With physical goods, it's not nearly that coupled.
>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)
My impression is that Starlink is a hastily-launched DoD project. It's not a broadband replacement and scarcely an alternative to other satnet providers or LTE hotspots.
My concern for SpaceX is more about post-IPO situation. Once new shareholders have their way, I don't see how it can avoid becoming corrupted. It looks like the perfect money pipe to obtain large amounts of money from the government.
Please, elaborate on where Microsoft is getting a hundred billion dollars plus per year from the government.
By an extreme margin Microsoft's main business is productivity software sold to businesses and consumers and has been for 40 years, along with Windows (the majority customers for which are businesses + consumers).
Their Office suite is foisted on governments. For example, several governments in the EU moved off of it starting a few years back... Many are still on it.
Oracle database is essentially never used outside of government nowadays. This has been the case for decades. Government is just locked into expensive contracts with them and they can charge whatever.
All too often someone who espouses libertarian or ultra free-market capitalist beliefs will smugly state that Silicon Valley is proof that America and free market ideals are better than another country such as say Norway, Finland, or Estonia.
I've never really had a good way to respond to that kind of belief in part because I'm not too well versed in the history of intelligence agencies funding American tech industries or the contemporary state of that relationship but also because it's so startlingly ubiquitous and adamant.
Does anyone else have any input on how it's best to address this misconception and worldview that people in SV have?
Update: s/majority/amount/
Used to be. The US government only funds 40% of basic scientific research now.
This is due to large increases investment from private industry, which now rivals the US government even for basic scientific research in addition to funding the vast majority of other research. US government funding didn't decrease, the pie just became much larger.
NSF regularly publishes detailed reports on US R&D funding. The trend toward industry funding eclipsing US government funding started in the 1960s.
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20257/trends-in-u-s-r-d-perfor...
1) The free market develops and sell products. 2) The government buys the products that the free market has produced. 3) Therefore the free market isn't viable without government tax money? Therefore socialism? Silicon Valley wouldn't be as successful without govt spending money on things it needs? Help me out here.
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.
The tech taking my blood had no idea; nobody else had ever read it.
I did complain and ask the blood donation org to make sequencing opt-in and my message was "passed on to leadership" but with no followup from "leadership."
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.
" The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.
George Orwell "
That's too easy. If CIA is involved, it's a topic that's actually important for global nobility.
CIA scope includes things like Hollywood movie productions, babysitting the next-in-line to the British crown, teen beauty pageants, keeping black people marginalized by dumping excess drugs on them, and of course DNA tracking of Nazis (which has been extended to basically everyone).
All this five eyes bs is framed as if the US is in the driving seat, and Americans eat it up with their hubris about "winning" the war of independence. Epstein/Maxwell scandal highlights that James Bond was actually British and not American.
It's kinda clever how it all ended up like this and I highly respect the capabilities. It's the best and most prosperous system that humanity has come up with. I sure as hell won't rock the boat.
Let's hope this establishment is flexible enough to handle the climate crisis. The solutions proposed so far include more colonization (of other planets) and more castles/bunkers (in remote locations) - there must be better ways to deal with a climate crisis.
Or, just check Strom Thurmond's list of children on Wikipedia.
USA can hell or heaven for different people
Their solution to the climate crisis is to build as many AI data centers as possible. Turns out they never cared about the climate crisis in the first place, and only wanted to use it to gain power. But now that they have AI, they don't need the climate crisis narrative anymore.
Most Satellite data (including non internet data) is delivered over Starlink.
Most Satellite Internet revenue is from Starlink customers.
And I'm sure a certain Eastern European country wouldn't be asking to extend coverage to Russia if it was truly "scarcely an alternative"
The cost (actually price) you're complaining about is lower than than other satellite providers and significantly lower than what was available in 2019. Around the pricing of more expensive mobile internet data plans meant for hotspots (in the US)
I'm pretty sure no one paying residential pricing back was doing >1TB/month on SATCOM
The performance for most users is definitely above the 100/10 99ms advertised (per Ookla)
How long are these "regular outages"? Have you used the service in 2026?
