"In 2012, Apple joined the PRISM data collection program run by the National Security Agency (NSA)."
"The firm added that between 1 December 2012 and 31 May 2013 it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from US law enforcement for customer data, involving between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. It did not say with how many it had complied."
Whatever number they give publicly on how many US law enforcement requests they received you can be sure that number won't include anything they turned over the NSA which is probably everything in their cloud all of the time. We know they backdoored the devices (https://www.cultofmac.com/news/nsa-spyware-allegedly-gives-b...)
just as a point of comparison, google had 25,879 requests involving 42,500 accounts in approximately the same time period (january 1 through june 2013)
google complied with ~65% of the requests
("fun" tidbit: the number for the last half year are 304,915 requests for 748,478 accounts, and google complied with.... 98%!)
Google's privacy ain't main/one of main selling point since we all know how things work in ad business.
If apple was principally against sharing those things they wouldnt be joining the very organization made for that.
Plus any public statement from anybody, unless forced by court, shouldnt be taken as facts. We have no way of knowing if it was 25k cases or 25 million cases, and they have no reason to tell such non-public truth if its harmful to them.
CIA funding helped keep Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock afloat, serving as propaganda for freedom of expression and individualism in contrast to Soviet collectivism.
Fellow readers whose interests are piqued by this comment: this is apparently true. This book [1] talks about it in greater depth. From Wikipedia:
> [The author] describes the growth of the Abstract Expressionist art movement, and its frequent showcasing in New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), as largely a CIA-sponsored operation [...] Since many abstract expressionist painters and sculptors were anarchistic, and strongly anti-CIA, a "long leash" policy was adopted that "kept CIA operatives at a remove of two or three degrees from the artists and art exhibitions—sometimes even more—so that they could not be linked to any furtive governmental bankrolling."
You are correct in the sense that CIA was absolutely using art as a propoganda tool and highlighting how US has such a strong artistic foundation. But that doesn't mean they were personally financially keeping Pollock afloat because it somewhat implies that Pollock is a product of CIA funding when in reality, CIA used Pollock's work as an asset in their cold war.
It's not like CIA has some mastermind strategy, it is also a preferred career for old money nepo kids who gain quasi-global legal immunity from these government roles. CIA job is much better than being a honorary consul for some shithole just to evade parking tickets.
If those nepo kids like to mingle in the NYC artsy scene, then that's where the funds flow.
If those nepo kids larp white supremacists with their KKK costumes and the CIA has lots of drugs lying around, then they drown their black tenants in free drugs.
Case in point: the "Leet Babe" vanity SSN of GhisIaine MaxweIl
Your tone implies that the same people who freak out about reasonable gov intervention, are also (hypocritically) okay with the shenanigans being discussed.
But if I had my druthers, I'd rather the CIA was "manipulating" us more often by subsidizing jazz artists rather than funnelling cash and prisoners to torture sites in El Salvador.
Can we please not do this here? Can we please not vaguely gesticulate towards some government bogeyman anytime our comments are downvoted or flagged or just because we see something we don’t agree with?
To quote Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn’t belong.
if you have anyone specific in mind, you should email hn@ycombinator.com
if you dont have anyone specific in mind, this comment does nothing except "FUD"
edit: really, getting downvoted into oblivion for this? baseless and general accusations of deepstate actors is really what we want the comment sections of hn to be?
You’re naive if think there is an intelligence organization in the world who can log into the internet who doesn’t scrape analyze and opinionate over the intellectual bastion which is HN.
baseless and generally-applicable accusations of deepstate activity are worthless as a comment.
that does not mean i dont think governments, corps, etc. aren't scraping data or even attempting to shape narrative. but i dont want to read general, non-actionable, vague comments about deepstate actors while browsing hn.
comments like that are not interesting, they don't pique curiosity, they don't promote good conversation, and there's nothing to learn from them.
And for people that know their history, the DoD basically built Silicon Valley as we know, funding research and buying essentially 100% of the output of valley fabs for several years for Radars, then ICBMs, and then flight computers (F14 was arguably the first modern microcomputer) from about 1962-1972. Only when silicon companies scaled beyond this demand did the consumer computer revolution begin to take flight.
