alt Hacker NewsThe Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
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For anyone not familiar with the concept of "dark forest":
> […] In Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, the author proposes a literary explanation for the Fermi paradox in which countless alien civilizations exist, but are both silent and paranoid, destroying any nascent lifeforms loud enough to make themselves known.[181] This is because any other intelligent life may represent a future threat. As a result, Liu's fictional universe contains a plethora of quiet civilizations which do not reveal themselves, as in a "dark forest"...filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost".[182][183][184] This idea has come to be known as the dark forest hypothesis.[185][186][187]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is...
> The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life such as theirs as an inevitable threat and thus destroy any nascent life that makes itself known. As a result, the electromagnetic radiation surveys would not find evidence of intelligent alien life.[8][9] […]
> The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest,[11] as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts".[12][13] According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilisation can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
* Kurzgesagt (10m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE
(Cixin's novel probably made the idea famous, but others (Brin, Bear) have explored it previously.)
The “dark forest” vibe feels real, but it’s less sci‑fi and more boring economics: scraping is cheap, attribution is hard, and trust is fragile. I worry the default outcome is everything drifting toward logins/CAPTCHAs/walled gardens—not because people want that, but because “public + unmetered” turns into “free training data + abuse surface.” Feels like we need better primitives for proof-of-origin (signing/publisher identity) and some kind of tiered access for bulk crawling. Anyone seen a non-centralized approach that could actually get adoption?
This entire page is a sales pitch, but it doesn't really cover how things are hidden or how much that costs.
How does it compare to tor hidden services?
If you want something a bit more "serious" on this, check out The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Bogna Konior. [0]
[0] https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-fo...
Not quite. Cixin Liu’s series had a premise of dramatic asymmetry.
AI in our context is the inverse. Everyone can spend “credits” to get a supergenius coder.
Apparently the formal specification of OpenNHP was submitted as an IETF Internet-Draft in January:
Some time around 2010 I update th virus and Trojan definitions on a windows 95 machine that wasn't really used beyond 2004. It had every free scanner one could download. They found over 1500 things. Apparently someone ran a trojan generator on my machine. I don't know when they all became known trojans or if it found all of them but when the box was in use the scanners found nothing.
God knows what is sleeping on our machines today.
I once hear there are very very expensive tools with luxurious gui's that bundle bags of fresh exploits and receive new ones over the tubes.
The guy told me that most of the code involved cleaning up after it self.
I think the AI will only run known exploits? Its nice to find those but if anyone really wants in it's just a matter of money.
I'm curious what applications we can bake into hardware. You can't insert malicious bread into a toaster to gain access to other things.
Maybe the answer isn’t faster response, but removing default visibility altogether.
Analogies - new setting: 20%
PentAGI just launched an open-source AI penetration testing tool.
Anthropic just launched Claude Code Security.
AI is entering cybersecurity — permanently.
But here’s the uncomfortable question:
What happens when attackers automate faster than defenders react?
This entire page seems incredibly cheaply machine generated, including the text and images. If you want to make a case for your product, you should at least make it look like some effort went into this.