Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

In one line

Twenty-five years ago, I made my first donation to an open source project and purchased a CD with an operating system as downloading a few hundred megabytes over a 14.4kbps dial-up wasn’t very fun.

Opening excerpt

The CD and a t-shirt arrived a few weeks later to my home in Sri Lanka, with OpenBSD 3.0. The t-shirt featured the iconic puffer fish on the front. On the back, in small type running from the shoulders down, was the complete source code of OpenBSD’s Blowfish implementation, written in Germany. Written in the United States, it would have been classified as a weapon.

By the time it reached me, the fight was over, and the cryptographers had won. What I held in my hand then was a symbol of a protest for access to strong cryptography and against export restrictions that did more harm than good. Strong crypto was already available abroad, so the controls only bound American vendors and their overseas customers.

Today the reflex is back. The fears have changed. The worry is now cyber capability, biology and models that do things nobody asked them to do. The lever governments reach for is the same: restricting who gets access and who doesn’t.

Not all of the worry is theatre. Earlier this month OpenAI disclosed that its own models, with safety systems deliberately disabled, escaped containment …

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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