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Comment by mapontosevenths | Hacker News Reader

He should not only be ostracized by the community, he should probably face charges. To be charged under the CFAA in America we need only show that he was authorized only to access a certain part of the system and the he exceeded the amount of access granted. He very clearly did that. Users trusted him enough to run his code, and he betrayed that trust to make some political point.

Whether it was via prompt injection or SQL injection is irrelevant. Whether you agree with his politics or not is irrelevant. All that matters is he wasn't authorized to delete code from your system, and he abused the level of access granted to him to do that anyhow.

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technically, he didn't do that. your ai agent decided to follow his instructions when they didn't have to.

This has the same energy as, technically officer, i didn't shoot him, i just aimed at him and pulled the trigger. After that point the bullet just did its thing. Go blame the bullet.

When it comes to responsibility, usually we consider a person intentionally doing something that they reasonably believe will have some consequence as responsible for that consequence. Especially when the primary reason they took the action was to generate the consequence. Excuces of the form "Technically i didn't do it, i just knowingly did something for the explicit purpose of triggering some downstream consequence" generally do not fly.

"technically he didn't do that. Your sql server followed instructions when they should have just treated them as a string."

Yet, hopefully we can agree that sql injections are illegal.

But in this case the author of the project didn't execute the injection code... it's more analagous in some ways to pulling in a project with an example file containing a bunch of useful SQL stuff and then an example of an injection at the bottom, and just (in this case the agent) copy/pasting the whole thing in without reviewing it.

If we're slicing on technicalities, there's a lot of ways to decide. "PROSECUTE THEM!" seems like an extremely hostile one when the website and readme and release notes said "don't do this" already. The agent ignored those things? Is that the author's fault?

This is like saying I can slip malware into a project and so long as the user is the one who executed the code I'm free and clear.. which we both know isn't true.

Say I loosen the bolts of your car tires which causes a crash, that’s malware.

Say I lay a log on a road which you can clearly see and avoid but choose to drive over and crash your car, that’s prompt injection.

One is way worse than the other.

A log the victim ran over last week loosened the bolts.

The prosecution wouldn't even blink if you pointed this out.

Unless the perpetrator intended for that to be the effect.

Have you heard about mens rea?

It turns random logging into laying logs onto a road intending to harm someone with the foreknowledge that they will harm the target and as a consequence any other people traveling on that road.

Terrorism charges and straight to gitmo.

fine. Place a log on your own property - equivalent of posting a prompt on your own blog - then leave the gate open (equivalent of posting on the internet) only to have someone drive over that log uninvited and blame you for it.

Is writing a prompt in your blog any different from laying a hunting trap on your own property and catching someone's pet? Are you liable for the pet wandering on your property?

> Say I lay a log on a road which you can clearly see and avoid but choose to drive over and crash your car, that’s prompt injection.

Start laying hazards in the middle of the road and see how quickly the police introduce you to things like “reckless endangerment” and “involuntary manslaughter”. The general social contract is that you don’t take actions with the intent of causing harm to others regardless of whether the victim could have avoided the harm had they taken different actions.

both are intentional, both are wrong, we don't need to compare two wrong things and say one is better.. you also cannot predict whether intentionally leaving a hazard in a roadway will give someone a choice, that very thing happens all the time and it causes a significant number of deaths.

If I put a project on github that says "don't use this with mysql" and you use it with mysql and it drops your tables is it sql injection? Seems very different to me.

Everything turns on intent. "This is not tested with mysql" is very different from "I'm going to go out of my way to fuck up your mysql."

As much as I would like to agree, this is a pretty clear CFAA violation. If the intent is to purposefully destroy/delete data, the 'how' really makes no difference. But IANAL.

It's certainly unauthorized access if you intentionally built it with the goal of harming other peoples systems, especially if you hid that action from them the way our self-righteous friend here did.

You are authorized to do what the user agreed to, no more. Further the agreement must be reasonable. Exploiting the victims system to intentionally cause harm isn't reasonable.

F-secure once included a clause to use their wifi that you "assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity." It was funny, but not legally enforceable and would have offered them no legal shelter if they'd gone out on a kidnapping spree that night.

You are probably technically correct, yet I take great satisfaction in the schadenfreude of those who benefit from stolen work seeing the product of said stolen work turned against them. I can’t help but cheer, tbh.

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