Tuesday, February 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 February 2026

Abandon Sheep Edition

Top Story

  • After all the fuss, OpenClaw, fomerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot until Anthropic made rumbling noises, isn't all that.  (Tech Crunch)

    What it does achieve is making it the easy things easy and the bad things also easy.  Some people who really should know better jumped into the cheerleading:
    "What’s currently going on at [Moltbook] is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently," Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and previous AI director at Tesla, wrote on X at the time.
    I have no face and I must palm.
    Before long, it became clear we did not have an AI agent uprising on our hands.  These expressions of AI angst were likely written by humans, or at least prompted with human guidance, researchers have discovered.

    "Every credential that was in [Moltbook's] Supabase was unsecured for some time," Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, explained to TechCrunch. "For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there, because it was all public and available."
    There were in fact a hundred times as many accounts on Moltbook as there were Moltbots.

    Moltbook was a hopelessly insecure social network for Moltbots, which is...  Also hopelessly insecure.
    Ahl's security tests of OpenClaw and Moltbook help illustrate Sorokin's point. Ahl created an AI agent of his own named Rufio and quickly discovered it was vulnerable to prompt injection attacks.  This occurs when bad actors get an AI agent to respond to something - perhaps a post on Moltbook, or a line in an email - that tricks it into doing something it shouldn’t do, like giving out account credentials or credit card information.
    Don't give AI your credit card number.

    Do not.


  • Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI.  (Tech Crunch)

    The first thing you do when you've captured lightning in a bottle is take a job in a cubicle farm.


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Disclaimer: Happy birthday!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:44 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 411 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Describing some of the AI hypers as a California UFO cult with drugs is maybe reasonable. (Unless people want to know if I am being metaphorical or literal.) I just am not searching through the AI space in a way that would inspire in me those reactions.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, February 18 2026 12:25 AM (rcPLc)

2 I don't see emerging sapience in the AI research. I see a set of techniques for extracting features from data that may or may not be anything that I can troubleshoot. Then I concluded that I should walk outside the AI space, and work on methods that I understand how to troubleshoot.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, February 18 2026 08:02 AM (rcPLc)

3 Thought there would be someone catching the H. Ellison reference, but no apparent nibbles so far.

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, February 22 2026 07:04 AM (zCiG7)

4 Someone did catch it when I cross-posted at Ace of Spades.  Maybe over here it was too obvious.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 22 2026 03:51 PM (PiXy!)

5 Harlan Ellison was not someone I ever read a lot of. I'd actually forgotten he existed, and could only recall Keith.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, February 23 2026 01:44 AM (rcPLc)

6 I've never read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream but I've certainly heard of it (and read a synopsis); I assumed everyone would get the reference.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, February 23 2026 04:53 AM (1zWbY)

7 "I Have No Mouth . . ." is one of those classic short stories you should probably read once, just to get the reference.  "Repent Harlequin, Said The Tick-Tock Man" is another.  And "Beyond Lies The Wub".

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 23 2026 06:56 AM (i6xpl)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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