The Path to American Authoritarianism
U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.
The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.
What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, competition is real but unfair.
Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies.
Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study
Constant real-time surveillance of populations, analyzed by Oracle-powered machine-learning products, would keep everyone "on their best behavior." He believes the payoff will include better healthcare, thanks to treatments tailored to individuals, and the ability for governments to lift food production by better predicting crop yields.
‘It was never going to be me’: How Trump’s DOJ sparked a crisis and mass resignations over the Eric Adams case
Over the past 36 hours, seven prosecutors in New York and Washington have resigned rather than carry out the order to dismiss the corruption case against Adams, a Democrat. The prosecutors have decried acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove's order to drop the charges – which cited in part Adams’ role as mayor helping the Trump administration combat illegal immigration – as a bargain amounting to a “quid pro quo.”
Assistant US Attorney Hagan Scotten resigned in a blistering letter Friday: “Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.
If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten wrote. “But it was never going to be me.”
Enforcing Bigotry
PBS caves to Trump closing its DEI office and seeing its staff leave the company
A textbook demonstration why not to comply in advance.
PBS has caved to President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI push and announced the closure of its diversity, equity, and inclusion office. The staff members in PBS’ DEI office are also leaving the company.
“NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social last April. “THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!”
Republican members of Congress are planning on renewing efforts to do just that.
You Must Hide Your Pride At NASA
Employees cannot have pride flags, lapel pins, badge lanyard, TEAMS backgrounds, clothing, laptop stickers – or anything related to pride in their offices. This guidance is NOT being put in written form (like everything else has been) but is rather communicated verbally from the 9th floor to all management for them to inform/warn their staff. The penalty for violating this guidance can result in being put on administrative leave. This applies to all employees – not just LBGTQ+ but also LBGTQ+ allies.
Google Calendar removes Black History Month, Pride and other cultural events
The Department of Education Told Employees to End Support for Transgender Students
The U.S. Department of Education told employees late Friday that it will end all programs, contracts and policies that “fail to affirm the reality of biological sex,” carrying out President Donald Trump’s vow to restrict transgender rights.
The email sent to employees Friday afternoon stated: “The deliberate subjugation of women and girls by means of gender ideology — whether in intimate spaces, weaponized language, or American classrooms — negated the civil rights of biological females and fostered distrust of our federal institutions.”
Promoting Disease
RFK Jr. Wants to Send People Addicted to Antidepressants to Government “Wellness Farms”
Kennedy described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.
On the farms, he said, residents would grow their own organic food—which would help them recover from addiction, “because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related. A lot of the illnesses are food related.” The idea that addiction is connected to consuming non-organic food is not backed by robust science—but it’s in line with many other unfounded claims that Kennedy has made in the past about pesticides and non-organic food causing chronic disease, behavioral problems, and autism.
Montana Bill to ban mRNA vaccines passes out of House committee
The bill deems the technology, which was employed to create the Covid-19 vaccines, a hazard.
The bill was amended to specify that the legislation would ban mRNA vaccines “for infectious diseases" and not “gene therapy products used to treat cancers or genetic disorders.”
New study reveals a major link between vaccines and Alzheimer’s
Just a year ago, they reported that individuals who had received at least one flu vaccine experienced a 40% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s compared to those who had never been vaccinated.
Those vaccinated with the Tdap/Td (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis) vaccine were 30% less likely to develop Alzheimer's compared to their non-vaccinated counterparts. HZ (Herpes zoster) and pneumococcal vaccines also showcased promising results, revealing a 25% and 27% reduced Alzheimer's risk, respectively.
Kakistocracy: Rule by Idiots
Musk accused Reuters of ‘social deception.’ The deception was his.
Musk posted a screenshot of a U.S. government webpage showing a contract between the Defense Department and Thomson Reuters Special Services for “Active Social Engineering Defense” and “Large Scale Social Deception.”
“Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception,’” Musk proclaimed. “They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
A slightly closer look would have revealed that the contract, signed during President Donald Trump’s first term, was for help defending against cyberattacks — that is, combating deception, not fueling it. And it went to a separate division of the company, not the news agency.
China’s Salt Typhoon Spies Are Still Hacking Telecoms—Now by Exploiting Cisco Routers
Despite high-profile attention and even US sanctions, the group hasn’t stopped or even slowed its operation, including the breach of two more US telecoms. They targeted the internet-exposed web interfaces of Cisco's IOS software, exploiting two different vulnerabilities in those devices' code, one of which grants initial access, and another that provides root privileges.
Recorded Future found more than 12,000 Cisco devices whose web interfaces were exposed online, and says that the hackers targeted more than a thousand of those devices installed in networks worldwide. Of those, they appear to have focused on a smaller subset of telecoms and university networks whose Cisco devices they successfully exploited. For those selected targets, Salt Typhoon configured the hacked Cisco devices to connect to the hackers' own command-and-control servers via GRE tunnels.
Unpacking the BADBOX Botnet with Censys
BADBOX is a newly discovered botnet targeting both off-brand and well-known Android devices—often with malware that potentially came pre-installed from the factory or further down in the supply chain.
zkLend loses $9.5M in crypto heist, asks hacker to return 90%
Decentralized money lender zkLend suffered a breach where threat actors exploited a smart contract flaw to steal 3,600 Ethereum, worth $9.5 million at the time. Threat actors exploited a rounding error bug in zkLend's smart contract mint() function.
"The attacker manipulated the "lending_accumulator" to be very large at 4.069297906051644020, then took advantage of the rounding error during ztoken mint() and withdraw() to repeatedly deposit 4.069297906051644021 wstETH getting 2 wei then withdraw 4.069297906051644020*1.5 -1 = 6.103946859077466029 wstETH to expend just 1 wei."
GOAD: Game of Active Directory
It provides pentesters a vulnerable Active directory environment ready to use to practice usual attack techniques.
Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture
Hash tables are among the oldest data structures we have. And they’re still one of the most efficient ways to store data. But when the table gets full, it slows down. For 40 years, computer scientists accepted Andrew Yao's conjecture that access to the last open spot in a hash table scales as O(n).
But Andrew Krapivin, a student, found a method that scales as (log n)^2 -- a vast improvement.
China’s EV giants are betting big on humanoid robots
Gerneral-use humanoid robots are being used to install wires in EV cars in China. There were over 160 humanoid-robot manufacturers worldwide as of June 2024, of which more than 60 were in China, more than 30 in the United States, and about 40 in Europe.
China has emerged as the world's largest EV market and manufacturer. China is now committed to becoming a global leader in robotics and automation, just as it did with EVs. Robotics is where EVs were a decade ago—a trillion-yuan battlefield waiting to be claimed.
Humanoid Robots Showcase Folk Dance Skills on Spring Festival Gala Stage
Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website
The doge.gov website is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone.
DOGE Website Posts Classified Information, Worrying Intelligence Officials
The site published data about the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal intelligence agency that builds and launches U.S. surveillance satellites. The data is classified but there is debate in the intelligence community about whether it needs to be.
DOGE Is Hacking America
Bruce Schneier: The U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history. The DOGE team, with limited experience and minimal oversight, are gaining the highest levels of administrative access and making changes to the United States’ most sensitive networks, potentially introducing new security vulnerabilities in the process.
But the most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted. It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms--by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.