Ready, Fire, Aim/Rev 3

Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

This pix shows it all. Agent Orange, drifting off toward the land of dementia or Alzheimer's and Captain America, looking patently ridiculous in trying to show the world's he's in total control, indirectly points out the fact this administration's not only evil but also blindingly incompetent to the max, this time in using Signal to tell senior officials top secret details of an op done against the Houthis, a group proving to be truly innovative in waging asymmetrical war against the west and US in the Red Sea by supporting the Palestinians in the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the Israelis in Gaza.   

Houthi supporters in Sanaa protesting against Israel's blockade of aid deliveries to Gaza

It's not just the Situation Room or Signal — senior Trump administration officials bypassed a range of secure government systems when they decided to discuss plans for an upcoming attack in Yemen on a commercially available app.

Axios spoke to one current senior U.S. official and five former senior U.S. officials — all of whom have taken part in communications around similarly sensitive overseas operations — about the secure channels through which these conversations are supposed to happen, why turning to Signal could seem appealingly expedient, and why doing so is potentially dangerous.

What they're saying: "It's shocking. It's shocking negligence," a former senior defense official said. "We've got the best secure communication systems in the world — of any country — so why are we using a rickety, commercially available system?"

The former official said Signal is "not even in the same universe" as the Pentagon's JWICS intranet, through which some of the country's most delicate intelligence is shared.

Why incompetence & lying rule in the land of Trump.

• White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the app
  "the most secure and efficient way to communicate."
• But security experts consider communicating via Signal, particularly from a personal device, far less secure than using a classified government channel.
• The White House and National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment.

Those conversations didn't need to happen on Signal, or on personal mobile devices. The current official noted that many of the officials on the Signal chat have SCIF's in their homes, making moving to a classified setting relatively straightforward.

Note. Signal's a great app, this is not the issue, security is.

A darker reason for using Signal may be the time frame for messages to be retained. 

To whit. 

Signal allows users to set messages to disappear after a period of time, ranging from seconds to four weeks, while secure military communication systems have data retention policies that vary based on the sensitivity of the information and legal requirements, potentially retaining data for much longer periods. 

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

Signal:

Disappearing Messages Feature:

Signal offers a "disappearing messages" feature, allowing users to set a timer for messages to be automatically deleted from all participants' devices. 

Timeframe Options:

Users can choose a timeframe for messages to disappear, ranging from a few seconds to up to four weeks. 

User Control:

The user has control over when and for how long messages are retained. 

Potential Concerns:

This feature raises concerns about compliance with federal record-keeping laws and the potential loss of critical intelligence. 

Secure Military Communication Systems:

Data Retention Policies:

Military communication systems have data retention policies that are designed to ensure the preservation of critical information and compliance with legal requirements.

Longer Retention Periods:

These systems may retain data for much longer periods than Signal's disappearing messages feature, potentially years or even decades, depending on the nature of the information.

Security and Compliance:

These systems are designed to ensure the secure storage and retrieval of sensitive information.

Customizable Policies:

Data retention policies can be customized based on the specific needs of the military or government agency. 

Any questions?

Ready, Fire, Aim/Rev 2

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Can't these idiots do anything right? Seems war plans against the Houthis went prime time according to The Atlantic. If so, ready, fire, aim applies yet again.

Territory controlled by the Houthi movement shown in dark green

The poorest nation in the Middle East is doing a number on the US in ways thought impossible until now as asymmetrical war, driven by drones, is now how war is conducted in the year of our lord 2025.

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

Addendum: 

The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.

The orange menace's also ineffective ...

Stealing is ok, if you're Open AI

Image by Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance via Getty / Futurism

If you want Open AI's tech to work, you gotta let us steal crap without paying, which points out the fact AI's evolving so quickly that the amount of content produced by us rubes no longer suffices. 

As Ars Technica reports, the Sam Altman-led company is begging president Donald Trump to instate federal regulations defining "fair use," the thorny standard at the heart of the copyright lawsuits lobbed against OpenAI by The New York Times and other companies.

This policy proposal to the White House's Office of Science and Technology comes amid increasing momentum on the state level to regulate AI. In the lengthy document the president probably will not read himself, OpenAI said that it could not compete with China — which the company insists on calling the People's Republic of China, or PRC for short, throughout — if regulations stymie AI access to copyrighted works for training data.

Channeling Meta's model applies.

