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!
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.
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?
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.
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 :+)
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'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".
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.
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.
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.
"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%!)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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."
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!
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...
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.
I was also going to mention this - unfortunate example they chose!
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.
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...
They're putting poison in the sugar water!
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
Yeah that’s my school
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?
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.
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 :+)
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
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.
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 is a worthwhile question to ask "why is the foreign intelligence service funding a private company?"
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.....
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.
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.
You NeXT and Krispy Kreme are in the same category?!
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.
Yep, same expectation, but it's just click bait. I never learn.
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%!)
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
> 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
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
“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?
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.
CIA funding helped keep a lot of industries afloat in the 20th century.
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
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?
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.
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).
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.
That was because Russia was creating actual art and laughing at the media America produced.
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.
The USSR was selling art to fund the KGB. Stone glass houses.
> 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 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.
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.
Nothing says rugged individualism like some good-old state-sponsored abstract art.
Those sub-miniature microphones and speakers in your phones? More CIA investment, eventually commercialized by companies like Knowles.
American industries that is. (I’m currently reading the new Economic Hitman.)
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...
...and from US military perspective, a lot of these "investment" paid in the end to their favour, Id say?
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
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?
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.
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...
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.
If "buying the products they made" constitutes funding the company then I guess.
Well, seems like this indicates another long-time and discerning user profile for Apple's pricier XDR display products.
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.
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.
CIA has funded a lot of things that are of national interest.
From Google etc ...
> 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...
It's fascinating history and theorizing but didn't Jobs kill many, many moribund product lines upon his return?
Defence Production Act
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.
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.
is archive.is dead?
I just loaded the website after reading your comment, so no.
Doesn’t work for wsj but not dead
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
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).
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?
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.
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."
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
[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?...
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.
Now do Anthropic and OpenAI.
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.