Thread

1. darajava · 1790258172 · focus · HN ↗

   Having lived in Australia for a while, I’ve been struck by how clunky and outdated many of the software systems I’ve encountered are - particularly in government and banking sectors. In my experience, there’s often a bureaucratic approach to technology that makes straightforward things unnecessarily complicated.

   Why was this government website so easy to hack into? Based on what I've seen, their security could be so flimsy that even slightly abnormal usage could have led to unauthorised access. Although we don't know the details of the hack, I can't imagine it was technically very difficult.

   1. minraws · 1790258514 · focus · HN ↗

      The question is not of technical difficulty though, most hacks are trivial or within reasonable limits for most motivated solo actors, much less state level actors, but a company without any of that hacking into govt systems is breach of trust and should be treated the same way it would have been if a human had actually committed a breach.

      This isn't a question of OpenAI was the only one who could have done it, it about who did it.

      The same way having a gun doesn't make one guilty, shooting someone with a gun even if unintentionally is a crime (unless ofc in self defense but I don't think Australia has the ability to breach OAI).

      1. darajava · 1790259001 · focus · HN ↗

         > The question is not of technical difficulty though, most hacks are trivial or within reasonable limits for most motivated solo actors

         Not exactly my point. My guess is that the system is so brittle that it was probably hard not to hack.

         Agents see websites differently to humans. If its goal was to, say "get medical stats" and it saw that it had a choice of 10 requests to make, and one or two of those happened to be unclearly illegal but useful to its goal, it would have gone for it anyway just as I likely would have if given the same choice without firmly knowing it was illegal.

         Having said that, it could have been some clearly malicious hack that was performed and I'm not sure why it would have to write any files. We'll likely never know what happened.

         1. jmoggr · 1790264734 · focus · HN ↗

            The victim enticed me to do it!

            Excusing agents because they didn't know any better seems like a bad place to start a policy discussion from. That they didn't know any better (or knew and didn't care) is the actual problem, random things getting hacked is just one side effect.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.