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But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw. Releasing vulnerable software that users run on their own machines isn't going to compromise OpenClaw itself. It

But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw. Releasing vulnerable software that users run on their own machines isn't going to compromise OpenClaw itself. It can still deliver value for it's users while also requiring those same users to handle the insecurity of the software themselves (by either ignoring it or setting up sandboxes, etc to reduce the risk, and then maybe that reduced risk is weighed against the novelty and value of the software that then makes it worth it to the user to setup). On the other hand, if OpenClaw were structured as a SaaS, this entire project would have burned to the ground the first day it was launched. So by releasing it as something you needed to run on your own hardware, the security requirement was reduced from essential, to a feature that some users would be happy to live without. If you were developing a competitor, security could be one feature you compete on--and it would increase the number of people willing to run your software and reduce the friction of setting up sandboxes/VMs to run it.

piker 8mo ago
You should join the tobacco lobby! Genius!
- gehsty 8mo ago
  More straightforwardly, people are generally very forgiving when people make mistakes, and very unforgiving when computers do. Look at how we view a person accidentally killing someone in a traffic accident versus when a robotaxi does it. Having people run it on their own hardware makes them take responsibility for it mentally, so gives a lot of leeway for errors.
  - datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
    I think that’s generally because humans can be held accountable, but automated systems can not. We hold automated systems to a higher standard because there are no consequences for the system if it fails, beyond being shut off. On the other hand, there’s a genuine multitude of ways that a human can be held accountable, from stern admonishment to capital punishment. I’m a broken record on this topic but it always comes back to liability.
    - ass22 8mo ago
      Thats one aspect. Another aspect is that we have much higher expectations of machines than humans in regards to fault-tolerance.
  - DrewADesign 8mo ago
    Traffic accidents are the same symptom of fundamentally different underlying problems among human-driven and algorithmically-driven vehicles. Two very similar people differ more than the two most different robo taxis in any given uniform fleet— if one has some sort of bug or design shortcoming that kills people, they almost certainly all will. That’s why product (including automobile) recalls exist, but we don’t take away everyone’s license when one person gets into an accident. People have enough variance that acting on a whole population because of individual errors doesn’t make sense— even for pretty common errors. The cost/benefit is totally different for mass-produced goods. Also, when individual drivers accidentally kill somebody in a traffic accident, they’re civilly liable under the same system as entities driving many cars through a collection of algorithms. The entities driving many cars can and should have a much greater exposure to risk, and be held to incomparably higher standards because the risk of getting it wrong is much, much greater.
- casey2 8mo ago
  Oh please, why equate IT BS with cancer? If the null pointer was a billion dollar mistake, then C was a trillion dollar invention. At this scale of investment countries will have no problem cheapening the value of human life. It's part and parcel of living through another industrial revolution.
almostdeadguy 8mo ago
Love passing off the externalities of security to the user, and then the second order externalities of an LLM that then blackmails people in the wild. Love how we just don’t care anymore.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
Aurornis 8mo ago
> But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw This is the genius move at the core of the phenomenon. While everyone else was busy trying to address safety problems, the OpenClaw project took the opposite approach: They advertised it as dangerous and said only experienced power users should use it. This warning seemingly only made it more enticing to a lot of users. It’ve been fascinated by how well the project has just dodged and avoided any consequences for the problems it has introduced. When it was revealed that the #1 skill was malware masquerading as a Twitter integration I thought for sure there would be some reporting on the problems. The recent story about an OpenClaw bot publishing hit pieces seemed like another tipping point for journalists covering the story. Though maybe this inflection point made it the most obvious time to jump off of the hype train and join one of the labs. It takes a while for journalists to sync up and decided to flip to negative coverage of a phenomenon after they cover the rise, but now it appears that the story has changed again before any narratives could build about the problems with OpenClaw.
socialcommenter 8mo ago
This argument has the same obvious flaws as the anti-mask/anti-vax movement (which unfortunately means there will always be a fringe that don't care). These things are allowed to interact with the outside world, it's not as simple as "users can blow their own system up, it's their responsibility". I don't need to think hard to speculate on what might go wrong here - will it answer spam emails sincerely? Start cancelling flights for you by accident? Send nuisance emails to notable software developers for their contribution to society[1]? Start opening unsolicited PRs on matplotlib? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867
- _heimdall 8mo ago
  At least during the Covid response, your concerns over anti-mask and anti-vaccine issues seem unwarranted. The claims being shared by officials at the time was that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it. Claims were similarly made that we needed roughly 60% vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. With that precedent being set it shouldn't matter whether one person chose not to mask up or get the jab, most everyone else could do so to fully protect themselves and those who can't would only be at risk if more than 40% of the population weren't onboard with the masking and vaccination protocols.
  - socialcommenter 8mo ago
    I specifically wasn't referring to that instance (if anything I'm thinking more of the recent increase in measles outbreaks), I myself don't hold a strong view on COVID vaccinations. The trade-offs, and herd immunity thresholds, are different for different diseases. Do we know that 0.1% prevalence of "unvaccinated" AI agents won't already be terrible?
    - _heimdall 8mo ago
      Fair enough. I assumed you had Covid in mind with an anti-mask reference. At least in modern history in the US, we have only even considered masks during the Covid response. I may be out of touch, but I haven't heard about masks for measles, though it does spread through aerosol droplets so that would be a reasonable recommendation.
SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
I don't agree that making your users run the binaries means security isn't your concern. Perhaps it doesn't have to be quite as buttoned down as a commercial product, but you can't release something broken by design and wash your hands of the consequences. Within a few months, someone is going to deploy a large-scale exploit which absolutely ruins OpenClaw users, and the author's new OpenAI job will probably allow him to evade any real accountability for it.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
flessner 8mo ago
I am guessing there will be an OpenClaw "competitor" targeting Enterprise within the next 1-2 months. If OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini are fast and smart about it they could grab some serious ground. OpenClaw showed what an "AI Personal Assistant" should be capable of. Now it's time to get it in a form-factor businesses can safely use.
- socialcommenter 8mo ago
  With the guard rails up, right? Right?
buremba 8mo ago
Exactly! I was digging into Openclaw codebase for the last 2 weeks and the core ideas are very inspiring. The main work he has done to enable personal agent is his army of CLIs, like 40 of them. The harness he used, pi-mono is also a great choice because of its extensibility. I was working on a similar project (1) for the last few months with Claude Code and it’s not really the best fit for personal agent and it’s pretty heavy. Since I was planning to release my project as a Cloud offering, I worked mainly on sandboxing it, which turned out to be the right choice given OpenClaw is opensource and I can plug its runtime to replace Claude Code. I decided to release it as opensource because at this point software is free. 1: https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu

