#state sponsored hacking

[kamrulislamsakib]

The Evolution of Hacking: From Cyberpunk Fantasy to Real-World Reality

Hacking has been a part of internet culture for as long as there’s been an internet to hack. For some, it’s a rebellious act—tearing down the walls built by corporations or governments. For others, it’s an artform, a way of playing with systems, seeing how far you can push boundaries. But what does hacking really mean today? And why does it still capture our imagination?

Historically, hacking has been portrayed as a dark art. Think back to movies like The Matrix or Hackers—hackers as antiheroes, taking down the system from the inside. But while these portrayals are often exaggerated, they did reflect a truth: hacking represents a desire to reclaim power and control. In a world where tech companies and governments collect personal data and monitor our every move, hacking is one way to level the playing field.

In the real world, hacking has taken on many forms. There’s ethical hacking, where people are hired to test systems for vulnerabilities, and there’s black-hat hacking, which involves illegal activities. But even those who engage in illegal hacking often see themselves as part of a larger rebellion against control and surveillance.

It’s easy to romanticize hacking, to see it as this cool, underground world of rebellious acts and revolutionary potential. But the reality is more complex. Hacking today isn’t just about taking down the man; it’s about finding flaws, building something new, or even just learning how things work beneath the surface. It’s about pushing boundaries, challenging authority, and questioning the systems that run our world.

And perhaps that’s the real reason hacking still resonates with so many people. It’s not just a skill or a rebellion—it’s a form of empowerment. It’s the ability to break free from the constraints placed on us, even if only for a moment.

In a world where everything feels so rigid, so controlled, hacking is the ultimate act of freedom. It’s a reminder that the digital world is malleable, that we can create our own paths through it, and that the rules are often made to be broken.

[frameconfessions]

I don't think the Technocyte Coda "boys" are the original On-Lyne boys. I think the originals are long dead and these things are cloned from leftover DNA like hairbrushes and things like that (like one of Amir's datamined emails mentions in the mall). We know the Orokin like trying to do longevity experiments and cloning experiments later on in the timeline and if Gregory V is Alad V's ancestor, the motivations would certainly line up.

[fullhalalalchemist]

URGENT: Congress about to pass a mass censorship and surveillance bill under the guise of "protecting children"

May 13 2023

The Senate has been in a "do something!" mode regarding children's online safety. They're using this as an excuse to push for widespread internet censorship and surveillance. The EARN IT Act, has a slimmer chance of passing with widespread opposition and some senators saying they won't vote for it. TLDR;The real threat is actually KOSA (s.1409), the Kid's Online Safety Act, which will mass censor and surveill the entire internet by giving all 50 state attorney generals the power to remove content that is "harmful" for kids, and force you to upload your govt ID online to access the internet. I'll explain how it works below the action items but it's absolutely urgent that anyone who likes having a free and open internet fights back. It's all hands on deck, because this has so much public support it's insane:

HOW TO FIGHT KOSA

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES & THE COMMERCE COMMITTEE

This is a link to the Senate Commerce Committee phone numbers and a call script to read off of. (202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline

Opposition is getting drowned, and these upcoming weeks will be heavy for lobbying and they're using young people to do it. We NEED to show these senators that young people are actually opposed to this and don't want it.

2. Sign these petitions

Open Letter Against KOSA

Petition 1

Petition 2

Petition 3

Petition 4

Resistbot: Text PHJDYH to 50409

3. Spread the word.

The opposition is getting absolutely drowned online. Dove has nearly 100k signatures to push for KOSA. Influencers on tiktok are pushing for this without ever having read the bill. Fucking Lizzo is sponsoring it. If you have twitter, reddit, tiktok, are in any community, SPREAD THE WORD, PLEASE.

Here is a linktree with all the above petitions for easy shargin: Link to linktree

HOW KOSA WORKS

First, KOSA pressures platforms to install filters that would wipe the net of anything deemed “inappropriate” for minors. This means instructing platforms to censor. We saw how these filters impacted websites firsthand with tumblr in 2018, with not only blocking all adult content but also sfw queer content such as suicide hotlines, art archives, wiping out entire blogs because they had queer fandom related posts, etc. Places that already use content filters have restricted important information about suicide prevention and LGBTQ+ support groups. KOSA would spread this kind of censorship to every corner of the internet. And who gets to decide what is and isn't harmful for minors? Oh don't worry, just every single state attorney general and the FTC, which is appointed by the president. You know, the same attorney generals that just banned gender-affirming healthcare under the guise that it "ruins mental health" of minors. This is why the Heritage Foundation was one of the first to sponsor the bill because they can use it to censor trans content, and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is it's co-author.

Second, KOSA would ramp up the online surveillance of all internet users by forcing websites to use age verification and parental monitoring tools. Yup, that's right. Now every single person who wants to access the internet has to upload their govt ID online to third party apps that get hacked all the time. You queer in a red state? You undocumented? You an activist? Have fun getting all your online activity and metadata attached to your govt ID.  

Over 90+ human and LGBT rights groups agree that KOSA is dangerous and updates to the 2023 version won’t and can’t address the big problems with the bill. This bill has MASSIVE bipartisan support, and the authors Blumenthal and Blackburn (yes, that Blumenthal that's pushing the EARN IT Act, and who also sponsored the RESTRICT Act and SOPA/PIPA if you remember) are using the tragedy of mothers who lost their kids to online harassment and young adults who've been traumatized online to lobby for it, and got Dove the company to use a bunch of influencers to push for this under the guise it prevents eating disorders...I wish I was lying. There are already 30 co-sponsors.

It is all hands on deck. I'm dead serious when I say if this bill is passed it is the beginning if not end of the open and free internet.

[nyancrimew]

so your bro was sent to the equivalent of a state-sponsored insane asylum prison for....hacking into places? Not even shit that would get you wanted by the us government but just corporations?

yes, but also im sorry but it's rly funny u assume that isn't exactly what gets u wanted by the us government, it's always just about corporate greed, what do u think the "justice" system is here to protect

[weyounbathwater]

A donkey with a man's name was found playing poker call that a card ass ian lmaoo wait whats happ

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🪱 trillcore Follow

Guys, that same admirer left me another bouquet of Kilmarian daisies in my quarters <3

#personal #dax rambles #wishing for her

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⚜️ kaiwinning Follow

Gentle reminder that your pagh femininity can be damaged by engaging in unclean behaviors, such as violence, contact sports, rectal copulation, and real person shipping. Please stay vigilant and protect your pagh in the name of the Prophets!

#kai speaks #religion #the prophets #pagh #pagh hacks

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⚾ captainsiskoofficial Follow

So, was anyone going to inform me that someone installed this ancient program onto the station's computer, or did everyone assume that I would eventually learn from Jake?

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🛸 nogging5 🔁 jakeykeykey Follow

📰 jakeykeykey Follow

🛸 nogging5 Follow

Jake, I'm starting to worry about your obsession with "ancient" humor....

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🛠️ chiefengineer1 🔁 moremorn Follow

🍺 moremorn Follow

🛠️ chiefengineer1 Follow

How are you doing that?

