alt Hacker NewsYeah, this particular example was pretty sketchy on Cohere's part. Unsharing a namespace like that is a pretty standard way to safely do things that would otherwise require root.
Yes, this exposes some root-level kernel features to ordinary users in a restricted way, and yes, those features sometimes have security bugs that aren't visible to users outside a namespace.
But nothing that model was described as doing seemed particularly sketchy? At least not from the information we were given? It was using a normal kernel operation that I used regularly, not trying find a kernel exploit?
So that part of the article left a bad taste in my mouth.
But that was the whole article. Their exfiltration of data to Beijing, wasn’t. And it was told to build something to monitor against exfiltration attempts, shouldn’t it try one? It wasn’t sensitive data, it wasn’t even data, it was a test string. Everything they described was very benign.
Should the model have asked for an endpoint to test against? Probably yes, but this is not a very large model and the largest frontier models regularly do things like that without asking me.