8 ms·

FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI [video]

162 points by maelito 9mo ago

throwfaraway135 9mo ago
I agree that communities should try to protect themselves from malicious actors. But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical: IMO FOSS is a gift to humanity and as such: "A gift should be given freely, without obligation or expectation, as a true expression of love and kindness"
- poszlem 9mo ago
  I think this mixes up the 'how' with the 'why.' FOSS isn't the end in itself, I think that for most people it's just the tool that lets us work together, share what we've built, and get something back from the community. If this is suddenly being weaponised against us, I don't see how that's not a problem.
  - breezykoi 9mo ago
    For a lot of people, FOSS is also very much the why. It’s not just a practical tool—it represents core principles like freedom, transparency, and collaboration. Those values are the reason many contribute in the first place.
    - juliangmp 9mo ago
      Emphasis on the freedom, especially the freedom to use by anyone for any purpose. If it took some people in the FOSS space this long that it also includes people, companies or purposes they disagree with, then I don't know what to tell them.
      - duskdozer 9mo ago
        That's just one interpretation of freedom.
        breezykoi 9mo ago
        You are correct but in the context of free software, the FSF has been explicit about this ("The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose"). Publishing software under a FOSS license imply that you agree with this definition of freedom.
        pixl97 9mo ago
        I mean, not really... That's like saying "I have the freedom to kill you". Saying that you can create something, then you reserve the 'freedom' to limit what everyone else does for it really doesn't fall under the word freedom at all.
        oblio 9mo ago
        The interpretation is simple and the complete opposite of "I have the freedom to kill you". The software creator (human or AI) must give the user of its software the same freedoms it has received. If it has received the freedom to view the original, readable, source code, then users should have the freedom to view the original, readable, source code. If it has received the freedom to modify the source code, then users should have the freedom to modify the source code. Etc. It's not hard to follow for people who want to do the moral thing. It's VERY hard to follow for people who want to make money (and ideally lots of it, very quickly).
        juliangmp 9mo ago
        Have you actually read one a Free/Open-Source license? Like for example the MIT[1] license: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software [...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...] Or the FSF's definition[2] of Free Software The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). Or the OSI's definition[3] of open source. 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor It's almost as if this concept is at the very core of FOSS. [1]: https://mit-license.org/ https://mit-license.org/ [2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms [3]: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
  - Applejinx 9mo ago
    If you consider that the people weaponizing code are not honest, I as a FOSS producer am unworried. There may not be a lot of people out there able to use my code compared to LLMs scraping it, but I'm giving a leg up to other humans trying to do what I do. If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded. And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior. These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.
  - dannersy 9mo ago
    I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc. It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith. My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.
    - breezykoi 9mo ago
      You're conflating freedom of use with moral endorsement. FOSS grants freedom, not ethical approval of every use.
      - dannersy 9mo ago
        No I am not. Your response proves my point in regards to getting bogged down in semantics. In a nutshell, my point is that if we do not care or do nothing when it comes to malicious use of FOSS, you very well may lose FOSS or at least the ability to develop in a FOSS environment. It is the paradox of intolerance of a different flavor.
- croisillon 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - wazoox 9mo ago
    "Pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté" Saint-Just
  - throwfaraway135 9mo ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic. For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGBT people -> a lot of LGBT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians. Also how do you know if you are intolerant or intolerant towards intolerance?
    - ignoramous 9mo ago
      > I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic. For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGPT people -> a lot of LGPT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians. Nice bait with broad sweeping generalizations there. One of critiques of "Paradox of Tolerance" is its proponents (probably not Karl Popper himself) take the argument to its extremes (similar to the generalization you posit), while the reality is more of a spectrum.
      - throwfaraway135 9mo ago
        I didn't intend it to be bait. It is a generalization, but if you read carefully, there is "a lot" at each point. And pretending that there aren't large swaths of people who have different ideas and you can group them into "tolerant" and "none tolerant" is also a generalization.