piker 8mo ago

You should join the tobacco lobby! Genius!

gehsty 8mo ago
More straightforwardly, people are generally very forgiving when people make mistakes, and very unforgiving when computers do. Look at how we view a person accidentally killing someone in a traffic accident versus when a robotaxi does it. Having people run it on their own hardware makes them take responsibility for it mentally, so gives a lot of leeway for errors.
- datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
  I think that’s generally because humans can be held accountable, but automated systems can not. We hold automated systems to a higher standard because there are no consequences for the system if it fails, beyond being shut off. On the other hand, there’s a genuine multitude of ways that a human can be held accountable, from stern admonishment to capital punishment. I’m a broken record on this topic but it always comes back to liability.
  - ass22 8mo ago
    Thats one aspect. Another aspect is that we have much higher expectations of machines than humans in regards to fault-tolerance.
- DrewADesign 8mo ago
  Traffic accidents are the same symptom of fundamentally different underlying problems among human-driven and algorithmically-driven vehicles. Two very similar people differ more than the two most different robo taxis in any given uniform fleet— if one has some sort of bug or design shortcoming that kills people, they almost certainly all will. That’s why product (including automobile) recalls exist, but we don’t take away everyone’s license when one person gets into an accident. People have enough variance that acting on a whole population because of individual errors doesn’t make sense— even for pretty common errors. The cost/benefit is totally different for mass-produced goods. Also, when individual drivers accidentally kill somebody in a traffic accident, they’re civilly liable under the same system as entities driving many cars through a collection of algorithms. The entities driving many cars can and should have a much greater exposure to risk, and be held to incomparably higher standards because the risk of getting it wrong is much, much greater.
casey2 8mo ago
Oh please, why equate IT BS with cancer? If the null pointer was a billion dollar mistake, then C was a trillion dollar invention. At this scale of investment countries will have no problem cheapening the value of human life. It's part and parcel of living through another industrial revolution.