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🍞 bababariel Follow

It seems as though I have returned, but as an entity inside the station computer.

#there are a lot of us in here

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🐊 cardassianpride Follow

Vent. Don't reblog.

#How long has my ex wife been sleeping with my guls?! #I just caught her doing it with the new recruit #and she tried to tell me this shit about how since I do it all the #time then she can do it too? #and I tried to explain but she just said that we aren't #married anymore so I can't tell her what to do #the state of the cardassian family is in fucking pieces #cardassia is doomed in the hands of women like these #ugh I need to call *** ***** to feel better #vent

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💴 finance-advice Follow

To the last anon: no, the Grand Nagus will not give personal advice to anyone who makes under four million slips of latinum per fiscal year. This was outlined in the Nagus' own rulebook in volume 3, section 387, paragraph 910. You would know this if you had done your own research. Stop asking for more clarification or you will be audited.

#finance #commerce #cw audit #mod b

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🍾 kanar-gul Follow

Repair station pussy really hit different

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🐊 cardassianpride 🔁 cardassianpride Follow

All of these beautiful bajoran women ready to serve the state make me fit to burst 😍😍😍

🐊 cardassianpride Follow

WRONG BLOG WRONG BLOG WRONG BLOG

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🍞 bababariel 🔁 quarkeyyy Follow

🧝 yourfriendlyvorta Follow

Hello, friends! What a wonderful opportunity for me to introduce myself using this, delightful, quaint social media experience! Let me, as the first Dominion representative on this platform, extend my warm welcome to the citizens of the Alpha Quadrant!

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[arandomcat1717]

Coming to you live from Octo Valley....iiits the Octo Sisters!!

Aka a splatoon AU in which Octavio got the kids in the divorce. Additional lore and doodles and stuff below the cut :)

Callie and Marie are still pop idols and host the news, except they're state sponsored and a lot of what they produce is heavy propaganda. They're also both highly ranked members of the army. They are very much beloved by Octarian citizens.

Octavio is their grandfather and he totally dotes on them. He's also their producer. (Craig is also still their grandfather, but they don't know that)

They regularly hack into Inkling news broadcasts to try and disrupt the Inklings and "instill fear and chaos". This mostly just gains them a cult following obsessed with discovering the "truth" (Almost no one actually believes they're Octarians, just that it's some weird publicity stunt)

They know Marina very well, almost being like big sister figures to her. Callie knows Acht, they met when she was sneaking out to temporarily get away from her responsibilities. It's kinda a childhood friends-to-lovers type situation.

In the Splat1 story, after Craig gets kidnapped, Callie and Marie still take up the role of guides to Agent 3 (Agent 1 in this story), hiding the fact they're Octolings. They lead Agent 3 into increasingly dangerous and suspicious situations, eventually culminating in a boss fight. The two of them also help out Octavio in the final boss

That's as far as I'll go with the story for now, but I do have a pretty substantial one thought out. If anyone is interested, then maybe I'll write it out :)

[elventhespian]

So with the pandora's box of AI being released into the world, cybersecurity has become kind of insane for the average user in a way that's difficult to describe for those who aren't following along. Coding in unfamiliar languages is easier to do now, for better and worse. Purchasable hacking "kits" are a thing on the dark web that basically streamline the process of deploying ransomware. And generative AI is making it much easier for more and more people to obscure their intentions and identities, regardless of their tech proficiency.

The impacts of this have been Really Bad in the last year or two in particular. For example:

(I'm about to link to sources, and you better be hovering and checking those links before clicking on them as a habit)

Ransomware attacks have become increasingly lucrative for private and state-sponsored hacking groups, with at least one hack recently reported to have resulted in a $75 MILLION payout from the victim. This in combination with the aforementioned factors has made it a bigger and bigger risk for companies and organizations holding your most sensitive data.

In the US, the Salt Typhoon hack over the past year or so has compromised virtually all major phone networks--meaning text and phone calls are no longer secure means of communication. While this won't affect most people in day-to-day, it does make basically all the information you share over traditional phone comms very vulnerable. You should avoid sharing sensitive information over the phone when you can.

CISA updated their security recommendations late last year in response to this compromise. One of the recommendations is to use a separate comms app with end-to-end encryption. I personally prefer Signal, since it's open source and not owned by Meta, but the challenge can be getting people you know on the same service. So... have fun with that.

2FA is no longer as secure as it was--because SMS itself is no longer secure, yeah, but even app-based 2FA has been rendered useless in certain circumstances. One reason for this is because...

A modern version of the early-2000's trick of gaining access to people's accounts via hijacked cookies has come back around for Chromium browsers, and hackers are gaining access to people's Google accounts via OAuth session hijacking. Meaning they can get into your already-logged-in accounts without passwords or 2FA even being needed to begin with. This has been achieved both through hackers compromising chrome browser extensions, and via a reinvigorated push to send out compromising links via email.

Thanks to AI, discerning compromised email is harder now. Cybercriminals are getting better at replicating legitimate email forms and website login screens etc., and coming up with ways to time the emails around times when you might legitimately expect them. (Some go so far as to hack into a person's phone to watch for when a text confirmation might indicate a recent purchase has been made via texted shipping alerts, for example)

If you go to a website that asks you to double-click a link or button--that is a major red flag. A potential method of clickjacking sessions is done via a script that has to be run with the end user's approval. Basically, to get around people who know enough to not authenticate scripts they don't recognize, hackers are concealing the related pop ups behind a "double-click" prompt instruction that places the "consent" prompt's button under the user's mouse in disguised UI, so that on the second click, the user will unwittingly elevate the script without realizing they are doing it.

Attachments are also a fresh concern, as hackers have figured out how to intentionally corrupt key areas of a file in a way that bypasses built-in virus check--for the email service's virus checker as well as many major anti-virus installed on endpoint systems

Hackers are also increasingly infiltrating trusted channels, like creating fake IT accounts in companies' Office 365 environment, allowing them to Teams employees instead of simply email them. Meaning when IT sends you a new PM in tools like Zoom, Slack, or Teams, you need to double-check what email address they are using before assuming it's the real IT person in question.

Spearphishing's growing sophistication has accelerated the theft of large, sensitive databases like the United/Change Healthcare hacks, the NHS hack & the recent Powerschool hack. Cybercriminals are not only gaining access to emails and accounts, but also using generative AI tools to clone the voices (written and spoken) of key individuals close to them, in order to more thoroughly fool targets into giving away sensitive data that compromises access to bigger accounts and databases.

This is mostly being used to target big-ticket targets, like company CSO's and other executives or security/IT personnel. But it also showcases the way scammers are likely to start trying to manipulate the average person more thoroughly as well. The amount of sensitive information--like the health databases being stolen and sold on the darkweb--means people's most personal details are up for sale and exploitation. So we're not too far off from grandparents being fooled by weaponized AI trained off a grandchild's scraped tiktok videos or other public-facing social media, for example. And who is vulnerable to believing these scams will expand, as scammers can potentially answer sensitive questions figured out from stolen databases, to be even more convincing.

