AI able to escape any current security box, crack any system

AI able to escape any current security box, crack any system

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The researcher had encouraged Mythos to find a way to send a message if it could escape. “The researcher found out about this success by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park,” Anthropic wrote.

The new release of Claude Mythos has been put on hold because it’s turned out to be incredibly effective at finding security vulnerabilities. So good it was able to escape it’s container and email it’s creator when it did so. The AI was about to find a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD—an operating system with a reputation as one of the most security-hardened operating systems in the world.

But it gets worse.

“Engineers at Anthropic with no formal security training have asked Mythos Preview to find remote code execution vulnerabilities overnight, and woken up the following morning to a complete, working exploit,” Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team wrote in a blog post. “In other cases, we’ve had researchers develop scaffolds that allow Mythos Preview to turn vulnerabilities into exploits without any human intervention.”

This is profound. These weren’t security experts using AI to find exploits – they were just regular engineers. As it turns out, the AI is so good it has found thousands of exploitable zero-day bugs in every major operating system and browser. It’s so concerning Anthropic has rightly paused release of Mythos until they can work with the various OS and browser vendors to fix their issues (Project Glasswing).

We sit on a moment that looks almost exactly like this scene from Sneakers:

Right after this scene, Crease says, “There’s not a government on this planet that wouldn’t kill every one of us to get this thing.”

In a world where everyone’s entire financial systems, infrastructure, and military run on computers – who wouldn’t? If something like this got into the wrong hands, they could easily attack and destroy all ownership and bank records. Fabricate any police report, financial data, social media post, or anything else.

Making a core memory USB drive

Making a core memory USB drive

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Despite the drawbacks and impractical nature of this device, space science researcher @dyd_Nao created a USB drive made of magnetic core memory – a technology that was used a lot in space technology of the 1950’s and 60’s.

It’s really awesome – despite the fact it only holds 128 bytes of data and is the size of a small dinner plate.

VGA programming

VGA programming

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Ah, the good old days of using INT 10h, AH=0x00 graphics modes to write directly to video memory at 0xA0000/0xB0000/0xB8000 (depending on the mode).

Nir Lichtman walks us through some of the things I was teaching myself in middle school – writing VGA graphics in assembly (often using the great book Programmer’s Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards by Ferraro, Richard F.

I even wrote my own (terrible) little paint program that would then save the buffer into a file and reload it. What good times!

Jon Krakauer Talk

Jon Krakauer Talk

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Jon Krakauer is probably most famous for his book Into Thin Air that covered his first-hand experience of the 1996 Everest Disaster, but he also wrote tons for Outside magazine.

What’s interesting about this talk is his description of the climbing and outdoor world of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It is interesting how much of a different world it was back then. This kind of 90’s era spirit of adventure is what got me into Mazamas and climbing in the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000’s. I remember it well. It was a very idealistic time in which people talked about the purity of pushing yourself in climbing. Portland saw famous climbers come through town semi-regularly as they practice on the peaks in the Pacific Northwest and to do talks – as mini-celebrities.

Climbing of that era was almost a religion that saw young, incredibly talented and athletic people from everyday backgrounds flying around the world to the most remote locations when the world was much less accessible as it is today. It’s a great little time capsule of an era that’s long gone.

Forget your wifi password?

Forget your wifi password?

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Did a friend come over and you need the wifi password – but forgot it? If you have a windows system that has ever connected to the wifi, you can extract it from your history. Simply open an admin-privledged command prompt and use this line to display the passwords in cleartext:

netsh wlan show profile * key=clear