Where do you see that? I only see speculation:

The Secret Service says the dangers posed included "disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks, and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises".

Was the installation used to commit a crime?

If not, why and under what authority was it dismantled?

If so, any arrests? Names?

Any known or suspected ties to existing threat actors or nation state intelligence?

Right now this is Roscoe P Coltrane posing next to a pile of jugs. But it has the elements of something that might be interesting.

The company I work for is heavily international - we crossed the 50% mark a few years back, and now a majority of our revenue comes from non-US countries.

Our parent company is almost entirely US-only.

We're hiring a lot world-wide, and a tiny amount domestically. Our parent is laying people off left and right.

We're also postponing domestic projects. International ones are full-steam ahead.

And the single-biggest reason is no exec can make any significant plans without serious risk of the President of the US doing something bone-headed that blows it up. The risk that some admin hanger-on will come up with a regulatory extortion scheme targeting big announcements is too great. Even if you're not directly targeted, they just flip various regulatory switches randomly, just as they've been doing for the past 8 months. Coked up fascists doing policy is just not good for business, yo.

If you think I'm exaggerating, you try finishing a project budget this month. (Hint.) To be clear this is not complaining about the fee - the constant changes that render yesterday's work irrelevant is the problem.

They could, but how do you determine which role is which? A global company like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, can't realistically operate entirely from the US - plenty of jurisdictions requires a larger companies maintain a regional office to operate in them, and even without that you often need local expertise in various fields, especially those with a financial/legal bent, and obviously for things like logistics, sales, and marketing (which can be a whole minefield of PR screwups if you don't understand the nuances of local culture) too. Overseas offices therefore are not going away without inflicting massive damage on the US's global companies.

If you complete MAGA's ultimate goal and get rid of, say, all the Indian H1Bs since TCS dominates the sector, that you'd realistically have to offshore the task of producing any Hindi localisation and region specific coding, because - you guessed it - you almost certainly won't be find enough native US citizens that also have both the required knowledge of Hindi and can also code. Even if you can recruit enough Hindi speaking coders in the US, given every other big tech company will need to be doing the same thing, you also need to repeat that for lots of other localisations with even smaller potential labour pools too.

That means you demonstrably need an overseas development team that deals with it, and if that can't economically be H1Bs in the US then it's going to be TCS or whoever else's workers in India, or whichever other outsourcing company and country's office you put them in. So, by a neccessity driven by the demands of Wall Street to prioritise value and return a profit, now you've got a development team of foreign labour based in an office somewhere outside the US. Surely it's not up to "the party of small government" (LOL) to dictate what tasks a private enterprise can and cannot do with their staff unless it's some kind of national security matter? If not, then they can tell them to work on whatever else they want, including all the coding that might have been done by H1Bs *or* US citizens based on their offices the US. If so, then there are some well known systems of government where that level of control is the norm; absolute monarchies/dictatorships, facism, and communism, and I think we can safely rule out MAGA going down the communism route...

It is really hard to get disbarred.

Varies a bit by state, but unless you're outright stealing from clients, you get a lot of escalating warnings and 2nd chances.

If you're curious how bad you have to behave to actually get disbarred, the shenanigans of one Richard P. Liebowitz may be instructive.

"Distracting" is probably the whole point. Look at the cool video, and not the UI disaster that is the rest of Windows 11. I guess you could also set it to a clip of Homer Simpson thinking of clowns when Marge is talking to him and switch to desktop to accurately mirror your state of mind in a typical Teams call? Can it play the audio too? $deity help the poor bastard that forgets to lock their screen when they leave their desk and falls victim to the very obvious office jape that this affords if so (HR are probably going to rolling up their sleeves and rubbing hands in glee when they hear about this).

But really, WTF asked for this? Other than the kind of user that has all that garish dynamic aRGB lighting on their "rig" or Microsoft got trolled by 4Chan, I got nothin.

Even if you assume full RTO (which won't happen), at $100,000 per H1-B, you're only going to need a reasonably low number of people in the team to setup a remote office for the entire team and ship a manager out there to oversee them - or just outsource that role too.

Fairly obviously, this almost certainly won't result in many thousands of H1-Bs each paying $100k to the US government each year; it'll result in many thousands of jobs that would have been paying US taxes on their wages, and then paying for accommodation, a car, for leisure, and whatever else into the US economy paying their taxes and spending their wages in wherever the new (or expanded overseas) office is instead.

Smart countries will be making setting up offices and bringing those outsourced workers in much easier right now, but I'd also expect some buildings in India are going to see their "Tata Consulting" logo get one from Amazon, Microsoft or whoever alongside it too.

[To answer your question, the figures typically come from CDNs and major websites doing browser data analysis so, while there's quite a bit of wiggle room, they are going to at least be in the ballpark and definiltely not orders of magnitude out.] Personally, I think people are being too simplistic about the stats and likely outcomes and, arguably, focusing too much on entirely the wrong issue.

