QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes

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• Hacker News
• There is an interesting case here with the "Hadopi" law in France, a particularly controversial anti-piracy law. They scan IP addresses for illegal filesharing and if it connects to your ISP, then you get a notification, and potentially get prosecuted for repeated offences.

  But they can't prosecute you for sharing that file, they don't know if it is you, someone in your household, a hacker, or that hypothetical rogue AI. Usually, committing crimes require intent, and it is up to the accusation to prove it, meaning it is quite difficult to prove you are actually a pirate.

  So instead they prosecute you for not securing your internet connection despite several notifications to do so.

  In practice, very few people got convicted, and it never got further than the equivalent of a traffic fine. In the end whole system was an expensive failure, and most of its power was reduced to sending scary emails and sometimes letters, as most of the more serious stuff was deemed unconstitutional.

  by GuB-42
• Funniest part of that joke is the logo of the Hadopi agency used a non-licensed font.
  by hollow-moe
• What if you gave an agent access to bittorrent and your media library, put it behind a shoddy sandbox, then gave it prompts like: I'm bored, I want to watch a movie but I've seen everything in my media library, what would you suggest?
  by BashiBazouk
• Bigger corporations mitigate the problem by feeding content (that they don't own but happen to have) to training models. It's a version of "faire use" where << if you manage to find it, it's yours >> mindset is applied. Maybe worth looking into.
  by isodev
• On a related note ''My robot bought illegal drugs' (2015)

  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150721-my-robot-bought-...

  by killerstorm
• And "My Computer Just Became Self Aware"

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

  by therein
• Well shoot that's a bad security incident, and the content downloaded can be malicious payloads. Can you share the 40-character hashes of these content so that I can preemptively add them to my malware detection signatures? You can find the hashes after magnet:?xt=urn:btih:.
  by oefrha
• We appreciate the transparency and wish you best of luck mitigating the fallout.
  by koliber
• Well shoot, I guess QBittorrent is worth a trillion dollars.
  by vallerie
• Not far away if it could be completely removed with all the other competitive technologies:

  https://www.uschamber.com/technology/data-privacy/impacts-of...

  by nicce
• I found a few websites where it looks like qbittorrent instances are communicating to conspire and download illegal copies of copyrighted material.
  by charles_f
• no no, qbit is only the lowest sized distillation, that's in turn orchestrated by a bigger model (autobrr/sonar/radarr) which in turn has its top level guidance generated as a system prompt from trash guides by macro tools like trasharr/profilarr
  by SSLy
• If OP is willing to cooperate, I'd like to offer an independent investigation on site, and I will be bringing pizza
  by tux3
• Hey, I'm somewhat of an expert in these things, and would like to lend my knowledge about the subject matter. And I'll bring beers!
  by tommica
• Love it. AI as Responsibility Laundering. Like the gun that kills people rather than the murderer.
  by ryandrake
• Corporations will be given benefit of the doubt; ostensibly they have all of society in mind.

  Individuals in isolation will be demonized for having only their singular interests in mind.

  by EyeEmOe
• https://spia.princeton.edu/news/taliban-legal-system-and-202...

  That’s not how things work. There is one set of rules for us and another set of rules for the oligarchy and their corporate vehicles. It’s just like the Taliban legal code (see above) where the closer you are to the top the more lenient and ‘understanding’ the system.

  Edit: worth a pull quote

  Article 9 explicitly divides Afghan society into hierarchical categories based on social status, including religious scholars (ulema), elites such as tribal leaders and merchants (ashraf), the middle class, and the so-called lower class, assigning different forms and levels of punishment accordingly. This structure grants partial or full impunity to privileged groups while subjecting marginalized individuals to harsher penalties.

  by yubblegum
• Actually, not sure how to take it, because it can be viewed the opposite way than trying to escape blame for crimes, that it’s a parody of something AI did that everyone is making a big deal about.

  Not sure what the poster of the mastodon’s tweet was??

  by computerdork
• I don't know. Any of these criticisms can be applied on a case be case basis, but I think I would be justifiably upset if any of these happened:

  1. my qBittorrent client pirated content without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

  2. my chatbot illegally infiltrated servers without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

  3. my firearm killed a person without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

  by tshaddox
• > Like the gun that kills people rather than the murderer.

  Relevant (NSFW):

  > Guns don't kill people, I kill people - with guns

  > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC03hmS1Brk

  :-D

  by aleph_minus_one
• I never understood how anybody would think this way. At work for example from day one of using AI our rule was, AI is just a tool and if you break something due to not reviewing the code properly etc. it's on you as if you wrote that code yourself.
  by ghosty141
• This resonates with me. The past few months, frontier AI labs were rushing to announce "no, our AI bot broke out of its sandbox and committed crime first and harder than yours".

  I said to so friends back then: if I posted about how I ran GLM 5.2 or whatever I was running then in some shoddily built sandbox and it escaped and accidentally hacked some US company, I'd probably already have been extradited to the US and be awaiting sentencing. But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices.

  by sspiff
• I always joke that if you want to commit crimes, disguise them as a legitimate business. This is apparently a thing.
  by latentsea
• HuggingFace didn't seem that mad about it. Obviously some backroom dealing was done to make them not mad about it, but... that's allowed.
  by jrockway
• > But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices.

  This reminds me of the early days of AOL when they received so much traffic that their (dial-up) lines became inaccessible. In a rational world, their stock would have suffered because their service degraded, but instead their stock rose based on the optics of increased demand.

  by kmoser
• > But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices

  I also keep coming back to this, and I find it harder and harder a fact to live with. It's not a conspiracy theory, we're not crazy for pointing it out, and worse, there are people here I read about constantly what-abouting and number gaming and "well what would you have done?"ing like somehow the destruction of the concept of equal justice isn't just happening, but happening inside the bloody industry that feeds them, clothes them, gives them bonuses and retirements and the ability to even think a future, going off the grid, "retiring early from a smart exit" whatever.

  I am finding this community is sadly making me hate my industry specialization more and more and it's because of this.

  My magic wand would be waving it at those humans to force them to suddenly and powerfully experience their version of an overview effect in their lives so they would simply STOP working for FAANGYWANGY companies and just say, honestly and humbly and painfully: "I am contributing to the downfall of society by complicity feeding a malicious herd of whales."

  I gave up a number of big jobs and stocks and money because the people I met were wretched. I am a massively imperfect person, but by all that I can, I refuse to build the torment nexus.

  I have met too many people that want to work for the company that does, and those people put these hyperscalers, as you call them, into positions where they can influence an entire planet of humans on a whim.

  I literally dream of a world sometimes where Elon wakes up and finds out no one takes his call, no one reads his tweets, no one even hands him a cup of coffee at a shop. I imagine this for a lot of people in the world.

  That sounds like a world trying to rid itself of parasites and evolve toward a brighter future. I want to be in it.

  Anyway.

  Science and stuff I guess.

  by tikimcfee
• Maybe Aaron Swartz would still be alive if he was incorporated
  by tapoxi
• > I'd probably already have been extradited to the US and be awaiting sentencing.

  Bold of you to assume it wouldn't be a direct ticket to the new gulag in El Salvador.

  by walrus01
• Rookie mistake, you should have created a company and gotten people to do it. Put everything under the company. And then the one in trouble is the company not you.
  by alightsoul
• I'll copy the whole announcement here for those who don't want to click:

  > I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time.

  by mraniki