Let me postulate that knowledge actually is power. That would mean that intellectual property is a strategic asset: the asymmetry between its pile of intellectual property and other nations’ piles can be converted to potential military force and dominance.
I can’t tell if the media get handed stories, “here, print this” or if they actually think about them (or pretend to) and then print the government’s talking-points, anyway.
This is one of my favorite jokes; I think of it as “zen-like” and “koan-like” – except it has one problem: it’s a “blonde” joke.
I believe in “the deep state” but it’s not quite what people think it is: the deep state is the combined momentum of several out-of-control government agencies; their political inertia and self-interest make their actions appear to be a behind the scenes government, but it’s mostly a desire to protect their importance and budget.
Warning: I get a bit ranty.
A surrealist is walking down the street, and sees a banana peel in his path; he says, “Mon Dieu! I am going to fall down again!” and keeps walking.
There is a bunch of strange stuff surfacing surrounding the alleged incident in which the NSA allegedly tried to buy back stolen data from an alleged Russian hacker. I’m tracking it, but there are still many shoes that need to drop before the story begins to even make a shred of sense.
… And the winner may be: Commentariat Comrade Reginald Selkirk. Comrade Selkirk, your [classified] [REDACTED] award has been placed in the award-vault and [REDACTED] 2,000 feet [classified] concrete.
Strava’s heat map has made a lot of people step back and realize, “wow, there are side-channels to data.” Most of us in the computer security world have known that for a long time; some of us have spent our lives trying to stop such channels from happening; it’s a frustrating way to spend your life but, as Townes says, “it beats sitting around waiting to die.”
Spook stuff fascinates me, because it’s the unwritten side of history; things that happen covertly can have huge impact, but are never publicly known. For someone like me, who is fascinated – maybe obsessed – with causality, spook stuff is a great cause of many things that we generally never know. Which means, our ability to understand the world around us is permanently compromised.
There’s another fun story about cold war submarines, which appears to have now been (semi-?) confirmed. Lots of story hasn’t come out, yet, but it probably will, within the next fifty years.