A million years ago (when I was at NASA working on security for people like physicists designing robotics for Mars) we talked about all the obstacles to swarms being successful.

Lately it seems like the script has been flipped and journalists are breathlessly warning that nothing can stop swarms.

In a decade or so we went from “can’t get swarms to flow” to “swarms can’t be stopped”. Both are exaggerating the truth.

The reality is somewhere in between, yet I fail to see anyone these days taking about the simple obstacle side of things.

In a 2014 lecture I was invited to give by the soon-to-be ill-fated head of Facebook security, for example, I gave specific examples of swarm countermeasures including illustrations.

More to the point, I had been asked to keynote a week of security training inside a huge silicon valley brand. My pitch was a move from synthesis to analysis; security teams must prepare immediately for an onslaught of inexpensive integrity attacks (realities of securing big data — my latest book).

I got a lot of nodding heads, right before I watched the newly minted head of Facebook security do the exact opposite. The integrity breaches he allowed, despite many direct warnings, are still known as the worst in history (facilitating atrocity crimes).

In later presentations I showed how swarm platforms like Waze were being countered and their agents redirected.

So here we are. The world is carping about horrible integrity attacks, just as I warned, and saying they will get worse. That’s progress. However, the preparation steps of a decade ago or more seem to be overlooked.

I guess it’s the ancient problem that stark fear sells far more than nuance of risk management.

“Sugar filling mouths can’t be stopped” gets more eyeballs than “brush your teeth twice a day” let alone “change your diet based on science”.

The kind of stuff the old NASA physicists would probably say is painfully obvious: Throw up strategic obstacles and a swarm may be frozen if not suicidal.

Very inexpensive, very effective. What’s not to like?

We need to talk far more about integrity, the stuff that makes quality, because most or even all swarms right now don’t have it.

The over emphasis on confidentially and availability counter-measures has been missing an obvious weak point in security’s three legged stool.

In fact we’re long past the point where people blandly demanding end-to-end encryption should be asked what exactly they’re doing about dangerous integrity breaches (to avoid repeating Facebook mistakes).

Code quality has been trashed, the algorithm team is weak and tired at Twitter.

Staff who are still stuck in the dictatorship, like Tesla, warn potential hires to work somewhere, anywhere, other than for Elon Musk.

“Don’t come here if you value well-being or a safe workplace.” [It’s now] “cut-throat culture” and “leadership just sucking up to EM”…supervised by under-qualified engineers, no credit for work, no decision-making power.

The CEO responsible for creating this talent crisis (already infamous for racism and trying to normalize Hitler in America) has allegedly been personally reinstating the worst Nazis to his platform.

Even self-proclaimed Nazis guilty of breaking laws and ruled dangerous are released by Twitter now without care, and then violent hate is promoted.

The racist, antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic Anglin — who declared in 2018 that he hates women and believes they “deserve to be beaten, raped and locked in cages” — owes Obeidallah millions of dollars from a libel suit for fake tweets that potentially put his life at risk.

[…]

Anglin told his followers to “go confront Dean,” Obeidallah recounted. “So I got a ton of death threats. And I sued him in federal court and I won.”

[…]

Unbelievably, Twitter’s interface was reportedly recommending on Friday that users follow the neo-Nazi’s account.

Believable.

Twitter is now unsafe by design.

As the collapse of FTX reverberates through the financial community, Stanford deserves ever more scrutiny.

Here’s a giant clue: the villain of FTX was born and grew up entirely in Stanford, the son of two Stanford professors. He is quite possibly the most accurate example of the Stanford mindset.

Take his mother for example.

First she says this:

Fried told the Stanford Daily that her absence was simply due to a “long-planned” decision to retire and has “nothing to do with anything else going on,” presumably referencing the downfall of her son’s fake crypto empire.

Then she throws this wrench into her own story:

She added that she would like to make a return to teaching in the future, which somewhat refutes her earlier statement.

I love the fact that a reporter calls attention immediately to BS coming out of both sides of her mouth.

A long-planned decision that she would stop on this spot, contradicted by saying she will decide to start again any minute.

Any guess where she plans to retire? Here’s a giant clue:

The news comes amidst criticisms surrounding the [FTX CEO] family’s acquisition of a $16.4 million vacation home from FTX shortly before its collapse.

When you really look at Stanford setting up a Potemkin village to lobby government, funded by Facebook and run by the “retired” Facebook executive embroiled in GDPR and Cambridge Analytica breaches (let alone worst privacy breaches of all time)… FTX seems to fit a pattern of fabricating reality to suit only the holier-than-thou of Stanford.

As I’ve explained before, the very name Stanford represents cruel fraud, systemic racism and ultimately genocide.

It’s always been odd to me that people willingly associate themselves with Stanford. Some surely swallowed the mantra they always could find a way to be right while doing wrong. It’s the worst possible version of what some today call a plan for “Metaverse”.

In that sense I wonder if the villain of FTX ever really tasted reality before now. And on that note the real villain of Stanford was and always will be… Stanford.

Once again, the timing is highly suspicious.

In September, Liu purchased a $31 million house in Beverly Hills.

September was basically a month ago, when everyone already was talking about CEOs missing targets heading into recession.

However, this CEO didn’t even really acknowledge the times, just that he likes to break the necks of his staff.

“In trying to do too many things at once, we have grown our organization at a breakneck pace over the past few years,” Airtable CEO and co-founder Howie Liu said in the note to staff. […] Unlike many other tech layoffs of late, the company’s note did not acknowledge broader economic issues as part of the layoffs — and only alluded to outsized growth in recent years.

$31 million is a lot of broken necks.

Update Dec 12: Head of children’s charity paying himself an absurd $2m/day demands Google fire “overpaid” staff to increase margins (and put children at risk).