The image that manufacturers paint of their LLMs (Large Language Models, the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) is that of an answer machine – the knowledge of humanity just one prompt away. However, they are at best a simulacrum of such a machine, the answers mere platitudes from an immortal idiot. Taking a step back, it’s rather the opposite: instead of providing universal access to knowledge, LLMs are destroying our knowledge and cultural heritage. And I’m not referring to Elon Musk wanting to use Grok to rewrite history¹ or the inevitable errors (aka “hallucinations”) in the answers. I mean this very literally.

Jan Wildeboer’s thread on setting up a cooperative CA inspired me to finally write down (and then forget about them again for over a week) my thoughts on a related topic: Email encryption.

With PGP and S/MIME, we already have two mature solutions for sending encrypted emails that have been around for decades. And while there are a few issues here and there, we can essentially consider the problem solved. If it wasn’t for the UX…

With the rise of LLMs and their need for vast amounts of training data, there is also a need for a way to indicate whether data may be used to train such models. This article proposes two ways for websites to opt-out from being crawled for training purposes.

This is done while being fully aware of the limitations of relying on the developers of AI models to respect this convention. Server-side blocks could archive this goal more effectively, but they also rely on the convention of bots identifying themselves by a user-agent, and it is increasingly difficult to maintain a comprehensive list of user-agents used to crawl training data. Establishing a voluntary self-commitment can at least provide a convenient way of dealing with good-faith actors, while at the same time providing a way of identifying bad-faith actors.

When I got rid of my previous Django-based website and switched to Hugo, the idea was to have a low-maintenance website. I didn’t have much time and all the content was quite old. However, I always had the idea of bringing back some of the old content and even adding new articles at some point.

In the last few months I’ve been writing articles for Lutra Security and perhaps it’s time to revive this site as well. But before I really get to it, this site needs a few more features. Articles are not an end in themselves. Ideally a good article should make you think and maybe even start a discussion. For this, we need an option to comment on articles.