I've used dialup, Hughesnet, WISPs and broadband, now - Starlink was the least-consistent performer by a wide margin. The one upside is the bandwidth figures, but when I wanted to use it for my seedbox Starlink sends me a meanly-written letter. The distinct feeling I got using Starlink was "huh, I must be subsidizing a dual-use system because this is not an acceptable baseline of service quality even by LTE standards."
This insidious relationship goes ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, my friend!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/colombia0106/inde...
They have a ridiculously large network for their vending machines, and a massive global footprint.
I’m not sure why we shouldn’t hold other brands accountable for their public relations.
I served a long time and if no pizza place would deliver to a military base because they were protesting military action, it would have actually made an impact. To what degree is unknown but I know every dominos in a 20 mile radius from our base was on call to deliver 8000 pizzas from time to time.
That aint nothing
A lot of their support was a “they live ten years into the future” thing. They anticipated problems that may not have been exposed or recognized yet in the market.
"Don't ask me how I made my first million." is as relevant as ever.
He signed the visitor log as working for 'the company'. The CIA bit was a well-trod inference.
Even the humble Atari 2600, if you got a look, was well-shielded. My father purchased a PS/2 Model 50Z for himself, and for me, a PS/2 Model 30 286, and the shielding was likewise impressive.
When I went to CompUSA to upgrade to 386, the salesmen were very specific about informing me of the "FCC Class B" ratings. IIRC, the system couldn't be rated FCC Class B unless the motherboard was mated to a particular tower case and sold as a "barebones system". If I wanted to take my chances with separate chassis and bare motherboard, that would not carry the rating and I could cause undue interference at home. I knew this was real important, since my father was a radio guy, and he'd taught me quite a bit about RFI.
NeXT had a superior development environment, but, Steve Jobs didn't spend the 1 or 2 engineer-years it would have taken to make the OS be POSIX-compliant. Thus, in addition to authority and budget, a waiver needed to be signed off on, in order to buy NeXT hardware.
The "three letter agency" or "TLA" portion of the US government, didn't always need off the shelf apps, but they had to build their own; and they didn't have to pass scrutiny over a waiver for something with a national-security implication.
Thus the CIA, DIA, NSA etc. bought both Sun and NeXT hardware.
That sounds accurate. I worked for a NIC company that had one of the first full speed 10GbE packet sniffers in the early 2000s, and some of our customers were 3-letter govt agencies. We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre.
You'd think they could at least setup a front company at least. Using AOL addresses that way seems too suspicious. Competent person using AOL with a weird technical question? Must be the NSA.
You can notice something similar on Ghidra or Cyberchef repos. People in government agencies and military follow this M.O. all the time; hiding in plain sight.
Nowadays, probably Gmail fullfils the very same role, with a caveat: clearly available world-wide. For Germany, this used to be GMX or T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom).
I suppose this is the equivalent to how the first delivery of funds to Lockheed to build the U-2 was sent to Kelly Johnson's home as opposed to his Skunk Works office.
You know there's the "excessive formalism and thorough certifications" for some gov positions (sounds like red lamp), but I don't doubt there's the "you didn't see anything" level where the objective is to pretend it's just a disinterested party asking some funny questions.
Then Steve Jobs just decided to flake out on them because it wasn't the direction he wanted to take the company.
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.
"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."
From Google etc ...
The reason is also pretty simple and a no right or wrong category answer as well a problem why so many devs suffer with AI: the IT departments at the CIA, NSA etc. were the same guys, that ran Next: Hippies.
Hacking systems in the pre AI era was a matter of skills. Today, a matter of the used LLM.
I find every indignation embarrassing. The state more or less funded all: hardware, software, directly or indirectly. Call it NASA, science or CIA.
I find nothing more pathetic than activists with iPhones. It is like being dependent on drugs but using make up or medication is not part of the equation. You cannot have it all.
There is only less wrong or less right, no categorial thinking. Apple China bites them now massively not because due to Trump but due to what Trump told them: China will come for them. Same for Google, who wants to manufacture the Pixel phone outside of Chine in the next years.
While I stand corrected, it isn't much better anyway, in regards of the points of view being discussed towards CIA and software industry.
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.
> [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."
No.
I swear CIA exploits go through so many games of telephone, that reality is whatever people want by the end.
The CIA was involved in including artists like Pollock in the 60s in the MoMA, by then he was well established.
