Probably is. NOAA and other gov sources help us predict things like clear air turbulence related to the jet stream. One probably doesn’t want to politicize those kinds of predictions too much or risk scraping passengers and their dinners from ceilings.
Too late! NOAA's budget is getting slashed and they're stopping weather balloon launches, starting with the plains states. Good luck with those turbulence forecasts!
To be fair there have been a bunch of headlines about a great many things, like office closures without mentioning the minor detail that the offices haven’t been used in years, the workforce is remote, and there is no impact on service delivery or staffing. Doesn’t stop journalists from dancing around the implication if it makes the orange man and mars man look bad though.
how do you know that the offices haven't been used in years and there is no impact unless a journalist told you? Is there any reason to trust rando twitter accounts besides the fact that it makes you feel better about "your side".
"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory tariffs slam US exports, many Americans lose jobs and whole regions lose industries, etc., it's generally bad for companies selling things.
Biggest potential winners are anyone willing to directly pay the President a kickback for massive corrupt payments from the government, anyone facing severe legal liability for past illegal actions who can buy a get-out-of-jail card, and foreign autocrats who want the US to stop protecting its own interests.
lol that indieweb website. Join the collective or we won’t think you independent. Just run Wordpress with a few hundred million other site owners and you’re good. There’s a metric fuckton of activity in the space and you don’t need a manbun.
Data for nation state espionage and industrial espionage?
Whoever owns Wiz obtains read only access to large company and government cloud networks. Even in the Wiz outpost model where the scanning engine is deployed into the user's own cloud network, results from scans are sent back to Wiz Cloud, and this includes sensitive information such as "Installed packages, Exposed secrets, Malware detection".[1] For an example real world deployment, GitLab SaaS public documentation expects the "Wiz Runtime Sensor" to be installed in every container.[2] This Wiz software requires highly elevated privileges to a level that the GitLab security risk assessment only briefly describes.[3]
The data Wiz collects on customers appears to allow answering of queries such as:
1. Which containers of government agencies in country X have the xz-utils library installed? Of these containers, what other software is installed alongside? How many of these containers are exposed to the Internet, directly or indirectly?
2. Which government agencies in country X have a publicly exposed service vulnerable to CVE-20xx-xxxx?
3. For top 200 companies, plot the popularity of AWS or Azure service ACME123 over the past 12 months compared to competing Google service ACME456.
Aside from security risks of having sensitive information of entire governments or large organisations hoovered up by Wiz, use of the "Wiz Runtime Sensor" also includes the risk of an incident similar to the failed CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor update of 2024.
The criticisms above are not specific to Wiz. There are many other competing products/services with similarly poor architectures and lack of protection of sensitive IT system information of governments and large organisations.
This doesn't work in fog. Space lasers are great. No fog. Everyone wants the 500 Terahertz frequencies to work because bandwidth. They have about 25,000 times the carrying capacity of say 20 Ghz. The lower Ghz stuff penetrates weather to varying degrees. Visible light not so much unless it's a vacuum which is perfect. They should move their nodes into space. Oh wait someone already did that.
It's not only fog. Depending on pupil size it can also be rain. But during my thesis 10y ago one of the big limitation on horizontal line of sight laser telecommunication was scintillation due to turbulence. And this phenomenon appear in clear weather condition with heat. So it was limited in clear and sunny weather.
I don't know what up time did there expect ? But the bandwidth should fluctuate a lot.
I have Alexa and a few Siri devices next to me and I just said a bunch of phrases indicating fire, choking, that we should call 911 etc and nothing triggered. So yeah - this is just internet bullshit until proven otherwise.
it both is and isn't secret bullshit. there's no evidence that there's a list of secret keywords Lord Bezos is listening for, but there's plenty of evidence that these devices active unintentionally all the time and that those unintentional activations lead to you being recorded and that recording being sent off into the cloud
I don't think it's any secret that the device can unintentionally activate in certain circumstances (and whether or not that's due to it thinking it heard its name is another debate)... but my problem with OP's statement is that they seem to frame it as if it's intentionally and maliciously listening more often than it should, and I just don't see any evidence to support that claim.
What I'm saying is that intentionality doesn't have to be relevant to this discussion. All you need to do in order to be maliciously spying on someone, given that you have this bug in the first place, is to
1) not fix the bug
2) quietly remove the option to opt out of remote processing
and then all of a sudden you've got a situation where of course no one is actively spying because We Would Never(tm)(c)(r) but there's a really reliable pipeline by which recordings of me talking to me family in my home end up on a remote server somewhere where they're used to train AI and maybe even automatically scanned for certain keywords that might indicate that I'm some sort of troublemaker and need flagged for additional "attention". It's a plausibly-deniable panopticon. In fact having it activate by purposefully unremediated mistake rather than by keyword makes it a better spy. You can discover a list of keywords and avoid them but ambient noise causing the device to randomly sample and exfiltrate recordings means you can never know when you're being recorded and thus have no choice but to always act like you're being recorded, just in case.
I think the graph showing the pct of artists who never had a hit again is interesting given that it peaks in the early 90s. I've heard the grunge era described by record industry folks as a freight train that no one saw coming.
reply