Q Day

Illustration: Nicholas Law

Ah, viable quantum computing, the long sought after holy grail, is worth pursuing no matter the cost as said tech not only goes beyond computation in terms of crunching numbers but also has the ability to model reality due to the superposition of qubits connected by entanglement, the prime driver to an existence in which we all share. With this being said, there's always a cost to everything, in this instance, privacy as QCs are uniquely qualified to deal with the issue of primes as prime numbers are the building blocks of cryptography, the mathematical construct on which privacy depends.

The general definition of a qubit as the quantum state of a two-level quantum system.

To whit ...

Suppose you ask a classical computer to solve a simple math problem: Break the number 15 into its smallest prime factors. The computer would try all the options one by one and give you a near-instantaneous answer: 3 and 5. If you then ask the computer to factor a number with 1,000 digits, it would tackle the problem in exactly the same way—but the calculation would take millennia. This is the key to a lot of modern cryptography.

Take RSA encryption, developed in the late 1970s and still used for securing email, websites, and much more. In RSA, you (or your encrypted messaging app of choice) create a private key, which consists of two or more large prime numbers. Those numbers, multiplied together, form part of your public key. When someone wants to send you a message, they use your public key to encrypt it. You’re the only person who knows the original prime numbers, so you’re the only person who can decrypt it. Until, that is, someone else builds a quantum computer that can use its spooky powers of parallel computation to derive the private key from the public one—not in millennia but in minutes. Then the whole system collapses.

The algorithm to do this already exists. In 1994, decades before anyone had built a real quantum computer, an AT&T Bell Labs researcher named Peter Shor designed the killer Q-Day app. Shor’s algorithm takes advantage of the fact that quantum computers run not on bits but on qubits. Rather than being locked in a state of 0 or 1, they can exist as both simultaneously—in superposition. When you run an operation on a handful of qubits in a given quantum state, you’re actually running that same operation on those same qubits in all their potential quantum states. With qubits, you’re not confined to trial and error. A quantum computer can explore all potential solutions simultaneously. You’re calculating probability distributions, waves of quantum feedback that pile onto each other and peak at the correct answer. With Shor’s algorithm, carefully designed to amplify certain mathematical patterns, that’s exactly what happens: Large numbers go in one end, factors come out the other.

There are now hundreds of companies trying to build quantum computers using wildly different methods, all geared toward keeping qubits isolated from the environment and under control: superconducting circuits, trapped ions, molecular magnets, carbon nanospheres. While progress on hardware inches forward, computer scientists are refining quantum algorithms, trying to reduce the number of qubits required to run them. Each step brings Q-Day closer.

That bomb going off will only be the beginning. When Q-Day becomes public knowledge, either via grim governmental address or cheery big-tech press release, the world will enter the post-quantum age. It will be an era defined by mistrust and panic—the end of digital security as we know it. “And then the scramble begins,” says Demchak.

Illustration: Nicholas Law 

A heist for the ages ...

Image by Drew Angerer via Getty / Futurism

This pix of Zuck, depicted as a borrower of books extreme, kinda indirectly shows how the third luckiest man on earth does business. It's never enough, it's akin to cutting down all the trees in a forest in order to build houses nobody will live in because the potential for money overrides all, in this case, data, as LLMs needs this now rapidly dwindling resource in order to evolve. This need for data also shows, in indirect fashion, how inefficient the physical construct of AI truly is as digital is used to crunch analog, the data stream used by neural nets to interact with the real world in real time as researchers seem to be fixated on that model to enable AI to evolve as needs warrant. This is not sustainable but you already knew that, right?

The training compute of notable large models in FLOPs vs publication date over the period 2010-2024. For overall notable models (top left), frontier models (top right), top language models (bottom left) and top models within leading companies (bottom right). The majority of these models are language models.

For all the revolutionary change artificial intelligence promises, it also makes lofty demands. For starters, AI is extraordinarily power hungry. Generating all the electricity that AI datacenters consume takes forest-loads of energy, not to mention hardware and cooling infrastructure. That stuff all costs a lot, making AI a huge money pit. That's had a big effect on our economy, as the tiniest bit of AI hype can send huge shockwaves through Wall Street and beyond.

But AI's also greedy in less noticeable ways: namely, for your data.

The large language models (LLMs) that underpin products like OpenAI's ChatGPT, for instance, need to devour enormous datasets of written words to fine tune an algorithm to follow the rules of language. They're so hungry for raw data, in fact, that original material for these algorithms to gobble up is becoming hard to come by.

