You know, when I see the phrase "CIA funding" I expect something like "the CIA put a backdoor in NeXT computers destined for Hungary" or something, not "NeXT made computers and the CIA bought and used them."
Did you know about the CIA's DECADES-LONG FUNDING of Coca-Cola? I have a hot tip from my good friend the soda machine technician that the CIA regularly funnels THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS a month into the pockets of BIG SODA when they restock their office kitchens and vending machines with Coca-Cola products!
This insidious relationship goes ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, my friend!
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.
The Civil Reserve Pizza fleet always amazed me. About once a quarter, the Air Force Academy would get dominoes pizza for all 4000 cadets. every cadet + staff and some visitors gets a medium pizza for dinner. that's about 4000 pizzas stuffed into the back seats of honda civics from around colorado springs arriving in a 2 hour span. I dont know how they did it but boy could they mobilize
We used to have pizza day at my elementary school and every kid would get their own personal sized dominos pizza. It's impressive how they can deliver on 600+ pizzas all warm and delivered at the same time.
Google Maps has 16 Dominoes locations around Colorado Springs. 4000 means each location is making about 125 pizza/hour for 2 hours. (For just the Academy.)
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?
Dominos uses a special dough that allows them to make a pizza in like 5 (?) minutes.
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 :+)
I used to work for Domino's Pizza in the mid to late 80s. Our piemakers were trained for speed and could usually slap dough, sauce, cheese and throw down toppings in around 30-40 seconds per pie. The ovens were super hot and cooked pizzas in 3-4 minutes. The whole goal was to get the pizza out the door so the driver didn't have to speed. This was still during the "30 minutes or less or it's free" period.
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.
Wasn’t even that — Black Rifle was founded in 2014 and the Starbucks announcement was in 2017. Note that as of 2025, they only have 500 total employees. Which I think only proves your moral harder.
(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.)
You’re totally right, my mistake. Founded in 2014, gained popularity in 2017 for pledging to hire 10,000 veterans because starbucks said they’d hire 10,000 refugees. According to wikipedia only ~150 of their ~500 employees are vets.
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
I find it useful to always take a step back and point out that both sides are dumb. Though it often ends up with both sides hating you instead of only one, but ya know.. https://allthatsinteresting.com/august-landmesser
My exgf was adamant that aspartame (in Diet Coke) was a mind control drug. Turns out that Donald Rumsfeld (of Bush administration fame) was CEO of the company that made it, and he was the one who got the FDA to approve it for human consumption. So, there is a conspiracy theory not far from your joke.
Whoa. This is weird. My friend's dad was an FBI agent for over 20 years. I remember him telling us a story about a case he worked in the early-90s where a Coca Cola exec was embezzling millions from the company. The exec was caught, basically red-handed. After working with his lawyer, the exec provided a story about some South American gang that strong-armed him into washing money for them (threatened to kill him and his family; I think he said they even kidnapped his daughter). My friend's dad said his team worked with the exec for several months to corroborate the story about the South American gang. Apparently he was telling the truth. Then, after gathering intel on the gang, they came up with a plan to go after them. However, a few days before they were set to act on their plan, they were told to stand down. Actually, no, before that they were told by their leadership that there would be no capture (of the gang), only kill. Then the plan was cancelled altogether.
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.
We can talk about this on a legal or a moral basis. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll focus on the moral basis. If company A offloads some of its work to company B, and company B commits atrocities in a foreign company to keep costs down on said work, is company A not morally culpable if it continues to work with company B? Is it different if we think in terms of two people as opposed to two companies (and if so, why?)?
Strange 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?
There'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.
Sure, 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.
I 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.
I 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.
The 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
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.
Yes-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
A 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.
It'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".
Or explicit investment, as with the many companies that were partially funded through In-Q-Tel. This is a strange article. All government agencies acquire computers for normal operations.
But that sort of analysis would prevent you from dropping a wikipedia link about something only somewhat related, and then implying that EVERYTHING is backdoor'd by the government.
Most never dealt with procurement to realize choosing an operating system for an organization requires everyone agreeing to use vendors that support the os.
Three-letter agencies often keep on life support the kind of cool niche computers thst don't benefit from economies of scale. There are clandestine government projects that required Lisp machines and Connection Machines years after you or your employer were no longer able to buy one.
It was a bit more than they bought computers with a purchase order, like the part where it describes how CIA brought in a team of ex-Sun people to help scale manufacturing.
The US IC TLAs have a long history of supporting US companies that have interesting (to them) capabilities that may be too early for the public market. To their credit they often have some foresight in this regard.
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.
I purchased quite a few of those systems when they came out of production and went into the surplus supply chain. I don't recall anything unusual about the cubes with NeXTDimension boards that were in there though. Some had two boards, which was outrageously over-the-top powerful. There were a lot of slabs that were also labelled "NRO", and I bought lots and lots of them. No hard drives, of course. There was a surplus yard in Maryland that had the contracts for the TLAs. Not open to the public, but if you spent enough and brought donuts, you could clamber across the content of that week's 18-wheeler crammed to the top with magical gear coming out of places that had unlimited budgets and fast replacement cycles. It was legendary. I still have a fax machine somewhere in my dusty piles with "Joint Chiefs of Staff - Whitehouse" property tags.
