The Real AI Threat?

Fri Dec 11 00:53:01 UTC 2020

On Thu, 10 Dec 2020 18:56:04 -0500, Max Harmony via NANOG said:
> Programs have never done what you *want* them to do, only what you =
> *tell* them to do.

Amen to that - there was the time many moons ago when we launched a copy of a
vendor's network monitoring system, and told it to auto-discover the network.
It found all the on-campus subnets and most of the machines, and didnt seem to
be doing anything else, so we all headed home.

Come in the next morning, and discover that our 56k leased line to Nysernet
(yes, *that* many moons ago) was clogged with the monitoring system trying to
do SNMP probes against a significant fraction of the Internet in the Northeast.

Things apparently went particularly pear-shaped when it discovered the MIT/Boston
routing swamp...

And of course, we *told* it "discover the network", when we *meant* "discover
the network in this one /16.".  Fortunately, it didn't support "discover the
network and perform security scans on machines" - but I'm sure there's at least
one security-scanning package out there that makes this same whoopsie all too
easy to do, 3+ decades later...

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