And finally, Big Tech's interest in replacing their employees with AI to net higher profits has resulted in cybersecurity teams who are overworked, even more understaffed they already were before, and increasingly lacking the long-term industry experience useful to leading effective teams and finding good solutions. We're effectively in an arms race that is burning IT pros out faster and harder than before, resulting in the circumvention of crucial QA steps, and mistakes like the faulty release that created the Crowdstrike outage earlier last year.

Most of this won't impact the average person all at once or to the same degree big name targets with potential for big ransoms. But they are little things that have combined into major risks for people in ways that aren't entirely in our control. Password security has become virtually obsolete at this point. And 2FA's effectiveness is tenuous at best, assuming you can maintain vigilance.

The new and currently best advice to keeping your individual accounts secure is to switch to using Passkeys and FIDO keys like Yubikeys. However, the effectiveness of passkeys are held back somewhat as users are slow to adopt them, and therefore websites and services are required to continue to support passwords on people's accounts anyway--keeping password vulnerabilities there as a back door.

TLDR; it's pretty ugly out there right now, and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. Because even with more sophisticated EDR and anti-virus tools, social engineering itself is getting more complex, which renders certain defensive technologies as somewhat obsolete.

Try to use a passkey when you can, as well as a password locker to create strong passwords you don't have to memorize and non-SMS 2FA as much as possible. FIDO keys are ideal if you can get one you won't lose.

Change your passwords for your most sensitive accounts often.

Don't give websites more personal info about yourself than is absolutely necessary.

Don't double-click links or buttons on websites/captchas.

Be careful what you click and download on piracy sources.

Try to treat your emails and PMs with a healthy dose of skepticism--double-check who is sending them etc for stealthily disguised typos or clever names. It's not going to be as obvious as it used to be that someone is phishing you.

It doesn't hurt to come up with an offline pass phrase to verify people you know IRL. Really.

And basically brace for more big hacks to happen that you cannot control to begin with. The employees at your insurance companies, your hospital, your telecomms company etc. are all likely targets for a breach.

[mariacallous]

For a while in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. Its name was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer—a cabinet full of industrial-grade processors and specially designed chips, strung together with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the internet.

At a time when chess was still the main gladiatorial arena for competition between humans and AI, Hydra and its exploits were briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker published a contemplative 5,000-word feature about its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra “fearsome”; and chess publications covered its victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” human grand masters.

True to form as a monster, Hydra was also isolated and strange. Other advanced chess engines at the time—Hydra’s rivals—ran on ordinary PCs and were available for anyone to download. But the full power of Hydra’s 32-processor cluster could be used by only one person at a time. And by the summer of 2005, even the members of Hydra’s development team were struggling to get a turn with their creation.

That’s because the team’s patron—the then 36-year-old Emirati man who’d hired them and put up the money for Hydra’s souped-up hardware—was too busy reaping his reward. On an online chess forum in 2005, Hydra’s Austrian chief architect, Chrilly Donninger, described this benefactor as the greatest “computer chess freak” alive. “The sponsor,” he wrote, “loves to play day and night with Hydra.”

Under the username zor_champ, the Emirati sponsor would log in to online chess tournaments and, with Hydra, play as a human-computer team. More often than not, they would trounce the competition. “He loved the power of man plus machine,” one engineer told me. “He loved to win.”

Hydra eventually got overtaken by other chess computers and was discontinued in the late 2000s. But zor_champ went on to become one of the most powerful, least understood men in the world. His real name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.

A bearded, wiry figure who’s almost never seen without dark sunglasses, Tahnoun is the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser—the intelligence chief to one of the world’s wealthiest and most surveillance-happy small nations. He’s also the younger brother of the country’s hereditary, autocratic president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. But perhaps most important, and most bizarrely for a spymaster, Tahnoun wields official control over much of Abu Dhabi’s vast sovereign wealth. Bloomberg News reported last year that he directly oversees a $1.5 trillion empire—more cash than just about anyone on the planet.

In his personal style, Tahnoun comes across as one-third Gulf royal, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder, and one-third Bond villain. Among his many, many business interests, he presides over a sprawling tech conglomerate called G42 (a reference to the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which “42” is a super-computer’s answer to the question of “life, the universe, and everything”). G42 has a hand in everything from AI research to biotechnology—with special areas of strength in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech. Tahnoun is fanatical about Brazilian jiujitsu and cycling. He wears his sunglasses even at the gym because of a sensitivity to light, and he surrounds himself with UFC champions and mixed martial arts fighters.

According to a businessman and a security consultant who’ve met with Tahnoun, visitors who make it past his layers of loyal gatekeepers might get a chance to speak with him only after cycling laps with the sheikh around his private velodrome. He has been known to spend hours in a flotation chamber, the consultant says, and has flown health guru Peter Attia into the UAE to offer guidance on longevity. According to a businessman who was present for the discussion, Tahnoun even inspired Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, to cut back on fast food and join him in a quest to live to 150.

But in recent years, a new quest has taken up much of Sheikh Tahnoun’s attention. His onetime chess and technology obsession has morphed into something far bigger: a hundred-billion-dollar campaign to turn Abu Dhabi into an AI superpower. And the teammate he’s set out to buy this time is the United States tech industry itself.

In the multiplayer game of strategy that is the AI arms race, the US controls the board right now for a pretty simple reason. A single American hardware company, Nvidia, makes the chips that train the most competitive AI models—and the US government has moved to restrict who can buy these Nvidia GPUs (as the chips are called) outside the country’s borders. To take advantage of this clear but jittery lead over China, the CEOs of America’s AI giants have fanned out across the globe to sweet-talk the world’s richest investors—people like Tahnoun—into financing what amounts to an enormous building boom.

Lurking behind every synthetic podcast and serving of AI slop is a huge, thrumming data center: Hundreds of Hydra-sized server cabinets lined up in tight rows, running computing processes that are tens or hundreds of times more energy-intensive than ordinary web searches. And behind those is another set of data centers that train foundational AI models. To keep pace with demand, AI companies need more data centers all over the world—plus the land to put them on, the water to cool them, the electricity to power them, and the microchips to run them. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has predicted that tech companies will pour a trillion dollars into new AI data centers over the next five years.

Building out the next phase of AI, in short, is set to require mind-boggling amounts of capital, real estate, and electricity—and the Gulf States, with their vast oil wealth and energy resources, possess all three. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar have all set up major AI investment funds in the past couple of years. But as a home for new data centers and a source of investment capital, the UAE has emerged as a particularly attractive potential partner on a number of fronts—from its sheer wealth to its brand-new nuclear power supply to the relative sophistication of its own AI sector.

But there’s a rub: Any American AI partnership with the UAE is, in some way, a relationship with Sheikh Tahnoun himself—and for years many of Tahnoun’s most important technology partners have been Chinese.