It's pretty obvious now that governments have been propping up the tech sector in many countries. It's a weird industry. Look at the biggest tech companies. They all start out with apparently legitimate products but slowly lose market share over decades, end up doing nothing and yet more profitable and more valuable than ever. Look at companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceX, Salesforce... Their main business is extracting money from the government.
I think software, paradoxically, has deeper network and intertial effects than pretty much anything else we have invented so far. Compare the leverage it enables to the ecosystem lock in it forces.
With physical goods, it's not nearly that coupled.
> many tech leaders cite patriotism and national renewal in their quest for military contracts, but mutual self-interest is what drove cooperation in the past
How can they be patriots when they do so at the expense of the 1st, 4th, 5th and 10th amendments to the U.S. Constitution? That's not patriotism, it's terrorism.
> But why would Jobs, a child of the counterculture who had practiced Buddhism under a Zen master and cited taking LSD as a formative experience, tether his company’s future to spies?
That's a funny sentence to read when you know the actual history of LSD, how it was brought to and disseminated throughout the U.S., and the role it played in de-fanging the counterculture.
Practically all basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars. It's easy to underestimate the importance of DOD, NIH, and NSF grants in ongoing technological innovation.
I dont know if im buying magic CPU upgrade story. CPU/FPU are soldered and non overclockable. Motorola didnt have a super beefed 68030 version, extra special 68882 fpu, nor faster pin compatible 56001. The only socket on board is for 56001 which was already fitted from factory.
Graphics from Intel is much more believable, probably something that later became Intel i860 based NeXTdimension. But that would push whole story a couple years since Intel i860 released mid 1989.
They were probably talking about an accelerator card. That would make sense if the writer isn't familiar with them and Romello wanted to simplify things a bit and just called it a compute upgrade or something.
I'd be willing to believe in factory overclocks, one magic speed bin that wasn't common enough to market to the public, but was common enough to yield a few here or there. I worked at a place that was able to secure factory overclocks from Intel, 100MHz faster than what everyone else was buying.
But they were rather uncomplicated, compared to the BGAed monsters we have now. Infrared heatguns and reflow ovens are nothing new. Neither is liquid cooling.
The point is there were no chips to put on the Next Cube that would make it faster in 1988, and the whole system was designed and tuned for specific fixed clock so bus overclocking is also very unlikely.
The only possibility is April 1989 announcement of 50 MHz versions of 68030/68882 and Clock Doubler circuit running CPU/FPU fast only when its not touching the bus. Afaik to this day this is the only way to OC Nexts.
But this still pushes whole thing to ~1990. Would NSA get 20000 highly binned CPUs before actual volume production? Then there is absolute lack of evidence of even one such system ever surviving, and stuff does survive despite being classified, like Tempest IBM 5170s.
People talk a lot about metadata collection but not about DNA collection.
It is imperative for any intelligence service to know if any politically exposed person has a child, especially if it spawns from an affair. Logically, we have to assume that all laboratories processing human blood are also doing some sort of DNA genealogy.
Apple :
"In 2012, Apple joined the PRISM data collection program run by the National Security Agency (NSA)."
"The firm added that between 1 December 2012 and 31 May 2013 it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from US law enforcement for customer data, involving between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. It did not say with how many it had complied."
Whatever number they give publicly on how many US law enforcement requests they received you can be sure that number won't include anything they turned over the NSA which is probably everything in their cloud all of the time. We know they backdoored the devices (https://www.cultofmac.com/news/nsa-spyware-allegedly-gives-b...)
just as a point of comparison, google had 25,879 requests involving 42,500 accounts in approximately the same time period (january 1 through june 2013)
google complied with ~65% of the requests
("fun" tidbit: the number for the last half year are 304,915 requests for 748,478 accounts, and google complied with.... 98%!)
Google's privacy ain't main/one of main selling point since we all know how things work in ad business.
If apple was principally against sharing those things they wouldnt be joining the very organization made for that.