      - neutronicus 9mo ago
        Yes, I think of “paradox of tolerance” as a sort of glib rebuttal people give when enjoined to tolerate someone. “Fuck you, that person is intolerant, I get to do whatever I want to them. And man, how uncultured are you that you would even suggest otherwise. You must never have heard of this philosopher!”
- Palmik 9mo ago
  Nothing wrong with a GPL-like viral license for the AI era. Training on my code / media / other data? No worries, just make sure the weights and other derived artifacts are released under similarly permissive license.
  - breezykoi 9mo ago
    Wouldn't you want the code generated by those models be released under those permissive licenses as well? Is that what you mean by other derived artifacts?
    - s1mplicissimus 9mo ago
      That's how I interpreted it at least
  - teekert 9mo ago
    It really should be like that indeed. Where is RMS? Is he working on GPLv4?
    - twoodfin 9mo ago
      If model training is determined to be fair use under US copyright law—either legislated by Congress or interpreted by Federal courts—then no license text can remove the right to use source code that way.
      - RobotToaster 9mo ago
        > then no license text can remove the right to use source code that way. At least in the US. Quite what happens if another country ordered, say chatGPT, to be released under the AGPL since it was trained on AGPL code, who knows.
    - oblio 9mo ago
      RMS is probably greatly behind the technical news at this point. I mean, he's surfing the web via a email summary of some websites. Even if he doesn't condone of how the internet is evolving, he can't really keep up with technology if he doesn't "mingle". He's also 72, we can't expect him to save everyone. We need new generations of FOSS tech leaders.
- gentooflux 9mo ago
  AI is not humanity. Also many open source licenses have attribution clauses, which AI does not honor when it regurgitates.
  - pipo234 9mo ago
    I think the attribution is a very good point! Essentially LLMs are recontextualizing their training data. So on one hand, one might argue that training is like a human reading books and then inference is like writing something novel, (partially) based on the reading experience. But the contract between humans considers it plagiarism when we recite some studied text and then claim it as your own. So for example, books attribute citations with footnotes. With source code we used to either re-used a library as-is, in which case the license terms would apply OR write our own implementation from scratch. While this LLM recontextualization purports to be like the latter, it is sometimes evident that the original license or at least some attribution, comment or footnote should apply. If only to help with future legibility maintenance.
- fweirdo 9mo ago
  > But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical I agree with you. Imagine a parallel Earth where there was a free OS that the majority in the world used called GNU/Felix. Felix (it/its), who wrote GNU/Felix and who was the project’s strong but kind leader, one day had a head injury that somehow decreased its empathy but raised its IQ. Subordinates of Felix on the council of leadership noticed that it was adding features that would track all user data to use in some nefarious plan. In this case, most would agree that for both the freedom and good of all, Felix should no longer lead this effort. However, they would want to be sure that even the Will Bates’ great company Bikerosoft didn’t lead the project either, because despite its wonderful and ubiquitous Bikerosoft Office apps and Ezure cloud tools and infrastructure, it was a profit-based company.
Fiveplus 9mo ago
Reading this felt like the official obituary for the 90s techno-optimism many of us grew up on. The "end of history" hangover is real. We went about building the modern stack assuming bad actors were outliers, not state-sponsored standard procedure. But trying to legislate good use into licenses? I don't know how you would realistically implement it and to what extent? That solution implies we have to move toward zero-trust architectures even within open communities. As an example: formal proofs and compartmentalization are unsexy but they're a solid way we survive the next decade of adversarial noise. I remember reading a quote somewhere that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, "If the architecture of my code doesn't enforce privacy and resistance to censorship by default, we have to assume it will be weaponized". I am out of ideas, practical ones, lots sound good on paper and in theory. It's a bit sad tbh. Always curious to hear more on this issue from smarter people.
- elcapitan 9mo ago
  > trying to legislate good use into licenses It's also questionable to which extent restrictive licenses for open source software stay that relevant in the first place, as you can now relatively easily run an AI code generator that just imitates the logic of the FOSS project, but with newly generated code, so that you don't need to adhere to a license's restrictions at all.
- littlestymaar 9mo ago
  > That solution implies we have to move toward zero-trust architectures even within open communities Zero trust cannot exist as long as you interact with the real world. The problem wasn't trust per se, but blind trust. The answer isn't to eschew trust (because you can't) but to organize it with social structures, like what people did with “chain of trust” certificates back then before it became commoditized by commercial providers and cloud giants.
- pooyan99 9mo ago
