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UTF-8 is a brilliant design

https://iamvishnu.com/posts/utf8-is-brilliant-design
67•vishnuharidas•1h ago•28 comments

EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

https://www.weplanet.org/post/eu-court-rules-nuclear-energy-is-clean-energy
229•mpweiher•1h ago•109 comments

Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/many-hard-leetcode-problems-are-easy-constraint/
290•mpweiher•4h ago•204 comments

QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

https://github.com/qgis/QGIS
96•rcarmo•2h ago•23 comments

Rust: A quest for performant, reliable software [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_-6KI3m31M
29•raphlinus•11h ago•0 comments

The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

https://www.tftc.io/treasury-iexpanding-patriot-act/
477•bilsbie•7h ago•370 comments

How FOSS Projects Handle Legal Takedown Requests

https://f-droid.org/2025/09/10/how-foss-projects-handle-legal-takedown-requests.html
35•mkesper•2h ago•4 comments

3D modeling with paper

https://www.arvinpoddar.com/blog/3d-modeling-with-paper
175•joshuawootonn•5h ago•28 comments

Humanely dealing with humungus crawlers

https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/humanely-dealing-with-humungus-crawlers
38•freediver•2h ago•6 comments

Vector database that can index 1B vectors in 48M

https://www.vectroid.com/blog/why-and-how-we-built-Vectroid
42•mathewpregasen•2h ago•15 comments

Advanced Scheme Techniques (2004) [pdf]

https://people.csail.mit.edu//jhbrown/scheme/continuationslides04.pdf
75•mooreds•3h ago•7 comments

Qwen3-Next

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=4074cca80393150c248e508aa62983f9cb7d27cd&from=research.latest-advancement...
478•tosh•13h ago•187 comments

Windows-Use: an AI agent that interacts with Windows at GUI layer

https://github.com/CursorTouch/Windows-Use
72•djhu9•3d ago•12 comments

Power series, power serious (1999!) [pdf]

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/19863F4EAACC33E1E01DE2A21...
7•signa11•2d ago•1 comments

How to Become a Pure Mathematician (Or Statistician)

http://hbpms.blogspot.com/
25•ipnon•3d ago•3 comments

Oq: Terminal OpenAPI Spec Viewer

https://github.com/plutov/oq
62•der_gopher•4h ago•9 comments

Building a Deep Research Agent Using MCP-Agent

https://thealliance.ai/blog/building-a-deep-research-agent-using-mcp-agent
43•saqadri•2d ago•9 comments

Doom-ada: Doom Emacs Ada language module with syntax, LSP and Alire support

https://github.com/tomekw/doom-ada
58•tomekw•4h ago•5 comments

VaultGemma: The most capable differentially private LLM

https://research.google/blog/vaultgemma-the-worlds-most-capable-differentially-private-llm/
39•meetpateltech•3h ago•10 comments

Racintosh Plus – Rackmount Mac Plus

http://www.identity4.com/2025-racintosh-plus/
103•zdw•3d ago•19 comments

Why do browsers throttle JavaScript timers?

https://nolanlawson.com/2025/08/31/why-do-browsers-throttle-javascript-timers/
15•vidyesh•1h ago•11 comments

Groundbreaking Brazilian Drug, Capable of Reversing Spinal Cord Injury

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/scienceandhealth/2025/09/groundbreaking-brazilian-...
10•_aleph2c_•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: DWS OS, a Plan 9 Inspired Web “OS”

https://dws.rip
38•tdubey•4h ago•8 comments

Chat Control faces blocking minority in the EU

https://twitter.com/TutaPrivacy/status/1966384776883142661
327•miohtama•6h ago•104 comments

A beginner's guide to extending Emacs

https://blog.tjll.net/a-beginners-guide-to-extending-emacs/
114•ibobev•4h ago•13 comments

K2-Think: A Parameter-Efficient Reasoning System

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07604
7•mgl•2h ago•2 comments

Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

https://www.nrk.no/vestland/xl/over-100-ships-have-sailed-without-legitimate-insurance-from-the-n...
190•aregue•5h ago•85 comments

Show HN: I made a generative online drum machine with ClojureScript

https://dopeloop.ai/beat-maker/
144•chr15m•10h ago•27 comments

Show HN: An MCP Gateway to block the lethal trifecta

https://github.com/Edison-Watch/open-edison
32•76SlashDolphin•4h ago•14 comments

Debian 13, Postgres, and the US time zones

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/09/11/debtz/
255•move-on-by•16h ago•129 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: An MCP Gateway to block the lethal trifecta

https://github.com/Edison-Watch/open-edison
32•76SlashDolphin•4h ago
Hi there, me and some friends were inspired by Simon Willison's recent post on the "lethal trifecta" (https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/ ) and started building a gateway to defend against it.

The idea: instead of connecting an LLM directly to multiple MCP servers, you point them all through a Gateway.

The Gateway:

- Connects to each MCP server and inspects their tools + requirements

- Classifies tools along the "trifecta" axes (private data access, untrusted content, external comms)

- When all three conditions are about to align in a single session, the Gateway blocks the last step and tells the LLM to show a warning instead.