Plus any public statement from anybody, unless forced by court, shouldnt be taken as facts. We have no way of knowing if it was 25k cases or 25 million cases, and they have no reason to tell such non-public truth if its harmful to them.
my comment is primarily to give a sense of scale.
you don't know whether "4,000 to 5,000 requests" is a lot or a little if you have no point of comparison.
i am not commenting on the conclusions, everyone should have the opportunity to draw those themselves.
I didn’t find this in the article where did this come from?
CIA funding helped keep a lot of industries afloat in the 20th century.
CIA funding helped keep Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock afloat, serving as propaganda for freedom of expression and individualism in contrast to Soviet collectivism.
Fellow readers whose interests are piqued by this comment: this is apparently true. This book [1] talks about it in greater depth. From Wikipedia:
> [The author] describes the growth of the Abstract Expressionist art movement, and its frequent showcasing in New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), as largely a CIA-sponsored operation [...] Since many abstract expressionist painters and sculptors were anarchistic, and strongly anti-CIA, a "long leash" policy was adopted that "kept CIA operatives at a remove of two or three degrees from the artists and art exhibitions—sometimes even more—so that they could not be linked to any furtive governmental bankrolling."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Paid_the_Piper%3F
Nothing says rugged individualism like some good-old state-sponsored abstract art.
You are correct in the sense that CIA was absolutely using art as a propoganda tool and highlighting how US has such a strong artistic foundation. But that doesn't mean they were personally financially keeping Pollock afloat because it somewhat implies that Pollock is a product of CIA funding when in reality, CIA used Pollock's work as an asset in their cold war.
Yes, in a similar way to how RATM’s music was used in Guantanamo.
Those sub-miniature microphones and speakers in your phones? More CIA investment, eventually commercialized by companies like Knowles.
It's not like CIA has some mastermind strategy, it is also a preferred career for old money nepo kids who gain quasi-global legal immunity from these government roles. CIA job is much better than being a honorary consul for some shithole just to evade parking tickets.
If those nepo kids like to mingle in the NYC artsy scene, then that's where the funds flow.
If those nepo kids larp white supremacists with their KKK costumes and the CIA has lots of drugs lying around, then they drown their black tenants in free drugs.
Case in point: the "Leet Babe" vanity SSN of GhisIaine MaxweIl
And somehow people freak out some bullshit about free market when there is gov intervention, even if it is reasonable
Your tone implies that the same people who freak out about reasonable gov intervention, are also (hypocritically) okay with the shenanigans being discussed.
Who are these straw men you refer to?
Let’s be clear: if the CIA was doing it, then it was not overt and obvious. It was secret manipulation.
Is that the kind of government intervention that you want to get?
As a general rule, probably not ...
But if I had my druthers, I'd rather the CIA was "manipulating" us more often by subsidizing jazz artists rather than funnelling cash and prisoners to torture sites in El Salvador.
You dig?
FYI be careful who you engage with. there are astroturfers and bot and deep state actors on these forums.
> deep state actors
Can we please not do this here? Can we please not vaguely gesticulate towards some government bogeyman anytime our comments are downvoted or flagged or just because we see something we don’t agree with?
To quote Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn’t belong.
if you have anyone specific in mind, you should email hn@ycombinator.com
if you dont have anyone specific in mind, this comment does nothing except "FUD"
edit: really, getting downvoted into oblivion for this? baseless and general accusations of deepstate actors is really what we want the comment sections of hn to be?
Absolutely certainly true.
You’re naive if think there is an intelligence organization in the world who can log into the internet who doesn’t scrape analyze and opinionate over the intellectual bastion which is HN.
baseless and generally-applicable accusations of deepstate activity are worthless as a comment.
that does not mean i dont think governments, corps, etc. aren't scraping data or even attempting to shape narrative. but i dont want to read general, non-actionable, vague comments about deepstate actors while browsing hn.
comments like that are not interesting, they don't pique curiosity, they don't promote good conversation, and there's nothing to learn from them.
they are a net negative on hn.
And for people that know their history, the DoD basically built Silicon Valley as we know, funding research and buying essentially 100% of the output of valley fabs for several years for Radars, then ICBMs, and then flight computers (F14 was arguably the first modern microcomputer) from about 1962-1972. Only when silicon companies scaled beyond this demand did the consumer computer revolution begin to take flight.