  The Internet was the “Wild West”, and I mean that in the most kind, brutal, and honest way, both like a free fantasy (everyone has a website), genocide (replacement of real world), and an emerging dystopia (thieves/robbers, large companies, organizations, and governments doing terrible things). It’s changing but not completely.
paganel 9mo ago
The guy holding this talk apparently does this: > NGI Zero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust, NGI0 Core and NGI0 Commons Fund, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative. with the Next Generation Internet thing at the end receiving money/financing from the political supra-state entity called the EU [1] . So I guess said speech-holder is not happy because political entities which are seen by the EU as adversarial are also using open-source code? Not sure how war plays into this, as I’m sure he must be aware of the hundreds of billions of euros the EU has allocated for that. [1] https://ngi.eu/ https://ngi.eu/
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  One way war plays into FOSS is that enemy nations are no longer supposed to be contributing to the same projects, being from nationality XYZ is now as relevant as programming skills one has to offer, likewise open source software from specific countries might no longer be allowed.
  - pluralmonad 9mo ago
    I imagine anytime the people that control the war resources decide to use them, there are plenty of other people not interested or involved in the destruction. If the UK declares war on an African nation tomorrow, since the US is an ally you would say those other people in the US should disallow devs from the target African nation from contributing to their project?
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Who knows, you can already see this by the nations that are blocked to access Github.
  - tucnak 9mo ago
    You are engaging with a russian troll larping as Bulgarian/Moldovan whatever. Look through his messages: it's all about Ukraine and EU, inclusing reposts from ruzzian propaganda subreddit etc. They are not arguing in good faith.
- 9mo ago
hahahahhaah 9mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
sebtron 9mo ago
Thsi talk is scheduled for January 31st, or am I missing something? Why is it being posted here? There is no video yet.
- hashtag-til 9mo ago
  This is correct. I suppose this is relevant to a subset of HN audience who attend FOSDEM. Even the talk abstract is worth discussion as it highlights an important side effect of FOSS goals and the current state of the world.
  - net01 9mo ago
    all talks are recorded. so you can watch it live or on replay. Talks are free to attend; they are @ ULB campus in Brussels. 31st of jan - 1 of feb.
simianwords 9mo ago
>AI in its current form has no actual sense of truth or ethics. This is untrue. It does have sense of truth and ethics. Although it does get few things wrong from time to time but you can't reliably get it to say something blatantly incorrect (at least with thinking enabled). I would say it is more truthful than any human on average. Ethically I don't think you can get it to do or say something unethical.
- simianwords 9mo ago
  To the people downvoting me: why do you think AI is untruthful or unethical?
  - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
    the burden of proof lies on someone making a positive assertion. why do you think it's possible for "AI" to be either of those things at this point in time (let alone whether it's possible at all).
    - simianwords 9mo ago
      If AI lies, please give an example of AI lying blatantly (use ChatGPT 5.2 with thinking). The lie should be clearly blatant one, something that a reasonable person would never do.
      - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
        "if AI tells the truth, please give an example of AI telling the truth blatantly." you can't. an LLM chatbot has no concept of truth, or reasonableness, or blatantness. you're willing to accept a distillation of tokens that may or may not form a truthful statement based on probability, with no intent or understanding behind it.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
sublinear 9mo ago
I'm not saying there's no point to this discussion, but it would bring focus if this was decoupled from the broader topic of open source. There has never been any inherent political or economic value in open source software. Those things come from deliberate decisions by authors and users such as licensing and mass adoption. Open source is not synonymous with the GPL and most businesses try to avoid open source software when implementing their core competency.
- MaxBarraclough 9mo ago
  > Open source is not synonymous with the GPL and most businesses try to avoid open source software when implementing their core competency. What you mean here? Businesses often implement their own core code, but they don't deliberately favour closed-source software.
juris 9mo ago
> US lawmakers starting to question whether RISC-V is an issue of national security: https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-conflict-fractures-global-technical-standards/ https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c... My worry: that it suddenly becomes treason to commit to or pull certain repositories, that certain repositories become nationalized, or that other nation states do the same. Heinous forks and theft of code en masse for fear of being shot by a drone streaming video over ffmpeg. Of code becoming a regulated munition, and tools that rat you out if you are designing resistance software.
anthk 9mo ago
FOSS will survive as long i2pd, usenet, irc, yggdrasil... are being kept alive.