The aim of the CIA was to use american art in juxtaposition to USSR propaganda. Freedom and individualism vs the boring state propaganda of russian workers that people saw leave the iron curtain.
This would be similar to now a days helping american movies get through Chinese censors or to win the Cannes award to showcase how good hollywood and america is. You still need to make the 200 million blockbuster first before the CIA uses their influence.
The myth also perpetuates the idea that modern and contemporary art is basically worthless and that its only valuable because of psyop campaigns from "them" (make it the cia, rich money laundering, sometimes weird antisemetic things take your pick), when in reality Pollock and Rothko were incredibly talented artists and their art has endured well after the CIA ended its operation
https://www.thecollector.com/what-is-russian-constructivism/
[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
If those nepo kids like to mingle in the NYC artsy scene, then that's where the funds flow.
For example, George H. W. Bush, born into the old-money Bush family in Massachusetts. The 41st president of the United States.
He was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1971 and Chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973 by Richard Nixon, and Chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China in 1974 and Director of Central Intelligence in 1976 by Gerald Ford.
Is that the kind of government intervention that you want to get?
Who are these straw men you refer to?
Fun fact: Ellison was the one who orchestrated Jobs' late-'90s return to Apple (after failing to purchase Apple outright) as part of a decades-long campaign of trying to help the spy sector take General Purpose Computing away from people. In the '90s their preferred approach to this was ‘Network Computing’, and Apple almost shipped a ‘Macintosh NC’ that would have connected to Oracle software on its backend, but that project turned into the iMac instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_NC
“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?
A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.
Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”
―― Larry Ellison, 1997, https://youtu.be/qriZvWzNPho?t=420
They were finally able to do it with the iPhone by leveraging nerds' well-intentioned-but-naïve weakness to the fallacy that More Encryption == Better Than, so now we all have what could be General Purpose Computers in our pockets that just refuse to run any software that The System doesn't want us to have.
The moral of the story is don't trust anybody who expresses too much interest in putting things inside Black Cubes :p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE
Unfortunately, this story was playing out in _Pen Computing Magazine_ and so forth, which doesn't seem to have a digitized/searchable archive --- anyone have any links or insights?
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%!)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nsa-can-legally-access-metadata-of...
In addidition to the official request NSA infiltrated links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...
Official requests.
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.
https://giga.law/daily-news/2013/07/22/apples-developer-site...
It was only once he passed than Apple went all in on it.
it really makes you wish that the lesson the Ruby Ridge far-right took away was simple anti-authoritarianism and not the antisocial tendencies of racial separatism and a Judeo-Christian theocracy
[0] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/ethic... [1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
Once the requests number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, including NSA requests isn’t going to result in ‘Ha, gotcha!’
Are any of the requests identifiable?
That was a RISC CPU many times faster than MC68030+MC68882 (it had a pipelined FPU, like Intel 80860 and the much later Intel Pentium, so for number crunching it was more than an order of magnitude faster than MC68030+MC68882).
It probably was used as an accelerator, on an expansion card. NeXT had NuBus for expansion cards. I do not know if it had enough connectors for the 2 expansion cards wanted by CIA, but if any customization was done it must have consisted in providing enough NuBus connectors.
The Intel graphics could have been Intel 82720, a clone of NEC μPD7220, which could do by itself simple 2D graphics tasks (like drawing lines and arcs, filling polygons and copying the font bitmaps for rendering character strings), freeing the main CPU.
By the end of 1990, my company bought what at that time were expensive workstation variants of an IBM PC/AT clone, which had some huge monitors with higher resolution than supported by VGA, for which an expansion card with Hitachi HD63484 was used to provide really impressive graphics.
Intel 82720 was similar to Hitachi HD63484, but HD63484 was more recent and it had more features, e.g. it supported up to 4k resolution (but 4k monitors were extremely rare and expensive in 1990, so we had only monitors with 768x1024 @ 16 bit per pixel, which was still excellent for that time).
So I assume that a similar card was referred to in the article.
We used our HD63484 card only with AutoCAD, because it was the only program that had graphics drivers for it. The rest of the programs used a standard VGA card and a VGA monitor.
I assume that a similar dual monitor arrangement must have been used by CIA/NSA with NeXT, so their special application program must have used their graphics card with a big monitor, while the standard NeXT programs must have used the original NeXT graphics.
