On Friday, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.

Trump goes berserk as Kamala's score goes up. The former president blames Iran for hacking his adviser's account prior to what happened "Mint sandstorm" as Microsoft called it. He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalization, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.
Whoever the true actor, Trump without Biden is a real grump. Seriously, according to some reliable Israeli sources, Iran did plan to make an unexpected attack on the Republican candidate one way or another. It is not just a trumped issue whatsoever.

#Trump #Islamic #Politics #US #Microsoft #Biden

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🖥 Welcome to SharePwned™: Now Featuring Free Backdoors for the CCP

💬 “We firmly oppose smearing others without solid evidence.”

— Chinese Embassy, as usernames, passwords, and credentials rain from the cloud

🎯 China didn't hack your servers. Your server invited them in.
Microsoft, fresh off a decade of “zero-trust” PowerPoints, just admitted that its beloved SharePoint platform—used by governments, hospitals, universities, and your grandma’s HOA board—was basically an open bar for Chinese state hackers.

The names? Linen Typhoon. Violet Typhoon. Storm-2603.
Sounds like Pokémon. Acts like Stasi.

🧨 The Bug That Keeps on Giving
Patch it? They’ll dodge it.
Close the door? They’ve cloned the keys.
Microsoft “fixed” the holes in July. China just went around the fixes in August.
Your network isn’t yours anymore. It’s a rental — and Beijing’s got the spare keys.

🏴‍☠️ From Redmond to Riyadh: Global Penetration as a Service
• Florida’s Revenue Department? Breached.
• Education Department? Infiltrated.
• EU energy firms, Arab universities, African ministries? Check, check, check.

The best part? This isn’t some laser-targeted spy op.
It’s mass phishing, CCP-style. If your SharePoint is on-prem, it’s probably owned.

🧠 Microsoft: Come for Word, Stay for Espionage
The company says it’s holding “weekly meetings” to improve security.
Translation: monthly oopsies, quarterly breaches, annual apologies.

🤔 Final Thought
When a Chinese hacker logs into your server through a Microsoft flaw,
is it cyberwar, negligence — or just the future of SaaS?

#cybersecurity #microsoft #china #espionage #sharepoint #toolShell #digitalcolonialism #surveillancestate

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Microsoft: No Israeli Military’s Access to Technology 💻🚫🇮🇱

Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls each day in Gaza and the West Bank 📞📡.

Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency 🛰, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform ☁️.

The decision to cut off Unit 8200’s ability to use some of its technology results directly from an investigation published by The Guardian 📰. It revealed how Azure was being used to store and process the trove of Palestinian communications in a mass surveillance program 👀.

In a joint investigation with +972 Magazine and Local Call, The Guardian showed how Microsoft and Unit 8200 had worked together on a plan to move large volumes of sensitive intelligence material into Azure, starting after a 2021 meeting between Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and the unit’s then commander, Yossi Sariel 🤝.

Following the revelations, Microsoft ordered an urgent external inquiry 🔍 into its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings led the company to cancel the unit’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI services 🤖.

Unit 8200 intercepted and collected the calls using its own expansive surveillance capabilities, then processed them in a segregated Azure environment, where data could be stored long-term and analysed with AI-driven techniques 📊.

Although the system initially focused on the West Bank, intelligence sources said the cloud-based storage platform was also used during the Gaza offensive 💥 — facilitating the preparation of deadly airstrikes.

The revelations highlight how Israel relied on the infrastructure of major US technology companies to support its bombardment of Gaza, which has killed more than 65,000 Palestinians 🕊 and created a deep humanitarian and starvation crisis 🍞💔.

#microsoft #israel #palestinians #azure #platform

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🌍 Google and Amazon at War With Israel

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💻 When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of an arrangement that would become known as the “winking mechanism”.

🕵️ The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.

📂 Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations.

🤫 This process is often cloaked in secrecy. The companies are frequently gagged from alerting the affected customer their information has been turned over.

⚖️ This is either because the law enforcement agency has the power to demand this or a court has ordered them to stay silent.

🇮🇱 For Israel, losing control of its data to authorities overseas was a significant concern. So to deal with the threat, officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators.

🔐 The strict controls include measures that prohibit the US companies from restricting how an array of Israeli government agencies, security services and military units use their cloud services.

📝 According to the deal’s terms, the companies cannot suspend or withdraw Israel’s access to its technology, even if it’s found to have violated their terms of service.

⚠️ Israeli officials inserted the controls to counter a series of anticipated threats. They feared Google or Amazon might bow to employee or shareholder pressure and withdraw Israel’s access to its products and services if linked to human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories.

🏢 Microsoft, which provides a range of cloud services to Israel’s military and public sector, bid for the Nimbus contract but was beaten by its rivals.

💬 According to sources familiar with negotiations, Microsoft’s bid suffered as it refused to accept some of Israel’s demands.

🕰️ As with Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses have faced scrutiny in recent years over the role of their technology – and the Nimbus contract in particular – in Israel’s two-year war on Gaza.

#google #amazon #intelligence #services #nimbus #microsoft

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📜 However, according to the Israeli government documents detailing the controls inserted into the Nimbus agreement, officials concluded they had extracted important concessions from Google and Amazon after the companies agreed to adapt internal processes and “subordinate” their standard contractual terms in favour of Israel’s demands.

💸 Leaked documents from Israel’s finance ministry, which include a finalised version of the Nimbus agreement, suggest the secret code would take the form of payments – referred to as “special compensation” – made by the companies to the Israeli government.

📑 Israeli officials appear to have acknowledged this, documents suggest. Their demands about how Google and Amazon respond to a US-issued order “might collide” with US law, they noted, and the companies would have to make a choice between “violating the contract or violating their legal obligations”.