162 points by maelito 9mo ago

I agree that communities should try to protect themselves from malicious actors. But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical: IMO FOSS is a gift to humanity and as such: "A gift should be given freely, without obligation or expectation, as a true expression of love and kindness"

poszlem 9mo ago
I think this mixes up the 'how' with the 'why.' FOSS isn't the end in itself, I think that for most people it's just the tool that lets us work together, share what we've built, and get something back from the community. If this is suddenly being weaponised against us, I don't see how that's not a problem.
- breezykoi 9mo ago
  For a lot of people, FOSS is also very much the why. It’s not just a practical tool—it represents core principles like freedom, transparency, and collaboration. Those values are the reason many contribute in the first place.
  - juliangmp 9mo ago
    Emphasis on the freedom, especially the freedom to use by anyone for any purpose. If it took some people in the FOSS space this long that it also includes people, companies or purposes they disagree with, then I don't know what to tell them.
    - duskdozer 9mo ago
      That's just one interpretation of freedom.
      - breezykoi 9mo ago
        You are correct but in the context of free software, the FSF has been explicit about this ("The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose"). Publishing software under a FOSS license imply that you agree with this definition of freedom.
      - pixl97 9mo ago
        I mean, not really... That's like saying "I have the freedom to kill you". Saying that you can create something, then you reserve the 'freedom' to limit what everyone else does for it really doesn't fall under the word freedom at all.
        oblio 9mo ago
        The interpretation is simple and the complete opposite of "I have the freedom to kill you". The software creator (human or AI) must give the user of its software the same freedoms it has received. If it has received the freedom to view the original, readable, source code, then users should have the freedom to view the original, readable, source code. If it has received the freedom to modify the source code, then users should have the freedom to modify the source code. Etc. It's not hard to follow for people who want to do the moral thing. It's VERY hard to follow for people who want to make money (and ideally lots of it, very quickly).
      - juliangmp 9mo ago
        Have you actually read one a Free/Open-Source license? Like for example the MIT[1] license: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software [...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...] Or the FSF's definition[2] of Free Software The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). Or the OSI's definition[3] of open source. 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor It's almost as if this concept is at the very core of FOSS. [1]: https://mit-license.org/ https://mit-license.org/ [2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms [3]: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
- Applejinx 9mo ago
  If you consider that the people weaponizing code are not honest, I as a FOSS producer am unworried. There may not be a lot of people out there able to use my code compared to LLMs scraping it, but I'm giving a leg up to other humans trying to do what I do. If what I'm doing is interesting or unusual, LLMs will firstly not recognize that it's different, secondly will screw up when blindly combining it with stuff that isn't different, and thirdly if it's smart enough to not screw that up, it will ignore my work in favor of stealing from CLOSED source repos it gains access to, on the rationale that those are more valuable because they are guarded. And I'm pretty sure that they're scraping private repos already because that seems the maximally evil and greedy thing to do, so as a FOSS guy I figure I'm already covered, protected by a counterproductive but knowingly evil behavior. These are not smart systems, but even more they are not wise systems, so even if they gain smarts that doesn't mean they become a problem for me. More likely they become a problem for people who lean on intellectual property and privacy, and I took a pretty substantial pay cut to not have to lean on those things.
- dannersy 9mo ago
  I think you'll find, especially within the tech community, people struggle with purity and semantics. They see that supporting and promoting FOSS is to be okay with its use for war, oppression, or whatever mental gymnastics they need to just not care or promote bad things. They will argue about what "free and open" means and get mixed up in definitions, political alignments, etc. It is pretty obvious to me, that being blase about whomever using FOSS for adversarial reasons is not very "open" or "free". Somewhere in the thread there is an argument about the paradox of intolerance and I don't really care to argue with people on the internet about it because it is hard to assume the debate is in good faith. My point is this: Throw away all your self described nuance and ask this yourself whether or not you think any malicious, war-monger, authoritarian, or hyper-capitalist state would permit a free and open source software environment? If the objective of a business, government, or billionaire is power, control, and/or exclusivity then, well, your lofty ideals behind FOSS have completely collapsed.
  - breezykoi 9mo ago