Almost all computing devices had fairly hardcore RF cage chassis around the internals.
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.
Sun Microsystems had hardware and a version of Unix that was POSIX-compliant. This passed the government openness/interoperability test in existence and anyone with authority and budget could buy Sun, and then buy approved applications and run them.
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.
Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain had a very good section on this. Ross Perot (one time third party presidential candidate) was a big investor in NeXT. Since he had founded 2 IT services companies that had extensive government contracts he was responsible for introducing many government agencies to NeXT and encouraging them to buy NeXT hardware on his personal endorsement. In Geoffrey's telling Steve ultimately blew up these relationships as a result of his immaturity and idealism to NeXT's detriment but he learned these lessons when we returned to Apple and became a more reliable business partner in his 2nd stint running apple.
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.
> ...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.
Must be -> could be. Which is the point. And it is an easy way to communicate based on merit. It is likely done from a terminal with 'normal internet access', next to one of the intranet ones (or even airgapped) where the issue is occurring. Even if you'd be able to hack AOL, you'd likely end up on a dead end, or a front company. There's an added bonus: NSA might even know who it was/is internally, so someone who isn't in the 'in group' would get noticed.
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).
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.
>We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre.
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.
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.
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.
Your tone implies that the same people who freak out about reasonable gov intervention, are also (hypocritically) okay with the shenanigans being discussed.
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."
Russia has exceptional art education and the best art school in the world. I am proud as an American that we weaponized shitty art as a cultural weapon (Pollock bukkake)
Within the former USSR, there is very, very little demand today for the socialist-realist works produced during the Stalin era. No one goes to see museum exhibitions of the visual art except as a historical oddity, and the doctrinaire literature of that time is rotting unread in myriad provincial libraries. Its own market rejected it. Meanwhile, some of the Western abstract expressionists still appeal to a decent audience of art lovers.
This narrative has been popularized all over social media for the last couple years.
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?
One idea - these days there are many MANY more players using the same strategy - maybe the CIA wants us to be aware of the technique to limit its effectiveness.
Not a direct response to your question; I figure you or others reading this may be interested in the thoughts of the host of The War on Beauty (best found on youtube).
My brain tingles when I hear "three letter letter agency did X"
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.
As the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal showed, the social network algorithms can be used to send political messages according to your psychological profile. (Political messages shown to you, can be different from political messages shown to your neighbor).
"
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
Except that was the whole problem with the CCP having hooks into TikTok. It's thing to be "oh it's just the algorithm", but if China's involved, they're gonna have a finger on the scale, but then when it's up to the US, we're supposed to think that no one's not messing with the algorithm to do... something? It's a comforting belief to think that there's some grand master plan and we're not all out here doing the best we can with what we've got and it's all up to random chance, but at the level where there is YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, it's hard to believe that there's no one guiding the algorithm for some purpose that isn't just make more money. Or maybe money is it and it's all an application of Goodhart's law.
Simple enough mechanism used that everyday people on YouTube can grasp, vague nationalistic bend, and plenty of people who don’t know about it, all makes great YouTube clickthrough rates.
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.
We can never be sure now can we? I mean, there are great artists who aren't famous and struggle and remain unknown, and then there are artists (talented or otherwise) who either know (or have backers that know) how to play the game to earn fame and / or make a good living. Talented or not, would he have been famous and successful without the CIA propaganda? I remember reading about some famous painter who used to make his intern help him with client commissioned works, but when the clients themselves came to review it, he would make sure they never saw the interns and would pretend to have painted the whole thing himself.
> CIA funding helped keep Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock afloat
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
The art may have been created independently, but rich money laundering is the main reason why that art is considered valuable. Remember that this is a movement created in NYC, where they perfected the connection between strange new art forms and billionaire collections of paintings valued into the several million dollars.
> The art may have been created independently, but rich money laundering is the main reason why that art is considered valuable.
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 stakes huge amount of money in rescuing art from europe during the 30s and 40s for example. That was not a money making scheme.
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.
Under Lenin sure. Not so much under Stalin, though. He had old fashioned tastes and disliked abstract art. He preferred "socialist realism" which featured cheesy pictures of happy peasants and tractor drivers working to build Communism.
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.
Some of this old money CIA nepo kids do much more then mingle in the NYC artsy scene.
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.
Yes they were a major early customer for Oracle, there is a little in [1] but not much, some hints that the first customer was running Oracle in a submarine.
that's why they're called "the company" in insider circles. they still do, openly and probably also covertly. their investment arm is called in-q-tel https://www.iqt.org/portfolio , funding things like gitlab and docker. they probably run half of silicon valley. the dead giveaway is a funding story about 2 guys in a garage or dorm.
