> - Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]
> The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]
Dude, you cannot put these two sentences together. The defense department was either a fluke or a PR stunt. If they partner with Palintir they absolutely do not care that their tech is going to be used for killing and other horrible deeds.
A company with morals (which does not exist BTW) would never partner with Palintir.
Yes, also it's not even encrypted. It's the worst case of all major browsers.
Firefox & Safari: E2E encrypted, you hold keys, not possible for Mozilla/Apple to access it.
Chrome: Encrypted, Google holds keys meaning it is useless, they can read and give away the data. One can enable sync passphrase which would enable E2E however.
Edge: Nothing is encrypted and no way to change this.
Well, and that's a major part of the problem: Even if you continue doing better and better work in your current job, you will never get paid more for it. If you want more pay, you have to seek a promotion, and the only jobs that get paid really well are management jobs.
Frankly, this smells a lot like a continuation of the old feudal mindset, where the people who tell other people what to do are considered to be more worthy, more valuable, better people, than the people who just...make things with their hands.
There's really no inherent reason why the person who is coordinating my team should be considered to be more valuable than me. And there's certainly no reason why the organization should consider me qualified for that position just because I do this one really well: management is a different skillset, that one doesn't naturally gain just by doing a non-management job really well. (And I can say this with some certainty, because I have seen both very good and very bad managers, and the difference is night and day. Not just on the morale of the people they're managing, but in the results of what they create.)
- September 2025: US imposes additional 100k USD per visa as a condition to eligibility. (previous was 5k - 20k USD)
- October 2025: Amazon cuts 14k jobs
- December 2025: Amazon announces additional 35b USD investment to India (total 75b USB by 2030); promises to create ~1m jobs there
- December 2025: Random H1B lottery is dismantled, giving preference to higher company salary spending e.g. the more salary H1B applicant would receive, the better the chances
- January 2026: Amazon cuts 16k additional jobs (30k jobs cut in total)
You really don't have to be a detective to figure out that this has nothing to do with AI.
1. Ramp up offshore hiring and relocate jobs in low-cost-of-living (LCOL) countries (India) to avoid paying the 100K H1-B visa charge.
2. Train their AI and robotics by researchers in LCOL countries (to eventually replace the high-cost-of-living (HCOL) warehouse labor workforce)
3. Deploy robots and AI agents to then layoff more people in HCOL environments and repeat (1) until their margins improve and they achieve AGI.
The flaw is that they had those keys to begin with. What's the point of encryption if key is available and free to use? Same with iCloud Email.
Privacy cannot come from human-made laws and regulations because they get abused on they change. Privacy comes from mathematics which do not care for laws and regulations.
The main threat model here is a stolen/lost device or an unscrupulous repair shop not a government agency with a warrant.
You also do not have to backup keys in the cloud, however for most users it’s the best solution since for them data recovery in case of a hardware failure is more important than resiliency against state level adversaries.
I am an Apple ecosystem lifetime participant. I have recovery and legacy contacts. What I would love is for those contacts to have the encryption key(s) for my data shared with them so they can provide me with recovery options if needed, but Apple cannot.
Certainly, nation state actors could pursue those people to obtain access to key material, but that is a different hill to climb than simply sending requests to Apple, especially for contacts outside of the jurisdiction or nation state reach. Perhaps Shamir's secret sharing would be a component of such an option (you need X out of Y trusted contacts to recover, 2 out of 3 for easy mode, 3 out of 5 for hard mode).
Mailbox encryption is near pointless since at the least it needs to be encrypted at both ends not to mention relays.
For email each individual message should be encrypted if you want any confidentiality and even then the meta data is in the clear.
And this is because in order to send or receive an email the provider needs to access it. If they put it into a box later on to which they do not hold the key that is just security theater at that point.
A lot has changed since then and it is common knowledge that Apple regularly give government agencies access to their systems and hides it from the public until a whistleblower leaks it.
In a statement, Apple said that Wyden's letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.
"In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."
> The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]
Dude, you cannot put these two sentences together. The defense department was either a fluke or a PR stunt. If they partner with Palintir they absolutely do not care that their tech is going to be used for killing and other horrible deeds.
A company with morals (which does not exist BTW) would never partner with Palintir.