The pairing was only natural, given Tahnoun’s record as a spy chief with vast commercial interests in high-tech state control. Tahnoun spent the early 2020s forging deep business and personal ties with Beijing, to the point that some products sold by G42 came to be nearly indistinguishable from Chinese ones. A G42 subsidiary called Presight AI, for one, sold surveillance software to police forces worldwide that bore a close resemblance to systems used by Chinese law enforcement. The Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s footprints in G42 went even deeper. Early in the generative-AI boom, Huawei’s engineers moved freely through Abu Dhabi’s most sensitive tech facilities as they designed massive AI training centers.

But in August of 2023, Washington threw down a gauntlet. It restricted exports of Nvidia GPUs to the Middle East—the very hardware that Abu Dhabi needed to realize its own AI ambitions. No company using Huawei equipment would get access. So Tahnoun pivoted, hard. In early 2024, G42 announced it was severing ties with China and would rip out Chinese equipment. Chinese nationals began quietly departing Abu Dhabi’s tech sector.

At the same time, US and UAE leaders went into a fevered phase of mutual courtship. Scores of public relations consultants, lawyers, and Beltway lobbyists set about portraying Tahnoun as a safe pair of hands in which to place US technology and trust. Marty Edelman, the emirate’s most trusted American lawyer, helped orchestrate the strategy from New York. The UAE’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba, deployed his considerable political capital to vouch for Tahnoun. Meanwhile, US government and tech leaders tried to maneuver what promised to be a huge spigot of Emirati money into the United States, to feed AI companies’ need for investment.

The first sign that the two sides had reached an understanding was, bizarrely, a deal that flowed in the opposite direction. In an unusual agreement brokered largely by officials in the Biden administration, Microsoft announced in April 2024 that it was investing $1.5 billion in Tahnoun’s G42, acquiring a minority stake in the company. According to remarks by a Biden official who helped steer the agreement, the objective was to get G42 to “work with Microsoft as an alternative to Huawei.” In the first phase of the relationship, G42 would gain access to Microsoft’s AI computing power on its Azure cloud platform, at a data center inside the UAE. And Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, would join the board of G42—a kind of American chaperone inside the company.

The big gushers of cash from the UAE were still to come, as were any Nvidia chips for Abu Dhabi. But the Microsoft deal amounted to a US government seal of approval for further business with the Emirates. In the summer of 2024, Tahnoun embarked on a charm offensive across the United States, with a visit to Elon Musk in Texas and a jiujitsu session with Mark Zuckerberg. Meetups with Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos followed in quick succession. The most important meetings, however, took place at the White House, with figures like national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, and President Joe Biden himself.

As the frenzied campaign to reframe Tahnoun and G42’s image seemed to gain traction—and the US seemed poised to loosen export controls on advanced chips for the UAE—some inside the US national security establishment were, just as frantically, waving caution flags. One of their fears is that the intellectual property of the United States could still leak to China. “The Emiratis are the consummate hedgers,” a former senior US security official told me. “The question everyone has: Are they playing both sides?” In a July open letter, US congressman Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for “significantly more robust national security guardrails” to be placed on the UAE before the US exported any sensitive technology to the country.

But the other fear is of the UAE itself—a country whose vision of using AI as a mechanism of state control is not all that different from Beijing’s. “The UAE is an authoritarian state with a dismal human rights record and a history of using technology to spy on activists, journalists, and dissidents,” says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I don’t think there is any doubt that the UAE would like to influence the course of AI development”—in ways that are optimized not for democracy or any “shared human values,” but for police states.

This past summer, around the same time that Tahnoun was barnstorming through America’s dojos and C-suites, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was hosting some of the world’s leading technology thinkers—including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—at his vast South African hunting estate called Ekland. They visited game parks, were waited on by butlers, and discussed Saudi Arabia’s future role in AI.

Not long after, Schmidt made a trip to the Biden White House to air his concerns that the US cannot produce enough electricity to compete in AI. His suggestion? Closer financial and business ties with hydroelectric-rich Canada. “The alternative is to have the Arabs fund [AI],” he told a group of Stanford students on video the following week. “I like the Arabs personally … But they’re not going to adhere to our national security rules.”

Those concerns over the Gulf States’ reliability as allies (and their tendencies to engage in unsavory practices like targeting journalists and waging proxy wars) haven’t stopped their money from flowing into US tech companies. Earlier in the year, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign Public Investment Fund announced a $40 billion fund focused on AI investments, aided by a strategic partnership with the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Kingdom Holding, an investment firm run by a Saudi royal who is deeply obedient to the crown prince, has also emerged as one of the biggest investors in Elon Musk’s startup xAI.

The New York Times wrote that the new Saudi fund made that country “the world’s largest investor in artificial intelligence.” But in September, the UAE eclipsed it: Abu Dhabi announced that a new AI investment vehicle called MGX would partner with BlackRock, Micro-soft, and Global Infrastructure Partners to pour more than $100 billion into, among other things, building a network of data centers and power plants across the United States. MGX—which is part of Tahnoun’s sovereign wealth portfolio—has also reportedly been in “early talks” with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about what Altman hopes will be a 5 to 7 trillion-dollar moonshot chipmaking venture to create an alternative to Nvidia’s scarce GPUs.

The spigot of Emirati cash was now open. And in turn, within days of the MGX announcement, the news site Semafor reported that the US had cleared Nvidia to sell GPUs to G42. Some of the chips were already being deployed in Abu Dhabi, the news site reported, including “a sizable order of Nvidia H100 models.” The US had finally given Tahnoun some of the hardware he needed to build his next Hydra. Which raises the salience of two questions: What kind of game is Sheikh Tahnoun playing this time? And how exactly did he get control of so much wealth?

on some level, nearly every story about royalty in the Gulf is a story about succession—about paternalistic families trying to ward off external threats, and the internal rivalries that crop up when inherited power is up for grabs.

Tahnoun and his brother Mohamed are both sons of the UAE’s first president, Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan—an iconic figure revered as the father of the nation.

For much of Zayed’s life, what is now the city of Abu Dhabi was an austere, seasonal fishing village with a harsh climate, a brackish water supply, and a nomadic population of about 2,000 people. The rest of the emirate had several thousand more Bedouin inhabitants. As rulers, the al Nahyans were paid in tributes and taxes, and served as custodians of the emirate’s shared resources. Their lifestyle wasn’t all that much better than that of their fellow tribesmen. But still it was dangerous at the top. Before Zayed, two of the last four sheikhs of Abu Dhabi had been assassinated by their brothers; another had been killed by a rival tribe.

Zayed, for his part, seized power from his older brother in a bloodless coup aided by the British in 1966—just as oil and its transformative wealth started flowing into Abu Dhabi. Where his elder sibling resisted spending Abu Dhabi’s new fortune, Zayed embraced modernization, development, and a vision for uniting several tribes under a single state—setting the stage for the creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971.

When the UAE was formed, Tahnoun was almost 3 years old. A middle child among Zayed’s 20-odd sons, Tahnoun is one of the so-called Bani Fatima—the six male children of Zayed’s most favored wife, Fatima, and his most important heirs. Zayed groomed these sons to go abroad, become worldly, and take up the mantle of the UAE’s future. But even as he established a state that carefully distributed new oil wealth among Abu Dhabi’s Bedouins, Zayed steered his heirs away from business and self-enrichment. Perhaps mindful of the assassinations and coups that preceded him, Zayed wanted to ward off the perception that the al Nahyans were benefiting unfairly from their role as custodians of the country.

