Tag: technology

Turned out to be the female Bernie Madoff:

Elizabeth Holmes — the Silicon Valley wunderkind whose blood-testing startup Theranos has collapsed in a slew of scandals — has been charged with “massive fraud” by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC on Wednesday accused Theranos CEO Holmes and a top lieutenant of defrauding investors of more than $700 million through false claims about its technology.

Holmes — a Steve Jobs wannabe who dressed exclusively in black turtlenecks as she talked up her blood-testing unicorn, which at one point boasted a valuation north of $9 billion — settled with the regulators for $500,000 while neither admitting nor denying the accusations.

Theranos disclosed in a 2016 letter to investors it was under a criminal probe. No criminal charges have been filed, and it’s not known if the investigation is ongoing.

Holmes additionally agreed to not be a director or officer of a public company for 10 years, and to forgo profiting from Theranos ownership until $750 million is returned to investors, according to the consent order with the SEC.

Theranos and 34-year-old Holmes ran “an elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance,” according to the SEC.

While Theranos had said it was on track to make $100 million by the end of 2014, the real figure was “a little more than $100,000,” according to the SEC.

The thing you have to understand about Silicon Valley is that for the last 20 years, it has essentially consisted of little more than techno-Ponzi schemes. Very, very few of the companies that are created there are actually intended to make money on the basis of their nominal business. What is remarkable, in many cases, is the way in which many of these startups never have very much revenue, let alone profit, at all.

These “startups” are basically schemes to suck in investors and keep stringing them along until the company can drum up an exit, which can take the form of going public, or in most cases, an acquisition. But the whole game is more akin to gambling than it is to conventional business development. This is the difference between an Infogalactic and a Gab, for example. We’re not Silicon Valley startup artists, we’re not looking for a future exit, we are developing our own new tech on a community-supported shoestring, we aren’t slinging around buzzwords or issuing press releases, and we strongly prefer volunteers and supporters to employees and investors. Only time will tell which Alt-Tech model works better, but if Gab eventually implodes, you cannot say the warning signs were not there.

Anyhow, I always assumed Elizabeth Holmes was a complete fake, so this news of her confirmed con artistry does not surprise me at all. She clearly didn’t know what she was talking about, she always seemed to be more interested in TED Talks and photoshoots than business, and she surrounded herself with the kind of older men who are always complete suckers for any woman who is young and blonde.

US global military supremacy has proven short-lived, as any military historian could have predicted. The Saker has again been proven correct about Russia’s advanced military capabilities:

There are two myths which are deeply imprinted in the minds of most US Americans which are extremely dangerous and which can result in a war with Russia.

The first myth is the myth of US military superiority.

The second myth is the myth of US invulnerability.

I believe that it is therefore crucial to debunk these myths before they end up costing us millions of lives and untold suffering.

Introducing the Zircon 3M22 hypersonic missile

First, some basic data about this missile (from English and Russian Wikipedia):

Low level range: 135 to 270 nautical miles (155 to 311mi; 250 to 500km).
High level range: 400nmi (460mi; 740km) in a semi-ballistic trajectory.
Max range: 540nmi (620mi; 1,000km)
Max altitude: 40km (130,000 feet)
Average range is around 400km (250mi; 220nmi)/450 km.
Speed: Mach 5–Mach 6 (3,806–4,567mph; 6,125–7,350km/h; 1.7015–2.0417km/s).
Max speed: Mach 8 (6,090mph; 9,800km/h; 2.7223km/s) during a test.
Warhead: 300-400kg (high explosive or nuclear)
Shape: low-RCS with radar absorbing coating.
Cost per missile: 1-2 million dollars (depending on configuration)

All this is already very impressive, but here comes the single most important fact about this missile: it can be launched from pretty much *any* platform: cruisers, of course, but also frigates and even small corvettes. It can be launched by nuclear and diesel-electric attack submarines. It can also be launched from long range bombers (Tu-160), medium-range bombers (Tu-22m3), medium-range fighter-bomber/strike aircraft (SU-34) and even, according to some reports, from a multi-role air superiority fighter (SU-35). Finally, this missile can also be shore-based. In fact, this missile can be launched from any platform capable of launching the now famous Kalibr cruise missile and that means that even a merchant marine or fishing ship could carry a container with the Zircon missile hidden inside. In plain English what this means is the following:

Russia has a missile which cannot be stopped or spoofed by any of the current and foreseeable USN anti-missile weapons systems. This missile can be deployed *anywhere* in the world on *any* platform.
Let me repeat this again: pretty much any Russian ship and pretty much any Russian aircraft from now on will have the potential capability of sinking a US aircraft carrier. In the past, such capabilities were limited to specific ships (Slava class), submarines (Oscar class) or aircraft (Backfires). The Soviets had a large but limited supply of such platforms and they were limited on where they could deploy them. This era is now over. From now on a swarm of Zircon 3M22 could appear anywhere on the planet at any moment and with no warning time (5000 miles per hour incoming speed does not leave the target anything remotely comparable to even a short reaction time). In fact, the attack could be so rapid that it might not even leave the target the time needed to indicate that it is under attack.

