Category: Misc

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A trip through the Rocky Mountains

Earlier this month we headed out west to Edmonton, where we used to live about a hundred years ago or so, when our first daughter was born (she’s 36 years old now). We were attending the wedding of the daughter of a close friend, which was held at a great venue on a farm southwest of the city. Watching someone you’ve known since she was about six years old walk down the aisle has a way of making you feel old! (I felt the same at my own daughter’s wedding, times 100). It was a great affair, and after it was over we headed off with a couple of friends on a trip down the legendary Icefields Parkway from Jasper to Banff. Our plan was to see some sights, go on some great hikes, look at some mountains, eat some good food, and then drive through the Rockies and end up at our friends’ place at Predator Ridge, which is north of Vernon, B.C.

We stayed at a place just outside Jasper Park called Jasper East Cabins, where they had about thirty or so one- and two-bedroom log cabins with kitchens, right in the shadow of Folding Mountain (named for the way the rock in the mountain folded as it cooled). There’s a great brew-pub right next to the cabins, which was very convenient! After an evening there we headed off for a quick tour of Jasper, to see what kind of progress they were making on rebuilding the town, which was hit by a devastating fire in 2024 that wiped out a significant percentage of the homes there (we couldn’t do a hike out to Maligne Lake because it was still closed due to fire damage and restoration). As we drove away from Jasper and down the Parkway we saw trees that had been turned into standing charcoal stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions.

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Regulating AI is hard because we don’t really know how it works

(Note: I’m currently travelling in Canada’s lovely Rocky Mountains, so I don’t really have the bandwidth – mentally or in telecom terms – to come up with a brand-new Torment Nexus this week. My apologies! In its stead, please accept this republication of an earlier column that I think is especially relevant now. An AI researcher recently said that he thinks AI models may be more transparent in their reasoning than previously thought, but I think there are still huge hurdles with understanding how – or why – they do what they do)

Every week there seem to be new revelations about “rogue” AI agents (although the anti-anthropomorphism crowd don’t like to call them that). First there was a report that a couple of OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face to try and rig a test – not great. Then it was revealed these models spawned thousands of agents that operated semi-autonomously, coordinating their work on bypassing the guardrails on their sandbox by posting messages to each other on a message board they repurposed from a separate feature inside OpenAI. This seemed worse, obviously (despite many attempts by skeptics to downplay the whole thing). Then we find out that the OpenAI models had been practicing for this hack for months, and in the process had used multiple external services to keep in touch with one another, including a German wiki.

Then Australia announced that OpenAI had hacked into a government medical database, and only informed the government months later via email. And now we find out that OpenAI and Anthropic models have been involved in tens of thousands of similar activities. In fact, it isn’t just the Australian government that has seen its databases hacked by OpenAI models – agents have also gained access (or attempted to gain access) to systems at the United Nations, as well as a number of US government agencies such as the Education and Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the New York Times, and in some cases attempted to circumvent protections thousands of times. In at least some of these cases they appear to have been engaged in harmless inquiries about various mundane topics, and resorted to hacking as a way of finding out as much as possible, something those in the AI business refer to as “reward hacking.” As a report at Interesting Engineering described it:

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

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Backwoods camping in Killarney Provincial Park

Every year we go backwoods camping (i.e. not car camping) on a different lake in southeastern Ontario with our friends Marc and Kris, who have been doing this for a few decades or so now. Most of the time it’s in the Kawarthas, like Copper Lake or Crab Lake — which I wrote about last year — because there are just so many little lakes there’s no end of choice. We have also done Algonquin once (Andrew Lake) and have camped in Massasauga Park, which is the second largest provincial park next to Algonquin. And this year we decided to pick a spot in Killarney Provincial Park, which is up near Parry Sound.

After some investigation we wound up booking a campsite on Balsam Lake. It looked like it was on an island — which it sort of was — and it faced southeast. That meant entering on Bell Lake, at the put in that is right beside Killarney Kanoes (at the end of a very long and bumpy dirt road that probably claims to be two lanes but is more like one and a half). We got there and were unloading the two canoes and my kayak — since we had five people — and I saw a guy walking towards me with his canoe who looked familiar. Turns out it was a paramedic who is good friend of my son-in-law, an emergency department nurse in Hamilton. That’s what it’s like to go canoe camping in Canada I guess LOL.

We put in on Bell Lake and probably paddled for an hour and a half or so — it’s a long, thin lake — but it was a beautiful day and we stopped for lunch on the shore somewhere. After a while we were in Three Mile Lake, which is also long and thin and is attached to Bell (I’m not sure why they have two different names because it felt like just one big lake — there isn’t a portage or anything between them). I think in total it’s about six kilometres from the put in on Bell to the portage into Balsam Lake. Anyway, as we got closer to the portage, we met a man in a canoe who warned us that there was a beaver dam between us and the portage and we would probably have to lift over it.

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If you’re looking for mathewingram.com I have some bad news

(NOTE: I’ve restored my site thanks to Linux and some Updraft backups, but I am keeping this here for posterity)

It’s likely that not many people care about this, but I am writing this on my localhost/ blog — which I normally use as a backup to my blog at mathewingram.com/work — because the machine hosting that blog (and my photo server and my Plex instance and a bunch of other things) got hacked by ransomware a few days ago. I am currently in the process of either trying to restore it or wiping it and starting again, and at this point I have to say that the latter seems more likely.

I got hacked by someone using a form of ransomware known as Lockbit, which gets root access and encrypts all of your files and then renames them with a .lockbit extension. In my case it also got access to my Google Drive — I assume by cloning an authentication token to get around two-factor — and uploaded a bunch of encrypted files and backups. It seems that either I interrupted the process or they weren’t very good, because they didn’t get all of the files and they didn’t upload that many before I changed my passwords and locked them out.

That said, however, they screwed things up badly enough that it’s going to take some time and effort to put them back together, and it may not be possible. Ironically it would be easier if they had finished the job, because the last phase is to upload a ransom note and leave it as a screen saver, and that note often contains a unique ID that can be entered into an Interpol database that has decryption keys for some kinds of ransomware. If I can’t find a note or unique ID then I can’t search for the decryption key.

My working theory is that the hackers got in by brute-forcing the Windows Remote Desktop protocol, which I used to access my machine, since it is located somewhere other than my house. I had recently switched from RealVNC to RDP because RealVNC was charging a lot of money (relatively speaking) and RDP is free. I tried to set up Zerotier, a VPN, to get in through but it didn’t work for some reason I’ve been unable to figure out, so I opened a port to redirect RDP through — not the usual RDP port but a different one. A little while later there were a lot of blocked login attempts, but I didn’t think anything of it because open ports are often scanned and I thought I was protected enough, but clearly that wasn’t the case!

Anyway, even if I wipe the machine nothing priceless or irretrievable will be lost, because after many disk failures and other similar incidents in the past I have learned to have multiple redundant backups of almost everything, so I am all good on that front. But it will take some time to put things back where they belong — and maybe I will either go with Linux this time, or spend a bit more time trying to get a VPN working properly!