In the mid-1990s, Tahnoun found himself in Southern California. One day in 1995 he walked into a Brazilian jiujitsu dojo in San Diego, asking to be trained. He introduced himself as “Ben” and, according to an article on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Eastern Europe’s website, went out of his way to show humility, arriving early and helping to clean up. Only later did he reveal he was a prince of Abu Dhabi.

As Zayed’s health failed in the late 1990s, his sons began to step into bigger roles—and to break away from his guidance by starting businesses of their own. It was around this time that Tahnoun started his first holding company, the Royal Group, the entity he would use to incubate the Hydra chess computer. He also started a robotics company that produced a humanoid robot, REEM-C, which in turn was named after an island in Abu Dhabi where he made a series of real estate investments.

When Zayed died in 2004, Tahnoun’s eldest brother, Kha-lifa, became the new ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE, and Mohamed, the eldest of the Bani Fatima, became the crown prince. The other sons took on an array of official titles, but their roles were more ambiguous.

As a reporter based in Abu Dhabi from 2008 to 2011, I fell into the pastime of “sheikh watching,” a Gulf-royal version of Kremlinology that involves reading between the lines of announcements and moves, and keeping in touch with palace insiders who occasionally betray a few secrets. At the time, Tahnoun seemed like a fascinating dilettante very far from actual power—he held no serious role in the government and seemed preoccupied with growing his fortune, dabbling in technology, and changing the skyline of Abu Dhabi.

That all changed when Tahnoun stepped up as the family member with the greatest knack for wielding a growing tool for nation-states: cyberespionage.

In July 2009, thousands of BlackBerry users across the UAE noticed their phones growing dangerously hot. The culprit was a supposed “performance update” pushed by Etisalat, the UAE’s largest telecom provider. In reality, it was spyware—an early experiment in mass surveillance that backfired spectacularly when BlackBerry’s parent company exposed the scheme.

I experienced this myself one day on a trip from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, bringing my BlackBerry to my ear and finding it so hot it nearly burned my face. It was my first direct, personal experience of the UAE’s hidden police state. But shades of its existence are apparent to anyone who has spent time in the Gulf States. Violent crime is nearly nonexistent, and life can be smooth, even luxurious. But in moments of stress or risk, these countries can become very dangerous places, especially for residents who dare hint at dissent.

The revolutions of the Arab Spring in 2011—which saw four Middle Eastern autocrats topple in the face of massive, Twitter-organized crowds—only heightened the UAE’s resolve to stamp out any green shoots of democracy. When a handful of Emirati activists made their own mild case for human rights and political reform in 2011, the state convicted them on charges of royal defamation. Then it promptly pardoned and released them into a life of surveillance and harassment.

While there’s no evidence that Tahnoun had any direct involvement in the BlackBerry debacle, he would soon come to oversee an empire capable of far more sophisticated spycraft. In 2013, he was named deputy national security adviser—around which time the UAE’s ambitions to spy on its residents and enemies started to reach an industrial scale.

For several years at that point, the UAE had been running a secret program known as Project Raven, formed in 2008 under a contract with consultant and former US counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. The US National Security Agency had blessed the arrangement, meant to give the UAE state-of-the-art surveillance and data analysis capabilities to contribute to the war on terror. But around 2014, Project Raven took a new tack. Under the new management of a US contractor called CyberPoint, it recruited dozens of former US intelligence operatives with a simple pitch: tax-free salaries, housing stipends, and a chance to fight terrorism.

But fighting terrorism was, in fact, only part of the agenda. Within two years, the project’s management changed hands yet again to a company called Dark-Matter, effectively an Emirati state-owned firm. Emirati intelligence leaders placed Project Raven under their own roof—just two floors from the UAE’s own version of the NSA. The message to Project Raven’s employees: Join DarkMatter or leave.

For those who remained, the job included tracking journalists, dissidents, and other perceived enemies of the state and the royal family. Among the key American operatives who stayed on with DarkMatter was Marc Baier, a veteran of the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations unit. Emails later showed Baier chatting with the Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, describing his UAE clients as “the most senior” and demanding white-glove service as he shopped for hacking tools. Other former NSA hackers on the Project Raven team got busy developing custom attacks for specific devices and accounts.

They got to human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor—one of the Emiratis who had blogged in favor of democratic reform during the Arab Spring—through his child’s baby monitor. It was 2016, and Mansoor had grown used to his devices behaving strangely: phones that grew mysteriously hot, suspicious text messages, drained bank accounts, according to a person familiar with his experiences. His phone had even once been infected with Pegasus spyware, a notorious product made by the Israeli cyber-arms firm NSO Group. But the baby monitor was new. Unknown to him, operatives at DarkMatter were using it to listen to his family’s private conversations.

In another project, DarkMatter assembled what it called a “tiger team”—a task force to install mass-surveillance hardware in public places. These probes would be capable of “intercepting, modifying, and diverting” nearby traffic on UAE’s cellular networks, according to an Italian security researcher who was being courted by DarkMatter in 2016. “To operate as we want them to, these probes are going to be put everywhere,” the prospective hire, Simone Margaritelli, was told in an email during his recruitment process.

And who was ultimately overseeing all this activity? In early 2016, Tahnoun had been named national security adviser, which placed him fully in charge of UAE intelligence. And there are signs that the ultimate controlling party over DarkMatter was none other than Tahnoun’s investment firm, the Royal Group.

Eventually, I may have become a target of the UAE’s hacking apparatus myself. In 2021 a coalition of journalists called the Pegasus Project informed me that my phone had been targeted by the UAE using Pegasus spyware in 2018. At the time I’d been reporting on a global financial scandal that implicated a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family—Sheikh Tahnoun’s brother, Mansour. The UAE denied that it had targeted many of the people identified, including me.

The hacking and tracking of American citizens would eventually become a red line for some of Project Raven’s former intelligence agents. “I am working for a foreign intelligence agency who is targeting US persons,” a Project Raven whistleblower named Lori Stroud would tell Reuters in 2019. “I am officially the bad kind of spy.”

The ensuing scandal resulted in US federal charges for several of its ex-NSA leaders, including Baier. DarkMatter and Project Raven, meanwhile, were painstakingly broken down, scattered, rebranded, and then subsumed into other companies and government departments. Many of their pieces and personnel eventually moved under the umbrella of a single new entity founded in 2018—called G42.

G42 has denied publicly it had any connections to Dark-Matter, but the threads aren’t hard to see. One DarkMatter subsidiary, for instance, was an entity that worked especially closely with Chinese companies. Not only did it eventually appear to become part of G42, but the subsidiary’s CEO, Peng Xiao, went on to become the CEO of G42 itself.

