one night after finishing my gym workout, I was eating my dinner. Suddenly, my friend showed me a few messages that were posted on cc (my college's coding club, which is the most respected club in our college). for people who are not from SNUC or not in tech if a message pops up in cc, it's something very important and should be given proper attention. after a closer inspection on my friend's phone, i pulled out my phone and saw a message from a b.tech graduate sharing his blog. He wrote
This is my first ever blog post — would love it if you gave it a read!
and this is one of the swarm of whatsapp messages he spammed across all college groups
he did not even care to remove or hide the gemini logo, this level of carelessness on releasing a blog or sharing stuff to the entire college is great for clout but definitely not a smart thing to share it with people at cc. few gists and blogs emerged targeting him and the slop he is putting out. I did not give a flying duck about read through the ai-slop, but the only reason i glimpsed over the blogs is only because i got to know it was plagiarizing by homelab blog and i was checking for credits.
reason for rant
there are two soulful reasons for this rant of a blog, one being the author whose work was stolen by a blog-stealing-ai-slop-generating colleague and the second it got pointed out my one of my friend's blogs (check it out here)
and how do you know the blog is ai-generated ??
i am a FAANG OSS dev with multiple internships and freelance work across llmops (and a lot more), and i have a high level mental model on all sort of llm output and this was one of the easiest ones to classify, because of key traits like
- emoji titles
- redundant structuring of data and words across the blog
- em dashes (—)
- emojis on bulletins
- unnecessary camelcase and pascalcase
- excessively structured breakdowns of simple ideas
whats wrong with ai on blogs
There is nothing wrong with using AI to make your life easier. However, the idea of using AI to complete tasks entirely such as generating full blog posts exists on a different spectrum.
if you are not putting any effort into writing your blog why should i put my effort on read it
the next question that yall might ask me too is
what you yapping about, you too use ai for your work
yes, I do, but it’s confusing. A place where you’re supposed to share your creativity with seer thoughtput across the blogging realm is driving me mad. Quality > thoughtput
I am not arguing, its great tools to have to tackle your day to day work and its always to have the best tools in your tool box. but often times it tends the dull the human mind and people who agree me will not have great time consuming ai-gen-blogs.
leaving it here
i dont wanna expand and expose all the shameless stuff blog-stealing-ai-slop-generating colleague, but if the reader wants a deeper dive dissecting every nuance of this case-study check out blog.pranaovs.me
hacking 101
i was planning on finishing my blog here, but with basic IDOR (insecure direct object reference), i got root access to the dns service and blocked all the dns routes with basic dns poisoning. with basic regex skills and by using .* blocked all the domains in his DHCP and DNS.
also, i'll leave it at this. if you're running services on the internet, follow basic security hygiene, audit your configs, and don't treat other people's infrastructure as a playground. focus on learning security to protect systems, not to take them down.
with a bit of dns-poisoning, his entire network is down. surprisingly there is no upstream auth for most of his services, and it was a piece of cake to hack into his services, all just with basic networking and cs skills.
i don't want to share other root exploitation on the rest of the network here to conceal a degree of decorum.
it has been such a fun experience to remotely execute a 10.0 CVSS exploit on the target servers (thanks for that colleague).