almostdeadguy 8mo ago

Love passing off the externalities of security to the user, and then the second order externalities of an LLM that then blackmails people in the wild. Love how we just don’t care anymore.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

Aurornis 8mo ago

> But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw This is the genius move at the core of the phenomenon. While everyone else was busy trying to address safety problems, the OpenClaw project took the opposite approach: They advertised it as dangerous and said only experienced power users should use it. This warning seemingly only made it more enticing to a lot of users. It’ve been fascinated by how well the project has just dodged and avoided any consequences for the problems it has introduced. When it was revealed that the #1 skill was malware masquerading as a Twitter integration I thought for sure there would be some reporting on the problems. The recent story about an OpenClaw bot publishing hit pieces seemed like another tipping point for journalists covering the story. Though maybe this inflection point made it the most obvious time to jump off of the hype train and join one of the labs. It takes a while for journalists to sync up and decided to flip to negative coverage of a phenomenon after they cover the rise, but now it appears that the story has changed again before any narratives could build about the problems with OpenClaw.

socialcommenter 8mo ago

This argument has the same obvious flaws as the anti-mask/anti-vax movement (which unfortunately means there will always be a fringe that don't care). These things are allowed to interact with the outside world, it's not as simple as "users can blow their own system up, it's their responsibility". I don't need to think hard to speculate on what might go wrong here - will it answer spam emails sincerely? Start cancelling flights for you by accident? Send nuisance emails to notable software developers for their contribution to society[1]? Start opening unsolicited PRs on matplotlib? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867

_heimdall 8mo ago
At least during the Covid response, your concerns over anti-mask and anti-vaccine issues seem unwarranted. The claims being shared by officials at the time was that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it. Claims were similarly made that we needed roughly 60% vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. With that precedent being set it shouldn't matter whether one person chose not to mask up or get the jab, most everyone else could do so to fully protect themselves and those who can't would only be at risk if more than 40% of the population weren't onboard with the masking and vaccination protocols.
- socialcommenter 8mo ago
  I specifically wasn't referring to that instance (if anything I'm thinking more of the recent increase in measles outbreaks), I myself don't hold a strong view on COVID vaccinations. The trade-offs, and herd immunity thresholds, are different for different diseases. Do we know that 0.1% prevalence of "unvaccinated" AI agents won't already be terrible?
  - _heimdall 8mo ago
    Fair enough. I assumed you had Covid in mind with an anti-mask reference. At least in modern history in the US, we have only even considered masks during the Covid response. I may be out of touch, but I haven't heard about masks for measles, though it does spread through aerosol droplets so that would be a reasonable recommendation.

SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago

I don't agree that making your users run the binaries means security isn't your concern. Perhaps it doesn't have to be quite as buttoned down as a commercial product, but you can't release something broken by design and wash your hands of the consequences. Within a few months, someone is going to deploy a large-scale exploit which absolutely ruins OpenClaw users, and the author's new OpenAI job will probably allow him to evade any real accountability for it.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

flessner 8mo ago

I am guessing there will be an OpenClaw "competitor" targeting Enterprise within the next 1-2 months. If OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini are fast and smart about it they could grab some serious ground. OpenClaw showed what an "AI Personal Assistant" should be capable of. Now it's time to get it in a form-factor businesses can safely use.

socialcommenter 8mo ago
With the guard rails up, right? Right?

buremba 8mo ago

Exactly! I was digging into Openclaw codebase for the last 2 weeks and the core ideas are very inspiring. The main work he has done to enable personal agent is his army of CLIs, like 40 of them. The harness he used, pi-mono is also a great choice because of its extensibility. I was working on a similar project (1) for the last few months with Claude Code and it’s not really the best fit for personal agent and it’s pretty heavy. Since I was planning to release my project as a Cloud offering, I worked mainly on sandboxing it, which turned out to be the right choice given OpenClaw is opensource and I can plug its runtime to replace Claude Code. I decided to release it as opensource because at this point software is free. 1: https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu