The Guardian fails to explain adequately but the court in question is likely the US Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act court (FISA) that approves warrants either for US persons (citizens anywhere or residents domestically) or for foreign assets on US soil like an Israeli partition in AWS. Those court orders often have gag orders attached that prevent service providers from disclosing them to the targets of the warrant.

There is also quite a bit of lawfare going on lately by a group called the Hind Rajab foundation with ties to Hezbollah in Europe that has been abusing courts in several countries by making evidence-free complaints against random Israelis, alleging war crimes without actually specifying any particular crime, mostly just part of their insane hatred of Jews.

That's apparently what this NIMBUS contract was about. The cloud providers would help Israel build out that private cloud on Israeli soil.

Most of the infrastructure in question under this NIMBUS contract, are in an Israeli govt data center operating as a private partition in AWS/Gcloud. This is similar to US Govt contracts with cloud providers. The idea is to use the cloud's interface to build up govt IT worker skill sets so they are more portable and to make hiring out of the private sector easier. The exception apparently is the AI infrastructure which is in high demand and very expensive if you can even get your order filled plus US govt export restrictions like those recently waived for the UAE.

  The Guardian is almost a self-parody when it comes to their conspiratorial tone when writing about Israel. The court orders or other legal processes that might be used to gain Israeli govt data are more likely to be FISA Court orders in the US or similarly in Europe, secret spy courts, basically. Allies do spy on each other. The Guardian uses a conspiratorial framing to seem like there is some World Police out there with the right to violate the sovereignty of one particular country that they don't like.

It was Aliens. They were out there raking the sand making it all smooth.

When you feed it a giant cesspool of invalidated data (The internet) you should not expect a single response to be accurate. none of these AI's are fed a carefully curated data set.

But companies are expecting to replace all their programmers with AI.... What could possibly go wrong?

Meh. It's not used anymore now.

I'm an actual Starlink user at my farm. It's head-and-shoulders better than any competing service.

I previously has used a cellular uplink... and even with a yagi mounted 30' up on a mast, I barely had 1-2Mb/s of bandwidth. It was truly miserable.

Starlink is a game-changer... give 'em the freakin' money. They've done something truly miraculous for rural internet users, who had previously only terrible/expensive options. As a taxpayer, I'm actually glad to see the money I contribute going to something useful.

Apparently he took out a "Flash Loan" and borrowed the tokens. Once he executed his trades to grab the money he bought up enough tokens to repay the loan and all was fine.

It seems it is totally normal for 18-year-olds to take out multi-million dollar loans with no collateral to back them in the crypto world? I feel like this points to a whole lot of other potential problems in the crypto/DeFi world.

You only need a something over 50% of the mining power -- as long as they can add new blocks with no Assange transactions at a faster pace than than the rest of the mining pool they can keep the longest chain Assange donation free. A 51% attack isn't just for double spending, and simply blocking particular transactions is the kind of thing you might be able to get tacit agreement for; and it does only have to be tacit if you are fine with a few transactions getting through every now and then (which also helps hide any collusion).

Hell, he is polling at less than half of Rick Lynn Perry, who is not the former Governor Rick Perry but a "senior desktop technician" currently contracted out by a staffing agency to work for Lockheed-Martin.

It swaps in some different powers that be. If Wikileaks published something that embarrassed people behind a bunch of the major miner consortiums and they decided to just not include any bitcoin transfers to Assange or Wikileaks in blocks they mined that could severely limit or completely stop such transfers, depending on how big a proportion of the mining pool they pissed off. And let's be clear, there are a very small number of mining consortiums that control a very large fraction of the total hashing power; this is a lot more possible than it may appear at first blush.

Hell, even the old school powers that be could put a severe crimp in things if they were sufficiently motivated. If such a power decided to lean on the mining consortiums they could likely get the result they want with either enough bribes or a big enough stick (and they would have both).

Letâ(TM)s not pretend that self serving interests were not all over the US Constitution.

We still havenâ(TM)t removed all the parts that protected slave owner interests above all others, like the US Senate and Electoral College.

US States with robust direct democracy options at least have a steam valve to bypass gerrymandered legislatures and corrupt Senators. A federal referendum process would be amazing.

The biggest current (last couple of years) price rises have been in Bitcoin, which is over a decade old now. Since it has been around so long, but the price is still going up a lot, presumably that is happening because of "tangible useful applications". So what are those applications? As a currency it has stalled, not least due to price volatility. Despite occasional bursts of announcements of retailers accepting Bitcoin, the number of retailers actually accepting Bitcoin remains very small, and often quite niche. Bit coin is not taking over as a currency. How about Bitcoin as a means of fast, easy, cross border money transfer (remittances). In the early days of Bitcoin is was widely touted that Western Union was going to get crushed by Bitcoin. It turns out Western Union is doing just fine. And over the major money transfer corridors WU fees are often lower than Bitcoin. Other major remittance agencies are also doing just fine using traditional methods. If any service is getting squeezed out of the remittance industry it is crypto ... fees can be larger, money often still needs to be exchanged from Crypto to local currency with all kinds of associated other costs, and so on. How about "digital gold", a hedge against inflation? It is not clear Bitcoin is really doing any better here, and assets and investments to hedge against inflation is a pretty huge market; Bitcoin has very limited appeal over all the other options available. So again, what are the magical tangible useful applications that make Bitcoin so very valuable? It's been a decade, but there still isn't anything to show ...

The first mistake is evaluating bitcoin by its "price". Assuming the key is that it is a currency the real question is the volume of actual transactions going on in bitcoin.

What is the amount of good purchased with bitcoin? It certainly isn't huge. How about remittances? Money transfer was one of the big use cases. It turns out that, despite a lot of hype and years to make a difference, bitcoin in particular and crypto-currencies in general, have made practically no dent in the remittances market. How about total volume of transactions? That's certainly higher, but how much of that is speculation trading based on the price of bitcoin? Hard to say, but surely we would see higher amounts of goods purchases and remittances if it really mattered.

So, instead of looking at prices, if we look at utility how is bitcoin doing? It's been a decade and it still hasn't had any significant uptake as currency -- not on any scale that justifies the hype anyway. Might it still be useful and gain traction in the future? Sure, it's possible. But the outlook isn't that great.