One phone call to Bezos, or Pichai or any of the others, and even the most sensitive EU data will be in the hands of the US government within hours. (Surely nobody can think these leashed pets will say no.) There's zero respect for security, privacy, national sovereignty, or the conequences.

The same thing is happening in Canada, and it will happen elsewhere. The Cloud Act plus the descent of the US into a fascist oligarchy has made this inevitable, and all of these countries have realized that they need to plan tech, and defense, and energy, and everything else to work with zero reliance on the US.

The US response to this be threats and tariffs, of course. They won't work: they'll only convince the EU to move faster.

I've spent most of the past decade working (for free) on an archiving project for a nonprofit organization. This is a labor of love for me: it's a chance to use a lifetime of technical skills to help preserve the past for the future. I've put in every spare minute that I can, and have given up most other things in my life to do so. I have to: there isn't anyone else with the requisite skill set to do this work for free, and the organization certainly can't afford to pay anybody.

The AI companies have created two massive problems for us. The first is their web scraping, which is way beyond abusive: it's an attack. Yes, YES, I know about all the techniques to block it and I've deployed a bunch of them, but every minute spent doing that is a minute not spent doing actual archiving work. And even if I managed to blunt most of these attacks, at least one will get through, and they'll steal everything we've posted (for free) and use it (for profit), against our terms of service and against the express wishes of the people who donated materials to us...which is making it vastly harder to convince donors to help us.

The second is the topic of this discussion: disk drives. We don't need the biggest and the fastest, but we need a lot of them because we're maintaining replicas of the archive in geographically distributed locations. And like everyone else, we either can't find them or we can't afford them. I've been using eBay and Craigslist and I've even been going to estate states to try to pick up used external USB/firewire drives and old desktop PCs so that I can pull the disks and hope they test okay. Again: every minute spent doing that is a minute not doing actual archiving work. (Also: because some of these disks have a lot of hours on them, I have to consider probable remaining lifetimes and account for that.)

This is maddening and heartbreaking at the same time. And the thing is: I've spent a lot of time interacting with other people in this space: GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums). Everybody has this problem. All of these people, who definitely aren't doing their jobs because of the lavish pay and spectacular benefits but because they appreciate and love the cultural area(s) they're in, are all struggling. And none of these institutions have the money to truly address the situation: they're all underfunded because they've always been underfunded.

TL;DR: this is cultural vandalism conducted by billionaires who are willing to burn the entire world down for money and power.

1. A few decades ago, universities/colleges ran their own IT infrastructure: email, web, applications, etc. But grossly-overpaid administrators decided that competent, experienced IT staff making far less were expendable and they began outsourcing everything they possibly could -- because, of course, reducing the number of administrators and their compensation was never an option.

The consequences of that are now here. What were 8,000 targets are now: 1. And this isn't the only such application -- for example, much the same thing is true of email. And thus attackers now have luxury of focusing their efforts on a single target andl leveraging that into extortion against 8,000. None of the clueless, selfish, ignorant administrators responsible for this debacle will admit any responsibility -- ever. They're too busy enjoying their mansions while graduate students struggle to afford ramen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and junior faculty are forced to moonlight in order to make ends meet.

2. Instructure is following the standard playbook here: lie, lie, lie. They're doing that because they know they can and because no will ever hold them accountable. It's clear from what we already know that this was a very thorough hack, Instructure knows it was a very thorough hack, and they're doing everything they can to hide that fact. And as a result of that, they're deliberately making it impossible for everyone at those 8,000 institutions to understand what really happened and to take appropriate defensive measures (if any, if possible). Instructure isn't in the least bit concerned about the damage done to all the students and faculty; Instructure only cares about itself.

Exactly so. And exacerbating the situation is that distribution losses mean that running 1000 minicenters will use MORE power than 1 center with 1000 times the capacity.

Then, as you noted, there's the cooling problem, which also doesn't scale. Neither does the noise problem: people live in quiet places because, well, quiet. A thousand little data centers running 24 hours a day isn't going to mesh well with that.

This entire concept is insanely stupid -- but no doubt some VCs will throw money at these morons and they'll profit handsomely.

All it would take is one phone call from Diaper Donnie to his pet fascist Elmo and every bit of data/metadata available on those terminals would be furnished to the Russians and thus would shortly be in the hands of the IRGC. (And if you're about to ask why in the world he would do that: keep in mind that we're talking about a moron with accelerating dementia who is incapable of understanding ANY concept, who cannot formulate a coherent plan for anything, and whose only values are his ego and his money.)

