The only difference I see on the facts vs what I read so far is that OpenAI knew of the hack and decided not to intervene. I haven't read the report but I find it hard to believe that OpenAI deliberately let its agents hack a third party company during a training run. It would certainly attract a criminal liability, which would be surprising to admit in writing.
Yes, but I setup syncthing's file versioning to 25, in case of keepass, for example. Also, I set it up that only my PC can send, all other PCs, smartphones, can only receive. Sure, there are still many ways to attack this system, but I still prefer it.
As long as you have different credentials on all of your machines. I have witnessed first hand that once a malware infects a machine, any machine with shared credentials in the vicinity is infected within seconds.
You don't want to compile code over SMB, even on a fast network. And what happens when you travel with patchy internet access? I use syncthing to a NAS, and the syncthing data being backed up by the NAS along everything else it contains.
Less hard these days. AI is a game changer for learning new technologies. It's like having a highly paid expert available to answer all your questions about your little USB backup. Makes learning how to use properly a new software trivial. And priceless when troubleshooting.
But a malware will scan for anything that looks like some credentials on your machine. So if you have a script with clear credentials backing up to a ftp server, the malware will go after the backup.
At the end of the day it depends on what is your threat model. Mine is 1) automated malwares and 2) my own fuckups. I am not trying to prevent the NSA from hacking me. Against an automated malware, custom scripts with encrypted credentials that don't show in clear in command lines or environment variables are probably good enough.
I don't particularly like the idea of my relatives sneaking into my files when I am dead. I destroyed all my father's files when he passed to respect his privacy.
The problem with this is relatives may need to when it comes to dealing with wills and assets later. Naive legal statements like "I leave my car to Bob" become rather difficult when the car is tied into cloud accounts, locked EV chargers and weird subscription services. It becomes a whole digital forensics operation.
I personally have no problem with them going through my stuff. Not the "I have nothing to hide" defence. I just don't give a crap.
With respect to my personal situation, my father took thousands of photos of me, my children etc back as far as 2002. Sent me a selection low res jpegs of them by email. I was thrilled when I got the original RAWs from his NAS in the end. There was so much stuff in there I had forgotten that he hadn't sent.
Consider using a local backup solution to store your and your family's digital assets. This way, you can easily access and share them later. You can start with a free tool like Telemetry Blocklist to ensure your backup solution isn't sending any data to the cloud. If you need more advanced features, Backup Agent can help you encrypt and back up your local AI stack, including photos and other files.
I have a set of files in my true offline backup that my family (or other executor) will have access to should I pass. This is things like bank details and such, credentials for online accounts & other services so they can close them (and perhaps archive things like photos if they don't already have copies), so that they can close off my affairs with minimal faf.
Everything else will be inaccessible if I'm not around. This also means less faf for them: all the info they need to care about is in that package, they don't need to look at the huge disorganised pile of everything else to find the information that they might need.
Yes. My instructions are basically to destroy or erase everything and don't let any device with storage fall into unknown hands. Not that there is anything there and everything is routinely encrypted, but there is still a chance that some of the data could be used for identity theft or other harm to someone else. None of the devices or data is that valuable.
I'd say if you want someone to have data or access, you should work that out in time.
But delete everything is good advice. I'd emphasize also keeping some list of services that you may have accounts or logins in and delete and close and erase every single one that you're not using.
everyone should do this, but it is difficult. imo, it is better to talk with your parents beforehand (if possible) to understand what they want to share with you and what they do not.
Anything that requires manual work will inevitably fail as a backup strategy in my opinion. You might not need that backup now, while you actively think about it, but in 4 years, when you had other problems to deal with and haven't done a backup in a long time.
For small datasets, a cloud backup (think s3 or azure blob) with credentials that can't be harvested automatically by a malware (eg custom backup script with encrypted credentials - claude will happily write one for you in seconds) is as good as offline. For small datasets (code base, important documents, even photos if you don't go crazy - or perhaps backup a lower resolution as a dooms day last resort thing), this is nearly free.
For larger datasets, you can buy some cheap X11SSH-LN4F or X11SSL-F motherboards on ebay with RAM and CPU for ~$100. These can be remotely switched on and off programmatically with IPMI (same thing, custom scripts with encrypted credentials - claude is your friend). Have your NAS perform an incremental backup once a week or once a month and keep it off the rest of the time (or trigger it from a raspberry pi with own credentials if you don't want to connect IPMI to your LAN or have encrypted IPMI credentials on your NAS). And unless a malware hits right at the time of the backup, it is as good as an offline backup while also being automated. Doesn't protect from a power surge though, which may or may not be a problem depending on where you live.
Also have your backup pull data from your NAS rather than the other way round, and run with different credentials than your NAS, so a malware can't jump from the NAS to the backup (or encrypt the backup). I have seen first hand that if you reuse admin credentials between machines, one machine compromised means all machines compromised within minutes.
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