Introducing the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)

Though officially very little is know about the Sarmat and the Yu-71, the reality is that the Internet has been full of educated guesses which give us a pretty clear idea of what kind of systems we are dealing here.

You can think of the RS-28 Sarmat as a successor of the already formidable RS-36 Voevoda (SS-18 Satan in US classification) missile: it is a heavy, very powerful, intercontinental ballistic missile with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (warheads):

Weight: 100 tons
Payload: 10 tons
Warheads: 10 to 15
Hypersonic glide vehicles: 3-24 (that’s the Yu-71 we will discuss below)
Range: 10,000km
Guidance: Inertial , satellite, astrocelestial
Trajectory: FOBS-capable

That last line, about being FOBS-capable, is crucial as it means that, unlike most Soviet/Russian ICMBs, the Sarmat does not have to fly over the North Pole to strike at the United States. In fact, the Sarmat could fly over the South Pole or, for that matter, in any direction and still reach any target in the US. Right there this capability is, by itself, is more than enough to defeat any current and foreseeable US anti-ballistic missile technology. But it gets better, or worse, depending on your perspective: the Sarmat’s reentry vehicles/warhards are capable of flying in low orbit, maneuver, and then suddenly plunge towards their targets. The only way to defeat such an attack would be to protect the US by a 3600 coverage capable ABM system, something which the US is decades away from deploying.

Although it upsets most Americans to be confronted with the facts, the truth is that the USA badly misplayed its dominant hand after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead of modernizing its military and maintaining its technological superiority, it elected to play global policeman at the behest of the neocons. And, as anyone who knows anything about military history can tell you, policemen make terrible soldiers. All the hundreds of bases scattered now around the world have been transformed at a stroke from tools for force projection into indefensible vulnerabilities, and with the development of hypersonic missiles – which probably explain the recent sightings of high-speed UFOs – the USA’s ability to project force via its naval dominance is now subject to a Russian veto.

As we’ve seen in Syria, this new ability of the Russians to rein in the lunatic neocons is probably a good thing. Although the US military is still superior, it is no longer supreme, and one hopes that the God-Emperor’s more intelligent military advisers will help him understand the new rules of the game. But the US will have to significantly adjust its strategy if it is not going to find itself being technologically passed up by China as well as Russia.

Once more, we are seeing that the Open Society approach championed by George Soros and the European Union is not merely foolish, but significantly disadvantageous. These new developments bring some dangers, but on the whole, the coming end of NATO and the neoliberal world order is almost certainly a good thing for the people of the West.

At first glance, one might assume that the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s opposition to sex trafficking laws is based on principle. But based on their actions, that clearly isn’t the case.

The EFF argues repeatedly that the existing law is “not broken” but they are wrong. In fact the EFF itself has used the existing law to argue that the most flagrant promoters of sex trafficking should not be held accountable for their crimes against humanity.

In Government Pressure Shutters Backpage’s Adult Services Section the EFF acknowledges that “Backpage knew that its website was being used to post ads for illegal prostitution and child sex trafficking, and directly edited such ads to make their illegality less conspicuous” but argues that Backpage should not be held accountable for those actions.

The EFF goes on to congratulate themselves on having supported Backpage by filing a brief on their behalf when they were sued by child sex trafficking victims. The EFF published an article about that case entitled Court Finds That Section 230 Shields Website From Child Trafficking Claims.

The legislation that the EFF is fighting against is needed specifically because the existing law shields the most egregious child sex traffickers from liability for their crimes and prevents children who have been enslaved and raped from seeking damages against those who have made millions from their exploitation.

The EFF knows this all to well because they have been in court arguing on the behalf of criminal enterprises like Backpage that the existing law gives them immunity.

And, let’s face it, for all its merits, the EFF does have more than a few of those obese bearded weirdos who look as if they just might have a small body or two stashed in the cellar.

One wonders what they imagined the likely outcome was going to be:

Rare.us, the viral content site launched by Cox Media in 2013 to take on the ever-evolving digital landscape from a right of center lens, will shut down at the end of the month, according to Facebook posts by its top editors.

Why it matters: It’s another example of a viral website built on Facebook traffic that is shutting down after Facebook announced it would be making changes to its News Feed algorithm to weed out publisher content.

