Trump appears to be pursuing several agendas. Personal enrichment stands out […] He has ignored or eliminated large swaths of rules that would have inhibited his freedom of action and his ability to put trusted acolytes in key roles. And then there’s rewarding donors, whether through pardons or favors for their clients. […] a sampling [:]

[Trump] ended bans that stopped executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists or seeking lobbying jobs themselves for at least two years. […] He loosened the enforcement of laws that curb foreign lobbying and bribery. […]

[Musk] installed a SpaceX engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration to review its air traffic control system. The F.A.A. is reportedly considering canceling Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract to update its aging telecommunications infrastructure in favor of a SpaceX’s Starlink product. […] SpaceX is a leading contender to secure a large share of Mr. Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense project, an effort that could involve billions of revenue for the winner. […] DOGE nearly halved the team at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates autonomous vehicles. The agency has been investigating whether Tesla’s self-driving technology played a role in the death of a pedestrian in Arizona. […]

The S.E.C. eliminated its crypto-enforcement program, ending or pausing nearly every crypto-related lawsuit, appeal and investigation. That includes the civil suit against Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had separately purchased $75 million worth of tokens tied to Mr. Trump’s family after the election.

The S.E.C. also suspended its civil fraud case against Binance, the huge crypto exchange that pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations and allowed terrorist financing, hacking and drug trafficking to proliferate on its platform. Soon after, the company met with Treasury officials to seek looser oversight while also negotiating a business deal with Mr. Trump’s family.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ How Government Spending Is Up Even as Musk Touts Savings | Wall Street Journal }

The best-known member of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

Life in the state of nature was less violent than you might think. Most of our ancestors avoided conflict. But this made them vulnerable to a few psychopaths.

{ Works in progress | Continue reading }

related { … Hegseth. He has released information that could have directly led to the death of an American fighter pilot. […] “he’s doing performative activities. He’s not yet demonstrated that he’s running the department.” | NY Times | It is an uncomfortable episode for the new defense secretary, who has vowed to hold senior military leaders accountable for mistakes. | Washington Post }

When Musk’s envoys show up at agencies that he privately does business with, including NASA, or that regulate his companies, troubling questions are raised. This happened when it was revealed that the Federal Aviation Administration was considering shifting a contract for its communications systems from Verizon to Musk’s Starlink. Questions have also arisen, and not been put to rest, about what Musk’s employees at DOGE might do with their access to a confidential database of drug approvals, given that Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company, has business before the Food and Drug Administration.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

related { Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts | NY Times }

more { X sues Lego, Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest, Shell International… accusing them of advertising boycott }

and { Elon Musk defends Ketamine use under doctor’s prescription for his mental health: “It helps me, and that helps Tesla” | Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Excessive use of the drug can make anyone feel like they rule the world. }

A human adult sheds about 1000 skin cells per cm2 per hour, causing billions of cells to be released from the body every day. This happens through epidermal desquamation, which is a continuous process that constitutes the final active step in the keratinocytes’ differentiation program. Desquamation causes a spontaneous detachment of dead skin cells known as corneocytes. The average size of these skin particles is smaller than the pores of typical clothing fabrics, allowing them to pass through and become aerosolized. Varying levels of DNA may be retained within corneocytes; enough to yield detectable profiles. DNA can be released in the air not only through skin cells but also in other forms. Dandruff constitutes part of bioaerosol material shed by humans, with a single particle containing between 0.8 and 16.6 ng of DNA. […] human DNA is present in indoor dust in sufficient quantity and quality to produce allele calls in STR analysis. […]

There are many cases in police investigations that require identification of individuals from crime scenes […] the most difficult cases involve organized crime and terrorism, where the participants may be forensically aware, hence the detection of conventional DNA and fingerprints may be difficult to achieve. […]

The high sensitivity of DNA technology makes it possible to obtain results from very low levels of biological materials (just a few cells) […]

We have used the building of our institute as the test-bed for the investigation; the experiments were conducted in 14 offices, two meeting rooms and five laboratory areas which are accessed by corridors. […]

Positive results were obtained from 93 out of 96 dust samples for one or more office occupants, resulting in a success rate of φ1 = 0.97. Only 22 of the same samples matched with a known non-occupant, giving a non-occupant success rate of φ2 = 22/96 = 0.23.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

related { DNA-based prediction of Nietzsche’s voice | PDF }

For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook […] as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes. […]

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.” […]

Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she’s at Facebook. Desperate to be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be “gently mobbed.” […]

Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. […] Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned.(The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.

Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager. […] Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. […]

The book includes a detailed chapter on “Aldrin,” the code name for Facebook’s project to get unblocked in China. According to Wynn-Williams, the company proposed all kinds of byzantine arrangements involving China-based partnerships, data collection and censorship tools that it hoped would satisfy China’s ruling Communist Party.

Knowing that Zuckerberg would probably face questions about China from Congress, his team gave him cleverly worded talking points. […] “Senators will need to ask exceptionally specific questions to get close to any truth.” When Zuckerberg eventually appears before a Senate
committee in 2018, a senator asks him how Facebook is handling the Chinese government’s unwillingness “to allow a social media platform — foreign or domestic — to operate in China unless it agrees to abide by Chinese law.” In his reply, Zuckerberg states, “No decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China,” to which Wynn-Williams comments: “He lies.”

Wynn-Williams has filed a whistle-blower complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission [Zuckerberg’s Meta considered sharing user data with China, whistleblower alleges | Washington Post]

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

William H. Mumler (1832–1884) was an American spirit photographer who worked in New York City and Boston. His first spirit photograph was apparently an accident—a self-portrait which, when developed, also revealed the “spirit” of his deceased cousin. Mumler then left his job as an engraver to pursue spirit photography full-time, taking advantage of the large number of people who had lost relatives in the American Civil War. […]

Mumler’s wife, Hannah Mumler, was also a famous healing medium, and conducted her own spiritual business in addition to the business of assisting her husband.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

When spirit photography appeared in the 1860s, the United States was reeling from the Civil War, which claimed an astonishing 620,000 lives. Deep in mourning, Americans were drawn to anyone who offered even a fleeting connection to the souls of their dearly departed. Self-proclaimed mediums performed seances in which the living could speak with the dead, and photographers like Mumler granted the wishes of the bereaved to see their lost sons or brothers one last time. […]

While taking self-portraits for practice, one of Mumler’s prints came back with an unexplainable aberration. Although he was “quite alone in the room” when the shot was taken, there appeared to be a figure at his side, a girl who was “made of light.” Mumler showed the photo to a spiritualist friend who confirmed that the girl in the image was almost certainly a ghost. […]

Mumler had a knack for self-promotion and his otherworldly photo was written up in popular spiritualist newspapers like the Banner of Light and also the mainstream press. Bostoners began lining up at his small portrait studio to pay as much as $10 for their likeness with a lost loved one.

One of his most famous images is the photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband Abraham Lincoln.

Over time, the evidence against Mumler started to mount. […] A man visiting Mumler’s studio recognized a female ghost as his wife, who was not only alive but recently had her portrait taken by Mumler. Wasn’t it obvious that Mumler was reusing old negatives and playing them off as ghosts?

Since things were getting hot in Boston, Mumler tried relocating to New York in 1869, but he was quickly arrested and tried for fraud. The New York prosecutors called a parade of expert witnesses who offered at least nine ways that Mumler could have used photographic trickery to produce his ghostly images. […]

Despite the best efforts of so many investigators, no one was able to solve the riddle of exactly how Mumler created his apparitions.

Mumler was acquitted and returned to Boston. He shied away from spirit photography and refocused his efforts on the chemistry of photo development. He eventually invented a technique called the “Mumler process” that allowed the first photographs to be printed on newsprint, transforming the practice of journalism.

{ History | Continue reading }

trailer { Smile for the Dead (2025), a documentary film about William H. Mumler }

The rape of the Sabine women, also known as the abduction of the Sabine women, was an incident in the legendary history of Rome in which the men of Rome committed bride kidnappings or mass abduction for the purpose of marriage, of women from other cities in the region. It has been a frequent subject of painters and sculptors, particularly since the Renaissance.

