Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• An oligarch’s dystopian scheme to discredit journalism with AI: Judd Legum on a coordinated, AI-powered campaign to flood the zone with fake reporting and erode trust in the real thing. Disinformation industrialized. Peter Thiel goes full super villain, funding a startup launched this month will use an “AI jury” to “subject the media’s claims to systematic investigation and judgment.” That same system of AI adjudication assigns a numerical value — the so-called “Honor Index” score — grading the trustworthiness of individual reporters. And for a starting price of $2,000, anyone can pay for the company to review and adjudicate complaints they may have about a news outlet or reporter. (Popular Information)
• Your Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose: How a Hong Kong conglomerate bought Milwaukee, DeWalt, and Craftsman — and what happened to quality after the acquisitions. (Worse on Purpose) see also Your Glasses Got Worse on Purpose: The consolidation playbook comes for eyewear too. (Worse on Purpose)
• Has De-Dollarization Begun?: US President Donald Trump’s military adventures, attacks on long-standing allies, and dismantling of institutions like USAID are eroding the trust on which the dollar’s global primacy ultimately rests. The world’s reserve currency may have already begun its long, slow decline. Kaushik Basu argues the dollar’s reserve status is more vulnerable than the consensus assumes — and Washington is doing its best to test the thesis. A worthwhile contrarian read. (Project Syndicate)
• A Vital System of Atlantic Ocean Currents Is Weakening and Closer to Collapse Than Thought: New research moves up the timeline on AMOC’s potential breakdown. (CNN)
• New Lawsuit: Do We Have a Right to Know We’re Being Surveilled? Scarsdale, New York didn’t want to share its plans for Flock surveillance cameras. A new lawsuit brought by NYCLU goes after Flock’s license-plate camera dragnet. The basic civil-liberties question — can a public agency hide where it’s watching from? — is overdue for a court answer. (Drop Site News) see also Your ISP Is Watching You. Here’s How a VPN Can Help: A practical primer on what your internet provider sees and what a VPN actually fixes (and doesn’t). Useful if your privacy hygiene is overdue. (PC Magazine)
• New disclosures reveal how DOGE actually worked: Depositions offer insight into what Elon Musk’s group was up to, including its heavy use of ChatGPT. Members describe a club-like atmosphere in which they pushed for grant and contract cancellations across the government with little oversight. (Washington Post)
• Bad Connection: Uncovering Global Telecom Exploitation by Covert Surveillance Actors. Two sophisticated telecom surveillance campaigns for the first time, links real-world attack traffic to mobile operator signalling infrastructure. The findings expose how suspected commercial surveillance vendors (CSVs) exploit the global telecom interconnect ecosystem, leverage private operator networks, and conduct covert location tracking operations that can persist undetected for years. (Citizen Lab) see also They Built a Legendary Privacy Tool. Now They’re Sworn Enemies: There’s a lot of love all over the world for GrapheneOS, the gold standard of mobile security. There’s very little love between the two guys at the center of its history. (Wired)
• How Did the U.S. Run Out of Missiles in Iran?: $800B a year in defense spending, and the stockpile still came up short. (Doomsday Scenario)
• The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court: Secret memos obtained by The New York Times illuminate the origins of the court’s now-routine “shadow docket” rulings on presidential power. Adam Liptak reconstructs the emergence of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket. (New York Times) see also Two justices, one quest: push to gut Voting Rights Act reaches final act: Latest ruling is culmination of Justices Roberts and Alito’s campaign to slowly but surely strangle efforts to protect democratic rights of Black and other minority Americans The Guardian traces a decade-long Roberts/Alito project to dismantle Section 2. The arc was never accidental. The latest ruling is culmination of Justices Roberts and Alito’s campaign to slowly but surely strangle efforts to protect democratic rights of Black and other minority Americans (The Guardian)
• The Mind of a Minotaur Displaying Picasso’s dark side: If Picasso were alive today, I have to imagine he would have been canceled by now. Some tried to do it post-hoc, on the heels of 2018’s #MeToo reckoning, and failed. The Brooklyn Museum’s 2023 exhibition It’s Pablo-matic, curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby, notoriously attempted a grand reappraisal of the man in light of his mistreatment of women, urging other museums to reconsider how they present him. (The Point)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Lawrence Calcano, CEO and Chairman of iCapital, The firm is a fintech platform built to be the OS for alternative investments and complex products for financial advisors, wealth managers, and banks. The firm has over $1.2 trillion in active global assets on platform, across 2,455 funds used by 123,ooo financial professionals.
Oil Hits Wartime High Above $120 a Barrel
Source: New York Times
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