technocrit

The Trump administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against countries’ attempts to regulate how American tech companies handle foreigners’ data, arguing that data sovereignty laws threaten the advancement of AI services and technology, Reuters reported, citing an internal diplomatic cable.

The cable, signed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, says such laws would “disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit AI and cloud services, and expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship,” according to the report.

The cable pushes diplomats to “counter unnecessarily burdensome regulations, such as data localization mandates.” It also orders them to track proposals that would promote data sovereignty laws, and urged diplomats to promote the Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules Forum, an international group that claims to enable “trusted data flows globally through international data protection and privacy certifications.”

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After successfully recuperating tiktok, politicians are going to once again exploit pseudo-science to outlaw the "infinite scroll." Get ready for the comeback of the pager. Thanks libs!

If you are to believe the glossy marketing campaigns about ‘quantum computing’, then we are on the cusp of a computing revolution, yet back in the real world things look a lot less dire. At least if you’re worried about quantum computers (QCs) breaking every single conventional encryption algorithm in use today, because at this point they cannot even factor 21 yet without cheating.

In the article by [Craig Gidney] the basic problem is explained, which comes down to simple exponentials. Specifically the number of quantum gates required to perform factoring increases exponentially, allowing QCs to factor 15 in 2001 with a total of 21 two-qubit entangling gates. Extrapolating from the used circuit, factoring 21 would require 2,405 gates, or 115 times more.

underlying article: https://algassert.com/post/2500

I've been using Debian (and formerly Ubuntu) for many years.

But I've been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.

I've been considering the following distros:

• Arch
• Cachy
• Manjaro
• Any others?

I'm leaning towards Arch or Cachy. This is for a mediocre laptop that I'm planning to use as a media center: Kodi, Retroarch, Steam, etc. Should I even be using Arch for this? Maybe Debian is more stable...

Sorry if this has been asked before. Thanks for any tips!

As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed "courageous whistleblowers" who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user's messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app's end-to-end encryption. "A worker need only send a 'task' (i.e., request via Meta's internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job," the lawsuit claims. "The Meta engineering team will then grant access -- often without any scrutiny at all -- and the worker's workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user's messages based on the user's User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products."

"Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users' messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required," the 51-page complaint adds. "The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated -- essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted." The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.

The New York Stock Exchange is preparing for a future where Wall Street no longer closes. The exchange announced it is developing a tokenized securities platform that would enable round-the-clock trading, fractional share ownership, and immediate settlement of U.S. listed equities and ETFs. The project is being built by its parent company, Intercontinental Exchange, which owns and operates the NYSE and much of the infrastructure behind global financial markets.

This new digital platform is designed to combine the NYSE’s existing Pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade systems. The goal is to preserve the regulatory protections investors expect while introducing features that traditional market plumbing has never supported. If approved by regulators, the platform would allow trading to continue 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with transactions settling instantly instead of waiting days to clear.

That change would mark a real shift in how markets work. Today’s equity trades still rely on multi-day settlement cycles that tie up capital and add risk during volatile market conditions. Tokenized capital allows trades to settle immediately, freeing up funds and reducing counterparty exposure. For everyday investors, the ability to buy shares in dollar amounts rather than full units could make expensive stocks more accessible and flexible to own.

The global semiconductor landscape has reached a historic inflection point as the open-source RISC-V architecture officially secured 25% market penetration this month, signaling the end of the long-standing architectural monopoly held by proprietary giants. This milestone, verified by industry analysts in late December 2025, marks a seismic shift in how the world’s most advanced hardware is designed, licensed, and deployed. Driven by a collective industry push for "architectural sovereignty," RISC-V has evolved from an academic experiment into the cornerstone of the next generation of computing.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed S4505, a law that requires websites to display warnings claiming that features like algorithmic feeds, push notifications, infinite scroll, like counts, and autoplay cause addiction -- despite, as TechDirt argues, the absence of scientific consensus supporting such claims.

Data colonialism on the African continent has moved from abstraction into formal state policy through binding agreements signed without public consent, parliamentary scrutiny, or meaningful legal protection for citizens. Nigeria’s memorandum of understanding with France on tax administration data, alongside healthcare data-sharing agreements signed by Kenya and Rwanda with United States agencies, reflects a pattern of external control over sovereign information systems. These arrangements represent a transfer of strategic national assets rather than technical cooperation. Historical experience across former colonies shows that control over taxation, health records, and population data has always preceded deeper forms of domination, even when formal sovereignty remained intact.

Epstein’s human trafficking organization depended entirely on the wealth management industry (WMI). It was how he obtained the capital to build it, and it was how he hid his activities from the authorities. And none of this was an abuse of the industry; it is precisely how the WMI is designed to work. Nor is it an abuse of the law, because both American and international law has been carefully designed to accomodate the WMI.

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But capitalism didn’t just provide seed funds for Epstein’s operation. It also provided a whole legal and financial apparatus that helped him find victims and disguise his transactions. An article in Deviant Behavior by sociologist Thomas Volscho observes that at first, “the predominant means for gaining access to potential victims involved Epstein using philanthropy to gain access to youth-serving institutions.”

In particular, Epstein seems to have leveraged immense wealth to buy influence in youth organizations that focused on financially at-risk children and then used the wealth disparity to control them. This was a natural step for Epstein, since wealth managers often work with charitable organizations for tax-avoidance purposes. As his conspiracy matured, Volscho writes, Epstein’s “sex trafficking enterprise was funded by Epstein’s tax shelter advisory business, where he primarily helped wealthy people avoid taxation on the sale and/or bequeathing of their assets and incomes.”

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So while Epstein likely used blackmail and other illegal schemes to avoid prosecution for his crimes, his primary strategy — offshore wealth management — was not just legal but a central feature of modern financial capitalism. If the Left wants to use the Epstein case to talk about elite impunity, that conversation has to begin with the strategies the rich use to hide their finances that are completely legal.

Gotta ditch Microsoft like years ago...