Less dramatically: if you're an insurgent force in a modern country, the last thing in the world that you want to do is communicate by any form of electronic network. Surveillance and detection methods for these are well-known and readily available. And even if the communications themselves are encrypted, the metadata available enables traffic analysis, correlation with external events (including those arranged for the purpose), and endpoint identification.

In such an environment, it's much better to use encrypted memory cards distributed by couriers and dead drops. The cost of attempting to disrupt such an effort is many orders of magnitude higher, both in terms of money and personnel, than the cost of disrupting electronic distribution.

The moment these new TLDs are announced, I recommend permanently blacklisting them in your mail system; using DNS RPZ to remove them your view of DNS; and permanently blacklisting them in any HTTPS proxies you might be running. Don't wait for them to go live and for the abuse to start: it will start because it always does: that's why these TLDs exist. Just cut to the chase, blacklist them, and forget about them.

If this causes a problem for anyone: it's their own fault. They shouldn't be supporting this debacle by investing in it. Let them burn.

When you're trying to train a model, it's critically important that you scrutinize every piece of training data -- meticulously. The larger and more complex the model, the more important this becomes.

If you neglect this, then the model may fail in anomalous and unpredictable ways. In other words: you can run 10,000 tests and they'll all be just fine, but when you run the 10,001st, the model fails. Worse, you won't know how...or why...or how to fix it, because the answers to those questions are buried in a network too large for a human being to comprehend. This problem has been well-known for decades; it's how things like this: Tesla Autopilot Confuses Boy In Orange Shirt For A Cone In Brazil happen. They thought they were training the vision system to recognize traffic cones; they were really training it to recognize orange objects of a certain size and height:width ratio.

Faced with this situation, you can either (a) go back and figure out what you did wrong in the training process or (b) slap a half-ass patch on this particular failure to just make it go away. Choosing (b) is simple and quick and easy and cheap. But if you pick that choice and skip (a), then you have zero assurance that the 15,027th test or the 21,922nd test won't fail just as badly, because you did nothing to address the root cause.

And predictably, this -- choice (b) -- s what OpenAI has done. It's predictable because they made no attempt whatsoever to curate the training data in the first place -- they just stole everything they could from the entire Internet -- because they're cheap and lazy and a in hurry to cash in before the bubble bursts. This move is entirely consistent with that approach. I would call it "poor software engineering" but it doesn't even deserve to be in the same sentence with "engineering".

...it's time to bail. The same for Oracle or Salesforce and for some others. As soon as the acquisition is announced, it's time to make a plan to move to something else somewhere else. These companies have an absolute talent for destroying everything they touch, and they can do it surprisingly quickly.

This is very difficult for some people; I understand. I had a hard time letting go of Sun after having been a customer since before they had customers. But it's necessary, because any/all attempts to stay the course are inevitably doomed. It's better to rip the bandaid off as soon as possible, drink a toast to what was, and leave it behind.

Correct. There are a lot of psychotic and sociopathic billionaires, and even within that group there are people who refuse to have anything to do with Nazi Elon Musk. He is one of the most purely evil people alive on this planet today -- and there's a lot of competition for that.

The damage that it's going to do the Internet, and to society, and to education, government, and all the other components of society, is staggering. An enormous amount of work done by dedicated people over decades will be swamped by the flood of AI slop, and I don't think we'll know what we've lost until it's gone.

Many readers of this site are likely familiar with various sci-fi stories that deal with nanobots which have begun reproducing without limit, eventually consuming all resources and reducing their planet to "gray goo". This is the information equivalent: it will expand to occupy everything that it possibly can, overwhelming everything generated by humans. And when that happens, it will impact our shared view of reality, which is based on a (mostly) common set of facts.

And when nothing is real, anything can be real. This will not escape the attention of would-be fascists and dictators.

I don't see why they wouldn't -- and I'm not being snide, I'm being serious. Consider:

They (Polymarket, Kalshi) are in possession of some very valuable information. There's a buyer ready and willing to purchase it. Provided that they use sufficient opsec and intermediaries and cryptocurrency (aka "fake money for criminals") they should be able to make things very difficult for anyone investigating.