I vaguely remember going to a presentation by a NeXT engineer about an enterprise objects/webobjects project they did for the USPS where they photograph every letter passing by on a high-speed conveyor, use realtime processing to get the zip code and then sort it onto the correct belt
Yeah, Rob Blessin of Black Hole Computing bought the Cubes and Slabs (sans hard drives) when the CIA moved on to white hardware. At the time, I didn't have the need/funds for a spare, but did grab a NeXT-branded Canon inkjet printer.
We had a Kendall Square Research machine with a NeXT front end. Can't say what it was being used for though, but it did take a lot of security clearances to get into that machine room...
Government contracts propping up early-stage hardware companies is more common than people think. Being a reliable customer matters more than being a glamorous one.
"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."
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.
The question is, how much data NSA accesses in a single request. The official rules have changed but the "two hop" rule permits the agency to recover metadata from about 25,000 phones with a single request, according to 2016 Stanford study.
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...)
from NIST [0] to AT&T [1], the NSA has always had a backdoor into huge swathes of data created or transmitted through whatever means along with having Congress laws passed to retroactively make all of this collection legal [2]
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
I think the exploits of the Inquisitors across the millenia especially post-Cathars when torture and mass slaughter were recommended tools for religious indoctrination might be a bit a counter-factual to this (but religious history is not my most strongly studied area)
I didn’t find this in the article where did this come from? I remember when Apple suddenly shutdown the developer network to deal with a security breach in 2013.
You understand that there is difference between US law enforcement and the intelligence community? And that all service providers are required, by law in almost ALL countries, to respond to legal requests from their governments? What you are citing is not any serious evidence of some shadowy conspiracy between apple and the "government".. Not that I believe Apple's bullshit about protecting users privacy, but you're grasping at straws there.
Credit to Steve Job's, he wasn't too interested in joining PRISM. Reasoning was never given but I would suspect it was part his anti-establishment bent, part trying to not damage the brand if it came out.
It was only once he passed than Apple went all in on it.
Definitely, he may have been the architect of digital jails but he did seem to care about his prisoners. Tim Cook is just a free for all but with some nice marketing.
> 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.
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?”
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
As a slightly different take on this, a pervasive rumour in the pen computing circles is that one of the reasons Jobs killed the Newton was that the USMC had just had a very successful test of the Newton MessagePad and some sort of wireless communication system and was looking to get Apple registered as a defense contractor so that they could implement them service-wide.
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?
I'd say the whole Silicon Valley was almost entirely financed by national security agencies back in its beginning days during the Cold War. Does not mean it's bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Factory overclock, and in those days Motorola could probably have given them a batch of mid-development DSP chips (sort of proto 56002) that could clock much higher and still sit on the unmodified motherboard, max out the scratchpad memory, etc. Then the add-on cards. Anything that was potentially involved in nuclear response decisions probably could get a lot of budget. It would be interesting to inspect the hardware that still exists to see if there are any signs of what exactly actually happened.
The faster chip from Motorola could have been only MC88100+MC88200, which had been developed concurrently with MC68030. So Motorola really had a faster alternative at that time. Moreover, Wikipedia says that Jobs actually wanted in the beginning to design NeXT with MC88100, not with MC68030, but he gave up due to problems with price and availability.
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.
The TMS 34010 was also available at that time and could support high resolution screens and accelerated graphics, the article states that it was an Intel graphics card though.
> faster chip from Motorola could have been only MC88100+MC88200
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.
No ASICs would have been needed for an expansion card with MC88100.
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.
Makes me wonder what they did when NeXT was subsumed back into Apple. I guess the spy agencies had a lot less pressure on them by that point, so they weren't trying to procure computers from obscure sources to keep foreign spies from interfering.
And they had also switched to NEXTSTEP on SPARC, HP-PA, and x86 hardware a couple years after the last NeXT hardware shipped. (It’s a trivial recompile for 99.9% of NeXT software.)
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.
Having used it, Starlink's entire business model seems to be rooted in handwavium. You'll almost never hit advertised speeds or latency, and there are regular outages where you get no service at all. The cost of the service fluctuates constantly if you don't get locked-in to a specific rate, too.
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.
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 was a bit hesitant to put SpaceX on the list as it has provided the government better value for money than NASA when launching rockets and the innovation is real. I also believe Elon is one of the better billionaires. His businesses haven't taken away opportunities from any small business. His chosen industries have irreducibly high capital requirements; small businesses cannot compete in those industries anyway and they are too risky.
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.
What's fascinating to me is just how many people in the American tech industry are in complete denial about the amount of government support their industry receives and by extension that they personally receive.
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?
Microsoft's main business... is extracting 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).
They don't produce anything that people like. Everyone using their products is forced to use it.
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.
A large majority of basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars. One mustn't underestimate the importance of DOD, NIH, and NSF grants in ongoing technological innovation.