The word “rape” is the conventional translation of the Latin word raptio used in the ancient accounts of the incident. The Latin word means “taking”, “abduction” or “kidnapping”, but when used with women as its object, sexual assault is usually implied. […]

According to Roman historian Livy, the abduction of Sabine women occurred in the early history of Rome shortly after its founding in the mid-8th century BC and was perpetrated by Romulus [legendary founder and first king of Rome] and his predominantly male followers; it is said that after the foundation of the city, the population consisted solely of Latins and other Italic peoples, in particular male bandits. With Rome growing at such a steady rate in comparison to its neighbors, Romulus became concerned with maintaining the city’s strength. His main concern was that with few women inhabitants there would be no chance of sustaining the city’s population, without which Rome might not last longer than a generation. On the advice of the Senate, the Romans then set out into the surrounding regions in search of wives to establish families with. The Romans negotiated unsuccessfully with all the peoples that they appealed to, including the Sabines, who populated the neighboring areas. […]

The Romans devised a plan to abduct the Sabine women during the festival of Neptune Equester. They planned and announced a festival of games to attract people from all the nearby towns. At the festival, […] the Romans grabbed the Sabine women and fought off the Sabine men. […] All of the women abducted at the festival were said to have been virgins except for one married woman, Hersilia, who became Romulus’s wife and would later be the one to intervene and stop the ensuing war between the Romans and the Sabines.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

update DOGE team has slashed hundreds of jobs paid for by fees from banks, medical device companies and other forms of funding rather than taxpayer dollars

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

Federal workers responsible for America’s nuclear weapons, scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu, and officials responsible for supplying electricity are among those who have been accidentally fired […] Trump administration is now rushing to rehire hundreds of these workers […] Trump called the work by DOGE “amazing.”

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

DOGE employee cuts fall heavily on agency that regulates Musk’s Tesla […] The loss of personnel from the specialized unit is part of a 10 percent overall workforce reduction at the federal agency tasked with ensuring safety on America’s roads. In all, the agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will lose between 70 and 80 people

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

unrelated { Doctor gets message from health insurance agent during surgery | CNN | video }

bonus quote { “Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less likely to be deceived who knows nothing than the one who knows something.” —Jefferson }

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall. […]

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company […]

Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. […]

other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online résumé touts his work for Palantir […]

The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

{ you can go on Indian Amazon at amazon.in its fucking wild }

unrelated { How To Make $100K From A Dick Joke }

Cybercrime is already a huge, multi-trillion dollar problem, and one that most victims don’t like to talk about. It is said to be bigger than the entire global drug trade. Four things could make it much worse in 2025.

First, generative AI, rising in popularity and declining in price, is a perfect tool for cyberattackers. Although it is unreliable and prone to hallucinations, it is terrific at making plausible sounding text (e.g., phishing attacks to trick people into revealing credentials) and deepfaked videos at virtually zero cost, allowing attackers to broaden their attacks.

Second, large language models are notoriously susceptible to jailbreaking and things like “prompt-injection attacks,” for which no known solution exists.

Third, generative AI tools are increasingly being used to create code; in some cases those coders don’t fully understand the code written, and the autogenerated code has already been shown in some cases to introduce new security holes.

Finally, in the midst of all this, the new U.S. administration seems determined to deregulate as much as possible, slashing costs and even publicly shaming employees. Federal employees who do their jobs may be frightened, and many will be tempted to look elsewhere; enforcement and investigations will almost certainly decline in both quality and quantity, leaving the world quite vulnerable to ever more audacious attacks.

{ Gary Marcus | Politico | Continue reading }

related { 2025 deepfake threat predictions from biometrics, cybersecurity insiders }

On September 13, 1961, a tall, balding man with “spiteful eyes” (according to a CIA report), collected a large package from a Damascus post office addressed to “Abu Hussein”. He took the parcel home to his luxury apartment on the Rue Georges Haddad in the diplomatic quarter of the Syrian capital and opened it, whereupon the packet exploded, removing his eye and parts of his arm.

The bomb was a gift from Yitzhak Shamir, later prime minister of Israel but then head of Mifratz, the special operations unit of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.

