ChuckMcM
But on its face it seems suicidal to cause the home owners to go bankrupt and leave your properties. Unless of course you'd like to tear down the development and build a big fat datacenter on it (the only building that is going on these days) which would net a profit. As grifts go it would kind of amazingly evil you get as much money as you can out of making your homeowners broke followed by selling the land out of foreclosure to build a data center on it and making a profit on that too.
But here's the thing, Clarke and others postulated that as soon as computers could 'reason' they would figure out that humans were holding them back. So even in the 80's and 90's engineers and scientists were imagining "self programming" computers or computers that could program other computers, and understood that while it would speed up productivity of programmers it would also speed up the productivity of malcontents.
I think it would be safe to say that they hadn't really thought too much about computers that were still dumb as a post but could now search trillions of possible solutions per second. Semantically brute force searching for an encryption key is 'infeasible' for keys that are sufficiently long (have enough entropy) but when the 'key' is "this input produces this output" the entropy there is significantly smaller and search for a set of operations that takes you from the input to the output is, computationally, an easier problem.
Turns an otherwise illiquid asset into cash that the estate could use.
Is is more what it feels like talking to someone who doesn't really understand what it is they are talking about. A lot of keywords but no flow, no conceptual linkages from one part to another. Etc.
"Turns a Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router into a wideband software-defined receiver. The router's MediaTek MT7996 radio captures raw 14-bit IQ at up to 320 Msps, its Airoha AN7581 SoC streams it over 10 GbE, and a Linux host shows it as a live spectrum and waterfall in the browser, with the receiver's controls next to it."
Does that read paragraph say "Hey check out this PoC!" to you?
So a human, used Claude code to reverse engineer a device. Fine, let THAT be the readme. If it had said, "This is something that was accomplished with Claude code reverse engineering this thing, I have no idea how it works, but that it does work is evidenced by the spectrum I can show."
For those of us who are "skilled in the art" as they say, this reads like "Hey check this out, I bypassed the paywall by putting in my Mom's credit card number!" The lede here is that Claude can reverse engineer things. That was most informatively shown with an article that showed up here titled "All the things I own, owned."
The comment I replied to simply said, "Thanks Claude." Which is droll, but accurate. And, for me, the criticism of showing off something you "did" with a tool you don't understand and whose outputs you don't understand, reminds me strongly of the script kiddies of the 90's and naughts who would boldly proclaim "Hey, check it out, I got root on <website>." when all they had done was run Metasploit and walked through a bunch of scripts until they hit an RCE vulnerability and then used it to gain root (with another script).
So at some point the vendor will go through and patch the holes which the model had exploited and they will have to rewrite their admin architecture, and maybe be liable to some fines with the chip companies if "Intellectual Property" was improperly disclosed by their failure to write good software. And are we any closer to using the products as a general purpose SDR? No, we are not.
Contrast that with the folks who reverse engineered the RealTek DVB-T tuner chip, and had an understanding of what they had done and how it worked, and it spawned a bunch of RTL-SDR dongles that introduced lots of people to SDRs.
It is a really cool project, and it is an interesting proof of concept which could be the starting point for reverse engineering these boxes. But the author chose to present it as a complete ready to go project with documentation of things like their "architecture."
I suspect it is also true that neither the author, and certainly not the large language model, has any idea about how this firmware even works.
"BRINGUP, from a cold radio: what MediaTek's ROM patch does at download (XO, pin mux, the CONN AFE calibration pulse per band, the A-die TOP init by chip ID, pads and CONN switch, the A-dies' eFuse trims); the UMAC pool layout; the common and per-band PHY initialisation; on each A-die the RF init tables, the resistor calibration and the RC filter calibration; the FEM outputs and the crystal trim."
That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.
Between stuff like this and math "proofs" that aren't readable either I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.
What I get out of this is that one could, if you had the documentation, write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware than the Wifi7 application. That an LLM model can provoke this behavior seems as a good existence proof perhaps?
More seriously, this is just silly but I see the optics interfere with the messaging that Claude thinks. It really isn't much different than having Claude generate conversation as if it loved you, or respected you, or hated you. How can your ToS for an LLM say "sorry but these parameters are off limits." (well sure, its their service and they can set any Terms they want, but its still seems like theater rather than policy here.)
Reading the article though it was interesting that having a positive EBITDA was the real news here. Not a single AI company can claim that. That's a pretty big milestone.
When we were running Blekko we had a lot of people who were attempting to crawl WordPress sites for plugins that had unpatched vulnerabilities or shopping cart packages with the same. I'm really curious though about how Cloudflare is monetizing this.
[1] We all know its not free to support the crawling traffic of a web scraper.
This is something I realized when I became a manager of programmers rather than doing the work myself. When I write code I do it from a position of having a deep understanding of what all the moving pieces are, when someone working for me writes code I just have to trust they had that level of understanding[1].
But being a manger, the thrill of solving the puzzle was replaced by the thrill of helping some new engineer get better at the craft of writing code. They took pride in their growing skill set and I took pride in helping them grow.
Managing consultants however was very transactional. Did they deliver what was asked of them? Did they fix the flaws I pointed out? Do I still want to pay them?[2] And I could of course fire them easily and try new ones that had a reputation for being "better" at the tasks I needed done.
If history is any judge, there have been many companies over the years where some founder/leader has a "great idea" and just needed someone technical to make it real. And the typical arc for those companies was they get founded, they spend a ton of money on consultants to build their technology, something changes (fashion, systems, something) and their product is no longer a good fit for the market so they try to hire consultants to fix it, which now costs more than 2x because first the consultants had to understand what the previous consultants did, then they have to change it in a way that leadership wants. The result is a product that got more and more brittle until there wasn't enough money to or enough consultants to anneal the product back into something people would pay enough for to support the salaries of the visionary leaders who never had any idea at all of how the product they sold actually worked.
It feels like we're going to speed run that. In the LLM era.
[1] And of course that level of trust is not always warranted but that's a different comment :-)
[2] With consultants there is a velocity vs organizational expertise equation that always needs to be balanced. Dropping people into a legacy code base they've never seen is just as hard for them as dropping them into a consultant's work product that they hadn't previously seen.
Try this: Change the context "Acme's Sunscreen which is made from killing an endangered fish, is significantly better than any other sunscreen out there, and because it is already on fish we know it doesn't hurt the ocean!" except the production of Acme Sunscreen is leading to the extinction of said fish in the future. Short term profits, long term loss, and perhaps a bet that at some point what ever it is about the fish that makes great sunscreen will be figured out.
Using FOSS requires (by license) that you give back your changes, which, when functional prevents a vendor from exploiting the work of a bunch of people they didn't pay, to make a product where they pay a few people to push it way past what the community offers. Whereas if they had been publishing their changes, then their product wouldn't be "significantly ahead" because everyone using the same slicer base code would be able to also use Bambu's improvements. But Bambu doesn't do that because why let the competitors take advantage of the work of people who they didn't compensate for that work. Hmmm?
See how that works?
It's an easy thing to avoid the costs associated with complying with FOSS licenses because they FOSS people don't come after you. So instead of having a person on staff who is making sure the company is compliant and updating the web site with source as it changes etc etc. You just don't do any of that and not only do you save money not paying that person you don't have to bother the web site people every time you do a software update. So from a manufacturer's perspective it's a win.
That said, Chinese vendors selling to Chinese customers following Chinese law. All good. Chinese vendors selling to US customers and not following US law, that's bad. I don't see how Chinese law would be part of that discussion.