So all Next had to do was
1 Develop another set of ASICs for fully incompatible CPU bus in parallel and in secret
2 Develop another motherboard in parallel and in secret
3 Manufacture another motherboard in parallel and in secret
4 Port NextStep to another fully incompatible CPU arch in parallel and in secret
5 Kill all the developers involved so none of this ever came out
> accelerator, on an expansion card
graphics on expansion, accelerator on expansion, additional HDD, new color monitor, new OS. Sound like in your alternate reality NSA paid $6K a pop for 20000 magnesium boxes with new incompatible with anything NuBus backplane offering whole 3 free slots, so $2K per slot.
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.
That’s a far cry from “probably definitely”.
obviously.
i dont have access to the number of gag-order requests, and if i did, i wouldnt be posting them on hn
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.
The interface bus of MC88100 was actually the same that was inherited by the first PowerPC CPUs a few years later, when Apple, IBM and Motorola cooperated to make the PowerPC specification, based on the IBM POWER ISA.
It would not have needed any ASICs, but just some PALs to interface with the on-card memory. The expansion card would only have needed to make the on-card memory also readable and writable by the host MC68030 CPU through NuBus, which would also have required only some PALs, no ASICs.
Your price estimate is likely to be around the correct value, so there is no doubt that CIA/NSA did not try to save pennies when buying all this hardware.
The NeXT computer was more expensive than an IBM PC/AT, but otherwise in all this configuration there is only the MC88100 card that is added in comparison with the CAD workstations that I have used myself in 1990, at a company with a moderate budget for such acquisitions, so there is no doubt that US TLA agencies could purchase something better.
A MC88100 accelerator card would have cost as much as an entire computer with its peripherals, but this just means that such a workstation would have cost as much as 2 standard CAD workstations, like the ones I used. Surely CIA/NSA could afford that.
"The physical pinout of the DSP56001 is different from the DSP56002" https://digisolutions.de/downloads/Differences56001_56002.pd...
Buying new unproven workstation just to develop expansion cards to make it fast makes no sense when you can just buy off teh shelf fast SUN or SGI.
Motorola already had MC88100+MC88200, a RISC CPU with pipelined FPU, which was many times faster than MC68030+MC68882. For floating-point computations it might have been at least 20 times faster than MC68030+MC68882.
NeXT had NuBus for expansion cards, so it would not have been any problem to have a NuBus accelerator card with MC88100+MC88200 and a decent amount of memory for that time, e.g. 16 MB or 32 MB.
MC88100 had been developed in parallel with MC68030. I remember very well the advertisements for MC88100 from 1988, because for some time it was the fastest monolithic CPU (until Intel launched the similar 80860 a year later, which had a higher clock frequency, because of being made with a newer CMOS fabrication process, the same which was used for the first 80486). The advertisements were that now you could have your own supercomputer by choosing MC88100, instead of paying millions for a Cray.
Wikipedia even says that Jobs wanted in the beginning to design NeXT with MC88100, but he switched to MC68030 due to price and availability problems, which should not have been a problem for the CIA.
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.
Isnt Signal open source? Or large parts of it?
Again, no.
The art is valuable because of many compounding reasons. The interest of rich families, like Guggenheim in New York, creating the modern system of galleries and museums certainly affected the price. But the interest in art of women like Peggy Guggenheim was genuine. She staked huge amount of money in rescuing art from europe during the 30s and 40s for example. That was not a money making scheme, they lost millions on it.
Modern schemes to stake value in art have more to do with Freeports and keeping valuable art outside of taxing jurisdiction. Specially in liquid markets that can be sold in auction and generate cash when needed.
Other schemes are gallery or collectors who have a huge amount of work by one artist and then inflate the price in auction, which is the only visible price marker, to inflate their own collection. There is a famous Warhol collector, who has a shit ton of stuff and will overpay in auction to then sell his own collection privately for the inflated auction price.
Art is much more of a taste signifier than a tax or investment opportunity. There are obviously no downsides for rich people to sell overpriced assets to each other, but the truth is that people will want a Caravaggio or a Rothko in their house and will pay millions for it. With no intention to ever sell them and paying sticker price so no tax breaks at all.
If a muscular Soviet art scene embarrassed the Americans into juicing up their own art scene, isn’t that good and healthy for both?
