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It’s about a bazillion times easier to reverse engineer colab if you just SSH into it. You can set up a reverse proxy. I used ngrok back in the day, but maybe t
by sillysaurusx 4y ago
It’s about a bazillion times easier to reverse engineer colab if you just SSH into it. You can set up a reverse proxy. I used ngrok back in the day, but maybe they blocked it.
The most interesting thing was a custom binary that mounts your Google drive as a folder. I was able to copy it off colab and use it on my own Linux boxes, which was handy in a “oh neat, lookie there” kind of way. I assume it’ll break whenever they update their api, but you’d still be able to just grab the new binary from a random colab instance.
There’s also a custom script they run to set up everything, using Node. It spawns a bunch of stuff that I’ve forgotten. (It was 2019 when I was poking around, and a pandemic has a nice way of wiping one’s memory of ye olden hacking days. Still a bit sad I never got to go to the tensorflow conference.)
Anyway just ssh in and ls -la / and you’ll see one or two interesting folders. You can rsync them down to your box and examine at your leisure.
- sva_ 4y agoIt should be noted that it is against their rules and you might get worse instances if they somehow detect it https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html#limitations-and-restrictions https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html#limitation...
- sillysaurusx 4y agoI think they’re just trying to fight abuse. You can do everything from colab that you can do from ssh anyway. It’s just faster to enter commands. Good catch though. I didn’t know that. When I originally figured out how to ssh in, I kept it a secret figuring that it’d be a matter of time till they clamped down. Guess it took a few years, or I just missed it. Bunch of us in the ML scene used to do it regularly, since it’s way easier to monitor a training run via tmux.
- RyEgswuCsn 4y agoI think they do shut you out if you try to spin any process through "unauthorised" means. There have many projects that offer automated setup of SSH/VNC/VSCode on a colab instance, and my experience has been that colab somehow is able to manage to shut off the connections soon after I start them.
- teruakohatu 4y agoDoesn't Pro allow SSH?
- sva_ 4y agoI looked at the license agreement, and it says under "5. Restrictions" > circumvent, reverse-engineer, modify, disable, or otherwise tamper with any security technology that Google uses to protect the Paid Service or encourage or help anyone else to do so; > access the Paid Service other than by means authorized by Google; or I'm not sure what exactly they mean by "means authorized by Google". https://colab.research.google.com/pro/terms/v1 https://colab.research.google.com/pro/terms/v1
- dinvlad 4y agoI would imagine their threat model pretty much assumes anyone can do anything on that host :-)
- nl 4y agoBut their other docs explain how to use SSH tunnels to connect to local runtimes: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/local-runtimes.html https://research.google.com/colaboratory/local-runtimes.html Not quite the same thing I guess.
- quartzic 4y agoJust use rclone instead; it's open source, fast, supports nearly every cloud storage provider, and has FUSE support for mounting. https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/