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by Someone1234 130 days ago
I don't follow that.

OpenClaw sits on top of a physical machine/VM you control, you give it (hopefully) limited/sandbox access to that machine's resources to act like-you, and it does useful things. OpenClaw's user interface is just a gateway, and is only as useful as whatever the machine/VM has under the hood.

So the "setting it up yourself [on a VM/machine you control]" is kind of core to the whole idea being useful, you take that away, and it is just another Chat-Bot? Making it more of an ChatGPT/et al competitor rather than OpenClaw.

1 comments

Installing it on your PC or laptop puts your personal data and ISP subscription at risk, while installing it in a hosted VM yourself requires a bunch of Linux security and networking knowledge or else you'll get pwned pretty much immediately (https://youtu.be/40SnEd1RWUU). So this service is giving you a VM already set up with a security baseline.
Is that what this does? All the link takes us to is an empty website about "Kimi Claw."

The entire crutch of the "Claw" concept is being able to directly reconfigure the VM/Machine to be "your" environment (to a point). A blank VM with nothing configured on it, is as useful as a cardboard bathtub.

Ultimately this link is a terrible intro to whatever this is.

Hm, that YouTube video made me think a bit, sure if you put it all like that, it does feel like a lot of stuff to get right, but whenever I do it, it takes about 30 minutes to lock down the firewall, do some port-scans to verify, punch a VPN through and hide SSH behind it. That way you're already protected from 99.9% of attacks, and then hope that that last tenth of a percent won't stumble upon you, and also that the VPN is secure enough, though I guess if that is breached it's not only you who's fucked. Also you need to look out that Docker doesn't destroy your firewall. I don't know, it doesn't feel like that much work, right? Maybe I'm just blind to it.
What you and I consider routine work, someone who works with mostly Webdev or might consider extremely difficult. There a lot of programmers who have never used a Linux shell, or know much about networking beyond TCP, or used Linux before outside of a uni class 20 years ago.