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- Hacker News
- I’ve already read so many sci-fi novels where the part of the plot was that human communication infrastructure became unusable due to AI shenanigans… not here to read another one, thank you very much.by creaktive
- What does it even mean for "the Internet" to go offline? All nodes go off at the same time? All routers? BGP as a whole? All of that across the whole world?by cassianoleal
- It's always the DNS (by unloader6118
- Cloudflare goes downby nprateem
- These "visionaries" talking about these things hardly never have an actual grasp on how these things work in practice, which is why you'll see outlandish claims like this. What they mean in clear language is basically "Some things will change a bit", but that never sells clicks so "World will end as we know it" becomes the title.
- Been scraping the “good bits” (bits, ha ha) from the internet for some time. I'm quite ready for the internet to go away (so long as my digital backup remains viable!).
I guess I'll realize what I liked about it once it's gone.
Having moved back to the Midwaste after a few decades in California I realize how much I miss the Asian restaurants in the Bay Area. (Don't miss the traffic.)
by JKCalhoun - “If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.”
is so sensationalized to the point of leaving me genuinely flabbergasted as to how a rational person could have published this. If interested, I would recommend reading the actual study itself.
by misko77 - Indeed, you don't need to tell it who you are, it will already know to write the backdoors.
It may be sensationalized, but that doesn't mean it isn't based on legitimate fears based on actual real current and past actions of governments and corporations. They do spy on people. They do put in backdoors. They do want control over what you do and don't do so as to maintain the balance of power in the hands of those who currently wield it. None of these are fictions, they have all happened and are currently still happening, but with an AI accelerator/amplifier.
- Well, he is right about one thing; we are not prepared for what’s coming.by bronlund
- > Systems well beyond what is publicly known are already circulating in Washington, he says: “They can basically hack just about anything. So you get this continuous attack surface just ramping up.” From that follows a simple budget calculation: “If you spend hundreds of millions, billions on a submarine, well, guess what, a frontier model costs a hundred million. You will see a diversion of defense capability towards defensive and offensive AI, towards drones and robots.”
Firstly, I think we need to stop connecting things to the internet that have no business being on there. There are literally millions of devices with little to no maintenance plan that are the weak parts of our networks. We can massively reduce the attack surface.
Secondly, everything needs to be robust against not having the internet. Russia for example purposefully turned off their external internet during peacetime to maintain robustness. I think the majority of the West would currently fall over instantly under such a situation. It becomes increasingly clear that all services are now under continuous attacks.
> He is equally blunt about the foundations underneath all of it: “Our infrastructure is held together by twigs. The internet is terrible.” A British power plant went down for days after a hack, he says, and Cloudflare and others have come under attack. “We have to assume that the internet will go offline in the next few years. Maybe it’s good.”
The really concerning part is that we only hear about what is discussed publicly, i.e. the attacks that are unavoidable to declare. It's well known that countries will hide breaches under the guise of national security, and companies will also do what they can to hide breaches (including paying ransoms to attackers).
But nothing will happen until it is far too late - this is the same pattern I see over and over again. And then the reaction will be over the top and likely make our lives more difficult. "Ah yes, we keep getting attacked via the internet - now you need to have an interview, get a license and pay a license holder fee just to surf the web."
by bArray - The internet is designed to not go offline. It's true that a lot of it is dependent on big infra providers like Cloudflare but them going down permanently would be a problem for a couple days for anyone with good backup plans or weeks for those without. Painful but not catastrophic.
Your connection is not going down and independent sites will stay up. Taking down everything would mean someone breaking all the local ISPs where you live, because otherwise you could just connect to your neighbors or public wifi. And most governments would do everything they can to fix it ASAP.
The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.
by tancop - > The internet is designed to not go offline.
Only somewhat true, but the fundamental assumption is that it is operating during mostly peaceful times. You have hostile countries cutting or dragging anchors across deep sea fiber optics, you have attacks on energy suppliers, etc. The most effective attacks for denying service are to infrastructure.
> The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.
An attack is not just limited to internet infrastructure, but even if it was: You would just have to take out a significant part of the backbone. It could be the backbone routers, the DNS servers, distribution boxes, home routers, etc, etc. Once the capacity is reduced, you may find the people themselves end up DoS'ing the remaining capacity.
by bArray - “Sovereignty is the ability to resist power being exerted over you” is a pretty compelling definition. Thinking forward about what form that power takes with LLMs developing custom exploits faster than our existing processes can patch them - it seems to me that our current security best practices might turn out to be pretty useless or even an active risk in and of themselves.
