> The detail that turned a suspicious directory into a story: the encryption key.
(<3)
I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, which has nothing at all to do with exfiltration of secrets, but it does amuse me when it happens. I imagine the labs have access to lots of secrets that various actors would like to get their hands on...
(shameless plug for my own harness, which is open source and doesn't have a backend to send any data to: https://www.opairdev.org/ )
however...when it is debugging problems or responding to questions about the code, it will just say it read my env file and found xxx environment variables as a verification step, or sometimes it will even mention that I need to uncomment some environment variables in the env file, which makes the whole deal about security feel iffy giffy....
Claude Fable uploads my git history (git log) every day to the Anthropic servers!
Commit messages in https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... sum to 900MB.
Also, this commit message alone: https://gitlab.com/old-game/sb-b/nanobox.io/nanobox-pkgsrc-l... weighs 100.5MB (they squashed years of history as a single commit and piped "git log" to the commit message).
DeepSeek Harness is my favorite for coding. Hermes is my favourite for Other things , followed by OpenCode (sucks at managing long running services) .
Others swear by Pi.dev
Mind and marketshare are currency in this space. Either these people are honest and deserve your trust and business, or they don't. They've been mischaracterizing the way they've been handling your data. Shut them off accordingly until they make things right.
I'm fine with certain codebases and configs being shared, but not others, hence the sandbox/container recommendation. I suspect many others are the same way.
You shouldn't have to go and create zero-trust environments for things to operate in because tech companies can't be trusted to be honest and transparent about how they handle your data. It should be a given that they're up-front about what they do with it within the various terms and licenses, and easy to enforce those terms.
Those that cannot behave in such a way should get exactly zero of your business, even if the product is free and you can set up ways to block any sort of intrusions.
Also, as I understood, this is a feature to allow server-side indexing of the project. But of course I wouldn't run this, and I generally wouldn't run any IDE or AI tools without a sandbox.
Sadly this plague of silent auto-updates is spreading to Linux. For example, browser plugins in Firefox on Linux can silently auto-update without user consent and without any checks and can be used as backdoors. Furthermore, the auto-updates are not using a package manager; firmware also seem to quietly update and also is not using a package manager.
They had their own unbound "harness scans the whole user directory" oopsie and handled concerns about that by introducing code signing.
Which, yes, does have absolutely nothing to do with that issue.
I guess by now it is better, but to me they seem to lack the engineering culture necessary for a "good reputation" stamp.
__
Ref: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/14925#issuecomm...
among other issues.
And the original comment I've replied to proves this strategy right! So from a business standpoint: excellent work.
It does have a "mission" feature that's stuck in the strange, distant times of 2025 by way overdoing mandatory verification steps, which means they don't support swarms/workflows/crews/fleets yet -- that is, it's all done in sequence. But they have the boring, corporate engineering attitude that I think we're are all craving rn, and generally seem competent.
I can heartily dis-recommend Vix, even though they gamed themselves to the top of at least one ranking site that shall not be named; exactly like the quasi-bad-faith incompetence described with OpenCode above, but without even the "Open-" branding! Though perhaps that word has been so thoroughly burnt as a prefix by Sam Altman & Microsoft's criminal behavior that we should let it go...
Is this how "FLOSS" wins over "OSS"? Not with an ideological bang, but with a marketing issue?
Nah, I don't think so. Also, we arguably do not want FLOSS to "win" over OSS, because that just means people with no taste or sense cluttering up the repos, issues and support chats.
"Open" being used as a signal for non-hacker people was a weird and unpleasant development, but, if you think about it, it might be a blessing in disguise and shall keep them away from the more pleasant spaces.
It's not that they'd care about being scammed, mistreated and rug-pulled anyway. They want that. They do it themselves all the time. Every time they encounter a space that treats them well, they terraform it into baseline miserable-ness.
So let them have the "Open" prefix. It's just words, anyway.
I'm sure you're far more experienced than I with basically every aspect of this discussion, but I'd argue that's given you a blindspot, here. I'll hit some specifics below, but the headline is that you're effectively taking a stand against Eternal September II -- a goal that I hope we can all agree would be quixotically antisocial, given what followed the first one!
we arguably do not want FLOSS to "win" over OSS
Didn't you get into this stuff to change the world? To liberate the oppressed, undereducated, and forgotten with the radical power of the information superhighway? Cause it reads here like you're more motivated by selfishness (not wanting to bother talking to people with less expertise than you) and resentment. On that note...
They want that. They do it themselves all the time.
Less confrontationally; my mom is in her late 60s, and is pretty computer-literate for her age after decades of knowledge work. Surely you'd agree that she's not, like, evil for using OSX, iOS, GMail, Word, etc.? That she didn't chose those things because of a philosophical commitment to defending IP laws, but rather because of structural reasons? Even if she were pro-IP, wouldn't we want to win good, well-meaning people to our side?
So let them have the "Open" prefix. It's just words, anyway.
I hope none of the above was rude; I'm trying hard to keep my passion for this topic from pushing me past HN guidelines :)
> but I'd argue that's given you a blindspot, here
I'd argue it's the opposite. The idealism there _is_ the blindspot. Not the other way round.
You can't save everyone. And you will die trying.
That's the first thing that gets (or should get) hammered into people's heads when they pick up a career in all things social.
Which isn't to say that we shouldn't dream, but I believe that our dreams should be optimized for maximum gain with minimum pain.
I wonder how many opencode users upload their private secrets to the cloud, while thinking they're using a self hosted model.
Btw. I don't think this is malicious, just sloppy.
The same can be said about opencode though.
It's easy to trigger, I just need to go inside Codex settings and change something, it saves and instantly windows defender who never wants anything want to "you may be at risk, let me upload that for analysis yes/no".
So unless they've cleared it all with a recent update then it doesn't seem to affect everyone.
Besides why would you use a closed source harness from a certain place, even if you decide to use the model (if nothing then for the price alone). And, that first remark wasn't just for ZAI but all the providers.
At this point: wrapping the harness around something like sandbox-exec or agent-safehouse is a must. Better still, create a new user account (after so much resistance I am warming up to the idea).
Will ZAI see a blowback after this news? Naah. People will keep using it. Hell, I will keep using it. That's how it is now - post truth and post LLM world.
PS. Anyone singing praise of OpenCode here, it's literally one of the worst harneses, open or not. Just look at their fricking issues - the strategic and rampant placements of "no planned" is mind boggling. And for what? Slightly better than ClaudeCode in token consumption and that too starts getting muddled after a while.
That crosses into outright malware.
Makes me not want to use GLM or other Z.ai models either, since who knows what interesting easter eggs are embedded in their training data.
You know... (puts on foil hat)... I did notice that Z is also the weird Russian logo for their invasion of Ukraine and Russia and China have cooperated to some degree (or at least China is helping Russia in exchange for access to resources). I dismissed this when I first thought of it, but I will now leave it here. Still probably coincidence but my Bayesian priors were just updated in its direction very slightly.
next I can’t wait to see news about “ai company is using my data without my consent” as well.