Comment by avaer
15 hours ago
NAL but I'd be worried about treading into CFAA territory with things like this. In the US, the law allows draconian penalties if you find yourself on the wrong side.
Something like yt-dlp is just downloading public data, which I can see being defensible as automating the use of a service.
But this commandeers remote machine resources to do your compute in ways clearly not intended by the provider. I don't know how ethical it is, but I definitely wouldn't want to argue this isn't "hacking" (the bad kind) in criminal court.
Not to mention, did this "hack" ever really work? When the original post went viral showing the Chipotle chatbot reversing a linked list, I (among others who posted their results online) immediately tried it and didn't get the same results, so I always assumed it was just a faked screenshot.
They probably added something to the prompt after that viralness and then it was a cat and mouse game to jailbreak it
Their chat bot is pretty bad so who knows.
Whether something ever worked is not correlated with traction in a world where verification is measured by likes.
You really think someone would do that? Lie on the internet?
And if you think CFAA is bad, then the states have even harsher versions too. Illinois' version specifically criminalizes any violation of a ToS.
I once saw the bad side of one of these draconian state laws many years ago. People rarely have the misfortune of hitting these laws in some flyover states... and I remember the local judge being really shocked by the mandated penalties for such a simple offense.
> In the US,
I’m not a lawyer, but Chipotle is a US company and this github repo belongs to a US citizen currently residing and employed in New York, so US law might apply here.
Yep, the key phrase is “misuse of computing resources,” if I remember correctly. IANAL, however.
That said, kudos for creativity.
Yeah, this is not slap on the wrist stuff. I think the creator expects nothing more than a C&D letter, but they could face prison time if a zealous federal prosecutor wants to make an example of them.
And with direct links to his pesonal profile and company. Uh...
EvilNote: Put links to LinkedIn lunatics sites when committing crimes instead of my own.
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