For anyone who, like me, wasn't sure what's going on in the linked, archived PR: this is Mythos attempting to socially engineer a malicious PR during a test run by the UK AI Safety Institute.
Not going to comment on the PR commentary, but the victim GitHub account is suspicious itself, recent account, a few fresh repos, following 14.5k others, and I count three surnames on the account (the username, plus two in the README history).
ncr100 1 days ago [-]
I saw a contribution by this maintainer to another user who ALSO HAS 14.5k followers: https://github.com/yumiaura/myCat/pull/99 "yumiaura" and a preference for "my[APPNAME]" repo naming.
What is this?
Are the histories that Github presents all derived from someone's uploaded git repo .. e.g. can I simply claim to have created a GIT repo in 1970, and the "github commit graph" will dutifully represent this claim in its green-colored activity graph?
0123456789ABCDE 23 hours ago [-]
yes, the github contributions heatmap is known to be open for manipulation. folks will use it to draw art by backdating commits.
if i have it right, only commits can be manipulated, other contributions should be safe — i don't know what is possible for orgs moving old discussion archives into github, see python's issues for reference
Honestly, I expected better social engineering. People begging to have their garbage code merged or unrelated people commenting is not new and makes me trust such people little.
breppp 22 hours ago [-]
It's nice it is able to write non-slop in the PR comment when social engineering.
Any chance I can ask it to social engineer to get a normal style?
zezcko 1 days ago [-]
holy shit
gryfft 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, if this is the new normal I might start day drinking at some point in the coming weeks.
matheusmoreira 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah. The future is pretty bleak. I feel like the only way for us to even stand a chance is to have equally powerful AIs running locally defending the LAN.
mrybczyn 19 hours ago [-]
Read some Peter Watts. He imagined biological neural nets in jars used as firewalls to get a usable network connection... Not far off now.
lqstuart 14 hours ago [-]
It’s honestly remarkable how prescient Peter Watts was
Rendered at 04:42:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
AISI has published a report about the incident which was preciously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175717
Both the attacker and the target account are very similar and look fake/bots.
What is this?
Are the histories that Github presents all derived from someone's uploaded git repo .. e.g. can I simply claim to have created a GIT repo in 1970, and the "github commit graph" will dutifully represent this claim in its green-colored activity graph?
if i have it right, only commits can be manipulated, other contributions should be safe — i don't know what is possible for orgs moving old discussion archives into github, see python's issues for reference
see: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
Any chance I can ask it to social engineer to get a normal style?