I totally agree on your main point; 7-8 years is a good run for a specific major release of an OS, or any other software application. You might not like the decision, but Microsoft announced the end of official support some years ago and that we're now approaching that deadline is just BAU and not something anyone should really have an issue with. They're not taking Windows 10 off you (yet?), but they are making it clear that if you continue to run it you're doing so at your own risk from next month. Pretty much everyone, including the FOSS community, does this with older versions at some point. It's been done countless times before, and will be done countless times in the future - in that light, singling out this one specific example isn't a particularly sound argument, is it?

Whatever the percentage of Win10 holdouts is (I've seen recent figures closer to 50%), it's highly unlikely to be entirely down to "lack of TPM". Windows 11 is a privacy raping UI/UX nightmare, so I suspect a large majority of those Windows 10 holdouts have hardware that actually could run Windows 11 just fine, but are actively choosing not to do so. When many of them inevitably get compromised (which they will), it's going to be interesting to see who gets the blame for that - and the fallout from whatever the resulting botnets are used for - in the media, but that's another topic for another day. There will also be another fraction who simply don't know or don't care; the OS is part of the hardware purchase, and if the hardware is working fine then there's no reason to change anything, and they'll only upgrade when things break (likely due to overworked fans packing up after the CPU has been running flat out for several months as part of some botnet or other). Given most users performance needs have hit a plateau, that could be quite a large fraction, and will naturally decline over time. Finally, you'll have the fraction that understand the issue and have legacy hardware, but can't / won't upgrade because of other user-specific reasons - e.g. they just can't afford it right now.

Key point: none of the people in those groups - probably the majority of that 40-50% - are going to be sending their old PCs to landfill any time soon, and certainly not all in one go on October 14th.

The real issue here is that Microsoft has arbitrarily decided - for the financial benefit of themselves and their hardware/advertising partners - to try and force an unnecessary hardware and OS/"telemetry" upgrade, rather than simply put a banner in the setup process starting with something along the lines of "This hardware lacks critical security functionality and your data may be at increased risk...". We know beyond a doubt that this is an entirely arbitrary hardware requirement decision because of all the workarounds posted online showing how to get Windows 11 running on hardware it supposedly doesn't support. That is pretty much textbook abuse of a monopolistic position in the market, and that's the tack PIRG (and the likes of the DoJ, FTC, EU, etc.) probably should be taking; force Microsoft to remove the arbitrary restriction but make it clear that if you don't have TPM 2.0, that's on you. If you understand what TPM actually does, then you probably also have at least a basic clue about PC/network security and will realise that is pretty much zero additional risk outside of some corporate environments.

Yes, there will still be holdouts, just as there still are on even older software releases and Windows version, but at that point it's entirely on them. They've either chosen the Windows 11 path, with all that entails, or they've chosen some other option (trying to secure a Windows version <11, Linux, Mac, whatever) with all that entails. As long as is not a monoculture with a common failure mode, we should be fine with that.

Every time I see a story like this, I think about Daniel Suarez's book Daemon.

It isn't a great book - fairly disposable scifi that requires TV-style disbelief-suspension and eventually devolves into weird techno-utopianism. But has great bits of scene-setting mind candy that is frighteningly believable.

Like the fleets of robot cars used as weapons.

You are subsidizing billionaires.

I was pointing to the vacuousness of the claim.

I've already run an LLM natively on my phone. That did "not require a data center at all", and also did not require DS.

I realize that half is the focus of the article, but it misses a huge piece of the perniciousness.

They demand exclusivity with venues.

Which means you either hand over all your booking and ticket sales (for a fee, of course) to them, or not be able to book any Ticketmaster artists. If you haven't considered the question, you may not recognize that artist-choice and ticketing are two of the biggest levers a club owner has to manage their business. Most of the other costs of business are pretty inflexible - about your only other cost-control options are fucking over your workers and watering the beer.

This does a couple things - clubs become more like farmers - they get to soak up all the risk with none of the control. It also gives TM more control over artists - I've seen less info on how TM squeezes them, but don't think that isn't there. If an artist doesn't like their terms, they don't get to play their venues.

And of course they wet their beak at every single touch point along the way.

DeepSeek has proven that it can use far less computing power

I've seen where they've asserted that, where has it been proven?

if DeepSeek' s claims are true,

Ah.

some AI queries may not require a data center at all

And here's how you falsify the claim. When can I expect to see that 200B param model on my phone?

I'd bet money that number has very little to do with the actual accounting.

If I were running the their team, I would absolutely fuck with OAI and other competitors like this. They can't discount it completely - this is still early days, there almost certainly are undiscovered efficiency tricks out there.

But it forces them to spend time and money chasing those based on whatever is in DS's paper. Messes with their OODA loop, if you think about things that way.

When it shoves one of those interstitials at you, you'll see a URL parameter like this: "pipelineType=Chewbacca".

Change the Chewy reference to some other word of your choice.

It breaks the rest of the bullshit.