"We’re literally running out of text in the universe to train these systems on," said computer science scholar Stuart Russell back in 2023. Now in 2025, the well is all but drying up.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has inadvertently pulled the curtain back on what it looks like to ingest all that data.

In January, Meta lost a huge fight with a group of authors who sued the company for using their books to train its AI. The case uncovered the fact that Meta had illegally downloaded an infamous pirate library, LibGen, to procure millions of legally protected texts. Those books were then fed to Meta's LLM, Llama, after software engineers got approval from the Zuck himself. In other words, one of the largest companies in the world didn't even bother to pay for a single copy of each book it used to build its AI.

This week, The Atlantic compiled a search engine that could trawl the LibGen files and uncover which books, exactly, were scraped by Meta. The scope of Meta's data harvesting operation is extensive, spanning over 7.5 million books and some 81 million academic papers, on top of work published by museums, architects, and artists.

It's never enough is it.

Aperture

The time to Resist is now

A Tesla collision center in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Credit...Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun, via Associated Press

It's time to resist, to reenact the late 60's regarding Nam and map it to 2025 and the administration from hell including Musk, the self appointed president of a once great nation known as America. As a vet and citizen who gets SS, the anger I feel, along with millions of Americans, is through the roof as the very existence of our nation is at stake. Something has to be done and now. I have some suggestions that will take care of the problem but will not suggest as the desired solutions are not fit for public consumption.

Not every C.E.O. can do this

After he left the Pentagon, Musk turned to X to promise vengeance against people who damage Tesla vehicles in protest. My colleague Kate Conger, who is tracking how he uses his account as a megaphone, explains.

The posts — like much of what Musk does now — raised questions about his government role and how it intersects with his position as the leader of several major companies. While plenty of business leaders might demand an investigation into property destruction at their company, Musk may actually be able to influence law enforcement so that it prosecutes Tesla protesters.

It’s a level of power other executives simply don’t have. But Musk, through his proximity to the president, commands the extraordinary ability to issue federal directives, like demanding that federal workers send a weekly list of their accomplishments or that they return to a federal office instead of working from home.

Musk also re-shared a message from Trump that said “terrorists” had attacked Tesla. “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump had written.

And Musk posted a video in which he said, “If you read the news, it feels like, you know, Armageddon. I can’t walk past the TV without seeing a Tesla on fire,” and he re-shared other posts calling for investigations into the funders of protests against Tesla.

Musk also called for investigations into whistle-blowers who had leaked information about his Pentagon visit. “They will be found,” he wrote.

As Lt. Frank Slade says in Scent of a Woman, This is such a crock of shit!

The time to resist is now.

A civil war looms ...

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

Channeling Goebbels, Make a system look bad by crippling said system in order to eliminate it or privatize same as needs warrant, something DOGE is doing to Social Security by compromising one's ability to get or change SS settings according to one's needs. To your truly, outrage comes to mind as one, it's our money and two, compromising seniors not tech savvy or handicapped to get or control access to their money is cruel and indecent to the nth degree. 

In less than two weeks Social Security is set to enact major changes that threaten to upend services for many Americans, in order to fight fraud that amounts to a fraction of 1% of the agency's spending.

Why it matters: Social Security Administration veterans and powerful lobbying groups warn the changes, made at breakneck speed, may even foment more swindling.

The agency's internal documents caution the changes will effectively cut some Americans off from receiving benefits.

Former officials say the changes will overwhelm the agency's already stretched resources, with staffing at a record low and America's aging population rapidly rising.

Catch up quick: At a press conference on Tuesday, acting commissioner Lee Dudek said $100 million is lost each year to direct deposit fraud. To address it, the agency is curtailing its phone services.

Effective March 31, Americans won't be able to call and sign up for Social Security benefits, or make major changes to their accounts that require ID verification.

They either must use the internet or visit a field office, not an easy option for many of the people who most rely on Social Security.

By the numbers: $100 million in fraud represents about 0.00625% of the $1.6 trillion the government sends out each year in Social Security benefits.

A civil war looms ...

Update: A judge with guts puts a restraining order on DOGE regarding SS.

Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in a scathing ruling accused DOGE of launching a “fishing expedition” at the Social Security agency and failing to provide any reason why it needed to access vast swaths of Americans’ personal and private data.

Hollander said the “defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team” never identify or articulate a reason why DOGE needs “unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.”

Let's hope this is the beginning of the end of these bastards intent
on destroying a once great nation known as America.

The real purpose ...