> A large majority of basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars.
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.
What's your actually point? Reading between the lines I'm seeing the following logic.
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.
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.
Other comments tied this report into the cute and nerdy NSA/PRISM scheme of things.
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.
That caused alot of death for polio workers in local region Everything usa does take a toil in long run on local population . I am sure 911 caused alot of immense and grief for alot of people but total Estimated Toll comes to around over 4.5 million total deaths linked to the post-9/11 conflicts and Roughly 38 million people displaced or made refugees.
Last time I went to donate blood, I read all the fine print they asked me to sign, and I was giving them the right to sequence my DNA (!)
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."
> 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.
> 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?
" 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.
You know, when I see the phrase "CIA funding" I expect something like "the CIA put a backdoor in NeXT computers destined for Hungary" or something, not "NeXT made computers and the CIA bought and used them."
Yep, same expectation, but it's just click bait. I never learn.
Did you know about the CIA's DECADES-LONG FUNDING of Coca-Cola? I have a hot tip from my good friend the soda machine technician that the CIA regularly funnels THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS a month into the pockets of BIG SODA when they restock their office kitchens and vending machines with Coca-Cola products!
This insidious relationship goes ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, my friend!
It’s a good point
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
The Civil Reserve Pizza fleet always amazed me. About once a quarter, the Air Force Academy would get dominoes pizza for all 4000 cadets. every cadet + staff and some visitors gets a medium pizza for dinner. that's about 4000 pizzas stuffed into the back seats of honda civics from around colorado springs arriving in a 2 hour span. I dont know how they did it but boy could they mobilize
We used to have pizza day at my elementary school and every kid would get their own personal sized dominos pizza. It's impressive how they can deliver on 600+ pizzas all warm and delivered at the same time.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a fully laden Honda Civic
...or a station wagon full of magtapes.
How many bytes in a pizza?
Google Maps has 16 Dominoes locations around Colorado Springs. 4000 means each location is making about 125 pizza/hour for 2 hours. (For just the Academy.)
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?
It is surprise orders often
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
Dominos uses a special dough that allows them to make a pizza in like 5 (?) minutes.
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 :+)
Doesn’t take a special dough to achieve that.
Yeah, just the right oven. It took 90 seconds for pizza hacker in SF on a customized weber grill: https://www.mikesenese.com/DOIT/2010/05/wood-fired-pizza-on-...
I used to work for Domino's Pizza in the mid to late 80s. Our piemakers were trained for speed and could usually slap dough, sauce, cheese and throw down toppings in around 30-40 seconds per pie. The ovens were super hot and cooked pizzas in 3-4 minutes. The whole goal was to get the pizza out the door so the driver didn't have to speed. This was still during the "30 minutes or less or it's free" period.
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.
Yeah that’s my school
It’s a free country. This sort of boycott would just result in Black Rifle Pizza.
Black Riffle Coffee was founded because Starbucks pledged to hire 10,000 refugees, not because they boycotted the military.
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.
Wasn’t even that — Black Rifle was founded in 2014 and the Starbucks announcement was in 2017. Note that as of 2025, they only have 500 total employees. Which I think only proves your moral harder.
(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.)
You’re totally right, my mistake. Founded in 2014, gained popularity in 2017 for pledging to hire 10,000 veterans because starbucks said they’d hire 10,000 refugees. According to wikipedia only ~150 of their ~500 employees are vets.
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
I find it useful to always take a step back and point out that both sides are dumb. Though it often ends up with both sides hating you instead of only one, but ya know.. https://allthatsinteresting.com/august-landmesser
If you think government geopolitical policy could be disrupted by a lack of pizza delivery i can assure you it’s not.
They're putting poison in the sugar water!
My exgf was adamant that aspartame (in Diet Coke) was a mind control drug. Turns out that Donald Rumsfeld (of Bush administration fame) was CEO of the company that made it, and he was the one who got the FDA to approve it for human consumption. So, there is a conspiracy theory not far from your joke.
Your satire probably isn't that far off:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/colombia0106/inde...
I was also going to mention this - unfortunate example they chose!
Whoa. This is weird. My friend's dad was an FBI agent for over 20 years. I remember him telling us a story about a case he worked in the early-90s where a Coca Cola exec was embezzling millions from the company. The exec was caught, basically red-handed. After working with his lawyer, the exec provided a story about some South American gang that strong-armed him into washing money for them (threatened to kill him and his family; I think he said they even kidnapped his daughter). My friend's dad said his team worked with the exec for several months to corroborate the story about the South American gang. Apparently he was telling the truth. Then, after gathering intel on the gang, they came up with a plan to go after them. However, a few days before they were set to act on their plan, they were told to stand down. Actually, no, before that they were told by their leadership that there would be no capture (of the gang), only kill. Then the plan was cancelled altogether.
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.
> Actually, no, before that they were told by their leadership
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?
It's a rhetorical device to emphasise the reason for cancellation, not a revision.
