How is this different from a backdoor in, say, a Thunderbird extension? I've maintained an extension for Thunderbird and, when I was no longer interested in it, a guy pushed hard to take over the project after sending a few legitimate contributions. I declined because it seemed crazy to give the keys to tens of thousands mailbox to a guy I didn't really know. I also found it crazy that people would trust me initially, but well, I know I'm a good guy :-)
Yeah I thought the same thing. This has nothing to do with MCP really, the same flaw is there in all software: you have to trust the author and the distributor. Nothing stops Microsoft from copying all your Outlook mail. Nothing stops Google from copying all your gmail. Nothing stops the Mutt project from copying all your email. Open source users like to think that "many eyes" keep the code clean and they probably do help, especially on popular projects where all commits get reviewed in detail, but the chance is still there. And the rest of us just trust the developers. This problem is as old as software.
Not really true. They have skin in the game. They have legitimate revenue at stake. If they betray trust on such a scale, and we find out, they'll be out of business.
Idk, I think Microsoft could get away with a lot. Not selling your emails to the highest bidder, that might be a bridge too far, but training an LLM on Outlook emails? Probably. Just have an LLM scan every email to see if its contents are mundane or secret first, and only use the mundane ones. There might be a scandal of some sort, then Microsoft would say sorry (but keep the model), and then everyone would move on because the switching costs are too high.
"Not really true"?! TRUE AS HELL! "Outlook New" LITERALLY DOES THAT! It's an infostealer. Microsoft gets your login info and downloads your mails, contacts and calenders to its own servers!
How this app is legal and not marked as malware is beyond me! It's the biggest information heists in history!
Do people actually choose to use Outlook if they're not already forced to use Exchange/Office365, usually for work?
In my experience, it's hands down the worst e-mail client I've ever used. I only have it on my work PC because my employer uses Office 365. It never even crossed my mind to try to use it for my personal e-mailing needs.
I do agree, however, that companies that decide to trust MS don't care one bit about their scandalous practices. I don't even think it's as much of an actual choice as a cop-out, as in "everybody uses microsoft", so they rarely actually ponder the decision.
Outlook New gets installed by default on Windows 11. Of course people gonna use it. Even if they just trial it, their data is gone. A Anti-Virus should stop the software from running. But that will never happen.
> "everybody uses microsoft", so they rarely actually ponder the decision.
Exactly. That is my main argument against PantaloonFlames's claim "They have legitimate revenue at stake. If they betray trust on such a scale, and we find out, they'll be out of business."
At a certain scale nothing matters anymore! You can Bluescreen half the planet and still be in business.
Sure, I agree, and the problem is absolutely magnified by AI. If a back door gets into Thunderbird, or Google decides to start scanning and sharing all of your email, that’s one point of failure.
An MCP may connect to any number of systems that require a level of trust, and if any one thing abuses that trust it puts the entire system at risk. Now you’re potentially leaking email, server keys, recovery codes, private documents, personal photos, encrypted chats - whatever you give your AI access to becomes available to a single rogue actor.
Giving AI agents permission to do things on your behalf in your computer is obviously dangerous. Installing a compromised MCP server is really the same as installing any compromised software. The fact that this software is triggered by the user or an agent doesn't really change anything. I don't think that humans are more able to decide not to use a tool that could potentially be compromised, but that they have chosen to install already.
> Open source users like to think that "many eyes" keep the code clean and they probably do help, especially on popular projects where all commits get reviewed in detail, but the chance is still there.
> How is this different from a backdoor in, say, a Thunderbird extension?
I don’t get the argument. Had this been a backdoor in a Thunderbird extension, would it not have been worth reporting? Of course it would. The value of this report is first and foremost that it found a backdoor. That it is on an MCP server is secondary, but it’s still relevant to mention it for being the first, so that people who don’t believe or don’t understand these systems can be compromised (those people exist) can update their mental model and be more vigilant.
I have helped many extremely drunk people this way, given them a lift, but point out to them that getting a lift from a stranger you just met is a really bad idea. they're just lucky they met an honest guy with some free time because I keep weird hours and like the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall pub.
> Having worked with OCaml at Jane Street is not, I think most of us would agree, going to be, going to be a serious barrier to getting hired to work with another language somewhere else.
The retention factor is *not* that other companies wouldn't want to hire them, but rather that these employees are likely to dislike being forced to use something other than OCaml.
