In my experience, students were actually pretty good about understanding this for themselves, at least in a security course I ran a survey in[0]. Unfortunately I didn’t get a statistically significant sample size (10/~60).
Another caveat is this was a graduate course, so I would expect more maturity and integrity on average than an undergrad course. But anecdotally I thought it was an interesting result.
60 people over a decade dying is not minor. If a school killed two entire classes of kids over their k-12 education, that'd be a shocking amount of death. If a sports team lost 6 players every year we'd shut down the team instantly. Treating 6 deaths as minor is absurd and callous.
It only feels ok because it's so abstractly connected to pollution.
If this data center killed 6 people every year on site due to industrial accidents, we'd almost certainly close it. What Amazon warehouse kills half a dozen people on site every year?
> The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.
It would seem the redaction of the rare titles is a way to avoid de-anonymization and subsequent harm to the business of the seller who agreed to place a tracker in one of the books. That being said, maybe they could have chosen a better methodology which would have allowed the disclosure of the title, although ultimately I’m not sure the title matters too much outside of their claim they were “rare”.
The issue is if rare is simply "not many in circulation", that's very very different from rare being "it is a unique artifact". The former kind of rarity doesn't really present an existential end, whereas the latter does.
My neighbor self-published a book, printed I think 100 copies at his own expense. It's literally a rare book. I can't imagine he nor anyone would care if an AI company bought a copy, no matter what they did with it.
Maybe these "rare books" are first edition Mark Twains, and. maybe they're unwanted books that would otherwise have gone to be pulped. The distinction is important and by not giving any evidence or even a qualitative claim about the types of books, 404 media is being pretty weak here.
I don't think HN commenters need to be the arbiters of which books are beneficial to society.
And beyond just benefit to society, don't forget how subjective the decision about what constitutes a "unique artifact" is. That random product manual from 1966 becomes a near-priceless relic to me if it lets me repair and use the sewing machine handed down from my grandmother. Not necessarily the ink printed on paper, but the information contained within.
The above is based on a true story involving archive.org's Manual Library. The idea that even such esoteric and forgotten information would get hoovered up into the walled garden of Amazon's AI and then destroyed in the outside world, such that I have to go pay them to access even a facsimile of it, is frankly disgusting.
>That random product manual from 1966 becomes a near-priceless relic to me if it lets me repair and use the sewing machine handed down from my grandmother. Not necessarily the ink printed on paper, but the information contained within.
On the other hand, now that the manual is in the AI, you can just ask the AI how to repair the sewing machine.
The information contained within has not been lost, and in fact has become much more accessible.
> you can just ask the AI how to repair the sewing machine
Like so often in its usage, the word "just" is carrying immense weight in this sentence. Please see "hoovered up into the walled garden of Amazon's AI [...] such that I have to go pay them to access even a facsimile of it"
> has become much more accessible
This accessibility rests on a number of assumptions, not the least of which is Amazon's (of all companies) charitable good graces in offering access to their AI at an affordable price. It also assumes that the model can accurately regurgitate the text without hallucinating about other, similar machines, and that it can faithfully recreate any diagrams.
> That random product manual from 1966 becomes a near-priceless relic to me if it lets me repair and use the sewing machine handed down from my grandmother.
That ain’t a rare book.
I would also be shocked if you couldn’t find a way to repair and use this 1966 sewing machine… so it seems like a red herring.
Thanks for your opinion. I see you disagree with my first point.
> I would also be shocked if you couldn’t find a way to repair and use this 1966 sewing machine… so it seems like a red herring.
"Repair of the sewing machine is obviously simple and thus left as an exercise to the reader."
Seriously, though, I'm trying to say that you can't make that call for me. You can think that, but I know from experience repairing old machines (with more or less sentimental value) that having the original manual can be the difference between fixing it and irreparably damaging it. I could also, in turn, suppose that you probably do not actually collect and preserve rare "unique artifact" books, and therefore your argument about them is a red herring. But then we would both just be casting aspersions.
And even then, the "rare" qualifier is not needed here. What Amazon/LLM companies are doing is amoral. This is intellectual piracy (not in the "copyright infringement" sense) at the highest level. Stealing and centralizing the accumulation of human knowledge to eventually rob us all and put all power into the hands in the hands of a handful of people, who are not benevolent.
Made a comment up above, but that's tdpServer and tmpServer (sometimes tdpd and tmpd) and it's what I use in my python implementation of tmpcli, the (somewhat broken) client binary on some TP-Link devices.
You're correct, it gives you access to everything the Tether app can do.
I had been trying to find that again! It was instrumental in some RE/VR I did last year on tmp and the differences between the UDP socket (available without auth) and the TCP socket. Thanks for making that.
I can't remember the details of the scheme, but it also allows you to authenticate using your TPLink cloud credential. If my memory is correct, the username is md5(tplink_account_email) and the password is the cloud account password. If you care, I can find my notes on that to confirm.
Many eons ago I wrote a Python version of tmpcli for this exact reason. Made some minor improvements a few years ago but haven’t touched it since. Curious what methodology Codex came up with, I haven’t revisited it since models got really good.
The idea is that tmpServer listens on localhost, but dropbear allows port forwarding with admin creds (you’ll need to specify -N). That program has full device access and is the API the Tether app primarily uses to interact with the device.
Ha kudos! I went across this project - thanks for your work :) It didn't work on the specific model I own (Archer NX600).
My solution is really just using their pseudo-JWT over their obscured APIs (with reverse-engineered names of endpoints and params). Limitation is that there is still only one client allowed to be authenticated at one moment, so my daemon has priority and I need to stop it to actually access Admin panel.
We’re splitting this across two threads, but if you give Codex access to jadx and the Archer android app you might be able to get something without that problem. The TPLink management protocol has a few different “transport” types - tmpcli uses SSH, but your device might only support one of the other transports.
Of course! Happy to contribute. As is the case with your device, there's a lot of weird TP-Link firmware variants (even an RTOS called TPOS based on VxWorks), so no guarantee it'll work all the time. Glad there's more research being done in the space!
Another caveat is this was a graduate course, so I would expect more maturity and integrity on average than an undergrad course. But anecdotally I thought it was an interesting result.
[0] https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-05-17-learning-focused...
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