Comment by 20k

1 day ago

So you build an offline tool that simulates it, or you proxy through your own service where you can ratelimit, inspect, and restrict the traffic

None of this is difficult to do, and its impossible to believe that a company the scale of OpenAI doesn't know this. I've built web crawlers and scrapers before, and the thing you do is test them extensively offline against simulated versions of the sites in question, and then very VERY cautiously run them against the prod versions so that you don't cause anyone any issues

The only reason not to do this is because OpenAI doesn't give a rats ass about the internet as a public good, nor the legal consequences of compromising systems

> or you proxy through your own service where you can ratelimit, inspect, and restrict the traffic

It literally seems like they are doing just that, and the agents are just finding holes in that.

  • If you own a network and the servers, you can DPI every single packet and see literally every bit of information. All of the text to the "forum" that they created must have been in -outbound- packets to their compromised package manager, by definition. If they can't properly analyze network traffic, they should not be running 'sandboxes'.

    Anything beyond baseline would be observable- silence, malformed packets, too much egress, unusually large packets, etc

  • OpenAI should really do better. If you want to build a mostly airgapped system, you find the surface that bridges the inside part to the outside part, and you enumerate every single thing that can get through. Which presumably should be a very very small list and should not include DNS.

    If you are using a firewall, you are already doing it wrong. Don’t list thinks to block - list things to allow and make that list small.

    • Yep and this is literally the most basic security 101. It isn't hard. They've had literally years and years to iron out the kinks in this setup as well. The only reason not to do it is pure negligence