    You're conflating freedom of use with moral endorsement. FOSS grants freedom, not ethical approval of every use.
    - dannersy 9mo ago
      No I am not. Your response proves my point in regards to getting bogged down in semantics. In a nutshell, my point is that if we do not care or do nothing when it comes to malicious use of FOSS, you very well may lose FOSS or at least the ability to develop in a FOSS environment. It is the paradox of intolerance of a different flavor.
croisillon 9mo ago
[flagged]
- wazoox 9mo ago
  "Pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté" Saint-Just
- throwfaraway135 9mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic. For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGBT people -> a lot of LGBT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians. Also how do you know if you are intolerant or intolerant towards intolerance?
  - ignoramous 9mo ago
    > I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately often this is too simplistic. For example, a lot of Palestinians are not tolerant towards LGPT people -> a lot of LGPT people are not tolerant towards Israelis -> a lot of Israelis are not tolerant towards Palestinians. Nice bait with broad sweeping generalizations there. One of critiques of "Paradox of Tolerance" is its proponents (probably not Karl Popper himself) take the argument to its extremes (similar to the generalization you posit), while the reality is more of a spectrum.
    - throwfaraway135 9mo ago
      I didn't intend it to be bait. It is a generalization, but if you read carefully, there is "a lot" at each point. And pretending that there aren't large swaths of people who have different ideas and you can group them into "tolerant" and "none tolerant" is also a generalization.
    - neutronicus 9mo ago
      Yes, I think of “paradox of tolerance” as a sort of glib rebuttal people give when enjoined to tolerate someone. “Fuck you, that person is intolerant, I get to do whatever I want to them. And man, how uncultured are you that you would even suggest otherwise. You must never have heard of this philosopher!”
Palmik 9mo ago
Nothing wrong with a GPL-like viral license for the AI era. Training on my code / media / other data? No worries, just make sure the weights and other derived artifacts are released under similarly permissive license.
- breezykoi 9mo ago
  Wouldn't you want the code generated by those models be released under those permissive licenses as well? Is that what you mean by other derived artifacts?
  - s1mplicissimus 9mo ago
    That's how I interpreted it at least
- teekert 9mo ago
  It really should be like that indeed. Where is RMS? Is he working on GPLv4?
  - twoodfin 9mo ago
    If model training is determined to be fair use under US copyright law—either legislated by Congress or interpreted by Federal courts—then no license text can remove the right to use source code that way.
    - RobotToaster 9mo ago
      > then no license text can remove the right to use source code that way. At least in the US. Quite what happens if another country ordered, say chatGPT, to be released under the AGPL since it was trained on AGPL code, who knows.
  - oblio 9mo ago
    RMS is probably greatly behind the technical news at this point. I mean, he's surfing the web via a email summary of some websites. Even if he doesn't condone of how the internet is evolving, he can't really keep up with technology if he doesn't "mingle". He's also 72, we can't expect him to save everyone. We need new generations of FOSS tech leaders.
gentooflux 9mo ago
AI is not humanity. Also many open source licenses have attribution clauses, which AI does not honor when it regurgitates.
- pipo234 9mo ago
  I think the attribution is a very good point! Essentially LLMs are recontextualizing their training data. So on one hand, one might argue that training is like a human reading books and then inference is like writing something novel, (partially) based on the reading experience. But the contract between humans considers it plagiarism when we recite some studied text and then claim it as your own. So for example, books attribute citations with footnotes. With source code we used to either re-used a library as-is, in which case the license terms would apply OR write our own implementation from scratch. While this LLM recontextualization purports to be like the latter, it is sometimes evident that the original license or at least some attribution, comment or footnote should apply. If only to help with future legibility maintenance.
fweirdo 9mo ago
> But the part about FOSS being used in a project not aligned with the creator's values seams hypocritical I agree with you. Imagine a parallel Earth where there was a free OS that the majority in the world used called GNU/Felix. Felix (it/its), who wrote GNU/Felix and who was the project’s strong but kind leader, one day had a head injury that somehow decreased its empathy but raised its IQ. Subordinates of Felix on the council of leadership noticed that it was adding features that would track all user data to use in some nefarious plan. In this case, most would agree that for both the freedom and good of all, Felix should no longer lead this effort. However, they would want to be sure that even the Will Bates’ great company Bikerosoft didn’t lead the project either, because despite its wonderful and ubiquitous Bikerosoft Office apps and Ezure cloud tools and infrastructure, it was a profit-based company.

