I'm sure that there are worse options, probably being actively considered since this is no longer getting them what they want; but an opaque 'public/private partnership' slush fund that spends its time slathering a thin layer of dubious military justification on random projects seems like a very, very, dodgy way of doing things.

I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Since Microsoft doesn't honor their license agreements, why should anyone else?

It's not THAT unlikely that if you have Porsche money, you can afford to get 3 phase service in your home.

Obviously the switch from "loss leader on a scale the capital markets can barely absorb" to "losing money" is going to sting; but I'm curious if we'll see sneakier knock-on effects.

So long as they were losing money hand over fist the vendor does want to throw enough tokens at you to make you feel like you are having a good time; but as few as are required to do that since they lose money on every one. If they were breaking even or turning a profit the incentive would be to sneak as much spend and upsell in as possible; and it's well known that the verbosity/cost of LLM chatter is hard to predict; harder if there are multiple models and other complications being switched around in the background.

What sort of exciting little tricks will we see from vendors who actually make more if you use more?

I get that there was probably a panicy passenger, but given 4.5 hours to land if they turn around or 4 hours to land if they continue to their destination and nothing but water under them either way, they may have actually prolonged the situation slightly by turning back.

They were half way there. It made no sense to turn around at that point.

Maybe he thought it was off.

Not only did they panic over a poorly chosen Bluetooth device name, they turned around AT or just past the halfway point, apparently to maximize the damage and inconvenience. They could just as well have continued as normal and sorted it out at the destination.

How about perform an exploratory laparotomy just in case you implanted a bomb?

I doubt it rises to that level. The device had a name that happened to be Bomb. Yelling FIRE is a specific communication of a dangerous condition.

The bluetooth name has nothing to do with security. It is more likely that MattsSpeaker is a bomb than the thing named BOMB. Any number of things with no bluetooth or bluetooth turned off are also more likely to be a bomb than the bluetooth thing called BOMB.

In 1971, 'Creeper' proved the concept of a computer virus. Years later, experts were calmly and sometimes patiently explaining to people that you couldn't get a virus from an email.

Then Microsoft threw the weight of it's huge dev team into the effort and finally made the email virus a reality.

Now, 30 years later, LLMs have at last given teeth to "the honor system virus".

Everyone knows that 10x engineers validate inputs and carefully manage dependencies; so clearly there's no risk of unexpected behavior.

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.