It's often the case that we make much effort into securing the key but expose it via an open agent socket at a well known path or use an open control master path for multiplexing.
Certain automation and dev tools like Ansible make it a pain to work if agent key requires a confirmation.
Weirdly enough, this is _why_ I ended up using Secretive: I needed a second ssh-agent because selecting which keys are forwarded per-host is very fiddly, and while standard ssh-agent kinda supports it, 1Password doesn't. Anyway, _a_ solution for this is having separate SSH agents, and Secretive is another agent on top of 1Password.
It is not that the they make money, but the problem is that corporations with huge budgets can overshadow the volunteer run packaging of the said projects and eventually become the canonical way of using them.
Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.
There is no "honest" AI though. It is always biased towards its prompt and ultimately its training data.
Compare flights? You have to assume it is objective and not tainted by corporate bias or backroom deals(aka ads and sponsored content), unless you selfhost and find an objective model.
Search Wikipedia? You have to constantly check that it is giving you straight facts instead of being constrained by its community and safety guidelines.
The problem with so many of these usecases is treating AI as a super intelligent Vulcan who is always logical and objective aka Spock, when we are better off treating it as if it is a salesman.
This is all true, but which travel booking assistant is really unbiased?
Online comparison sites might not be, the good old 'brick and mortar' travel assistant most likely isn't either.
You don't need an unbiased one. Only someone who cares about the consequences of getting caught while being blatantly unbiased.
Your neighborhood brick and mortar, or an online one may care about that while a faceless trans-national big tech will not even register that you left.
agree. That's why i love models (agents) that just search the web get the answer and use tools to their disposale instead of guessing based on training data which is outdated anyway...
Will be interesting to see how 402 payment required will be treated.
What if someone spins up a web endpoint that returns 402 with instructions on how to pay like CC details in the headers etc, or may be an openapi spec to provide payment and get an auth token, when you have given the agent access to your password vault for authentication to other services.
I currently work for a big French company, for which I have developed an "alternate" (emergency and temporary) accounting system because their actual system is broken, and another team is trying to fix it (has been trying to fix it for nine months now).
Said alternate system is a bunch of Python scripts, an sqlite database, and a file containing various API keys to read and write to other company systems; it runs on a dedicated virtual machine.
I share all the code I produce to the other team. But yesterday I found out that the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine, without my knowledge or consent (which was bad enough), and that the other team gave access to Claude, which has bean roaming free for a while now, on that production machine.
I've thrown a big fit over this; I don't know if I'm over reacting but I think it's insane.
> the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine
Your error is here.
It's not your production machine. It's the company's production machine. Always expect the company to do whatever it wants with its machine, and use the machine accordingly.
Yes I understand it's not "my" machine, but it's the dedicated machine my system runs on.
That someone would let an agent run on it at any time, read what's there, and possibly modify the code or stop a process, without even informing me, is what I find problematic, to say the least.
What good would such a thing do when the anointed gatekeepers (ie IT) have explicitly granted access to the transgressors? The scenario you're responding to here amounts to corporate slapstick.
I also work in the EU and privacy on company's machine is a more complex topic that's case by case dependent,but claiming the employer in the EU has no right to access your machine is plain false.
It's true, that the employer can't just enter your machine to look at your personal info just because they feel like it, but they can access it for work related reasons to access work related info, if they have just cause, like a security incident for example.
Ultimately, it's the company's machine, on the company's network, inside the company's premises, on the company's time, so the company can definitely access it for a business use case if they need to, typically with a notification to you to prepare it by removing private info from it or off the screen.
Now if you happen to put your private info there because you're sloppy, and your private info gets vacuumed by accident by IT's mass ingestion of work related data, then you have the right to tell them to delete your private info and they have to comply. That's where the privacy comes in, but it's on you to avoid storing private info on company property, because if it ends up ingested by accident then it's still on you, not your employer if they ingest it by accident.
But I gotta ask, just how hard is it to avoid putting your personal info on company property?
I expect that I can be relocated to another office with a month of advance notice. Also cleanup, fire security check and fixing water leakage while I'm not there.
I don't expect that someone else will provide the keys of "my" office to the biology department when they have to keep a few sheeps during the weekend.
For consumer AI products and non-enterprise business accounts, if you look closely at the ToS it says that you retain the rights to your inputs and the outputs you receive, collectively called “content”.
You can opt-out of training in your content. However that doesn’t cover the results of tool calls - which are fair game for training. Theres also the fact that they make a distinction between ‘pre-training’, ‘post-training’, and ‘training’.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI also leave a carve out in Enterprise contracts for “safety events”, which as far as I can tell is a euphemism for “something the model has never seen before”.
> I don't know if I'm over reacting but I think it's insane.
Your employer has gone beyond testing in prod to vibecoding live in prod, secrets included. Yes that's completely insane. Perhaps this exact mentality is how the primary system wound up broken in the first place?
My friend, there are people are out there telling their AI personal assistants to go on Amazon and purchase a surprise present for themselves based on their known preferences. And then they intentionally do not inspect what the AI purchases because it would ruin the surprise.