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?
You replied to a "still, good to ask in order to seek clarity" type point.
Comment hierarchy is part of the overall context.
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.
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.
At least we can still spot the deception. That won't last forever.
My friend's dad rarely, if ever, talked about his work. However, he got loose lips after retiring, and if he had a few beers in him.
Sorry is this a generated text? Because "Actually, no, before that" reads too weird in the comment.
It's fine for the personal offline chat, but for the comment it has smell: who wouldn't the author edited the comment?
Google's AI figures that doing pizzas assembly-line style, a pizzeria can make about 30 pizzas per employee per hour.
Unless the Academy is hitting them with surprise orders, it doesn't sound too challenging.
Anyone here been in this space, to talk specifics?
Our franchisee held competitions between stores to see how fast employees could make six large pepperonis. Winning times were less than two minutes. And it wasn't just slop, the pies had to met a minimum quality level (proper saucing and cheesing, the right number of pepperoni slices per pie).
I helped out occasionally at a store in Garden Grove by Disneyland that often did ~1500 pizzas on Friday nights. And as a DUMP (Dayshift Manager), did a few 40-50 pie lunch orders by myself, with a couple drivers helping out on ovens, for schools or companies. Stores kept daily records so knew how many employees to schedule based on past sales - pizza sales were surprisingly consistent over time. And we required advance notice for the really big orders so we could schedule appropriately.
Before COVID, for a few years the Dominos in my city had a policy where they'd deliver the pizza to your door in 20 minutes or the pizza would be free. This led to a lot of traffic accidents so eventually they had to stop :+)
At least back in 2003-2004 there would be some random thing happen and make it impossible to get the staff on the hill
So they would do these massive dominos orders
The moral of the story as I see it is: not acting because you don't want a backlash is a loosing game - they'll find a reason to backlash anyway.
(I don’t have this at my fingertips, I just happen to be driving through Montana and my wife asked me about the Black Rifle Coffee billboards so I literally just read the Wikipedia article a couple of hours ago.)
Obviously it's true and not a surprise to anyone familiar with the history. But no one is asking more complex questions: why is it being pushed by algorithms and networks ultimately controlled by the same powers? Is it a "limited hangout"? Well poisoning? What does the "CIA" gain from revealing a sliver of its past activities and discrediting (both directly and by insinuation) a large number of radical artists and thinkers?
But my take on the question: "why is it being pushed by algorithms" is that it is a property of the medium of "algorithmic feeds".
YT, shorts, etc. are a great medium for attention grabbing in a way that is district from TV. Broadcast TV caters to the "average" viewer, ex. Sienfeld, Johnny Carson show. "Algorithmic TV" caters to specialized viewers. Fringe ideas and science, "the truth about X". The crown prince of "algorithmic TV" (IMO of course) is Joe Rogan. For every niche quest he has on, there's many more YT channels on that topic. Weird history, ancient aliens, psychedelics.
So I don't really think the "algorithms" are controlled, rather they "algorithm" elevate weird ideas more than other mediums.
"
Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign used the harvested data to build psychographic profiles, determining users' personality traits based on their Facebook activity. The campaign team used this information as a micro-targeting technique, displaying customized messages about Trump to different US voters on various digital platforms. Ads were segmented into different categories, mainly based on whether individuals were Trump supporters or potential swing votes. As described by Cambridge Analytica's CEO, the key was to identify those who might be enticed to vote for their client or be discouraged to vote for their opponent. Supporters of Trump received triumphant visuals of him, as well as information regarding polling stations. Swing voters were instead often shown images of Trump's more notable supporters and negative graphics or ideas about his opponent, Hillary Clinton. For example, the collected data was specifically used by "Make America Number 1 Super PAC" to attack Clinton through constructed advertisements that accused Clinton of corruption as a way of propping up Trump as a better candidate for the presidency
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
I like your comment, though.
Vs art that needed to be paid for by intelligence
The thing is that both of these are cynical pledges. I’m not like yay starbucks on this - i’m sure they were doing it for the PR and because refugees are easily exploited workers. It’s one of the things I hate about reactionary backlashes - by creating “sides”, i find myself on a side with people i don’t want to be on a side with because the other side is dumber
Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.
