You can just stop writing.
aetherspawn 24 minutes ago
It’s kind of a bit ridiculous for Opus to blow up the minute I ask it to read from Ghidra, when the Chinese models, and even OpenAI, do not.
Leave the legality up to me, please, and don’t presume to be a power tool vendor regulating the use of their power drills, so to speak.
mrmuagi 21 minutes ago
Was going to ask you to elaborate but from your update I caught refreshing I see it kneecaps itself for safety?
I'm a hobbiest reverse engineer and I often use ida free/ollydbg to reverse engineer stuff. I'm tempted to use try and use llms as a help (I've used it for help with instruction one offs successfully, but not the decompiling/trying to make sense of decompiled functions).
theturtletalks 2 hours ago
We need a cypherpunks movement for open weight models
randomNumber7 an hour ago
Most people today are too aligned. Like they want the models to be also.
inigyou an hour ago
cypherpunks of today would probably be focused on bringing big tech down a notch, rather than spreading more LLMs
coretx an hour ago
https://tinygrad.org is probably the best punk in this regard. Moving LLM's out of your drug dealers datacenter and into your utility closet.
Scoundreller 3 hours ago
Time to create some esp32-in-a-lightbulb open weight model dead drops.
Please don’t open-circuit the light for several hours.
inigyou 2 hours ago
Recently I realised that a solar-powered garden light could easily hide an ESP32 and has its own power source. You could even place them in public without being too suspicious. Might want to disable the light, so the power lasts longer and so it's less likely to annoy someone into removing it.
Someone can do the math on panel and battery size. I'm thinking it'll work as-is, as the ESP with WiFi on will draw similar power to the LED that you disconnected.
But how will you give it even a GB of storage for a tiny model?
coretx 36 minutes ago
Many people use those to hide their ESP32-LORA devices. Far better range compared to wifi ;-) It works but you'll still need to swap the 18650's every now and then. More of a concern is the privatization of free spectrum. If everyone becomes a radio-refugee, there will be nothing but noise & pirates.
codazoda 2 hours ago
Possibly a simple SD?
lofaszvanitt an hour ago
Maybe it's already out there.
rhelz 26 minutes ago
(in a Forrest gump accent) my momma said that locks on doors only keep honest people honest. I'm not Forrest Gump, but my mom actually did say that and it's true.
What ever we have can be taken from us by powerful people, even life itself. In point of fact, that's exactly how these weights were created in the first place--they scraped the intellectual property of the world, and now are trying to restrict access to what they themselves just took.
That being said, I don't think any of the AI billionaires who are talking about this have taken the locks off of the doors or gotten rid of their security systems.
IshKebab 3 hours ago
Yeah this persuaded me more than I thought it would, but there are still some pretty big differences IMO. A frontier AI model is a lot harder and more costly to produce than an encryption algorithm. Especially if we believe Anthropic that the Chinese can only do it by distilling their models (though tbh I would err on the side of not believing that).
ACCount37 2 hours ago
RSA algorithm you can print on a shirt - and that would give you encryption that works as well as it possibly can. There's no "RSA 6.7 Turbo Pro EncryptingPlus" that would give you something radically new that the "t-shirt RSA" can't.
LLMs are massive, complex, and a moving target. Making them is hard, and there's no "we're done" there - the frontier updates every few months. It's easy to get and run a 2B model locally, but what concerns people isn't a cheap end device 2B - it's the 10T RLVR-fried monsters that frontier labs play with nowadays.
mohamedkoubaa 2 hours ago
Everything is on the shoulders of giants in one way or another
1saadcodes 14 minutes ago
[dead]
Cider9986 an hour ago
Apparently we are still fighting for secure communication through cryptography [1].
Other issue that doesn't get enough attention on HN is the criminalization of writing code. Probably because it was cryptocurrency applications. First they come for the people you disagree with. Just like they first came for porn sites, and now Wikipedia is being monitored.