Questions about the business interests of Elon Musk conflicting with his status as a presidential adviser and major Trump donor have persisted for weeks.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as income, ethnicity, political beliefs, or geolocation data) or data about people, mostly from public records but sometimes sourced privately, and selling or licensing such information to third parties for a variety of uses. This is the real purpose of Musk, to get and sell information and ... the higher the quality of content, the more money a data broker can get and WH data is some of the best around as anyone, with any degree of intelligence, would surmise. The collapse of Tesla's but a minor distraction as access to this data god send was his goal all along, something he got by bankrolling agent orange's campaign for a paltry 200 mil because now, he's the de facto controller of America's government thanks to Starlink's immense connect to the web along with the consummate stupidity of a now senile Trump, making Musk's ability to sell information to the highest bidder a fate accompli.

Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is now accessible across the White House campus. It is the latest installation of the Wi-Fi network across the government since Mr. Musk joined the Trump administration as an unpaid adviser.

It was not immediately clear when the White House complex was fitted with Starlink after President Trump took office for a second term.

Starlink terminals, rectangular panels that receive internet signals beamed from SpaceX satellites in low-Earth orbit, can be placed on physical structures. But instead of being physically placed at the White House, the Starlink system is now said to be routed through a White House data center, with existing fiber cables, miles from the complex.

White House officials said the installation was an effort to increase internet availability at the complex. They said that some areas of the property could not get cell service and that the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was overtaxed.

60 Starlink satellites stacked together before deployment on May 24, 2019

Thank you Richard for this insight. I owe you one. 

Why didn't I think of that?

Mitosis, Meiosis, Cell/Pixabay

Great ideas, or Why didn't I think of that? relates as great ideas are often hidden in plain sight, something most appropriate when researchers decided to gin intense immune responses to previously hidden cancers by invoking a "tumor-to-pork" strategy intended to induce the body to take care of the offensive intrusion based on trickery of a different kind, 

In a groundbreaking moment for cancer, Chinese researchers turned the immune response provoked by organ transplants to fight the leading cause of death worldwide.

According to Columbia University’s Department of Surgery, 10-20% of patients who undergo transplant surgery will experience at least one rejection. However, researchers in China ingeniously turned that negative into a positive by directing that powerful impulse to attack cancer cells.

Called a “tumor-to-pork” strategy, a new study published in Cell earlier this year demonstrated immense success in engineering a virus that tricked the human body into believing that cancer cells were pig tissue, according to the South China Morning Post, thereby triggering a hyperacute inflammatory response. The virus began attacking the tumor with a staggering 90% success rate, to the point of curing a patient with advanced cervical cancer.

How cool is that?

Alarm Bells ...

Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios

The train wreck known as the Trump Administration is beginning to impact
the well being of the nation with emphasis given to the economy at large.

To whit.

First, the good news: There is no solid evidence right now that the economy is in recession, or even particularly close to it.

The bad news is that warning bells of what is to come are ringing every which way.

The big picture: The cautions about the outlook keep piling on top of each other, including from surveys of consumers and businesses, corporate earnings, and financial markets.

It all suggests that the economic ground may — emphasis on may — be shifting beneath our feet.

But the evidence so far is all in the realm of anecdotes, or "soft data," not the kind of definitive, "hard data" evidence of a downturn that would make economists believe a recession is commencing.

Zoom out: A confluence of forces emanating from Washington is driving the vibe shift.

The threat of new tariffs far larger than those enacted in the previous Trump term is part of it, as is the erratic, on-again/off-again pattern through which they are being implemented.

Cuts to the federal workforce and government contracting may be leading some wary consumers to slow their spending (as is already evident in credit card data for the Washington, D.C. area).

It all adds a layer of uncertainty for companies trying to decide whether to engage in new capital spending or hiring.

Zoom in: On Friday, the University of Michigan's preliminary survey of consumer sentiment for March plunged for the third straight month, showing sharply lower expectations for the future among Democrats and Republicans alike.

Thursday, the S&P 500 fell into official correction territory — a 10% drop from its peak. (It rebounded sharply on Friday, however).

Leaders of businesses large and small are showing less confidence in the outlook, per surveys.

Warnings have percolated from airlines and retailers, including Dollar General and Walmart, about underwhelming consumer demand.

Announced layoffs reached their highest levels since the summer of 2020, when the pandemic was in full force — and highest for the month of February since 2009, per outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

Between the lines: Any one of these developments can, and generally should, be chalked up to the ebb and flow of data.

This equates to a hedge, does it not?

Cloud Line