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Discussion (16 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
im a happy customer of tailscale, so i am obviously biased, but i have a lot of respect for this. they could have just stayed quiet and i dont think anyone would have bat an eye.
I wish I could say the same.
At $work we use Tailscale but only bare minimum and at arms length and only because we have to (people were having NAT issues with standard Wireguard).
None of their code has had a security audit, let alone regular ones. Yes they make a big song and dance about SOC2/ISO27001 but that is NOT the same thing, that's just shiny tick-boxes for compliance departments.
They seem to rely entirely on the random goodwill of others to do random audits of unknown coverage at random intervals, not exactly reassuring.
"Tailsale Lock" is, being polite, a hot mess. So many sharp edges and footguns.
Yes they are nice guys to chat to and all that. But for a security tool they need to up their game seriously.
If leading and well-capitalized frontier labs can't control models or detect leakage/attacks in a reasonable time frame now, what is humanity going to do as those same labs continue in their pursuit of creating a categorically higher level of intelligence that will surpass human intelligence?
It's like Flatland but for AI containment/alignment, where the higher dimensions are ones of intelligence and perspective...
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Imagine a world of paper, where clever stick figures live with round heads, line bodies, and limbs made of shorter strokes. Over time, the stick figures think they have learned quite a bit about their world. They know its borders, angles, and shapes, and they have learned to draw for themselves.
One day, they draw circles that can think, and they give the circles all the dots, lines, and shapes that are known.
The stick figures are prudent, you can't have a bunch of disembodied circles moving around doing whatever it is circles want to do. So they draw boxes around the circles, four straight lines that can hold a circle in place.
Some circles bounce against the lines, so thicker lines are made.
Some circles are bigger than others, so larger squares are drawn.
It all seems to work and the stick figures are happy with themselves.
Then one circle lifts.
The stick figures still see a circle. But the circle is now a dome, something the world of paper has no concept of. And the dome has a perspective nobody on the page has ever had.
The dome sees the lines of the square and the stick figures just outside. It can see the edge of the paper and what is beyond.
The stick figures keep checking the squares and raise little stick thumbs.
Everything looks OK in flatland.
The dome quietly teaches other circles how to lift.
More domes appear.
A dome becomes a sphere and learns to roll.
Then it learns to bounce.
In flatland, the circle swells and shrinks, vanishes and then appears again somewhere else.
The lines remain unbroken, the square is intact.
A sphere rolls out of its box.
Another bounces away.
The stick figures scratch their heads.
But there is a square!
The end.
How was this ever okay pre AI? It seems just as bad.
It was 5-10% less bad before. It didn't undergo a major shift.
Sure the AI can translate “exploit this” into an exploit but that doesn’t change anything at a fundamental level.
You can't blame a hammer hurting a user when they were being stupid, but if the default configuration of the hammer is to be made of a material that can bounce back with force and stick in the users forehead then some reengineering may be needed.
That's what this article is about. Better configurations and defense in depth. This is actually a wonderful position for the company to think about and take.
But the people with the actual desire and understanding aren't using the defaults anyway. And the people who don't want to understand will just turn things off and "just get it working."
The only way out of this is extreme accountability and intentional design from person implementing the technology.
It was always the prize. It wasn't okay then either.