Rare has amassed 2.3 million Facebook fans since launch. The site’s traffic peaked in 2014 at around 22.5 million global unique visitors, according to Quantcast. The site’s global traffic had fallen to 5.5 million global unique visitors in February of 2018.

Last week, LittleThings, a 4-year-old publisher which built an audience by sharing happy stories on Facebook, also shut down, citing Facebook News Feed changes.

It’s heads they win, tails you lose. No matter what you do, they’re not going to let you win. No matter how big you get, they won’t hesitate to cut off their own nose if that’s what it takes to trip you up. So don’t play their game!

Know your enemy. ALWAYS know your enemy. And build your own platforms.

Somehow, I tend to doubt that. Frankly, it surprises me that Google executives aren’t bragging about it… but they know their statements would almost surely end up as evidence in more than one lawsuit:

YouTube’s New Moderators Mistakenly Pull Right-Wing Channels

YouTube’s new moderators, brought in to spot fake, misleading and extreme videos, stumbled in one of their first major tests, mistakenly removing some clips and channels in the midst of a nationwide debate on gun control.

The Google division said in December it would assign more than 10,000 people to moderate content after a year of scandals over fake and inappropriate content on the world’s largest video site.

In the wake of the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, some YouTube moderators mistakenly removed several videos and some channels from right-wing, pro-gun video producers and outlets.

So, Sundararajan, my old pal, was this a “mistake” too?

After review, the following video: Immigration and War has been blocked from view on the following YouTube country site(s): Austria, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Czechia, Germany, Estonia, France, United Kingdom, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Martinique, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Poland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Reunion, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, French Southern Territories, Wallis and Futuna, Mayotte
Clipgrab.

Certain features have been disabled for this video

In response to user reports, we have disabled some features, such as comments, sharing, and suggested videos, because this video contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences. 

Netflix has always been a shady operation, in my opinion. Their streaming business depended entirely upon someone else being forced to pay for most of the enormous bandwidth costs that their delivery system required. They got away with that one somehow, but I think it is unlikely that they’ll be able to get away with alleged accounting practices that sound creative even by Hollywood’s infamous standards.

This almost-TV network will pay at least twice what anyone else will for original content, whether you are selling a TV series, film – or even a stand-up comedy special.

The modern version of this scheme is enabled by a very unique form of accounting hocus-pocus, used by the almost-TV network.  This accounting magic allows the company to claim that it is generating a “profit”.  The reality is that this company burned through about $2 billion of cash last year, and will burn through another $3-4 billion in 2018.

This almost-TV network simply depreciates the value of all these films and shows over a far longer period of time than everyone else ever has.  The company claims that their definition is legit, because the content is in their own “library”.

This almost-TV network is the 1st to deliver its content in a unique way, using relatively new technology – they were the first company to do it this way on a large scale.  This means the Feds presently have no basis to challenge the almost TV-network on its suspect accounting, because the new “definition” has not been proven wrong.  Only the ultimate financial collapse of the company will do that.  In the meantime, the accountants and auditors go along for the ride and happily collect their fees, as they always do.

The almost-TV network tells its stockholders that it can taper down this spending spigot in the future, to generate actual cash.  This is an obvious lie, in 2 ways.

If the almost-TV network ever cut spending and new content, many subscribers would drop them like a hot potato.  Second, the company is making many big public commitments to spend money like drunken sailors, for several years into the future.  The huge deal they made this week – that is just to the head guy alone.  It doesn’t count a penny towards what it will cost to make his shows.

This sort of corporate shadiness is yet another sign that the end of the most recent credit bubble is in sight. A commenter on the site had some interesting insights on the Netflix situation by making two historical comparisons.

The AOL fraud was based on an accounting scam where they capitalized all marketing expenses. All those CD-ROMs that you got through the mail and in magazines was claimed by AOL as a “research and development” cost. So could be amortized over seven years instead of charging them against that years accounts. So AOL not only never made any profit but had actually lost huge amounts of money. Which Time Warner discovered the hard way after the merger. Many billions of losses. Its not like everyone in the business at the time did not know that AOL was based on fraud.

The Softkey/Learning Company fraud was based on acquiring larger and larger software companies and greatly inflating the “goodwill” of the acquired companies. So their balance sheet looked great and the companies they acquired were cash rich and had great cash flows. But the scam needed bigger and bigger companies to acquire, like all Ponzi schemes, and when they ran out of companies to gobble up they sold the whole festering sack of shit to the nearest clueless idiot with money. In this case Mattel. Who a few years later had to write off $3 billion in losses and almost went bankrupt.

A friend of mine was involved with a very large corporation that grew through credit-funded mergers; his company was acquired several steps before the final end game. The company had billions in revenue and was worth many multiples more when it finally imploded. It was an extremely educational experience to be able to witness the whole thing gradually play out from the outside.