That way, before anything dangerous can happen, the user is nudged to review the situation in a web dashboard.

We'd love for the HN community to try it out: https://github.com/Edison-Watch/open-edison

Any feedback very welcome - we'll be around in the thread to answer questions.

Comments

warthog•3h ago
Seen a hack using whatsapp mcp recently - this seems promising
aaronharnly•2h ago
"without risk", "solves", and "Guaranteed" are big words – you might want to temper them.
noddingham•2h ago
Agreed. If someone could help answer the question of "how" I'd appreciate it. I'm currently skeptical but not sure I'm knowledgeable enough to prove myself right or wrong.

But, it just seems to me that some of the 'vulnerabilities' are baked in from the beginning, e.g. control and data being in the same channel AFAIK isn't solvable. How is it possible to address that at all? Sure we can do input validation, sanitization, restrict access, etc. ,etc., and a host of other things but at the end of the day isn't it still non-zero chance that something is exploited and we're just playing whack-a-mole? Not to mention I doubt everyone will define things like "private data" and "untrusted" the same. uBlock tells me when a link is on one of it's lists but I still click go ahead anyways.

76SlashDolphin•1h ago
At least in its current state we just use an LLM to categorise each individual tool. We don't look at the data itself, although we have some ideas of how to improve things, as currently it is very "over-defensive". For example, if you have the filesystem MCP and a web search MCP, open-edison will block if you perform a filesystem read, a web search, and then a filesystem write. Still, if you rarely perform writes open-edison would still be useful for tracking things. The UX is such that after an initial block you can make an exception for the same flow the next time it occurs.
daveguy•1h ago
Well, I guess 80-90% protective is better than nothing. Better might be a lock that requires positive confirmation by the user.
76SlashDolphin•1h ago
It is possible to configure it like that - when a trifecta is detected, it is possible for the gateway to wait for confirmation before allowing the last MCP call to proceed. The issue with that MCP clients are still in early stages and some of them don't like waiting for a long time until they get a response and act in weird or inconvenient ways if something times out (some of them sensibly disable the entire server if a single tool times out, which in our case disables the entire gateway and therefore all MCP tools). As it is, it's much better to default to returning a block message, and emit a web notification from the gateway dashboard to get the user to approve the usecase, then rerun their previous prompt.
noddingham•1h ago
Thanks for the follow up. I can see the value in trying to look at the chained read - search - write or similar patterns to alert the user. Awareness of tool activity is definitely helpful.
76SlashDolphin•2h ago
Fair criticism! We wrote the Readme earlier on when we were still ironing out the requirements. I'll fix it up shortly.
doctoboggan•1h ago
Wouldn't the LLM running in the gateway also be susceptible to the same jailbreaks?
76SlashDolphin•1h ago
That's a good question! We do use an LLM to categorise the MCP tools but that is at "add" or "configure" time, not at the time they are called. As such we don't actively run an LLM while the gateway is up, all the rules are already set and requests are blocked based on the hard-set rules. Plus, at this point we don't actually look at the data that is passed around, so even if we change the rules for the trifecta, there's no way for any LLM to be poisoned by a malicious actor feeding bad data.
8note•59m ago
couldnt the configuring LLM be poisoned by tool descriptions to grant the lethal trifecta to the run time LLM?
76SlashDolphin•52m ago
It is possible thay a malicious MCP could poison the LLM's ability to classify it's tools but then your threat model includes adding malicious MCPs which would be a problem for any MCP client. We are considering adding a repository of vetted MCPs (or possibly use one of the existing ones) but, as it is, we rely on the user to make sure that their MCPs are legitimate.
bradleybuda•1h ago
I think the "lethal trifecta" framing is useful and glad that attempts are being made at this! But there are two big, hard-to-solve problems here:

1. The "lethal trifecta" is also the "productive trifecta" - people want to be able to use LLMs to operate in this space since that's where much of the value is; using private / proprietary data to interact with (do I/O with) the real world.

2. I worry that there will soon be (if not already) a fourth leg to the stool - latent malicious training within the LLMs themselves. I know the AI labs are working on this, but trying to ferret out Manchurian Candidates embedded within LLMs may very well be the greatest security challenge of the next few decades.

76SlashDolphin•1h ago
Those are really good points and we do have some plans for them, mainly on the first topic. What we're envisioning in terms of UX for our gateway is that when you set it up it's very defensive but whenever it detects a trifecta, you can mark it as a false positive. Over time the gateway will be trained to be exactly as permissive as the user wishes with only the rare false positive. You can already do that with the gateway today (you get a web notification when the gateway detects a trifecta and if you click into it, you get taken to a menu to approve/deny it if it occurs in the future). Granted, this can make the gateway overly-permissive but we do have plans on how to improve the granularity of these rules.

Regarding the second point, that is a very interesting topic that we haven't thought about. It would seem that our approach would work for this usecase too, though. Currently, we're defending against the LLM being gullible but gullible and actively malicious are not properties that are too different. It's definitely a topic on our radar now, thanks for bringing it up!