The sheer elegance of hacking a law enforcement intercept architecture that's designed to make intercept traffic hard to track would be so irresistibly satisfying to any hacker that I don't see how they could say "Nahhh, too far."
Many years ago I wrote a functional spec for lawful intercept in a 3G data node. It was based on a spec for a different product, so it contained a lot of institutional knowledge of how lawful intercept works.
A key element of the design of lawful intercept is not to trust the company running the network. Otherwise employees of that company would become targets for organized crime influence, among what are probably a few other considerations. The network operator isn't told about intercepts, and the relatively low rate of traffic intercept, the node has to support up to 3% of traffic intercepted, at least that was the spec at the time, makes it relatively easy for that traffic to be hidden from network management tools. It's not supposed to show up in your logs or network management reporting.
Intercepts originate on LI consoles operated by law enforcement agencies. This sounds pretty good so far. Until a hacker breaks into an LI console. Now that hacker can acquire traffic with pinpoint accuracy, undetected by design.
I have always been skeptical of claims that network operators have eliminated salt typhoon from their networks. I do not believe they know when the exploit began. Nor can they tell if their networks are truly free of salt typhoon activity. There are multiple vendors of LI console software. It's a standardized interoperable protocol to set up intercepts. So there's no one neck to wring.
I worked in/with network ops at a big US telco. Some of the engineers have ideas on which nodes have these intercepts (and what they are) based on the call flows they monitor and the level of access they have to troubleshoot problems further. I can’t guess the details further since that wasn’t my domain, but that part of opsec wasn’t fully hidden.
It's pretty difficult to say what it's going to be three months from now. A few months ago Gemini 2.x in IDEA and related IDEs had to be dragged through coding tasks and would create dumb build time errors on its way to making buggy code.
Gemini in Antigravity today is pretty interesting, to the point where it's worth experimenting with vague prompts just to see what it comes up with.
Coding agents are not going to just change coding. They make a lot of detailed product management work obsolete and smaller team sizes will make it imperative to reread the agile manifesto and and discard scrum dogma.
Epstein was selling kompromat to Russia and others. But Russia would be bad enough. You don't have to be doing the gross stuff going on at his place to be a national security problem. He was selling influence ranging from minor personal indebtedness to the worst blackmail material. You don't have to be at the really icky end of that spectrum to have participated in degrading national security.
Bezos is "better" depending on if youu think more rational, less overly fascistic oligarchs are "better." I'm going to go see if they reviewed Melania's movie.
The amount to which supposedly engineering based rationales are applied to Elon's decisions is cult like behavior. Here's what's really going on:
That thing I called full self driving just to troll government regulators? Just make it work and don't complain about what I called it.
That rocket that's way too big for orbital payloads but can't go beyond orbit without sending 20 more rockets full of fuel? Just make it work. Occupy Mars!
The two car models that work and have a halo effect on the rest of the product line? I'mma cancel that! Just make the stupid truck we're keeping work!
We've all had a boss like that. I'm sure they salute each other.
Being omniconnected was his job, if you think he was being managed, and his business, to the extent he was freelancing and trading on his own account.
How do you become omniconnected? You offer people a good time. How do you have repeat customers? You offer them a too good time. Why the disgusting acts? Because mere sex isn't scandalous enough.
Sometimes you do it because you've been commissioned to do it to a specific person. Sometimes you do it on spec because you think you can sell it. There is no one goal or ideology or theme to it other than it's gotta be nasty enough to blackmail a target.
Population is a particularly good example: just decades ago it seemed like we were barreling toward an overpopulation crisis. I'm aware that some people think we're beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth long-term. But there seems to be a broad consensus that birth rates are declining everywhere without a food crisis or other immediately visible calamity.
Population appears to be on a droopy S curve. The preposterousness of those space data centers and the fact that we don't have a theory of consciousness makes it seem plausible that AI could also not continue to rocket ahead.
>The preposterousness of those space data centers and the fact that we don't have a theory of consciousness makes it seem plausible that AI could also not continue to rocket ahead.
The rate of datacenter construction in the last few years exceeds Moore's law and is almost certainly unsustainable. 'Only' 2x improvement every 2 years would seem relatively slow compared to what's happened recently.
However, I expect AI will continue to advance over the coming decades even once the bubble pops. They're clearly on to something with neural networks.
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