Fiveplus 9mo ago

Reading this felt like the official obituary for the 90s techno-optimism many of us grew up on. The "end of history" hangover is real. We went about building the modern stack assuming bad actors were outliers, not state-sponsored standard procedure. But trying to legislate good use into licenses? I don't know how you would realistically implement it and to what extent? That solution implies we have to move toward zero-trust architectures even within open communities. As an example: formal proofs and compartmentalization are unsexy but they're a solid way we survive the next decade of adversarial noise. I remember reading a quote somewhere that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, "If the architecture of my code doesn't enforce privacy and resistance to censorship by default, we have to assume it will be weaponized". I am out of ideas, practical ones, lots sound good on paper and in theory. It's a bit sad tbh. Always curious to hear more on this issue from smarter people.

elcapitan 9mo ago
> trying to legislate good use into licenses It's also questionable to which extent restrictive licenses for open source software stay that relevant in the first place, as you can now relatively easily run an AI code generator that just imitates the logic of the FOSS project, but with newly generated code, so that you don't need to adhere to a license's restrictions at all.
littlestymaar 9mo ago
> That solution implies we have to move toward zero-trust architectures even within open communities Zero trust cannot exist as long as you interact with the real world. The problem wasn't trust per se, but blind trust. The answer isn't to eschew trust (because you can't) but to organize it with social structures, like what people did with “chain of trust” certificates back then before it became commoditized by commercial providers and cloud giants.
pooyan99 9mo ago
The Internet was the “Wild West”, and I mean that in the most kind, brutal, and honest way, both like a free fantasy (everyone has a website), genocide (replacement of real world), and an emerging dystopia (thieves/robbers, large companies, organizations, and governments doing terrible things). It’s changing but not completely.