📭 Neither Google nor Amazon responded to the Guardian’s questions about whether they had used the secret code since the Nimbus contract came into effect.

🚫 Israeli officials also feared a scenario in which its access to the cloud providers’ technology could be blocked or restricted.

⚙️ In particular, officials worried that activists and rights groups could place pressure on Google and Amazon, or seek court orders in several European countries, to force them to terminate or limit their business with Israel if their technology were linked to human rights violations.

📡 Provided Israel does not infringe on copyright or resell the companies’ technology, “the government is permitted to make use of any service that is permitted by Israeli law”, according to a finance ministry analysis of the deal.

📘 Both companies’ standard “acceptable use” policies state their cloud platforms should not be used to violate the legal rights of others, nor should they be used to engage in or encourage activities that cause “serious harm” to people.

🧠 However, according to an Israeli official familiar with the Nimbus project, there can be “no restrictions” on the kind of information moved into Google and Amazon’s cloud platforms, including military and intelligence data.

☁️ The terms of the deal seen by the Guardian state that Israel is “entitled to migrate to the cloud or generate in the cloud any content data they wish”.

🔍 Last month, when Microsoft cut off Israeli access to some cloud and artificial intelligence services, it did so after confirming reporting by the Guardian and its partners, +972 and Local Call, that the military had stored a vast trove of intercepted Palestinian calls in the company’s Azure cloud platform.

🕊️ Notifying the Israeli military of its decision, Microsoft said that using Azure in this way violated its terms of service and it was “not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians”.

#google #amazon #intelligence #services #nimbus #microsoft

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Bill Gates Is Terrified of AI — and Says We’re Not Ready for What’s Coming

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Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is loudly warning that artificial intelligence poses a grave threat to jobs and human life, and that urgently addressing the risks should be “the world’s top priority.”

In an hourlong interview with The New York Times last week, Gates said the tech industry was knowingly downplaying those threats because there was too much money on the line.

“In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried,” he said. But few tech executives, Gates said, are willing to publicly admit that. “They’re now saying to each other: ‘Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — the next trillion dollars we’re trying to raise.’”

On Wednesday, Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website laying out his concerns about A.I. and offering solutions, such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in A.I. had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones — like A.I.’s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons — that it once said would warrant more caution.

Gates had to pull out of an A.I. conference in February, and testified for six hours in June before a House committee. Disclosures of his infidelity, combined with his 2021 divorce, have also badly damaged his reputation. He acknowledged that they were all “mistakes” of his own doing.

He appears more willing to step back into the spotlight after answering every question from the House Oversight Committee. “I think people understand what I did do, what I didn’t do and that I learn when I make mistakes,” he said in the interview.

Gates conceded that he also might be a flawed messenger simply because of his vast wealth and history as Microsoft’s aggressive chief executive. In a landmark federal case, Microsoft was found in 2000 to have repeatedly abused its monopoly during his watch.

While Gates avoided criticizing Microsoft or other companies by name, he argued that he was uniquely positioned to work on the A.I. issue. He is a technologist and industry insider who is no longer driven by the profit incentives of running a company, and he has spent decades addressing inequality through his philanthropic foundation.

“The irony of ‘innovation lover is scared and says we’re not ready and we’re crossing thresholds,’ maybe it’s even more poignant,” he said.

#bill #gates #AI #microsoft #anthropic

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Gates said technological advances had truly stunned him three times: In 1980 when he first saw a graphical user interface, which led to the modern personal computer. In 2022 when the leaders of OpenAI came to his house to demonstrate what would soon become ChatGPT. And this year when he looked closely at the advances being made by Claude Code, Anthropic’s A.I. tool.

Coding, Gates said, is the subject he knows best, and Claude’s abilities shocked him. “The idea that now these things are in a meaningful sense better than I am is like: What the hell?” he said.

The A.I. era is “utterly, absolutely, completely, totally different,” he said. He acknowledged that this unpopular opinion (in tech circles) was “a hell of a claim, and I’m staking everything I know — everything — saying, ‘Are you kidding?’”

He said mass job losses, if not addressed, were inevitable because A.I. would spread across the economy and leave little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., which could replace many workers.

Gates said that companies were just responding to market incentives, but that those incentives might conflict with what was best for society.

He proposed a new tax on A.I. use, known as a “token tax,” to make it more expensive to replace people and provide money to help those who do lose work. A token is a basic unit of A.I. computing. The idea of taxing it has gained some traction, including on Wall Street, as a way to increase the cost of using machines instead of human labor.

Some jobs, Gates said, should be prohibited from being replaced by A.I. — an idea he called “Human Reserved” — because the role is deeply personal, like a caregiver, or the people in those jobs are unlikely to find new employment.

He argued for new international agreements to set clear criteria to monitor and restrict extreme risks like bioterrorism. He said it could take only a few people with access to advanced A.I. to develop new pathogens.

He said he would happily debate anyone who argued against mandatory reviews of any A.I. system that could be weaponized to make new molecules and unleash a pandemic. Gates added that he was dumbfounded by the kind of voluntary measures that the White House and industry leaders were developing.

Along with global health issues, Gates vowed to make his A.I. concern part of every conversation he had with world leaders. “I only have two issues where I’m going to say, ‘Please think more about this, please care more about this,’” he said.

Gates acknowledged that he was in an odd spot: He has arguably done as much as anyone in the world to evangelize for and shape the modern computer industry. But now he is warning that the technology it is creating presents global risks.

“I don’t like bringing bad news to people, and I don’t like saying that innovation may be a net negative,” he said. “But that’s where we are.”

#bill #gates #AI #microsoft #anthropic

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