Sounds dictaded.
People write like they talk for effect. This is very, very common in the real world.
This is a little indirect? A Colombian bottle company 25% owned by Coke suppressed union activity. awful but hardly what the headlines are stating
We can talk about this on a legal or a moral basis. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll focus on the moral basis. If company A offloads some of its work to company B, and company B commits atrocities in a foreign company to keep costs down on said work, is company A not morally culpable if it continues to work with company B? Is it different if we think in terms of two people as opposed to two companies (and if so, why?)?
I don’t know how much responsibility should flow upward to Coca Cola, but “suppressed union activity” is excessively euphemistic.
They may well have used suppressors.
I don't understand what you're trying to say? Is this like M.K.Ultra?
More like CIA decades long funding of Crypto AG, Swiss company specialising in communications and information security.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
I don't think this is a good reply to a very funny and appropriate comment, but it's always important to keep mentioning that the CIA probably definitely murdered the founder's son: https://inteltoday.org/2020/02/15/crypto-ag-was-boris-hageli...
> Although there is — yet — no evidence
That’s a far cry from “probably definitely”.
Definitely a great candidate for being a intelligence agencies resource, either cooperatively or without their knowledge.
They have a ridiculously large network for their vending machines, and a massive global footprint.
As documented in Dr. Strangelove: https://youtu.be/DUAK7t3Lf8s
Haha, "follow the money!"
I'd trust my own intuitive suspicions more than official claims by the CIA.
But of course. Doesn't mean they're right, but you're right to acknowledge you probably do trust them more.
It is a worthwhile question to ask "why is the foreign intelligence service funding a private company?"
Strange 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?
You'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.
Another strange comment, this time from an account made 15 hours ago. My entire point was contextual and not in isolation!
There'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.
Sure, 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.
ai bots on hn? naaaaa.....
Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts
Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.
I 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
This 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.
Welcome to our collective future; enjoy your stay.
At least we can still spot the deception. That won't last forever.
I 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.
The 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
No, 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.
Yes-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
A 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.
It'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".
Or explicit investment, as with the many companies that were partially funded through In-Q-Tel. This is a strange article. All government agencies acquire computers for normal operations.
Funny you’re the only person mentioning IQT here. The CIA is a huge VC! They funded several of the cybersecurity startups I’ve worked at.
But that sort of analysis would prevent you from dropping a wikipedia link about something only somewhat related, and then implying that EVERYTHING is backdoor'd by the government.
You NeXT and Krispy Kreme are in the same category?!
Most never dealt with procurement to realize choosing an operating system for an organization requires everyone agreeing to use vendors that support the os.
Three-letter agencies often keep on life support the kind of cool niche computers thst don't benefit from economies of scale. There are clandestine government projects that required Lisp machines and Connection Machines years after you or your employer were no longer able to buy one.
Given Apple's involvement in PRISM while running ads about privacy and security... All tracks.
What exactly was their involvement in prism?
CIA agents also longed for a decent interface. understandable. relatable.
It was a bit more than they bought computers with a purchase order, like the part where it describes how CIA brought in a team of ex-Sun people to help scale manufacturing.
The US IC TLAs have a long history of supporting US companies that have interesting (to them) capabilities that may be too early for the public market. To their credit they often have some foresight in this regard.
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.
I purchased quite a few of those systems when they came out of production and went into the surplus supply chain. I don't recall anything unusual about the cubes with NeXTDimension boards that were in there though. Some had two boards, which was outrageously over-the-top powerful. There were a lot of slabs that were also labelled "NRO", and I bought lots and lots of them. No hard drives, of course. There was a surplus yard in Maryland that had the contracts for the TLAs. Not open to the public, but if you spent enough and brought donuts, you could clamber across the content of that week's 18-wheeler crammed to the top with magical gear coming out of places that had unlimited budgets and fast replacement cycles. It was legendary. I still have a fax machine somewhere in my dusty piles with "Joint Chiefs of Staff - Whitehouse" property tags.
Back in my day the IBM gear had special RF attenuating cases.
Almost all computing devices had fairly hardcore RF cage chassis around the internals.
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.
Sun Microsystems had hardware and a version of Unix that was POSIX-compliant. This passed the government openness/interoperability test in existence and anyone with authority and budget could buy Sun, and then buy approved applications and run them.
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.
Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain had a very good section on this. Ross Perot (one time third party presidential candidate) was a big investor in NeXT. Since he had founded 2 IT services companies that had extensive government contracts he was responsible for introducing many government agencies to NeXT and encouraging them to buy NeXT hardware on his personal endorsement. In Geoffrey's telling Steve ultimately blew up these relationships as a result of his immaturity and idealism to NeXT's detriment but he learned these lessons when we returned to Apple and became a more reliable business partner in his 2nd stint running apple.
“Nobody had business cards”
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.
> ...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.
And the incompetent questions all came from defense contractors..