Ordering from Amazon is way less risky than a password vault imo. The password vault does not have a return policy, for starters.
Beyond that, access to logins enables buying things on Amazon, sending emails to everyone you know, registering domain names and spinning up servers, stock trading, etc.
They typically refund food and don’t require you to return it.
If not: still better than giving ai your password vault. I’m not saying it is a good idea to let ai buy from Amazon. I am saying that giving ai access to your password vault is still a superset of letting ai buy from Amazon.
Sure it's a superset but other than the financial angle what's the perceived issue here? It seems like access to burn through your money is the underlying problem.
It could send personal and significantly problematic emails to family or professional contacts.
It could change LinkedIn to add competitive work.
It could sign a married person up for dating sites and invite people to your house.
It could lie on your taxes.
It could attempt to join a terrorist movement or elicit other illegal activity on your behalf.
It could find many other creative ways to ruin your life and/or reputation, in the same brute-force manner as recent cybersecurity issues that previously would have required impossibly large teams of people.
Even if burning through cash is the only problem you care about, though, credit cards on Amazon is a small part of the financial picture for many people. Banks and brokers can be a much bigger issue.
Wasnt there an announcement some weeks ago here on HN that one of the BigTechs popular services are now including your personal pictures as well? Wasnt it Google?
Exactly, I have a Gemini Pro account, I can’t see how privacy can be maintained. If I ask Gemini to take the content of an email and added the dates to my calendar, then all of that private information might as well be public then!
Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.
Maps refuses to show your *current* location if you don't enable location accuracy i.e. if you won't allow it to spy on your WiFi or Bluetooth it refuses to show your current location at all. GPS, what's that?
We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?
And the YouTube home page is blank if you have Watch History off. The recommendation algorithm still runs on the side bar of any video you watch, but the home page refuses to even show your subscriptions.
Yeah, this is just Google punishing people for not enabling their data harvesting.
There's no reason they can't have a mix of "this is popular in general" and "your subs and likes suggest you'd like this" on the front page - they just don't want people to disable watch history. They are required to offer that as an option, but they'll never stop pestering you about it.
I'm surprised they don't just store your watch history anyway , with the toggle option being "don't show me or people looking over my shoulder my watch history".
> And the YouTube home page is blank if you have Watch History off.
That one I do like. YouTube’s homepage (at least without an account and with history off) is a cesspool of uninteresting clickbait garbage so I’m glad to have it off. I do agree they seem to think of it as some kind of punishment¹, which makes it all the more satisfying that it works as I want it.
¹ It’s now entirely blank for me, but I remember when they started doing this (it wasn’t always the case) they showed a message that suggested not having a homepage was undesirable.
Welcome to monopoly where they get the free videos from the sheep and still order you around. Why has Youtube not been disrupted btw, everyone gave up or did VCs order it?
The difference is that I'm subscribed to a variety of channels on YouTube. Yes, I do want to see their videos on the front page. That's what the Subscriptions page is doing anyway.
Yes, but what algorithm will it use to show videos from the channels you're subscribed to? Will you and everyone else agree with that choice of algorithm? The only one that makes sense is chronological. Anything else leads to similar problems as in the past.
People use Google everyday, block all ads, get extremely angry about Google's grubby advertising hands, and then when you tell them their are paid services like Kagi and Proton...."pay for this stuff? Nah, I have a right to it for free!"
Yes, it's almost like a fairy tale where children are offered candy but then very bad things happen. Hansel und Gretel, etc. We should have known all along!
Continuing with your Hansel and Gretel metaphor, the first time the candy turned sour for me was Goog-411. It was a service (at least over here in the US) that allowed you to look up local businesses via voice prompts over a phone call. When the service was still active, calling 411 via a mobile phone had a per-call cost, so a free lookup service seemed great.
I found out later that Goog411 was created to primarily train on the voice prompts from the users of the service. Left a really bad taste.
I've just turned off location accuracy, google maps displayed a popup said results will be better if I turn it on, and after dismissing the popup it did use GPS to localize me with no issues.
I'm comparing 0 GPS assist with full assist. Takes a few seconds and another few for a proper lock.
With assist it's kind of instant. But I'm close to Polar Circle, maybe it's less sats over the North Pole?
This will only work for a few weeks, after which the location will be missing entirely. (Which just makes it more obvious that this is an intended feature, not a bug.)
> Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.
Call it what it is, please. User-hostile behaviour that compels you to turn their tracking on if you want to use any of the practically helpful services.
I'm a super privacy conscious person, and even I end up keeping many of these things on simply because I want to use for eg google assistant.
> Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows
Both might have thought 'If you are patient enough to tolerate a slower web based start menu, you are probably not a target market for a hardware accelerated terminal' :D
It's often the case that we make much effort into securing the key but expose it via an open agent socket at a well known path or use an open control master path for multiplexing.
Certain automation and dev tools like Ansible make it a pain to work if agent key requires a confirmation.
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