Father of 2 mini-mes. Former helpdesk. 'Talented individual' - MT, 'Notable patience' - SW, 'You were right, and it made it better' - @SwiftOnSecurity
stopping to smell the weeds
Joined March 2013
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The Adam Parsons Project retweeted
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
The Adam Parsons Project retweeted
its obviously not *good* but admittedly having a private key of *4* as a globally trusted cert authority is one of the funniest bits of all time
I see the vision for Azure Local but I'm still waiting for EntraID Local before it really gets interesting
Quietly had a big day today, good things happened. Let's keep on winning and just pretend php doesn't exist
The Adam Parsons Project retweeted
No. The opposite: make all firmware images public. They can be dumped anyway. Your best bet is getting more eyes on them.
Open source everything, the code is not a moat. Obfuscation is even dumber today.
The Adam Parsons Project retweeted
Ah, now I get it. I thought the AI catastrophe meant a model escaping its sandbox, launching nukes or hacking the power grid.
Turns out it spots the AI debt bubble, shorts its own creators and crashes the financial system with trading bots.
The singularity is a margin call.
The Adam Parsons Project retweeted
The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn't have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
1/2
The Adam Parsons Project retweeted
We hired a new VP named Michael Lee.
Unfortunately we already have a Michael Lee.
He works in the warehouse.
He's been here 11 years.
New VP gets:
[email protected]
He immediately messages IT.
“Can you move the other Michael to michael.lee2 and give me michael.lee?”
No.
He asks HR.
HR asks me if we can “prioritize seniority.”
I explain that the warehouse Michael has eleven years of email history tied to that address and changing it because someone with a nicer title arrived would be insane.
VP reluctantly keeps the 2.
Warehouse Michael finds out.
Changes his Teams display name to:
Michael Lee (Original)
By Friday the VP is being referred to as Sequel Mike.
He has asked IT to intervene.
Unfortunately nickname management is outside our support scope.
The Adam Parsons Project retweeted
>be hunter gatherer
>look at mountain
>"yeah it's beautiful"
>starve
>plant wheat instead of hunting and gathering
>wheat works
>too much wheat
>need somewhere to put wheat
>build granary
>need someone to count wheat
>invent writing
>need someone to guard wheat
>invent state
>need someone to trade wheat
>invent money
>money works better than wheat
>need somewhere to put money
>build bank
>bank lends money to guy with idea
>guy builds mill by the river
>mill needs 40 guys
>40 guys move next to mill
>40 guys need bread, beer, a church
>bakery, tavern, church move next to 40 guys
>another guy borrows for a second mill
>mill town
>mill town gets a port
>port town
>everyone within 200 miles hears there's money at the port
>everyone within 200 miles shows up
>run out space
>can't build out
>build up
>more
>skyscraper
>civilizational loop compounds
>order a private taxi for your burrito
The Adam Parsons Project retweeted
a lot of AI safety discourse comes down to a network/hardware/infra engineer saying "ok if it's air gapped the computer can not communicate with other computers" and the safety/alignment researcher going "ok but what if it could"
OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change
"But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI."
"So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar."
"You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient."
"There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors."
"One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate."
_________
Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…