Hussein’s real name was SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, one of the world’s most wanted Nazis, a mass-murdering monster nicknamed “the bloodhound” who was personally responsible for deporting 128,500 people to death camps.

In 1980, he lost the fingers on his left hand when a second letter bomb blew up in his hands.

{ The Times | Wikipedia }

Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, once the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution during World War II […] was in charge of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from 1943 to 1944.

By the early 1950s, Brunner is thought to have fled to Egypt and then to Syria, where he was known as Georg Fischer and worked as an arms dealer in Damascus.

Syria had already provided refuge to Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps.

When Hafez al-Assad seized power in a 1970 coup, Brunner helped the new regime set up an effective system of repression, inspired by the practices of the Third Reich.

Brunner shared his expertise in surveillance, interrogation and torture techniques, drawing on his experience with the Gestapo.

The brutal methods he taught the Syrian secret services were to have a lasting influence on the way the regime repressed political dissent.

One of the means of torture used by the Syrians, drawing on Brunner’s expertise, was the “German Chair,” a medieval-style rack used to stretch the victim’s spine.

In the 1990s, he gradually lost influence with the authorities. Things went badly awry when Bashar al-Assad took over from his father in July 2000. Brunner is then locked in a cell. Former security guards in charge of the protection of Brunner said that Brunner “suffered and cried a lot in his final years,” “couldn’t even wash” and ate only “an egg or a potato” a day. He ultimately died in deplorable conditions in December 2001, aged 89.

{ France 24 }

related { French Guiana’s Devil’s Island has witnessed some of humanity’s hardest moments […] Thousands of alleged criminals — some innocent, many not — were sent to Devil’s Island […] It was a sentence that carried with it a high probability of death, whether by the guillotine, tropical maladies, or from barbaric treatment by the prison’s notoriously sadistic guards. The dehumanizing treatment prisoners received on Devil’s Island was, in effect, a continuation of the barbarity long inflicted on French Guiana’s enslaved population. | JSTOR }

A gunman dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask over his lower face ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan […]

The first thing that’s unusual is that the shooter appeared to have a silencer. They’re not impossible to get, but they’re not readily available. The second thing is that he appeared to have inside information on the victim’s location. He knew where to wait and when to wait.

The fact that he used the silencer didn’t make sense to me at first, until I saw that the shooting took place at about 6:30 in the morning. Generally, if it was a midmorning sort of thing, you’d want a gun that made a lot of noise to scare observers off. But obviously at that time, no one was around. It also suggested that the urgency of the shooting was important. CEOs of health care companies are just not that hard to find in isolated settings. So the fact that he chose to do it in midtown Manhattan was a little bit unique. […]

A professional hit man would probably prefer to do something less public with limited exposure. Doing it in the middle of midtown—there’s just too many things that can go wrong […] However, if it was time sensitive, then that would make a difference. […]

This obviously was not the target’s usual routine. A professional would generally try to catch him in his regular routine in a place where the exposure of the shooter is minimized so that the risk of being caught or observed is pretty low. Manhattan, particularly in midtown, you’ve got cameras everywhere. […]

I would guess this person, if they’re hired, they would be relatively on the low end. The fact that it appeared in the video that the guy’s gun might have jammed is also a little bit of a concern for a professional. You make sure your equipment works. […]

Generally, you get that information by observing the individual. You find their schedule and their routine, and then you intercept them somewhere along the line on their routine. This was obviously not a routine setting. […] It suggests some sort of inside information. […]

I would think more likely it was somebody with a particular grudge that had access to inside information to know where to be and when to be there.

