4 ms·
Another fun one is the .zip or .tar.gz file that decompresses to itself: https://research.swtch.com/zip https://research.swtch.com/zip If you are processing em
by jerf 1y ago
Another fun one is the .zip or .tar.gz file that decompresses to itself: https://research.swtch.com/zip https://research.swtch.com/zip
If you are processing emails for security reasons, and want to find viruses even if they are in archive files, it's easy to write the code to "just keep unarchiving until we're out of things to unarchive", but not only can that lead to quite astonishing expansions, it can actually be a process that never terminates at all.
I remember when I first read about these, and "a small file that decompresses to a gigabyte" was also "a small file that decompresses to several multiples of your entire hard disk space" and even servers couldn't handle it. Now I read articles like this one talking about "oh yeah Evolution filled up 100GB of space" like that's no big deal.
If you have a recursive decompressor you can still make small files that uncompress to large amounts even by 2025 standards, because the symbols the compressor will use to represent "as many zeros as I can have" will themselves be redundant. The rule that you can't compress already-compressed content doesn't necessarily apply to these sorts of files.
- cyanydeez 1y agoI'd be curious if there's an LLM prompt equivalent of a zip bomb that will explode the context window. I know there's deterministic limits on context window, but future LLMs _are_ going to have strange loops and going to be very susceptible to circular reasoning. Before AGI, there will be a untenable gullible general intelligence.
- colechristensen 1y agoOne of the things that will likely _characterize_ AGI are nondeterministic loops. My bet is that if AGI is possible it will take a form that looks something like x_(n+1) = A * x_n (1 - x_n) Where x is a billions long vector and the parameters in A (sizeof(x)^2 ?) are trained and also tuned to have period 3 or nearly period three for a meta-stable near chaotic progression of x. "Period three implies chaos" https://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/LiYorke.pdf https://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/LiYorke.pdf That is if AGI is possible at all without wetware.
- Y_Y 1y agoChaos isn't intelligence. Chaos is unmanageable growth in your solution space, the oppisite of what you want.
- colechristensen 1y agoThere are theories and evidence that your brain operates hovering on the edge of the phase transition to chaos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_brain_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_brain_hypothesis
- mindesc 1y agoIf you have any system that tries to gravitate to a local minimum it is almost impossible to not make Newton's fractal with it. Classical feed forward network learning does pretty much look like newtons method to me. Please take a look into https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_method https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_method
- cyanydeez 1y agoWhats confusing to me is the dual use of the word entropy in both the physical science and in communication. The local minimums are some how stable in a world of increasing entropy. How do these local minimums ever form when there's such a large arrow of entropy. Certainly intelligence is a reduction of entropy, but it's also certainly not stable. Just like cellular automata (https://record.umich.edu/articles/simple-rules-can-produce-complex-behavior-physicist-wolfram-says/ https://record.umich.edu/articles/simple-rules-can-produce-c...), loops that are stable can't evolve, but loops that are unstable have too much entropy. So, we're likely searching for a system thats meta stable within a small range of input entropy (physical) and output entropy (information).
- JoshTriplett 1y agoI've seen LLMs get into loops because they forgot what they were trying to do. For instance, I asked an LLM to write some code to search for certain types of wordplay, and it started making a word list (rather than writing code to pull in a standard dictionary), and then it got distracted and just kept listing words until it ran out of time.
- masklinn 1y agoA few years ago David Fitfield invented a technique which provides a million-to-one non-recursive expansion, by overlapping the file streams: https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/ https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/
- panarky 1y agoMight be fun to respond with one of these to malicious requests for /.env, /.git/config and /.aws/credentials instead of politely returning 404s.
- bspammer 1y agoIt’s definitely tempting, but I prefer not to piss off people who are already being actively malicious.
- philodeon 1y agoIsn’t this how a court system works?
- Twirrim 1y agoIt's all just spray-and-pray crap. You're extremely unlikely to be their target, they're just looking for a convenient shell for a botnet. The most likely way they'll handle it if you do actually break them is just blacklist your address. You're not going to be worth the effort.
- Twirrim 1y agoI've been sending a nice 10GB gzip bomb (12MB after compression, rate limited download speed) to people that send various malicious requests. I think I might update it tonight with this other approach.
- 1718627440 1y agoCan't you just server /dev/urandom?
- ac29 1y ago> Now I read articles like this one talking about "oh yeah Evolution filled up 100GB of space" like that's no big deal. Is this actually a practical issue though? Windows, Mac and Linux all support transparent compression at the filesystem level, so 100GB of /dev/zero isnt actually going to fill much space at all.
- kiwijamo 1y agoThat's not switched on by default unless you use a filesytsem like ZFS.