Our responsible disclosure and CVE info cycle and patch cadences and defense in depth, etc, etc ecosystem are tuned around a world where there's a relatively small number of bad 0days and the cost of said 0days is reasonably high. We can evolve how we address threats, but our models have read all of the best literature about how it's been done previously. Think there's a gap for people too small to gain access to "the good security models" - the nerfed closed models and the open models seem likely to fail to adapt, unless that gap is addressed.
- I see no reason for the Internet to go offline, other than various political blocks compartmentalizing it. So: China, Russia, EU having their own network? Yeah, maybe. Super-AI nuking the Internet: no.
In fact, the more I use AI (handed sudo to Claude on my AI dev box just yesterday), the more I see it as a pretty good, and certainly tireless, sysadmin. Looking at what people do with AI by connecting it to undocumented hardware interfaces and getting working setups from this, the Internet will do fine.
The whole article is just a grab-bag of various AI fears without much grounding in what is happening. Maybe the summary doesn't do justice to what was said.
by blfr - I watched my 75 year old human plumber (who sniped a guy his first day in vietnam), kneel on two 3 inch wide joists and drill a 4 inch diameter hole at a 89 degree angle through said joists. Where’s the robot that does all that?
Above from all the other doomer crap in this article, I find the job replacement rhetoric the most offensive. It is always people that are so detached from the reality of labor, people who’s only “job” has been to essentially have ideas and opinions.
by jmogly - Maybe the robot won't take all the jobs, but they may take many jobs. Those masses won't be happy if some of the people will still have jobs.
And BTW, 75 year olds doing physical labor is not an ideal state of things unless that plumber really wants to work at 75.
by dmortin - The robot doesn't have to do all that to severely impact the plumber's, or just trades', job market as a whole. A massive influx of new trainees in the field will inevitably pull salaries down, thus the viability of the field as a career path. Even partial automation can, at least temporarily, reduce demand for certain things, or at the minimum move demand to other parts of the field.by folkrav
- You are right that they cannot be replaced TODAY. The bet people seem to be making is that the future will be very different and arrive a lot sooner then our intuition might suggest.by flippyhead
- This is the 'Not today, so never" fallacy. As capabilities in all fields are stagnant and human progress stands still. I would switch off the 'nam flicks and check out some of the recent Chinese robotics progress before attempting to peer into the future.by squidbeak
- Yeah but the accountant, the product manager, the graphics designer, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer are fucked.
Good thing we have plumbers. But who’s gonna have money to pay a plumber if nobody has jobs?
by uneoneuno - The robot part exists, the hard part is the intelligence for that robot to be autonomous.
Stuff like this is already available as a standard industrial product: https://www.hilti.com/content/hilti/W1/US/en/business/busine...
Giving a robot proprioception, balance, or even good enough vision to reliably position itself (tracks, wheels, or limbs) without crashing through soft ceilings underneath it, or failing to recognise the correct spot to putting the tool, that's what's currently really only good enough for a tech demo rather than an product you'd want to buy/hire.
by ben_w - You know, I hope to hell a robot replaces his job. No 75 year old man, let alone Veteran, should have to do that. A robot with replaceable knee joints is a way better fit.
My sincere hope is that robots can take these painful, laborious jobs and free us mushy humans from them.
I hope they can also take the jobs of the snipers and the sniped.
by vonnieda - "The way that Hugging Face defended itself was with an open source Chinese model, GLM, because they didn’t have access to the high cybersecurity models on the other side. They’re too dangerous."
This is not what happened. HuggingFace patched the vulnerabilities in the ordinary way, then used GLM for some of the forensic analysis afterwards. It's in the interest of HF to promote the GLM part of the story, because it emphasizes their agency in the situation as well as the open-source models they distribute. But GLM was a (useful) part of the postmortem, not of the defense.
by comicjk - Another AI salesman selling AI, nothing new hereby pizzaiolo
- And now it's in Nvidia's interest to sweep it under the rug.
- Funny - I was just reading about the creator of Ethernet this morning (Robert Metcalfe):
In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."[28]
by grubbs - Integrity is in such short supply, great to hear someone actually keep their word.
(I would have been cool with the cake, if he at it all in one setting.)
by nosioptar