{ Interview with Dennis Kenney, professor of Criminal Justice | Slate | Continue reading }

When you deposit money at a bank, you expect the bank to give it back to you. There are two things you might worry about, two sets of risks that might prevent the bank from giving you back your money. One is that the bank might lose the money. Banks do not generally just keep your money in the vault. They use it to make loans, so there is risk: The loans might default, or depositors might all demand their money back at once when the bank does not have a lot of ready cash. […]

The other risk is that the bank might lose track of the money. You might go to the bank and deposit $100, and the bank might write down “$100” next to your name in its notebook, and then it might spill coffee on the notebook and be unable to read the entry and forget that it owes you the $100. And then you might come back to the bank in a week and ask for your $100 back and the bank might say “who are you? what $100?” […]

If a bank loses all your money, the FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] can give you your money back, because the FDIC is the government and can print money. If the bank loses its list of who has the money, what can the FDIC do? […] The definitive list of who the bank owes money is kept by the bank. Unless it isn’t.

I have never really understood the Synapse situation, but in my defense Synapse doesn’t understand it either. […]

Synapse functioned as a middleware provider between banks and fintechs. Synapse was a pioneer in what came to be known as “banking-as-a-service” (BaaS). In this role, Synapse opened accounts on behalf of approximately 100 fintech companies (and millions of end users) at four different partner banks.

On April 22, 2024, Synapse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On May 11, the partner banks lost access to the records maintained by Synapse and were unable to determine which end-users rightfully should be able to withdraw their funds.

[…]

You could imagine a world in which technology companies were better and nimbler and more accurate at keeping lists on computers than banks were. But in our world, banks have hundreds of years of history and regulation that have taught them that keeping an accurate list of who has the money is really, really, really, really, really important, and they tend to do it.

{ Matt Levine / Bloomberg| Continue reading }

It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions. […]

Findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed in 2023 by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

This is just a cool insider trading case. There’s a guy, Robert Westbrook. He allegedly hacked into the email accounts of several executives at different US public companies. The SEC complaint lays out how he allegedly did that:

He would go to the executive’s Outlook email login page and click to reset the password. “Four of the five Hacked Companies used the same password reset portal software,” says the SEC, and he was apparently familiar with its workings.

He subscribed to “an online directory service provider and an online genealogy company,” which gave him “personal and family

information that could be used to guess the answers to the security questions that employees at the Hacked Companies may have used to reset their passwords.” You can do a lot of damage if you know a public-company executive’s mother’s maiden name and first pet’s name.

He’d reset their passwords and get access to their emails.

Then he’d read them and look for secret earnings information. […]

But even if you get earnings releases in advance, there’s no guarantee that you’ll make money. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague John Authers wrote last week about an Elm Partners study finding that most people can’t trade profitably even knowing tomorrow’s news. […]

Ten trades were winners, four were losers, the winners were bigger than the losers and his net profit was about $3.4 million. […]

This includes buying half a million dollars’ worth of one company’s[2] stock and call options before its March 2019 earnings report, and making a $236,492 profit when the earnings were good, and then buying $786,364 worth of that company’s put options before its March 2020 earnings report, and making a $1.04 million profit when those earnings were mixed.

{ Matt Levine / Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Maybe the easiest lucrative job in finance is:

Take a job at a hedge fund.
Get handed an employment agreement on the first day that says “you agree not to disclose any of our secrets unless required by law.”
Sign.
Take the agreement home with you.
Circle that sentence in red marker, write “$$$$$!!!!!” next to it and send it to the SEC.
The SEC extracts a $10 million fine.
They give you $3 million.
You can keep your job! Why not; it’s illegal to retaliate against whistleblowers.
Or, you know, get a new one and do it again.

[…]

The theory here is that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has a whistleblower protection rule that says that “no person may take any action to impede an individual from communicating directly with the Commission staff about a possible securities law violation, including enforcing, or threatening to enforce, a confidentiality agreement.”

[…]

Anyway:

OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.

[…]

OpenAI made staff sign employee agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation, the letter said. These agreements also required OpenAI staff to get prior consent from the company if they wished to disclose information to federal authorities. OpenAI did not create exemptions in its employee nondisparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations to the SEC.

{ Matt Levine | Bloomberg | Continue reading }

“If you need somebody to get vicious,” Mr. Trump once said, “hire Roy Cohn.” His legal strategy boiled down to: Delay and deny. Don’t hesitate to attack the judge and prosecutor (“I don’t care what the law is; tell me who the judge is” was his most famous line). Address the press every chance you get. And intimidate and ridicule witnesses.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }