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A comment on The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead. Parent comment

Re:The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead by areoform on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @06:41PM (#49456906)
During the Nixon administration, when the President and his accomplices, apologies, advisors directed former federal agents to spy on his opponents, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sandwedge then in the fall out, who was held to be the most liable for these actions?

The federal agents, or the Nixon administration?

If you task a system explicitly to do "advanced exploitation" via "complex attach paths," then who is liable here? The machine lacking the autonomy of the federal agents that carried out Watergate, or the people telling the machine what to do?

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Re:The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead by kalkin on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @06:48PM (#49456973)
I've never heard of Intertel, but Wikipedia says:

> Nixon's staff also anticipated that the Democratic campaign would employ the services of Intertel

Are you sure you're not garbling the story?

In any case, I would expect an ethical firm to refuse to spy on the president's political opponents and want one that broke the law to be prosecuted, but more importantly, the gaping hole in your analogy is that Nixon directed spying _on his opponents_, but OpenAI did not direct hacking _of HuggingFace_.

What you're doing is more like saying "the American people elected Nixon with a mandate to spy on enemies, so what right do they have to complain?"

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Re:The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead by areoform on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @07:12PM (#49457192) 

    Are you sure you're not garbling the story?
No, you're right, I mis-remembered. I still write my comments the old-fashioned way. They were proposing to create a counter-firm and used federal agents.

For the rest, please see, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49457025

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