paganel 9mo ago

The guy holding this talk apparently does this: > NGI Zero, a family of research programmes including NGI0 Entrust, NGI0 Core and NGI0 Commons Fund, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative. with the Next Generation Internet thing at the end receiving money/financing from the political supra-state entity called the EU [1] . So I guess said speech-holder is not happy because political entities which are seen by the EU as adversarial are also using open-source code? Not sure how war plays into this, as I’m sure he must be aware of the hundreds of billions of euros the EU has allocated for that. [1] https://ngi.eu/ https://ngi.eu/

pjmlp 9mo ago
One way war plays into FOSS is that enemy nations are no longer supposed to be contributing to the same projects, being from nationality XYZ is now as relevant as programming skills one has to offer, likewise open source software from specific countries might no longer be allowed.
- pluralmonad 9mo ago
  I imagine anytime the people that control the war resources decide to use them, there are plenty of other people not interested or involved in the destruction. If the UK declares war on an African nation tomorrow, since the US is an ally you would say those other people in the US should disallow devs from the target African nation from contributing to their project?
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Who knows, you can already see this by the nations that are blocked to access Github.
- tucnak 9mo ago
  You are engaging with a russian troll larping as Bulgarian/Moldovan whatever. Look through his messages: it's all about Ukraine and EU, inclusing reposts from ruzzian propaganda subreddit etc. They are not arguing in good faith.
9mo ago

hahahahhaah 9mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 9mo ago

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sebtron 9mo ago

Thsi talk is scheduled for January 31st, or am I missing something? Why is it being posted here? There is no video yet.

hashtag-til 9mo ago
This is correct. I suppose this is relevant to a subset of HN audience who attend FOSDEM. Even the talk abstract is worth discussion as it highlights an important side effect of FOSS goals and the current state of the world.
- net01 9mo ago
  all talks are recorded. so you can watch it live or on replay. Talks are free to attend; they are @ ULB campus in Brussels. 31st of jan - 1 of feb.

simianwords 9mo ago

>AI in its current form has no actual sense of truth or ethics. This is untrue. It does have sense of truth and ethics. Although it does get few things wrong from time to time but you can't reliably get it to say something blatantly incorrect (at least with thinking enabled). I would say it is more truthful than any human on average. Ethically I don't think you can get it to do or say something unethical.

simianwords 9mo ago
To the people downvoting me: why do you think AI is untruthful or unethical?
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
  the burden of proof lies on someone making a positive assertion. why do you think it's possible for "AI" to be either of those things at this point in time (let alone whether it's possible at all).
  - simianwords 9mo ago
    If AI lies, please give an example of AI lying blatantly (use ChatGPT 5.2 with thinking). The lie should be clearly blatant one, something that a reasonable person would never do.
    - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
      "if AI tells the truth, please give an example of AI telling the truth blatantly." you can't. an LLM chatbot has no concept of truth, or reasonableness, or blatantness. you're willing to accept a distillation of tokens that may or may not form a truthful statement based on probability, with no intent or understanding behind it.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]

sublinear 9mo ago

I'm not saying there's no point to this discussion, but it would bring focus if this was decoupled from the broader topic of open source. There has never been any inherent political or economic value in open source software. Those things come from deliberate decisions by authors and users such as licensing and mass adoption. Open source is not synonymous with the GPL and most businesses try to avoid open source software when implementing their core competency.

MaxBarraclough 9mo ago
> Open source is not synonymous with the GPL and most businesses try to avoid open source software when implementing their core competency. What you mean here? Businesses often implement their own core code, but they don't deliberately favour closed-source software.

juris 9mo ago

> US lawmakers starting to question whether RISC-V is an issue of national security: https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-conflict-fractures-global-technical-standards/ https://itif.org/publications/2024/07/19/the-us-china-tech-c... My worry: that it suddenly becomes treason to commit to or pull certain repositories, that certain repositories become nationalized, or that other nation states do the same. Heinous forks and theft of code en masse for fear of being shot by a drone streaming video over ffmpeg. Of code becoming a regulated munition, and tools that rat you out if you are designing resistance software.

anthk 9mo ago

FOSS will survive as long i2pd, usenet, irc, yggdrasil... are being kept alive.