How to Harden AI Instances for Privacy and Security

Background Last month, Cisco researchers detected over 1,000 Ollama instances within the first 10 minutes using Shodan scanning on 11434 port. Other services such as vLLM/llama.cpp/LangChain on 8000, LM Studio on 1234, GPT4All on 4891, are also identified. Later, Censys found 10.6K Ollama instances publicly available online, and 1.5K of these instances respond to prompts. That poses not only a great security risk of RCE, injection and poisoning, but also possible to expose private chat memory via unauthorized prompting. ...

October 18, 2025 · 6 min · Jun

Creating EPUB from Scanned PDF with MinerU and LLMs

As a book reader, I read over a hundred books each year and collect much more. The preferred format is absolutely EPUB, however, I can’t always get books in EPUB/MOBI especially for rare or old books. Usually, they are available in PDF if at all. Some of these PDFs are manually scanned in a barely readable condition. I wouldn’t blame on them since I’ve been doing that before and know that is not easy. What I need is a tool to convert the not so readable book into a readable one with OCR and LLM, that is MinerU. ...

September 16, 2025 · 4 min · Jun

My AI Learning Materials and News Feeds (Updated)

Forewords This is the 3rd time updating the lists, where I added a section of Prompt Engineering upon requests since it is a good starting point for those not into self-hosting nor theory. The term “Prompt Engineering” is a bit controversial but people will get better understanding after learning the listed materials. As a lifelong self-learner, I use all sorts of methods to learn new things, and AI is what I’m currently into. Although I’ve been using AI tools since 2022, my background wasn’t focused on AI. So, like everyone else, I had to do some “AI For Dummies” level study in order to get more involved. Below is a list of learning materials that I find very helpful for myself to get started with and might also be helpful for someone else in the same situation. ...

July 8, 2025 · 6 min · Jun

Revisiting Voice Cloning with GPT-SoVITS and so on

Forewords My last article on voice cloning is more than a year ago, and here we are again for adopting some latest advancement. Refering to some Chinese source such as this blog and this video, I was attempting to adopt new tools for my audio book service, such as CosyVoice, F5-TTS, GPT-SoVITS, and fish-speech. But before we start, I recommend to: Install miniconda for dependency sanity wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh && sudo chmod +x Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh && bash Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh Setup PyTorch environment as needed and confirm with python -m torch.utils.collect_env ...

June 11, 2025 · 8 min · Jun

Migrating Harbor instance from Linux to WSL2

In the past, I have covered how to set up Ubuntu in WSL2 and hosting local LLMs with Harbor, now I want to migrate my Harbor instance from baremetal Linux into WSL2 so that I don’t have to set it up from scratch. First thing to do is to open firewall port netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=33811 listenaddress=0.0.0.0 connectport=33801 connectaddress=172.xx.xxx.xxx On Linux hardware: copy Harbor files from /home/username/Harbor /home/username/.ollama On Windows hardware: connect the USB drive containing Harbor files and run ...

May 26, 2025 · 1 min · Jun