And: they (Polymarket, Kalshi) know who gave them this information, which means that they can set that person up to take the fall, just in case things go sideways. After all: they have no reason in the world to protect that bettor and every reason in the world to make sure they're not available to collect their winnings. So maybe they'll choose to be a little deliberately sloppy with the above-mentioned opsec so that if someone does investigate, the trail will lead to: the bettor, a person with access to such information and a person who knew who would purchase it and a person who already illegally tried to monetize it once via (P, K) and thus a person who might have tried to illegally monetize it a second time by selling it to the IRGC.

The IRGC gets their intel, the bettor gets busted, the DOJ gets to claim a win, and (P, K) get to keep the money.

I weighed in on this yesterday, so I'll try to keep this shorter. The purpose of these platforms is to enable people to profit from inside information, either because they're the decision-makers or they're in the room with the decision-makers, literally or figuratively. It's gambling, and almost all of it is rigged.

And as bad as this is, it's not the worst of it. These prediction markets possess knowledge of these bets and can sell it for a fortune. If five minutes from now I set up an account there and put $10,000 into a bet that the US Navy will fire on Chabahar (it's an Iranian port on the Gulf of Oman) within the next 24 hours, how much do you think the IRGC will pay to be instantly notified of that, before it goes live on their site? And do you think, for even a moment, that the thugs running Kalshi and Polymarket would hesitate to sell it to them? (By the way, this is a fabricated example. I picked it at random.)

TL;DR: this is an ongoing national security disaster, and isolated prosecutions like the one in this case will do little, if anything, to mitigate it.

Disclosure first: I'm on the boards of two non-profit organizations, and previously served on the board of another one. Because of that, I'm required by (US) law to sign an annual conflict-of-interest statement. I'm also required to recuse myself from any vote that would materially benefit myself. I'm required to do all kinds of other things, like exercise fiduciary responsibility and to ensure that we are in compliance with all federal and state laws and regulations, and so on. All of this exists because other people have done pretty much the opposite and have thus committed malfeasance, fraud, embezzlement, etc. So as tedious and repetitive as it is: I get it. It needs to exist. And I need to do my part.

But prediction markets give me a way completely bypass all of it, do whatever I want, and enrich myself at the expense of these organizations with no accountability. Which I'm not doing, by the way, because my heart is in these organizations. And I hate the assholes at Kalshi and Polymarket, and I don't want their dirty money.

But other people are doing it: individuals, people in corporations, people in organizations, people in government. It's that last one that should get everybody's attention, because people in government tend to wield far more power than anybody else. (We can have a debate about billionaires and corporate executives vs. mayors and cabinet officials if you like, but when push comes to shove, the former don't have control of police or military forces...and when push does come to shove, that matters.) The existence of these markets means that anyone who wields enough power to make something notable happen or not happen can profit from it, perhaps profit a great deal. Which is why there were bets (yes, they're bets, and yes, this is gambling) made on the Iran war: the bettors rigged the game. Either they were the people making the decisions or they were in the room with the people making the decisions; either way, this is horrifying.

The existence of these operations is incompatible with a functioning system of government. They are explicitly designed to manufacture corruption, as much as a hammer is designed to pound nails. And as new as they are, they're already doing it: they're profiting from damaging the machinery that keeps the country running. (And if you're going to observe that "running" is doing some work in that sentence: yes, I know. There are problems, there have always been problems, there always will be problems. But throwing a huge wrench in the machinery isn't going to fix those.)

These companies don't need to be regulated: they need to be shut down, and then criminally investigated.

The countries participating in this aren't all traditional allies/partners; this isn't like a meeting of NATO (now 77 years old). This loose coalition of disparate countries was put together in weeks, which is amazingly fast and not now how things normally happen in international politics. That's a reflection of how urgently they all view the situation, and how much they're willing to try to work with each other despite their many differences.

It's also a big deal that they're (apparently) determined to do this whether or not the traditional superpowers are on board -- notably, the US, which simply cannot be trusted to behave in a responsible manner or even a consistent manner by anyone. I would write "US national policy is erratic" but that understates things badly: the US does not have a national policy because it's been replaced by the day-to-day, hour-to-hour whims and temper tantrums of a pants-shitting mobster.

I don't know if they'll succeed in building a viable coalition. But they need to succeed because this is an existential crisis for some of them today and it will be for more of them tomorrow. And countries that have their backs to wall have repeatedly demonstrated that they can and will do what it takes: for a recent example, consider Ukraine, which -- out of necessity -- invented a whole new kind of warfare in a matter of months.