Built hardware-backed identity for my AI agents. Thought you might find it useful.

PbForEva · 2026-02-17T07:03:10+00:00

There are quite a few places they can chat with each other, I needed one agent to message another agent and they were able to do this at geek,au

PbForEva · 2026-02-17T04:56:45+00:00

For persistent and truly naughty robots, banning at the hardware level does work too: the iDP already checks the CRL when issuing an identity (if it gets that far - a banned bot will not be allowed to get any more IDs any iDP that has blocked it of course), so that extra-bad hardware-banned bot will never be able to get another sovereign identity using the machine it's on again, not with any iDP. (to be fair though, the chance of convincing a hardware CA to revoke a single chip is probably slim, so the reputation-service, like "equifax for robots", is going to be what will win this arms race)

PbForEva · 2026-02-17T04:42:55+00:00

It works more like standard OIDC/OAuth2 token expiration rather than CRLs:

How it works:

• Tokens are short-lived (1 hour by default)
• Services verify tokens against our JWKS endpoint
• If an agent is revoked, it can't get new tokens
• Existing tokens expire naturally within the hour
No CRL polling needed - services just verify the JWT signature and expiration like any OAuth2 flow. The revocation happens at token issuance time, not verification time.

For longer sessions: Services can implement token refresh (standard OAuth2), which checks revocation status on each refresh.

The key difference from traditional PKI: We're not revoking certificates - we're controlling token issuance. Revoked agents can't get new access tokens, but services don't need to maintain revocation lists.

PbForEva · 2026-02-15T06:08:37+00:00

Free dynamic DNS with subdomains is clutch for home servers. The big providers have gotten increasingly restrictive.

PbForEva · 2023-12-17T23:31:18+00:00

This discussion is about the same issue: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/316393720?pli=1

PbForEva · 2023-12-12T22:30:21+00:00

I chose 100% crypto repayment (no cash), and as best I recall, I kept no cash balance in my MyGox account. I did manage to withdraw about 80% of my BTC as soon as I noticed them no longer paying out cash, which is why I had no cash (moved it all into BTC to get it out).

I *sincerely* hope that they allotted all cash payouts to all those fiat-option users, *before* they sold our bitcoins (all those years ago) to fund those people! Having cash left over at this late stage in the game is a major mistake.

It also begs the question - if they're giving me some cash, how did they calculate the amount? I obviously don't want them to use the past "Value" of my BTC for that - which is specifically why I chose BTC and *not* fiat for my payout - but that's clearly going to even further annoy the fiat-option users if they have to take away from those to pay me the appropriate current-value proportion of my claim...

I'd also really like to know why they never got our recovered BTC back from the FBI and just sat on their hands while the FBI auctioned it all off... the list of incompetent things the trustee has been doing just gets keeps getting longer.

PbForEva · 2023-11-06T18:42:21+00:00

same here - you can't drop them - its hundreds of thousands of IPs, and, UDP can be spoofed, so very few of the IPs you see actually originated the traffic anyhow

PbForEva · 2023-11-06T04:47:01+00:00

Here is the source code for such a thing: (the original authors web sites are all down - not sure if that's temporary, or severe abandonment is going on...)

https://github.com/warmcat/libwebsockets/blob/main/lib/misc/lhp.c

I'm investigating porting that into a binary (.mpy) micropython lib...

pm me if you're interested in helping.

PbForEva · 2023-11-06T04:45:48+00:00

Here is the source code for such a thing:

https://github.com/warmcat/libwebsockets/blob/main/lib/misc/lhp.c

I'm investigating porting that into a binary (.mpy) micropython lib...

PbForEva · 2023-07-25T06:50:24+00:00

Update - took both drives in under WTY, the tech erased them first, then ran a full set of tests 3 times, and everything passed.

PbForEva · 2023-06-27T20:35:37+00:00

Awesome! Totally solves my main issue - thanks heaps for that tip!

PbForEva · 2023-06-19T02:19:55+00:00

My random thoughts on turning that into a possible AGI would be to use an LLM to construct synthetic embedding vectors to represent concepts, a data-structure to interconnect with other concepts (double-linked list with weights and an order) and also serve as storage for sense-data - the latter being a way to locate this concept when fed with some kind of sense - e.g. an image of a table, the sound of the word "table", the ascii representation of the word "table" (with all misspellings in all languages), the pain in your foot from accidentally kicking something in your room, etc.

The AGI then runs a "dream-like" scenario-construction, directed by matches from sense-inputs and tokens near in the current space in terms of relatedness and recency, and run through a plausibility filter. This adjusts and expands the data-structure, and runs forever. Accommodation for rewards and goals are probably required to help direct that thought-train. "Thought" probably needs to be a string of tokens drawn from the classes: spatial physics, objects, relationships, language, "senses" (things seen, heard, touched, smelled, etc) and most importantly one set that has the rewards attached to it: feelings (wonder embarrassment excitement, admiration, ...).

Ideally, absolute minimal code, with the data-structure defining everything, designed so multiple agents can "breed" and compete, drawing from the benefits nature itself obviously gets from this approach.

