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> So purely from a hacker perspective, I'm amused at the whining.

> Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game.

From a pure hacker perspective, I'm surprised there are people calling a legitimate usage a "weakness you could exploit"?

What weakness? What exploit? People have been using it in a way that was technically possible. And they paid for it, many purchased the product specifically because of it.

Then Google unilaterally changed the TOS of a product people already purchased and started pulling the rug. And again, there are people who call themselves hackers who approve of that? Even worse, they call people calling out Google for their monopolistic behavior whining.

Arn't they yoinking an OAuth token for replay in the Claw app?

If so, I don't think anybody who knows how auth works could feign complete innocence.

People got banned for calling `gemini -p` (non-interactive mode) from wrappers like pi or opencode, too.

I understand how grabbing an oauth token via reverse engineering could be a ToS violation. But there's no other purpose for the `-p` flag other than to use it with a wrapper. Unless people enjoy having interactive conversations via non-interactive mode for some reason.

Even their documentation clearly states this flag exists for "building custom AI tools" [1]. How is OpenCode, OpenClaw etc not a "custom AI tool", where exactly is the line drawn?

This is just a rug pull.

[1] https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/c7237f0c795...

Two kinds of oauth tokens at play here.

Tokens like those generated by the gemini CLI, accounted to the user and metered so you're charged every million or so tokens.

Tokens like those internal to the Antigravity app, accounted to the product (which is why this was noticed -- the resources allotted to the app were being exhausted) and not metered per token (which is why everyone was trying to use them for everything).

As the other commenter said, the first person to do this definitely knew what they were doing. All the script kiddies who piled on after, probably not, but that's also part of why "script kiddy" is a derogatory term. Not only do they usually not understand the scripts they run, they also typically do not understand the risks associated with them.

Google changed the ToS to disallow this usage? I'm pretty sure it was disallowed from the beginning

I mean, the "exploit" is really "we have an access key with overly-broad permissions and poor monitoring", but that's ... also kind of like 70% of old hacker stories?

"The gate code is 1234" "If you punch in this code it tricks the phone network into thinking you're an operator" "The credentials 'guest'/'guest' work on this network".

You probably could have had five, ten people using the Antigravity API key for whatever and even if someone noticed it probably wouldn't have been worth the time to fix.

But it's like you learn the gate code for the employee parking lot and instead of just quietly enjoying free parking you start punching in the code and waving more and more cars into the lot until it's jammed full, and then complain when the code's changed and they post a guard outside checking IDs.

This is where my mind went.

A curious person or two poking around is one thing.

A few hundred, or thousands, of "AI enthusiasts," or however you'd like to imagine OpenClaw users, could likely approach the scale of "a problem."

> What weakness? What exploit? People have been using it in a way that was technically possible. And they paid for it, many purchased the product specifically because of it.

It's technically possible, but Google didn't provide a feature allowing the creation of Antigravity or Gemini CLI API keys for use outside the respective apps.

> they call people calling out Google for their monopolistic behavior whining.

Google's monopoly is not in AI, it's advertisement. When you accuse them of ridiculous and unfounded crimes, you're diluting the chance of Google being held accountable. As someone that wants to see Google ripped apart by the FTC, we can't just lie and say everything Google does is criminal.

the monopoly here is on web indexing, isnt it?

Nope. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Kagi all have more-or-less complete indices. There's no moat around scraping the public Web.

Ddg has a miniscule index, and that exists mainly just to say they have one.

I’m a Kagi user, but I understood this recent post by the Kagi team to mean that they do not index the web themselves and that it’s nearly impossible for them to do so.

https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

My mistake. Looks like they license it from others.

To me it seems like it's impossible because they can't reorder bing search results or mixed them with other results. Or by their own admission because Google doesn't have a search API anymore. Unless I'm misreading. It's basically "Bing or Google wont allow us to use their products how we want to." And "It will take us over 20 years and lots of money to gain market share."

I'm paraphrasing here of course. But it doesn't seem impossible. I mean I don't think it's easy either. I also want to add that I don't want to live in a world with only one search engine.

> you could exploit to get free/cheap thing

$249/mo isn't cheap

If you pay $249 to get $1,200 of compute, "cheap" seems like the right word.

> You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiously, and only share them sparingly. They can last for years if you carefully fly under the radar, before they're fixed by accident when another system is changed. THEN you share tales of your exploits for fame and internet points.

It's the same with vulnerabilities in slot machines. Damn rare but they exist - in 2014, when I worked in that industry, one gang made a big bang: in a single night, casinos across Germany had to say goodbye to probably 10 million € [1]. Of course, that vulnerability made massive waves... but from what I heard back then, it had been circulating for many months beforehand. Of course, 10 million € is nothing to sneeze at, but keeping a low profile could have made everyone in the know far more profit.

[1] https://www.t-online.de/digital/aktuelles/id_68982394/softwa...

I fondly remember finding and exploiting a buggy slot machine on the night the Euro got introduced. A classmate (I never played slot machines) made some money but didn't understand what was going on. I observed and it became apparent (in my slightly intoxicated state) the machine would pay out 2 Euro coins where is should pay out 20 cents. And when playing a 1 Euro game, you would often "win" 80 cents. Pay-out immediately and you got 8 Euro. Of course after a few rounds, the 2 Euro coins ran out and it would do some RNG to pay out 1 Euro with 80% chance. Don't know if I tried feeding it back the 2 Euro coins, I recall just made enough to have a free new years eve

that was possibly just some attendant accidentally messing up which hopper they refilled (or with which coins), or someone screwed up the assignment on the control board which hopper was connected to which bus identifier.

Reminds me I gotta eventually write up what I found reverse-engineering the one armed bandit in my basement LOL

How did something like this not pass a Monte Carlo simulation, which I'd assume they'd conduct in an audit?

Someone misconfigured or misfilled the coin hoppers most likely.

That reminds me of a vending machine ran into as a little kid. It was in a private place and it had an out of order sign posted. Being hungry and young, I plugged it back in so I could take my chances. Every time I put in a quarter, three or four would fall into the coin return. When it was time to leave, all of the pockets on my cargo shorts were bulging so much that I had to hold my shorts up.

Back in maybe 2017 there was a YC startup called Audm that hired professional audiobook narrators to read magazine articles. I found them through their embeds in The New Yorker. The app was pretty mediocre and I wanted to use it in my podcast app, so I started writing a scraper. Very quickly I realized that the page embeds were making calls directly to their production database with no authentication whatsoever. So I pivoted to dumping the entire archive, hosting it on my LAN, and serving it as RSS over my VPN. It was cool, and I found that articles from some publications would post as much as 2 weeks before publication. Eventually they were bought by the NYTimes, and in 2020 they either set up permissions or moved the infrastructure. I gave up on the project, and I understand that most of the content is no longer available. I unfortunately lost my archive with a lot of data when my storage array died a couple of years later. I think the product space got commoditized very quickly by AI readers (none of which, to my ear, are as engaging as the human professionals). I think maybe 4 other people knew about my project when it existed.

Kind of a built-in feature of a Cool Thing is that it will get found/shared/widespread.

(See Napster.)

wise. couldn't agree more. I

literally this is why we can't have nice things.