Hey now, Flowers By Irene was just really connected to the World Wide Web back then. Who knew Teleflora was a secret numbers station?
Must be -> could be. Which is the point. And it is an easy way to communicate based on merit. It is likely done from a terminal with 'normal internet access', next to one of the intranet ones (or even airgapped) where the issue is occurring. Even if you'd be able to hack AOL, you'd likely end up on a dead end, or a front company. There's an added bonus: NSA might even know who it was/is internally, so someone who isn't in the 'in group' would get noticed.
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).
Funny
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.
>We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre.
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.
CIA funding helped keep a lot of industries afloat in the 20th century.
And somehow people freak out some bullshit about free market when there is gov intervention, even if it is reasonable
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?
Two Thumbs up!
It's time more people fully understood the meaning of "I don't care what color the Cat is, as long as it catches the Mouse".
Which is an opinionated rephrasing of the question whether ends justify the means. It’s not clear cut.
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.
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?
Nothing in my comment indicates the same ppl.
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
That was because Russia was creating actual art and laughing at the media America produced.
The USSR was selling art to fund the KGB. Stone glass houses.
Well that’s exactly the opposite situation isn’t it, funding their intelligence with art people were willing to pay for
Vs art that needed to be paid for by intelligence
Never would have thought that art and intelligence agencies have so much synergy tbh.
Russia has exceptional art education and the best art school in the world. I am proud as an American that we weaponized shitty art as a cultural weapon (Pollock bukkake)
What art school do you mean?
St. Petersburg Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
Is this ironic or did you inadvertently omit a word
Within the former USSR, there is very, very little demand today for the socialist-realist works produced during the Stalin era. No one goes to see museum exhibitions of the visual art except as a historical oddity, and the doctrinaire literature of that time is rotting unread in myriad provincial libraries. Its own market rejected it. Meanwhile, some of the Western abstract expressionists still appeal to a decent audience of art lovers.
This narrative has been popularized all over social media for the last couple years.
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?
One idea - these days there are many MANY more players using the same strategy - maybe the CIA wants us to be aware of the technique to limit its effectiveness.
Not a direct response to your question; I figure you or others reading this may be interested in the thoughts of the host of The War on Beauty (best found on youtube).
My brain tingles when I hear "three letter letter agency did X"
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.
As the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal showed, the social network algorithms can be used to send political messages according to your psychological profile. (Political messages shown to you, can be different from political messages shown to your neighbor).
"
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...
Except that was the whole problem with the CCP having hooks into TikTok. It's thing to be "oh it's just the algorithm", but if China's involved, they're gonna have a finger on the scale, but then when it's up to the US, we're supposed to think that no one's not messing with the algorithm to do... something? It's a comforting belief to think that there's some grand master plan and we're not all out here doing the best we can with what we've got and it's all up to random chance, but at the level where there is YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, it's hard to believe that there's no one guiding the algorithm for some purpose that isn't just make more money. Or maybe money is it and it's all an application of Goodhart's law.
Simple enough mechanism used that everyday people on YouTube can grasp, vague nationalistic bend, and plenty of people who don’t know about it, all makes great YouTube clickthrough rates.
I like your comment, though.
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.
We can never be sure now can we? I mean, there are great artists who aren't famous and struggle and remain unknown, and then there are artists (talented or otherwise) who either know (or have backers that know) how to play the game to earn fame and / or make a good living. Talented or not, would he have been famous and successful without the CIA propaganda? I remember reading about some famous painter who used to make his intern help him with client commissioned works, but when the clients themselves came to review it, he would make sure they never saw the interns and would pretend to have painted the whole thing himself.
Nothing says rugged individualism like some good-old state-sponsored abstract art.
> CIA funding helped keep Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock afloat
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
The art may have been created independently, but rich money laundering is the main reason why that art is considered valuable. Remember that this is a movement created in NYC, where they perfected the connection between strange new art forms and billionaire collections of paintings valued into the several million dollars.
> The art may have been created independently, but rich money laundering is the main reason why that art is considered valuable.
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 stakes huge amount of money in rescuing art from europe during the 30s and 40s for example. That was not a money making scheme.
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.
The problem with this approach is that the Russian Constructivists and their dealers were very successful in the Soviet Union.
https://www.thecollector.com/what-is-russian-constructivism/
Why is that a problem? Two schools can both produce good work, and still illustrate a contrast.
If a muscular Soviet art scene embarrassed the Americans into juicing up their own art scene, isn’t that good and healthy for both?
I meant the CIA’s approach to destabilizing the Soviet Union through artistic expression. Definitely good for the Art World.
Under Lenin sure. Not so much under Stalin, though. He had old fashioned tastes and disliked abstract art. He preferred "socialist realism" which featured cheesy pictures of happy peasants and tractor drivers working to build Communism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism
That could be I don’t know much history and my school never offered classes to study Soviet Realism unlike Russian Constructivism.
Damn, now I'm going to see every Pollock image as some sort of encrypted data where it just looks random because you don't have the key.