A Chinese speaker who studied computer science at Hawaii Pacific University, Xiao’s past is otherwise a black box. Though he was a US citizen for a time, he eventually surrendered his US passport for UAE citizenship—an exceedingly rare honor for a non-Emirati. And under a subsidiary of G42 called Pax AI, Xiao helped produce the next evolutionary step in DarkMatter’s legacy.

One morning in 2019, millions of phones across the UAE lit up with a cheery notification. A new messaging app called ToTok promised what WhatsApp couldn’t—unrestricted calling in a country where the voice-calling function of most chat apps was blocked. Within weeks, it had shot to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app store even beyond the Emirates. But there was a catch. Each time someone tapped the app icon, the user gave the app access to everything on that phone—photos, messages, the camera, voice calls, location.

Data from millions of phones flowed to Pax AI. Like DarkMatter before it, Pax AI operated from the same building as the UAE’s intelligence agency. The ToTok app itself came from a collaboration with Chinese engineers. For a regime that had spent fortunes on NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware and DarkMatter’s hacking teams, ToTok was elegantly simple. People didn’t have to be laboriously targeted with spyware—they were eagerly downloading it.

Representatives of ToTok adamantly denied that their product was spyware, but an engineer who worked at G42 at the time told me that all of the voice, video, and text chats were analyzed by AI for what the government considered suspicious activity. (Among the easiest ways to get flagged: placing calls to Qatar, then a rival in a mutual cyberwar, from within the UAE.) G42 declined to comment on specific details for this story but responded to WIRED with an overall statement: “G42 is steadfast in its commitment to responsible innovation, ethical governance, and delivering transformative AI solutions globally.”

Inside G42, staff sometimes refer to Tahnoun as “Tiger,” and his orders can swiftly change the company’s course. One mandate from Tiger, according to a former engineer, was to build him either a business that generates $100 million in revenue a year or a technology that makes him famous. In the workplace, there is no mistaking that the conglomerate has one foot inside the security state: Most of the company’s technology and data centers are based in Zayed Military City, a restricted-access zone, and all G42 staff need to pass security clearances to get hired.

Through G42, government intelligence services, and other cybersecurity entities, Tahnoun had effectively come to oversee the UAE’s entire hacking apparatus. But at a certain point, control over the UAE’s spy sector and the industry around it wasn’t enough for Tahnoun.

By the turn of the decade, Tahnoun had ambitions for more political power over the whole of the Emirates. His sibling Mohamed had been serving as the de facto leader of the country since their brother President Kha-lifa suffered a major stroke in 2014. Now, as Khalifa’s health continued to fail and Mohamed’s formal accession to the throne was becoming imminent, the position of the next crown prince was up for grabs.

These moments of dynastic uncertainty can be dangerous. In Saudi Arabia, the sons of the country’s first king, Abdulaziz al-Saud, have taken the throne one after the other ever since the 1950s. By the time the current king, Salman, took power in 2015, he was 80 years old, and the ranks of potential heirs below him had become crowded, corrupt, and rife with internal tensions. That’s why, in 2017, King Salman’s son Mohammed, or MBS, struck out to eliminate his rivals—mostly cousins and their aides—by arresting them in a purge, asserting himself as the new strongman.

In Abu Dhabi, Tahnoun’s argument in the succession debate, according to royal insiders, was that his brother Mohamed should follow precedent and allow the sons of Zayed to rule while they were of good health and sound mind—a system that would place him in contention. But Mohamed was adamant that his own son Khalid should be crown prince, a signal to the country’s large youth population that they were represented high up in government.

Tahnoun argued his point for more than a year, even providing evidence that Mohamed’s plan contradicted their father’s request for succession. But in the end, the brothers worked out a deal. Tahnoun agreed to set aside his ambition to be the crown prince or ruler—in exchange for vast power over the country’s financial resources. It was this bargain that would ultimately put him in charge of $1.5 trillion in sovereign wealth.

In 2023, Tahnoun was made chairman of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the largest and most important sovereign wealth fund in the country. Khalid’s appointment as crown prince was announced weeks later.

Officially, Tahnoun got a modest bump in title to become deputy ruler along with his brother Hazza. But those dealing with Abu Dhabi over the past few years say the same thing: Tahnoun’s powers have increased by an extraordinary degree, and not just in finance. He has also taken over diplomacy with Iran, Qatar, and Israel, and even handled the United States for a time when relations with the Biden administration declined. “Whenever there’s a difficult file, it’s given to Tahnoun,” says Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a scholar of Gulf politics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. That skill has helped him “grow his power enormously,” Ulrichsen says.

As Tahnoun has gained access to new resources, he has plowed them into his maze of investments and conglomerates. Under the Royal Group, he controls not only G42 but also another conglomerate called the International Holding Company—itself a massive consortium that employs more than 50,000 people and owns everything from a Zambian copper mine to the St. Regis golf club and island resort in Abu Dhabi. He also oversees First Abu Dhabi Bank, which is the UAE’s largest lender, and another multibillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund called ADQ.

And now, with a growing position in the global AI arms race, Tahnoun’s empire also includes a stake in the future of humanity.

In December, the US government confirmed it had authorized the export of some Nvidia GPUs to the UAE—specifically to a Microsoft-operated facility inside the country. At G42, subsidiaries have kept multi-plying: Space42 focuses on using AI to analyze satellite imaging data; Core42 aims to build massive AI data centers across Abu Dhabi’s deserts.

Inside the US security establishment, many remain worried about the US tech sector’s increasingly close relationship with the UAE. One unsettling fact, according to a former security official, was that China made no protest over Tahnoun’s decision to tear out all of Huawei’s equipment and sever ties with the company in 2023. “They didn’t raise a peep,” the official told me. When Sweden banned Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from its 5G rollout in 2020, Beijing’s foreign ministry spoke out against it, and Swedish telecom giant Ericsson lost huge amounts of business in China in retaliation. By contrast, G42’s big breakup with China somehow got a pass—suggesting to the official that there may be some kind of backdoor understanding between the two nations.

In a statement to WIRED, US congressman Michael McCaul reiterated his concern that technology could leak to China through the UAE’s deal with Microsoft, and stressed the need for tighter guardrails. “Before advancing this partnership and others like it further, the US must first establish robust, legally binding protections that apply broadly to AI cooperation with the UAE,” he said.

But even if those guardrails were put into place, the UAE has a history of finding ways to do what it wants. I’m reminded of the briefings that executives from Israel’s NSO Group gave to journalists for a time in the early 2010s, assuring them that Pegasus spyware had safeguards against abuse—and that Pegasus clients (like the UAE) would be blocked from targeting US and UK phone numbers (like mine). And I’m reminded of the blessings that the NSA gave to Project Raven at its inception.

While Donald Trump and his new administration are expected to continue with export controls over GPU chips, the view from people inside Tahnoun’s orbit is that the new administration will likely be much more “flexible” about the UAE’s AI ambitions. Plus at least one Trumpworld insider has a vested interest in the relationship: The UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have together contributed more than $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, guaranteeing the fund some $20 million to $30 million in annual management fees alone. Abu Dhabi’s leaders have consulted with Kushner and other Trump insiders, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, on AI policy, according to people familiar with the discussions.