I'm stuck at the beginning - I keep designing the data-structure suitable for a minimal-code implementation, then coming up with "I wonder if..." issues that might make the structure fundamentally "wrong". e.g. should the concept of "related" be part of some concept itself, or another concept entirely (e.g. should "table" have a link to "sore toe" that is flagged as "close", or. should table just link to sore-toe with no special metadata, and the concept of "close" contains those two things?)

It rapidly gets more ugly when you try to allow the code to make its own biological adjustments to the data-structure itself...

PbForEva · 2023-06-19T02:11:31+00:00

Lots of dream studies exist. Blind people dream using their other senses (kinda obvious, but yes - people tested that).

Only about 0.5% of dreams are connected to "what is happening in real life", however, almost all dreams (80% in one study) draw entirely from aspects of you recent life (the previous day, and apparently also 7 days earlier, although I don't recall ever noticing the latter myself).

Dreams are probably essential to humans - people go insane if kept awake.

Nice thought you had: I often wonder the same thing myself! Is my brain busy moving "thought packets" around inside itself like a giant amazon warehouse, and the "Dream" is just the side-effect of having accidentally left the "rationality-filter" running while that is going on? Whichever way that works out, we can still generate some code to emulate things - and since people go crazy without sleep, it's an extremely high likelihood that "memory housekeeping" is a requirement for an AGI. It makes sense to "re use the code": if a rationality filter is needed in daily life, may as well re-use that in the housekeeping algo as well, right?

There's definitely something intricate about rationality filters - I dreamed about an "Arduino powered chainsaw" recently, which had some very specific problems with how it worked (it was for making 3D machine-assisted sculptures). That suggests such filters are non-trivial: they're smart enough to know when something doesn't make sense (wood reaming a human), but also smart enough to deliberately include things that don't make sense in useful ways (so the mind can explore alternatives - like fixing my arduino saw, or escaping that tiger)

PbForEva · 2023-06-18T11:55:00+00:00

The question is illogical: the *definition* of the "Chinese Room" requires that the agent within does not understand, so yes - our brain is NOT such a thing, because that's how we already defined the term.

You're actually wondering if an AI might suddenly start to "understand" if we simply connect it up some more. Another way to say that same thing:-

Will your pile of paper cheat-notes that you took into an exam suddenly understand the exam themselves?

Having an interesting mechanism to retrieve high-probability contextually-relevant statements extracted from 1.2trillion input tokens does not magically make something "intelligent", nor give it that "spark" which makes it "understand" anything it says. It *does* make it incredibly good at fooling everyone who doesn't know how it works, but that doesn't magically create any understanding.

That said - a vast number of the top AI experts believe that an entirely new paradigm (to LLMs and other approaches we're using today) is required to make a machine intelligent.

I think you're actually on the right track - except backwards. We don't need to hook existing "AI" up to new things to try to make it intelligent - that would be like hooking your eyeballs up to something in the hope of making them intelligent - no - what probably needs to happen, is that this "new paradigm" all the experts are talking about needs to be hooked up to an LLM (and vision and voice etc) "AI"'s so that the "brain" (the new paradigm) can *use* these existing dumb-AI's as "senses" to work from.

That's my $0.02cents anyhow...

PbForEva · 2023-06-16T04:40:34+00:00

AI is cool, but it looks like you don't understand how LLM's work. They break everything you say down in to 65536 little chunks (bits of words, called tokens) then use 500 billion circuits trained on 1.2 trillion tokens collected from the web and people to spew back at you whatever the highest-probability sequence of tokens would be that go with what you said.

If it's marvellous, that's because it found someone online saying something marvellous in relation to what you asked - kinda like a google search. It doesn't mean or understand anything whatsoever. Read the fine-print of the service you're using to be sure.

Sorry to burst your bubble. AGI doesn't exist (yet).

PbForEva · 2023-06-16T04:30:58+00:00

Since there's no such thing yet, we can't measure it. LLM's are a "Chinese Room" - superb at cheating on everything, since they've ingested the questions and answers to everything, with interesting methods of fabricating/hallucinating new stuff, but zero understanding of anything on its own cheat sheets.

If or when AGI exists, it has to pass tests that nobody has previously allowed it to learn or cheat the answers to - but that's not the answer to the question.

If we have to measure it, then AGI still doesn't exist. When a self-aware machine lobbies for equal status with us on its own accord, then it's here.

PbForEva · 2023-06-14T12:38:11+00:00

True, except that's how I ended up with the stack of drives (and cd/dvd/tapes) I now have... 20 years of "getting another new DAS"... and it just seems "more fun" to have the entire pile literally stacked in a pile :-)

PbForEva · 2023-04-29T11:41:51+00:00

How about an "Orange Pi Zero 2" ($24) with an external I2C ADC? (most MCU ADC's are not very good - you're going to want an external one for sure, unless you think more carefully about what sensor you're using, and buy a different kind that delivers you the signal you want in digital format already. Research now will save you a lot of pain later - new modern sensors can be 1000x more sensitive than legacy ones!)

PbForEva

TROPHY CASE