Those sub-miniature microphones and speakers in your phones? More CIA investment, eventually commercialized by companies like Knowles.
MEMS microphones are fascinating, and incredibly small: https://41j.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/chipworks_ip...
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.
Some of this old money CIA nepo kids do much more then mingle in the NYC artsy scene.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush
There are many more..
...and from US military perspective, a lot of these "investment" paid in the end to their favour, Id say?
they were an early sponsor of the research that yielded relational databases, so I guess we can thank them for Oracle as well
Yes they were a major early customer for Oracle, there is a little in [1] but not much, some hints that the first customer was running Oracle in a submarine.
[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
that's why they're called "the company" in insider circles. they still do, openly and probably also covertly. their investment arm is called in-q-tel https://www.iqt.org/portfolio , funding things like gitlab and docker. they probably run half of silicon valley. the dead giveaway is a funding story about 2 guys in a garage or dorm.
The garage or dorm story is the biggest myth they keep repeating, it's basically nonsense.
American industries that is. (I’m currently reading the new Economic Hitman.)
I vaguely remember going to a presentation by a NeXT engineer about an enterprise objects/webobjects project they did for the USPS where they photograph every letter passing by on a high-speed conveyor, use realtime processing to get the zip code and then sort it onto the correct belt
Yeah, Rob Blessin of Black Hole Computing bought the Cubes and Slabs (sans hard drives) when the CIA moved on to white hardware. At the time, I didn't have the need/funds for a spare, but did grab a NeXT-branded Canon inkjet printer.
I worked at a federal contractor in the mid-1990's with one customer. They bought a ton of NeXT machines.
We had a Kendall Square Research machine with a NeXT front end. Can't say what it was being used for though, but it did take a lot of security clearances to get into that machine room...
Ross Perot used his connections, arranged that, and also personally invested in NeXT.
Then Steve Jobs just decided to flake out on them because it wasn't the direction he wanted to take the company.
Government contracts propping up early-stage hardware companies is more common than people think. Being a reliable customer matters more than being a glamorous one.
So will you tell me Steve Jobs was part of the MK-Ultra project too?
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.
If "buying the products they made" constitutes funding the company then I guess.
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."
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.
> google had ... requests
Official requests.
>Official requests.
obviously.
i dont have access to the number of gag-order requests, and if i did, i wouldnt be posting them on hn
The question is, how much data NSA accesses in a single request. The official rules have changed but the "two hop" rule permits the agency to recover metadata from about 25,000 phones with a single request, according to 2016 Stanford study.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641378
You think they don't put in requests for optical taps anymore?
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...)
from NIST [0] to AT&T [1], the NSA has always had a backdoor into huge swathes of data created or transmitted through whatever means along with having Congress laws passed to retroactively make all of this collection legal [2]
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_(...
I will argue that Judeo-Christian theocracy tempered even more egregious "rule by might and violence" that has always been a real factor
I think the exploits of the Inquisitors across the millenia especially post-Cathars when torture and mass slaughter were recommended tools for religious indoctrination might be a bit a counter-factual to this (but religious history is not my most strongly studied area)
> you can be sure that number won't include anything they turned over the NSA
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?
I didn’t find this in the article where did this come from? I remember when Apple suddenly shutdown the developer network to deal with a security breach in 2013.
https://giga.law/daily-news/2013/07/22/apples-developer-site...
You understand that there is difference between US law enforcement and the intelligence community? And that all service providers are required, by law in almost ALL countries, to respond to legal requests from their governments? What you are citing is not any serious evidence of some shadowy conspiracy between apple and the "government".. Not that I believe Apple's bullshit about protecting users privacy, but you're grasping at straws there.
Credit to Steve Job's, he wasn't too interested in joining PRISM. Reasoning was never given but I would suspect it was part his anti-establishment bent, part trying to not damage the brand if it came out.
It was only once he passed than Apple went all in on it.
One could even say it was very convenient for them that he passed.
Definitely, he may have been the architect of digital jails but he did seem to care about his prisoners. Tim Cook is just a free for all but with some nice marketing.
> 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.
It's also a funny sentence to read when you're familiar with Jobs' close personal relationship with Larry Ellison: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a...
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
As a slightly different take on this, a pervasive rumour in the pen computing circles is that one of the reasons Jobs killed the Newton was that the USMC had just had a very successful test of the Newton MessagePad and some sort of wireless communication system and was looking to get Apple registered as a defense contractor so that they could implement them service-wide.
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?
From Pen Computing Magazine #22, June 1998: "Why Did Apple Kill Newton?", by David MacNeill: https://www.pencomputing.com/Newton/AppleKillsNewton%28PCM22...
Defence Production Act
It's fascinating history and theorizing but didn't Jobs kill many, many moribund product lines upon his return?
Also didn't pretty much every tech guru from that time (if not from all time) drop acid? Gates certainly did, and more than once.
