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It is a worthwhile question to ask "why is the foreign intelligence service funding a private company?"
by sph 2mo ago
It is a worthwhile question to ask "why is the foreign intelligence service funding a private company?"
- darig 2mo ago[dead]
- seizethecheese 2mo agoStrange comment. The comment you're replying to is pointing out that the CIA bought computers for its own use. Am I confused and they also "provided funding" other than buying computers?
- butwaitTheres4 2mo agoYou're reading their comment in isolation. The thread starts with "I assumed something completely different." You replied to a "still, good to ask in order to seek clarity" type point. Comment hierarchy is part of the overall context.
- seizethecheese 2mo agoAnother strange comment, this time from an account made 15 hours ago. My entire point was contextual and not in isolation!
- bigyabai 2mo agoThere's no conspiracy, I think people just disagree with what "funding" can mean. A bulk sale in the realm of ~20,000 units is equivalent to stakeholder funding when you're at NeXT's scale. It doesn't inherently mean that anything nefarious happened, but there was a B2B contract written up with the feds, and Jobs accepted it. The root comment is a perfectly valid question. Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts, it's a bit weird that they'd single-out NeXT to sell them an off-the-shelf shell. I'm guessing that Steve's number was in a lot of government Rolodexes after Michael Dell and the others.
- seizethecheese 2mo agoSure, and that would be a reasonable thing to reply to the main comment here, but the actual comment was just muddying the waters and a total non sequitur, as written.
- orliesaurus 2mo agoai bots on hn? naaaaa.....
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- kjs3 2mo agoSince the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.
- detourdog 2mo agoI had a boss at a WebObjects shop who maxed out an old Cube with Cube motherboards and did some sort of magic something or other to make a multi-processor. http://www.polylith.com/Tech/NeXT/backplane_hack.html http://www.polylith.com/Tech/NeXT/backplane_hack.html
- kjs3 2mo agoThat's pretty clever, but not surprising. NuBus was designed as a multimaster bus, so it should work (famous last words). The fact that your boss said YOLO and tried, that it actually did work, and the boot code helped out, is very cool.
- detourdog 2mo agoThe partners at that firm were fearless and this particular partner had started at NeXT as CMU student support. They also literally ended up with a truck full of NeXT systems in the late 1990's. I directly reported to a guy that was still using his NeXT slab from his student days. Second best place I ever worked.
- jlaternman 2mo agoThis is AI. I can see the signature in what it thinks good argument looks like @seizethecheese The levels of clickbait in that headline are absurd. It's like seventh hell of clickbait. Also it doesn't come from the source. WSJ headline is: “The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA” So someone's running experiments of some sort on HN, driven by AI, is my read. Hope they snub that shit out.
- kjs3 2mo agoWelcome to our collective future; enjoy your stay. At least we can still spot the deception. That won't last forever.
- jambalaya8 2mo agoI think right now people are at the end of that cusp; daily they are worse at grasping how their results are collated, and thus are more unable to figure out what "facts" they are getting are reliable. Things are far more subtle than the Ping Pong Pizza days. The online interactions of millions and millions of people with search engines, AI, database backends, and etc. being used to "create" answers on the fly kinda worries me.
- kjs3 2mo agoI don't disagree with you, but my concern is more people simply accepting the 'answer' because how could the AI be wrong and not for a moment thinking 'I should check if this is right', and if called out defaulting to 'not my problem, the AI said so'.
- jambalaya8 2mo agoNot sure. But I figure we are pretty close to a world where people think AIs and tech are so advanced as to convince people they are autonomously making 'offers' of things (like, if people are so bad at all that 'free stuff!' crap that washes over everything in imaginary internetland, how can AIs do it?). Every day at least one of my devices comes up with some cockamamie fake thing it seems to build my personalized results around, even with content blockers enabled. That is ignoring stuff AI might come up with that isn't steeped in emptions... I mean, if you think about it, I am not sure how an AI should respond if it were acting as a PA (personal assistant) to someone looking for work with no luck after a certain amount of time, for instance. Facebook experimented (I think appropriately) with stuff like trying to calm down mania online, and got sort of bashed for it, but it seems cruel for an AI to be pumping sunshine also. I am aware the DOD researched this extensively and assume the CIA and similar other countries' intelligence agencies will have also. Add in stuff like what Musk experiments with and peoples' psychological issues with AI almost certainly would be terrible. These are things intelligence agencies have invested in research in for decades and decades. If there is much more human-machine overlap, if nothing else human interaction as we think of it will be extinct. Do not want that. Will people just turn into extensions of agentic AI instead of (godforbid either is bad) the other way around? Not a fan of cybernetics; that creeps me out (not, per se, me doing it , although at some point it seems if that happened one would feel like there was no choice but to also take part), but being forced to interact with any of it (and this part is here and now and moving forward continuously now; we are already forced to act with it, most of us, if obviously the tech is not at the point where we are competing for dominance with it quite yet). I'd like to think that even though agencies like the CIA have been involved in some sketchy stuff over the past almost a century, they also have probably gotten involved to try to prevent more of it than most anyone knows either.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dgellow 2mo agoThe CIA and NSA have provided money to a lot of private companies, including Signal. They have multiple startup funding programs. Nothing special about it, they expect to benefit from what the company will research or sell. It’s not necessarily with strings attached
- kennywinker 2mo agoNo, but it's always with an aligned agenda. When the CIA funneled money to modernist artists, they weren't expecting spy devices in paintings. They're waging a cultural war. Is signal funded to put backdoors? Maybe, but probably not. It's probably something more vague - A tool for anti-gov actors in countries that are our enemies, or to sell us all the idea that we are able to freely communicate while our devices are tapped by other means.
- dgellow 2mo agoYes-ish. I think there is also the element that an agency as massive and well funded as the CIA is not that far from being its own mini-state, and one way to use the budget (because it has to be used!) is to fund projects that might be useful or provide some form of return in the future, even if it’s just good for the CIA public image, or a way to attract and develop a network of talents
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago[dead]
- KellyCriterion 2mo ago- Is signal funded to put backdoors? - Isnt Signal open source? Or large parts of it?
- kennywinker 2mo agoIt is, but unless you’re building the binaries you use from source you’ll never know for sure they aren’t backdoored. Like I said, probably not…
- readthenotes1 2mo agoA guy from the CIA told me that they bought a ton of early sun boxes to keep them afloat, seeing American-made technology as a key national security interest. He signed the visitor log as working for 'the company'. The CIA bit was a well-trod inference.
- kjs3 2mo agoIt's worth reading the article and understand "funding" in this case means "they bought NeXT computers like everyone else who bought a NeXT...they just bought a lot of them". This is an article about commerce, not covert activities, other than "we're going to use the computers we bought for things we're not going to tell you about".