I worked at a federal contractor in the mid-1990's with one customer. They bought a ton of NeXT machines.
I did not know until now, that I bought a cold war spy artifact from ebay 20 years ago, and shipped it all the way to Singapore.
It's pretty obvious now that governments have been propping up the tech sector in many countries. It's a weird industry. Look at the biggest tech companies. They all start out with apparently legitimate products but slowly lose market share over decades, end up doing nothing and yet more profitable and more valuable than ever. Look at companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceX, Salesforce... Their main business is extracting money from the government.
>slowly lose market share over decades, end up doing nothing and yet more profitable and more valuable than ever
>SpaceX
SpaceX has been gaining market share, not losing, and its primary business is Starlink, of which most customers are consumers.
(there is also Starshield)
I think software, paradoxically, has deeper network and intertial effects than pretty much anything else we have invented so far. Compare the leverage it enables to the ecosystem lock in it forces.
With physical goods, it's not nearly that coupled.
> many tech leaders cite patriotism and national renewal in their quest for military contracts, but mutual self-interest is what drove cooperation in the past
How can they be patriots when they do so at the expense of the 1st, 4th, 5th and 10th amendments to the U.S. Constitution? That's not patriotism, it's terrorism.
> But why would Jobs, a child of the counterculture who had practiced Buddhism under a Zen master and cited taking LSD as a formative experience, tether his company’s future to spies?
That's a funny sentence to read when you know the actual history of LSD, how it was brought to and disseminated throughout the U.S., and the role it played in de-fanging the counterculture.
The NSA bought plenty of the machines back then too. They weren't always the favorites of the staff who spent plenty of time with IBM mainframes.
Whenever you really start peeling away at Silicon Valley mega tech stories, you mostly find tax dollars.
Practically all basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars. It's easy to underestimate the importance of DOD, NIH, and NSF grants in ongoing technological innovation.
I dont know if im buying magic CPU upgrade story. CPU/FPU are soldered and non overclockable. Motorola didnt have a super beefed 68030 version, extra special 68882 fpu, nor faster pin compatible 56001. The only socket on board is for 56001 which was already fitted from factory.
Graphics from Intel is much more believable, probably something that later became Intel i860 based NeXTdimension. But that would push whole story a couple years since Intel i860 released mid 1989.
They were probably talking about an accelerator card. That would make sense if the writer isn't familiar with them and Romello wanted to simplify things a bit and just called it a compute upgrade or something.
I'd be willing to believe in factory overclocks, one magic speed bin that wasn't common enough to market to the public, but was common enough to yield a few here or there. I worked at a place that was able to secure factory overclocks from Intel, 100MHz faster than what everyone else was buying.
But they were rather uncomplicated, compared to the BGAed monsters we have now. Infrared heatguns and reflow ovens are nothing new. Neither is liquid cooling.
The point is there were no chips to put on the Next Cube that would make it faster in 1988, and the whole system was designed and tuned for specific fixed clock so bus overclocking is also very unlikely.
The only possibility is April 1989 announcement of 50 MHz versions of 68030/68882 and Clock Doubler circuit running CPU/FPU fast only when its not touching the bus. Afaik to this day this is the only way to OC Nexts.
https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/nextstation-clock-doubler.4979...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190722120829/https://www.nextc...
But this still pushes whole thing to ~1990. Would NSA get 20000 highly binned CPUs before actual volume production? Then there is absolute lack of evidence of even one such system ever surviving, and stuff does survive despite being classified, like Tempest IBM 5170s.
People talk a lot about metadata collection but not about DNA collection.
It is imperative for any intelligence service to know if any politically exposed person has a child, especially if it spawns from an affair. Logically, we have to assume that all laboratories processing human blood are also doing some sort of DNA genealogy.
[stub for offtopicness]
(we put the gift link above)
ew paywall
https://archive.is/JfB5V
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/steve-jobs-apple-next-cia-161b65f9?...
Steve Jobs was a Fed.