Well, seems like this indicates another long-time and discerning user profile for Apple's pricier XDR display products.
I thought this was common knowledge.
CIA has funded a lot of things that are of national interest.
From Google etc ...
I'd say the whole Silicon Valley was almost entirely financed by national security agencies back in its beginning days during the Cold War. Does not mean it's bad.
LinuxSE also exists thanks to them.
SELinux, and that was NSA.
Yeah, I never remember how to type that, and was too lazy to check before posting.
While I stand corrected, it isn't much better anyway, in regards of the points of view being discussed towards CIA and software industry.
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.
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.
No, that is very wrong.
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.
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.
The Pyro accelerator.
1995
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.
Factory overclock, and in those days Motorola could probably have given them a batch of mid-development DSP chips (sort of proto 56002) that could clock much higher and still sit on the unmodified motherboard, max out the scratchpad memory, etc. Then the add-on cards. Anything that was potentially involved in nuclear response decisions probably could get a lot of budget. It would be interesting to inspect the hardware that still exists to see if there are any signs of what exactly actually happened.
> mid-development DSP chips (sort of proto 56002)
"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.
The faster chip from Motorola could have been only MC88100+MC88200, which had been developed concurrently with MC68030. So Motorola really had a faster alternative at that time. Moreover, Wikipedia says that Jobs actually wanted in the beginning to design NeXT with MC88100, not with MC68030, but he gave up due to problems with price and availability.
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.
The TMS 34010 was also available at that time and could support high resolution screens and accelerated graphics, the article states that it was an Intel graphics card though.
> faster chip from Motorola could have been only MC88100+MC88200
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.
No ASICs would have been needed for an expansion card with MC88100.
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.
I read the article. Worth to read. Questions: which Motorola chip CIA wanted? Same for Intel graphics card.
Makes me wonder what they did when NeXT was subsumed back into Apple. I guess the spy agencies had a lot less pressure on them by that point, so they weren't trying to procure computers from obscure sources to keep foreign spies from interfering.
According to the article, budgets were cut when the USSR fell.
And they had also switched to NEXTSTEP on SPARC, HP-PA, and x86 hardware a couple years after the last NeXT hardware shipped. (It’s a trivial recompile for 99.9% of NeXT software.)
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.
is archive.is dead?
Doesn’t work for wsj but not dead
I just loaded the website after reading your comment, so no.
now they are funding grapheneOs
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.
>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)
Having used it, Starlink's entire business model seems to be rooted in handwavium. You'll almost never hit advertised speeds or latency, and there are regular outages where you get no service at all. The cost of the service fluctuates constantly if you don't get locked-in to a specific rate, too.
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.
Most Satellite Internet users use Starlink.
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 was a bit hesitant to put SpaceX on the list as it has provided the government better value for money than NASA when launching rockets and the innovation is real. I also believe Elon is one of the better billionaires. His businesses haven't taken away opportunities from any small business. His chosen industries have irreducibly high capital requirements; small businesses cannot compete in those industries anyway and they are too risky.
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.
What's fascinating to me is just how many people in the American tech industry are in complete denial about the amount of government support their industry receives and by extension that they personally receive.
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?
Microsoft's main business... is extracting 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).
They don't produce anything that people like. Everyone using their products is forced to use it.
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.
Now do Anthropic and OpenAI.
Whenever you really start peeling away at Silicon Valley mega tech stories, you mostly find tax dollars.
A large majority of basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars. One mustn't underestimate the importance of DOD, NIH, and NSF grants in ongoing technological innovation.
Update: s/majority/amount/
> A large majority of basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars.
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...
That's a great link! Thanks for that :-)
Hence why Silicon Valley started at Silicon Valley. It was (is?) a huge defense contractor outpost.
What's your actually point? Reading between the lines I'm seeing the following logic.
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.
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.
Is your idea that NeXT machines had more sharp edges than other computers so would make it easier to collect blood?
Other comments tied this report into the cute and nerdy NSA/PRISM scheme of things.
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.
Twist on that was the fake immunization campaigns run in Pakistan so as to find relatives of Osama Bin Laden.
Or, just check Strom Thurmond's list of children on Wikipedia.
That caused alot of death for polio workers in local region Everything usa does take a toil in long run on local population . I am sure 911 caused alot of immense and grief for alot of people but total Estimated Toll comes to around over 4.5 million total deaths linked to the post-9/11 conflicts and Roughly 38 million people displaced or made refugees.
USA can hell or heaven for different people
Last time I went to donate blood, I read all the fine print they asked me to sign, and I was giving them the right to sequence my DNA (!)
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."
Why didn't you just not give blood that day?
[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?...
Misleading headline, AI generated article. Getting sick of this shit. Glad I still think for myself unlike a lot of the useful idiots here.
> 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.
> 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?
" 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 "
Steve Jobs was a Fed.
You forgot the '/s' in your comment.
Not sure why this is immediately flagged and buried, there's actual evidence for it. People need to stop being so uptight.