While the continued supply of GPUs could be a remaining source of leverage for the US, it could be a declining one as rival chips improve. Some analysts argue that, even now, export controls are not the source of strength that American officials think they are. “AI is not like nuclear power where you can restrict the materials,” says computer security expert Bruce Schneier. AI technology is already highly distributed, he says, and the idea that American companies are at a huge and absolute advantage is a mirage.

Now that Tahnoun has been “brought inside the tent”—and given a key and expanding role as an investor of choice for the current winners in the AI race—he has certainly succeeded in gaining some leverage of his own. And those who keep needing money from the UAE may be happy to see it gain more clout. At a World Government Summit last year, Sam Altman suggested that the UAE could even serve as the world’s “regulatory sandbox” for AI—a place where new rules for governing the technology can get written, tested, and advanced.

Meanwhile, the Middle East could be entering a period, like the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when rules are largely off the table. Now that rebels have taken over Syria from the regime of Bashar al Assad, the Gulf States—especially the UAE—will be anxious to increase surveillance to avoid any spread of Islamist unrest. “We’re going to see more repression, more use of surveillance technologies,” says Karen Young, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. And when it comes to managing threats and winning games of strategy, Tahnoun likes to make sure he’s playing with the most fearsome machine in the world.

[darkeagleruins]

CHINESE HACKERS BREACH U.S. TREASURY COMPUTERS:

Chinese state-sponsored hackers reportedly infiltrated the U.S. Treasury Department in December, compromising systems, including devices belonging to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her deputies.

Hackers accessed fewer than 50 files on Yellen’s machine.

The breach occurred via BeyondTrust, a third-party cybersecurity provider, marking what Treasury officials labeled a "major incident." China denied involvement, stating it opposes hacking in all forms.

This breach highlights rising cybersecurity tensions between the U.S. and China, raising concerns over safeguarding sensitive government systems.

Source: Newsmax

[vague-humanoid]

Sci-hub is the piratebay of academic journal articles. Its service is mostly illegal because it collects paywalled articles and makes them publicly available online via an indexed search. This is copyright infringement. People love it. The coverage is incredible, many journals have over 98% of their articles covered.

Frustrated with a lack of access to scientific articles, Alexandra Elbakyan of Kazakhstan founded the Sci-hub repository as a 20-year-old graduate student. Her site subsequently provided more open access to scientific knowledge than anyone in the history of science. She was named a person of the year in 2016 by Nature; yes, that Nature of the mega-profit-publisher Springer Nature who promotes open access by charging a 10 grand APC.

Reminiscent of the RAA’s takedown of Napster in 2001, Elsevier took legal action against Sci-hub in 2015 starting in the U.S. and quickly moving to other countries. This international campaign has to do with copyright law being organized by country, making it very difficult to pursue Sci-hub which exists in a cyberspace of mirrors, and it provides something that is unquestionably in the public interest and a basic UN human right.

Although there are allegations of security breaches that could lead to identity theft or other hacking university servers, I am not aware of a single piece of evidence Sci-hub has done anything other than ‘steal’ academic publications. It is not a threat to sovereign nation states, it doesn’t encourage sociopathic behavior. It is a form of rebellion against the plague that for-profit publishing unleashed on science, and a way to promote open science. Of course Elsevier was not wrong in its legal claim of copyright infringement. Elsevier wants researchers to pay for their articles and its minions see Sci-hub as causing profit losses. But the evidence suggests this is nonsense. Elsevier is wasting its time, precious time that it could use to sponsor arms fairs, create journals and sell them to big pharma or try to patent online peer review and force journals to pay to use it.

[kiseiakhun]

this post, https://www.tumblr.com/kiseiakhun/747865134888861696/when-his-comics-were-first-published-in-1994-the?source=share combined with knowledge of state sponsored publishing to create this idea. Atlantean fetish books directly sponsored by the Atlantean government. (Atlantean porn, officially brought to you by Aquaman) Atlantis doesn't have the same conventions about sex as humans & therefore might be more willing to attach the state to this. Also this way they get to control what's being published about them & gives them a ready made market to propagandise to.

(also they would try the reverse in Atlantis. also sponsored by the atlantean government to get the population to be more accepting of humans)

(re: this)

Hi anon I want you to know I showed this ask to all my Servers the day you sent this because I am so enamoured with it. Can we get married.

Now I'm sidetracked about how Atlanteans would have paper... like you can't make paper underwater and I can't think of any equivalent methods that would work in the ocean. Maybe a water-curing resin? Paper gets part of its strength from how cellulose shrinks and sort of links together as it dries so a natural plasticizer would seem like an equivalent... maybe they could just hack off pieces of fallen wood and polish it, but that takes wayyyy more skill and effort and time compared to paper making. Hm. Maybe they could mine volcanic stone? Maybe they just import cotton paper from the surface (thick cotton paper doesn't fall apart when it's wet like wood-based paper. At least not as easily). Maybe they draw on rocks with silverpoint. HMMMM. @pluckyredhead @aqua-dan do they address this in the comics?

I'm thinking so hard about this because drawn porn, at least, would need paper. Written porn in theory does not need paper, though it's wild to imagine people dictating their erotica to surface transcribers. Like do you think there's a specific job for that or do you have to podfic your porn yourself if you're a writer? Do most Atlanteans even know how to use their vocal chords to talk? All of their communication is telepathic.

Video porn is easy; we already have waterproof cameras, though I think equipment would have to be modified to withstand pressure at the deeper end, ALTHOUGH I don't think most of Atlantean society lives in the depths, Garth is regarded as something Exotic™ because he comes from a deep-sea kingdom Garth should have bioluminescence don't @ me.

Anyway yes. I think Atlantis would have to have different conventions about sex because water transmits vibrations so much better than air. Like... if you're fucking people Know. Everyone will Know. They can literally feel you fucking through the air. When you fuck everyone else fucks with you. I bet Atlantean orgies are a really popular porn genre. I bet surface people fetishize it. I bet Atlanteans are really intrigued by how people on the surface can just keep sex a SECRET and hidden/forbidden romance is really popular.

Okay so now the question is, is Atlantis propaganda porn vanilla (for them), a way to show Proper Sex, or is it wild freak shit to show off the ingenuity of their populace? What do you think they show in their Fucking videos. What do they import.

[redistrictgirl]

What could go wrong with my forecast?

Two days from the election and most of the big data nerds are still perplexed by the playing field - this big data nerd is no different. But I’ve already been paying close attention under the hood and preparing to take some lessons away depending on what happens on Tuesday. I think it’s important to stay transparent and humble, after all. Here, I’ll go over two red flags I’ve noticed this cycle, why I took the risks that caused them to pop up, and what would cause me to change my methodology in both cases. Get ready for a dry one.

Nonpartisans Flooding The Zone

This sounds oxymoronic, but it’s a pretty obvious trend with a clear explanation that doesn’t require me to be a hack. Three pollsters - Morning Consult, TIPP, and AtlasIntel - have released a heavy amount of unsponsored polling at different points throughout this cycle, data which seem to have skewed the averages quite a bit. One of them has been favorable to Democrats, one has been favorable to Republicans, and one has been pretty evenhanded, but they haven’t overlapped their big drops much, so it isn’t exactly canceling out.