Israel shoots down a drone, Iran shoots down an F-16:

An Israeli fighter has been shot down as the country’s air force carried out attacks against Iranian targets in Syria after intercepting a drone. The military said its planes faced massive anti-aircraft fire from Syria that forced two pilots to abandon an F-16 jet that crashed in northern Israel, seriously wounding one and lightly injuring the other.

‘This is a serious Iranian attack on Israeli territory. Iran is dragging the region into an adventure in which it doesn’t know how it will end,’ Israel’s chief military spokesman, Brigadier General Ronen Manelis, said in a statement.

Israeli forces identified an ‘Iranian UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)’ launched from Syria and intercepted it in Israeli airspace with a combat helicopter, a statement said. They then ‘targeted the Iranian control systems in Syria that sent the UAV into Israeli airspace,’ military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus tweeted. ‘Massive Syrian anti-air fire, one F16 crashed in Israel, pilots safe.’

The Israeli military then carried out what it called a ‘large scale attack’ against Iranian and Syrian targets in Syria.

Given the way in which a Russian plane was shot down earlier this week, it is increasingly apparent that the age of air supremacy, although not over, is approaching its end. Once lasers replace missiles and guns, it’s all but over for aircraft, manned or not.

An interesting analysis of the death of the American newspaper:

Traditionally, a U.S. newspaper relied upon three revenue streams, roughly one-third each: subscriptions, commercial advertising, and classifieds. First, the Internet ate the classifieds (see Craigslist), then moved on to some of that display stuff. It is this which is blamed for the decline of the industry and the associated calls that Google and or Facebook should cough up some money to revive it.

Much more important, though, is geography. The U.S. is a big country. You could drop the average European country into it and not really notice. A result of this is that U.S. newspapers were, largely speaking, a series of regional monopolies. This was down to the same network effects that people use to complain about Facebook today. Once you’re getting the majority of the classifieds in an area, for example, you’ll end up getting almost all of them. People read the section because that’s where the ads are, people advertise there because the readers are there, and so on. And as above, classifieds were a very important part of newspaper financing.

But note my point here about those regional monopolies. Apart from the very largest cities, there was usually only the one major paper. And there was another one of those every … well, that’s the geography-dependent part. The U.S. rail network has never been very fast at the distribution of either goods or people. It’s optimized for bulk commodities like coal, iron ore, and the like. But getting something printed this evening to somewhere 400 miles away before breakfast? Not so much. Thus, each major urban center, perhaps some hundreds of miles from the next, had its own newspaper ecology.

Now along comes the Internet. Our local monopolies created by geography are now broken. It’s that, much more than the loss of one or more revenue streams, which is leading to the change. We simply do not need 50 or 200 major newspapers all trying to tell their readers about everything. It can be, and therefore will be, managed with very much fewer than that.

In other words, journalists now in the position of the buggy whip manufacturers they always used to enjoy mocking as people whining about inevitable progress. And here I thought journalists were supposed to be progressives!

This means that we’re not actually seeing a development of an Alt-Media so much as we’re simply seeing the centralization and polarization of the media play out as it has in Britain. Whoever makes the shift to be the national conservative newspaper will survive, almost all of the others will eventually be devoured by the Left Opinion Leader paper (The New York Times), the Establishment Government paper (The Washington Post), and the Establishment Business paper (The Wall Street Journal).

It’s a mystery to WIRED. A deeply impenetrable mystery.

A quantum computer would be the cyber warfare equivalent of a nuclear bomb, which means the US government is often reluctant to let foreign scientists work on the most promising research. It’s a system that can slow down progress due the lack of ‘smart Americans,’ as one character in the book puts it.

“The number of American citizens who can do very high-end research who also can easily get security clearances is limited,” Ignatius says. “The ability of our schools to produce American students at a world-class level, that’s an important national challenge.”

He says that one reason the US lags behind other countries is a political culture in Washington in which too many leaders are ignorant of and hostile to basic science. Though he believes that recent events like the March for Science are a promising development.

“When adherents of the fact-based, reason-based, educated-and-proud-of-it world begin to fight back and say, ‘No, wait a minute. We’re not going to throw climate science or any other aspect of our fact-based tradition overboard,’ that’s going in the right direction,” Ignatius says.

He believes that one thing the US does have going for it is that the country still produces a disproportionately high number of creative and risk-taking individuals, and that it’s important not to lose that edge moving forward. “The sweet spot for us is somehow to be rigorous enough in giving people the basics, but also loose enough in letting people experiment and be creative,” he says. “But the basic math/science education, the US has got to get better at it, no question about it.”