Heya and welcome to Five Things Tech!
When I started to look through the pile of articles I had assembled for this newsletter, I noticed a trend. There weren’t many positive articles around, it was mostly a sober assessment of what’s going on in tech. And I think that’s fine. We need to be aware of what can happen when tech (and the tech bros) are unleashed.
Still, I think tech is amazing and I enjoy reading about all the cool stuff happening. Next week will be brighter. I hope. :)
Mark
Mark Zuckerberg is suspended in midair. He is not floating or sinking, nor is he ascending anywhere. He is being hoisted like a trophy.
Outside, the lake is still in the morning air and banked by turgid grass studded with ceramic decoys in the shape of coyotes, used to deter bears and geese. Everything in a Zuckerberg residence—the flora, the doors, the bookshelves, the light—seems uncannily enlarged, like on a movie set. After walking across the vast lawns of his summer palace and entering one of its smaller structures, it is jarring to find him held aloft like this, the sovereign of history’s largest nonterritorial empire being heaved against his will.
I actually met Mark Zuckerberg in Berlin for a meet & greet when facebook just had launched in Germany some 20 years ago. He was nice, a bit shy, seemed very tired and very nerdy. I don’t think that one person should have that much power and money, we really messed up the last two decades by not putting the right rules and regulations in place.
Inside the Chaos That Turned Tesla Into an Actual Car Manufacturer
In some ways, the tZero was a hit. When a VC would ride shotgun in the car with Eberhard at the wheel, Eberhard would implore them to touch the dashboard. As they reached forward, he’d punch the accelerator. As the car accelerated and the g forces piled up, the VC was literally unable to touch the dashboard. That was how powerful the tZero’s acceleration was, Eberhard would say.
Many of the VCs were astounded. Some even questioned whether the car was really electric. Many owned Ferraris or Lamborghinis. They knew sports cars—but this? They could never have imagined it was possible to do this with an electric drivetrain.
We should never forget that Elon Musk was never the founder of Tesla, but the guy who outmanouvered the founder.
Bitcoin’s Quantum Migration Debate
Bitcoin’s quantum debate is quite a quagmire. This is not merely a technical debate regarding the trade-offs of different types of cryptography and their strengths against a theoretical quantum computer. It is a debate about which properties of Bitcoin’s ethos are strongest when it is faced with a difficult dilemma: uphold the promise that valid coins remain spendable by their owners, or favor supporting the security of the system by not allowing a significant portion of its monetary supply to be raided via a vulnerability that was well known for many years.
The conundrum at the crux of this controversy is that every serious option violates a principle that Bitcoin users care about. Doing nothing may preserve today’s consensus rules while allowing future quantum-capable actors to take coins whose owners never consented. Freezing vulnerable coins may prevent that theft, but it retroactively invalidates long-standing spending conditions. A forced migration to quantum-resistant signatures may be prudent engineering, but it can also look like a deadline-backed confiscation regime. The debate is ugly because there is no clean path that perfectly preserves property rights, economic predictability, censorship resistance, backward compatibility, and user sovereignty all at once.
Quantum Computing sure poses interesting challenges. Good luck, crypto-bros!
How a Chinese Hacking Firm Tapped AI to Supercharge Cyber-Spying
A trove of internal data belonging to a China-based cybersecurity company, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provides a new window into an evolution that international cybersecurity experts have tracked in recent years.
The material turns the table on hackers by providing an inside view of how they operate. It shows the company, Zhengzhou Zhirong Network Technology Co., or ZRON, offering a menu of sensitive data that is presented as coming from the government email systems of China’s rivals and friends alike. Documents in the trove include Russian diplomatic correspondence, preparations for foreign leaders’ visits to the Philippines and confidential minutes from a meeting in the Pakistan prime minister’s office.
The trove seen by the Journal also contains intelligence reports that appear to be based in part on stolen data, internal company chat logs and a company slide deck that appears aimed at prospective clients.
Yikes. I am pretty sure we will have more and more bad actors embracing AI to wreak havoc - and we need to increase our cybersecurity defenses, ideally powered by AI.
As the coast begins to crumble, the clock ticks on moving San Onofre’s radioactive waste
Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant’s owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge.
But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors.
Well, I wanted to end this newsletter on a happier note, but to me this is really important. Nuclear is not the solution for the energy demand of the future. It’s too dangerous and also too expensive.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
🤖
— Nico