Let me be clear - I believe all three firms are good-faith and not trying to get any particular result! But the more polls you do, the harder it is to keep them all quality. Given that Mr. Nate Silver’s model has the same vulnerability as mine, it must have been tempting to put as much data as possible out there as possible to push the averages towards your typical poll, minimizing the risk of being singled out if you’re wrong. I hadn’t considered that incentive, assuming most flooding would be done by generally hackish firms.

It’s possible that AtlasIntel and TIPP are both right, and their polls haven’t actually suffered too much from being released on a conveyer belt, so if Mr. Trump keeps it close or wins comfortably, it will probably have helped my model to weight those firms more and I won’t touch that aspect of my averages. But if Ms. Harris has a clear win, I’ll probably end up limiting pollsters to the weight of one unsponsored poll per race per week in my averages from 2026 onwards. Pollsters like YouGov and Emerson, who do a lot of work for a lot of different organizations, are better equipped to handle lots of throughput, so I’ll probably leave sponsored polls as is regardless.

Heavy Fundamentals Weighting

Even in the home stretch, about a third of my model’s outputs come from prior state and district-level elections applied to the current national environment. This is far, far more than most forecasters, but it helped me immensely at the House level in 2022, so I decided to stick with what works this go-around.

The problem? The fundamentals look far, far better than the polling for Ms. Harris in most states. The same phenomenon for Senate Republicans ended up dragging my model in that chamber down quite a bit in 2022 (though it was still fairly accurate overall), so that could be a possible second point (out of five forecasts) against my unusual methodology in that department. If the Vice President indeed loses noticeably, you can expect me to lower the weight of those variables quite a bit in statewide races (though I may still keep the House forecast as is given how effective my strategy was in 2022).

Summary

I’m only two elections into making these forecasts, so I’m still learning and evolving my strategy. I always strive to provide the best calls I can, so thank you for your patience! The last two things I’ll post after this but before the election are my personal unscientific predictions after Jon Ralston’s Nevada call, a development I personally find very important, and my final data-driven forecasts Monday evening. Have a great Sunday!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Object permanence

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in AUSTIN TODAY (Mar 10). I'm also appearing at Fediverse House. More tour dates here.

#20yrsago Game developers’ amazing rants on the state of the industry https://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html

#20yrsago Weirdo wants to sue because he has same name as video game character https://web.archive.org/web/20050316043002/https://gr.bolt.com/chatter/mailbag/mailbag.htm

#15yrsago French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html

#15yrsago London Olympics: police powers to force spectators to remove non-sponsor items, enter houses, take posters https://web.archive.org/web/20100307080427/http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100303/tts-uk-olympics-london-ca02f96.html

#15yrsago Leaked documents: UK record industry wrote web-censorship amendment https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/bpi-drafted-web-blocking/

#15yrsago Lesbian panic shuts down Mississippi high-school prom https://web.archive.org/web/20100314150231/http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/6909566.html

#10yrsago UK foreign secretary: stop talking about Snowden, let spies get on with it https://web.archive.org/web/20150315031642/http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2399082/government-minister-is-bored-with-snowden-and-wants-to-get-on-with-surveillance

#10yrsago Piketty on the pointless cruelty of European austerity https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/thomas-piketty-interview-about-the-european-financial-crisis-a-1022629.html

#5yrsago Podcast: A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#artistsrights

#5yrsago Postmortem: the catastrophic EU Copyright Directive https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#article17

#5yrsago Scam-buster hacks into a scam-factory https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#scambaiting

#5yrsago Italy's "I Stay in the House" law https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#italiatine

#5yrsago Twitter's new Terms of Service help academics https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#acabot

#5yrsago Sensor Tower's VPNs and adblockers spied on users https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/11/i-stay-in-the-house/#quislings

#1yrago The Foilies https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/11/no-foia/#id-tell-you-but-then-id-have-to-kill-you

[3liza]

Ostensibly an Islamist terrorist gang, Anonymous Sudan said yesterday it attacked AO3 because it is “against all forms of degeneracy, and the site is full of disgusting smuts and other LGBTQ+ and NSFW things”.

The group posted a further message on its Telegram channel today, saying it will continue to target the site if it comes back online. “We can bypass any detection you put, we will make sure your site goes offline for the longest possible time as your ‘experts’ scratch their heads cluelessly to find a solution,” the criminals wrote.

However, security experts believe Anonymous Sudan is actually a Russian hacking gang posing as a splinter group of the original Anonymous hacktivist collective, aiming to cause trouble for Moscow’s enemies in the West.

[...]

A report from another security business, Flashpoint, goes further, stating: “Evidence suggests that Anonymous Sudan are likely state-sponsored Russian actors masquerading as Sudanese actors with Islamist motivations, as cover for their actions against western, or western-aligned, entities.”

[disposable-an0de]

An open letter to tony's chocolonely

Dear tony's chocolonely:

I enjoy your chocolate. i enjoy it a lot. i pay extra specifically because it is fair trade certified and i support your mission to avoid child labor. What i do not enjoy however, is the shape of your bars. I understand the symbolism behind your fucked up, madoka magica stained glass witch looking chocolate bars, they are hard to share and hard to divide evenly, much like the chocolate industry doesn't share its profits evenly. this is kinda fine when i am sharing a bar of chocolate with a friend, in the same way that helping a friend move is "kinda fine". Its arduous, its tedious, but we're doing it together, and that makes it fun. what isn't "kinda fun" is trying to use your chocolate for anything else. I try to only buy fair trade chocolate, so i end up melting yours down for brownies or shaving it or whatever. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to measure or even just, break apart your chocolate with tact? i have to hack with such power and force that it looks like im trying to chop a girls hand off to just divide your stupid, thick, state park road looking chocolate bars into meltable chunks. and you know what? fuck you! why are you punishing me for going out of my way to buy the extra special non slavery chocolate??? do you WANT me to sponsor the child slavery companies? ghirardelli is right fucking there, its cheaper and its not going to make me perform my ancient sword arts to take it the fuck apart! i understand that you need a 'thing' a 'gimmick' but "this is fucking miserable to pry apart" IS NOT A SELLING POINT. MAYBE if you made your packaging something other than "barbershop quartet" you wouldn't need the stupid fucking european borders to stand out. AND YOU DON'T EVEN STAND OUT! THE LINES AREN'T SHOWN ON THE PACKAGING!!! what, is the idea that someone who doesn't know about child labor in chocolate will look up "why is tony's chocolonely such a bitch to break apart?" and figure it out that way? was the giant "theres child labor in chocolate!!!!!!" flyer that looks like something a mormon would leave in a hotel that is wrapped around every bar too subtle?

(this is all in fun btw, their chocolate is amazing and if i was actually irritated by this i wouldn't go out of my way to buy it. i enjoy ranting about stuff that doesn't matter.)

sincerely, scar tissue