Private firms and open sources are giving spies a run for their money
economist.com
economist.com
> As railways expanded across America in the 19th century, there was little law enforcement.
That immediately tells me this is going to be a filler of 20 pages, followed by 1 page of actual content.
I just can't read this, it's actively destroying all willingness on my end to make the effort of skipping all that filler part until the substance pops up.
Are journalists paid by the word on these websites?
There are lots of nonsense filler articles out there on the internet; this is not one of them.
And why they are adding that becomes evident by sentence 3.
It just seems like you judged the whole thing based on the first sentence and decided to invent a bunch of grievances about it.
Except this article is paywalled which hides the article length. I also suspect a lot of people are jaded from years of blogspam now weaponized with AI. I can half understand the rant.
I think it has been a consequence of responding incorrectly to the digitization pressures due to a word inflating culture of verbosity in at least the American education system, where the “quality” of academic output is largely measured in quantity, i.e., an x page or y word length requirement. There is actually also a physical manifestation of that effect in the physical size of our education textbooks.
In Europe, the textbooks that at least used to be used (in a bit out of that phase of life) were very high information density and very compact books to facilitate transporting them, probably also largely due to utilitarian concerns since people didn’t and still do not drive everywhere as much. When I first ever came in contact with American textbooks, I was extremely shocked and surprised at just how utterly hollow and voluminous and heavy they were, page after page of concepts that would have been stated in a single sentence, if not a clause, in a European textbook of 1/10 the size and a 1/4 the cost. I cannot ignore the sense that this culture/system that took hold in America at some point is a heavy contributor to the reason we have arrived at this point that produces such a foam article.
All that lends itself to this kind of fuzzy fluff that looks impressive in a culture where we know that the vast majority of people only read headlines and the opening at best and digital words are cheap to “print”, which serves ad revenue and image/identity brand management purposes, i.e., the economist is still a venerated outlet, because “it has big impressive looking articles so I must be important and smart for reading the headlines”.
In contrast, in a world where paper is expensive and so is printing and distribution, and the primary source of information exchange is reading, not ADD attracting TikTok shorts, the incentive is article density to pack as much information as possible into expensive print real estate to produce actual value that someone is willing to pay for with expensive, un-inflated money.
What you “can’t stand” is actually an effect of the degradation of our civilization as a function of technological development and offsetting all our human reason for being, the very need for humanity in the function of life for the ruling class.
Frankly, I don’t see journalists and journalism, or the written word, for that matter (somewhat ironically), surviving this latest technological onslaught of AI precisely because at some point the current low grade state of journalism can easily be replaced by AI and I do not see a path for journalism to recover from the grave it is already in. Even if someone were to start re-adopting high grade, high information density writing styles; it would be done in a void in an ever degrading readership quality environment as the general education level of our societies degrades into the “communist” uniformly gray mush without distinction that comes from normalization. It is a classic negative feedback loop for humanity in general from here on out; not to be confused with the feedback loop for technology or the ruling class.
I guess there's some irony in a verbose comment that misses the point when complaining about verbosity in journalism.
There is a high chance of it being an eternally online kind of response or usually someone with an axe to grind on a topic drawing from some kind of saved document that may even be shared among other people.
> Microsoft tracks 78 trillion “signals” a day (such as connections between a phone and a cloud server), says Sherrod DeGrippo, the firm’s director of threat-intelligence strategy.
The same MS that bungled its security so badly that they got called into congress ( see: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-cybe... )
MS as the modern day Pinkerton's is a great comparison...
The work this side of MS does in shutting down serious cyber crime and cyber espionage is well known in the security space.
https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-cybersecurity-hack-raim...
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/microsoft-corporate-emails-h...
Threat intel team is supposed to be watching the hen house, they are doing a bad job. Fundamentally they are doing their job using insecure products and insecure services.
You say "highly regarded" I would say that "poor choices reflect on you (the threat team)". The one good apple in a barrel of rotten ones isn't going to save a thing.
Threat Intel is not responsible for "watching the hen house". Threat Detection, Incident Response, etc would be the teams you're looking for.
> the review board faulted Microsoft (MSFT) for not adequately protecting a sensitive cryptographic key
That's Application Security, who likely set standards that were not followed. Again, Microsoft is a very large company. A security audit should have caught this issue, but didn't.
Is there a culture of "security" at MS?
No, and there never has been.
"threat intel" is the group of people ideintyfing foxes, BY BEHAVIOR. They don't get their data out of thin air, it comes from threat detection and incedntd responses.
Your making the argument that MS is structured like a TV police department, sure, but the intel team is like the fbi/cia... they have a much larger perview and scope and have to because of their work.
Missing these sorts of thing in your own back yard isn't a statement of confidence.
Yup. Legalizing Weed on a federal level would be so good for the talent shortages faced by the glowies that it's reason enough to finally do it. People here have downvoted me in the past for talking about this as though it's not true.
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I wish that this article had touched on the fact that you too can be what basically amounts to a "private" "business" variant of this which is much more lucrative but without all the nasty clearance nonsense: expert networks/micro-consulting - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/expert-network.asp and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_network
If you have an "insider" view on a market or the mechanations of a company, chances are folks in suits are willing to pay you to talk about this for 300$ an hour minimum.
The allegations against App Annie are reminiscent of the expert network cases of a decade ago when the SEC and the Justice Department cracked down on consultants who allegedly provided inside information to hedge funds, hedge fund traders who relied on that inside information to make trades, and expert networks that facilitated these information exchanges. As the alternative data industry comes to prominence, like the expert consultant industry before it, it will likely draw increased focus from the SEC and, potentially, federal prosecutors.
None of App Annie’s investment firm customers have so far been charged in connection with their use of Intelligence data, but funds and others who subscribe to alternative data sources should take heed and take proactive steps to ensure that the data providers’ representations are accurate and that appropriate measures are taken to ensure that subscribers are not receiving material nonpublic information.That is a very interesting adjective to describe the history of US intelligence.