So at least they should really work hard to not let a BSOD happen in case of excessive nesting of widgets. The repro case is actually the same than the one for a bug which was fixed 6 years ago, and it is straightforward (just nest enough panels in a modal popup, and close it). It's hard to understand how this could not be caught by a non regression test.
45 nested WinForms is bizarre. I think you'd melt a UX designer's eyeballs. It's possible that Microsoft sees this as low impact (small user base), or is too complex to fix, or too high risk to fix.
You could create an interesting payload with this, especially given it can be done via PoSh.
Get payload on machine -> enable Full memory dumps -> execute payload/BSOD -> upon recovery, exfiltrate memory dump.
No doubt excessive nesting is bizarre, although the end user might not notice (nested panels that fit in their parent are not visible). That's not a reason to have your entire OS break :-(
It's crazy a such a simple script, which is actually the same as 6 years ago, can produce a BSOD in a deterministic way with the latest update of Windows. And nobody at MS seems to care about it.
CDuce was the result of my PhD thesis (about 20 years ago); mostly just a research prototype with enough engineering efforts to make it usable for small enough projects. It came after XDuce, which introduced the idea of building a functional language around regular expression types (used to XML schema languages, DTD, XSD, Relax). My work focused on distilling the theory from XDuce into more primitive constructs from type theory (products, unions, recursion), and embedding them into a more expressive type system and language (with set-theoretic intersection and negation, function types, extensible records -- used to model XML attributes, etc), also with a powerful XML pattern matching engine and an efficient implementation of type-checking (just deciding subtyping is in theory exponential in the size of schema, but works well in practice). The theory could probably be used to serve as the basis of statically-typed languages working, on, say, "typed" JSON structures. The work was/is continued by my PhD advisor and other colleagues to include parametric polymorphism (original CDuce supported ad hoc overloading polymorphism only).
The idea was just that if your language could directly express constraints on your document types in its native type system, the compiler could directly type-check statically complex transformations and make sure they produce documents from the expected output schema (assuming the input complies with the announced input schema). This is more direct than having to rely on mapping between XML and "native" data types, which (usually) don't fully preserve constraints imposed by XML schema languages, and are themselves tedious and fragile to write. This works well for XML->XML transformations. Of course, in most applications, XML parsing and/or generation is just a tiny part, which shouldn't affect the choice of an implementation language. With OCamlDuce, I explored the idea of extending OCaml to include XML types. The combination felt a bit ad hoc, but was ok. Today, it could be rebuilt indeed about PPX extension points + some type-checking hooks in the OCaml compiler.
It still benefitted from freedom of movement (which is defined as the ability to live, work and study abroad, and lack of discrimination between EU citizens and locals).
You should maybe address your willful misunderstanding of “free trade zone” in your first post, and your misrepresentation of the ongoing negotiations before going right to further degrading the discussion with empty snark.
A Canada-style FTA has always been one of the options available to the UK. It is immortalized in Barnier’s famous diagram from the very beginning of the negotiations: https://goo.gl/images/AqyD7w
I mean when you look at it purely from a "are we all demonstrably better off in the EU" perspective then sure the UK has benefitted from membership.
If however you look at it from the point of view of "I hate people who look or speak different" the it's a different and frankly more miserable situation.
I think the person you were replying to was of the latter persuasion.
The economy grows if there are more people in it. GDP is just all economic activity summed, so adding more people inherently grows GDP, which is what is usually meant by "the economy".
This obviously doesn't automatically mean everyone gets richer though, it just means more economic activity is now being counted under the UK vs other countries. This sort of immigration driven "growth" is sort of like a child "growing up" by getting fatter - yes it's definitely larger, but that doesn't mean healthier.
From the perspective of the average British person, merely having more people around doesn't inherently make things better even if GDP has gone up, and can practically make things worse if it happens too fast as there's a limit to how fast infrastructure can be built.
People who view the world exclusively via spreadsheets may struggle to understand this basic point, but everyone else can see it quite clearly.
Except no matter how much we spend on the NHS - it still can't cope. Schools are full, and the transport system struggles everyday (the tube every morning is a miserable experience).
These every-day issues are the things that people are most concerned with.
According to Wikipedia[1], SQLightning -- a port of Sqlite using LMDB -- was 20x faster than original sqllight. It could thus be interesting to compare LiteTree with SQLightning.
Indeed. But the last version of SQLightning is using SQLite 3.7. It would be useful to have an updated version. I was going to update it but then I decided to implement LiteTree in another way, using pages instead of rows. This is because our customers at Blocko/Aergo prefer higher performance over small storage.
