US Government Already Bailing Out OpenAI/Microsoft With "Contracts", As Usual, Back Doors You Cannot Remove Becoming 'a Step Closer' on New PCs (Unless Everyone Acts ASAP)
The next "logical" step towards digital prisons (the term recently and rather appropriately used by Amnesty International UK
Background readings:
- "The AI Bubble is Popping", Now It's Bailout Time
- OpenAI: If OpenAI Survives Another 2 Years, It'll be About 30 Billion Dollars in Cumulative Losses/Debt
- The United States Government Should Quit Bailing Out Microsoft at Taxpayers' Expense
- Bailout Biden is Bailing Out Microsoft Just Like Donald Trump Repeatedly Did
Owning to avid readers and their collective "eagle eye" we're now aware that the circular funding (accounting mischief if not much worse) takes another form "...through the company’s [OpenAI] partnership [sic] with Microsoft Azure..." (slop "now available at the Labor Department", hurrah!)
As every sane person of good integrity knows, the last thing they actually need in there (or anywhere else for that matter) is LLM slop! Spin that as advanced or generative or agentic.... it's still not intelligent at all. It's just slop. There's a deliberate misconception around these buzzwords and no viable, demonstrable use case which is beneficial. Those things are good at wasting energy, just like BitCoin.
So consider this yet another de facto bailout.
The whole bailout topic was covered and revisited here many times before and the links at the top of this post give a "taste" of how it works. Microsoft likes to pretend that giving it taxpayers' money is somehow not just in taxpayers' interest but also a matter of "national security" (nothing could be further from the truth). Military budgets are so vast that they're easy to latch onto (a bottomless pit) and they're rarely subjected to effective scrutiny, never resulting in rollbacks.
So let's assume that the regime now sends Microsoft some lifeboat, via Azure (as usual) and so-called "hey hi" (AI) - whatever it's even useful for.
Who does this benefit anyway?
Microsoft. It's feeding in debt. The money being burned must come from somewhere or it's simply Azure "credits".
Who benefits then?
Yes, Microsoft.
The company that hired Scam Altman last year. It's still in control. It's about Microsoft.
Think of it as a "clever" (and multi-layered) bailout. See what happened to FAST from Norway (the "Enron of Norway"). Debt-loading is a financial crime if done this way (corporate media downplays this). But bailouts are not, and this is what it's all about. "As are the others too, but the activity being exposed here is money-shuffling," someone tells us. "Maybe even book-cooking." If Open [sic] "hey hi" folds (dissolved as a business) and cannot pay its debts, it's not going to be Microsoft - or anyone else - being forced to pay.
Who stands to benefit if Microsoft survives? Trump's NSA. With back doors in all of Microsoft's "products" and "services", including full-disk encryption [1, 2] (with "master key" secretly transmitted to Microsoft and Trump's NSA; Apple is not the solution to this, just to be very clear).
For those who live or dwell under some comfy rock, using UEFI 'secure boot' Microsoft will likely be tying PCs to Vista 11 or later (there are already unofficial 'rehearsals' - one might dub them remote brickings) and this Microsoft-sponsored "news" site (ad space) now says that "Microsoft explains why TPM makes Windows 11 PCs better for you" (mindless stenography).
What's in there other than TPMs? Techdirt speaks of one among many aspects: Microsoft Is Dedicated To Building A Dodgy New Database Of Every Windows 11 User’s Online Behaviors (worse yet, all their past, even very discreet stuff and every password).
It notes that "privacy advocates understandably began expressing concerns that this not only provides Microsoft with an even more detailed way to monetized consumer privacy".
The problem is not "monetized" or "not monetized". The issue is, all this data - not just from the US - will flow into Trump's abusive agencies, which got co-opted or turned against their original goals (with flimsy rationalisations).
Techdirt could focus on the all-seeing, always-on "eye", but its opening part says this:
But it didn’t take long before privacy advocates understandably began expressing concerns that this not only provides Microsoft with an even more detailed way to monetized consumer privacy, it creates significant new privacy risks should that data be exposed.
Early criticism revealed that consumer privacy genuinely was nowhere near the forefront of their thinking during Recall development. After some criticism, Microsoft said it would take additional steps to try and address concerns, including making the new service opt-in only, and tethering access to encrypted Recall information to the PIN or biometric login restrictions of Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-in Security.
Microsoft, which sponsors Trump and profited a lot from his first term (he even gave Microsoft billions of dollars in COVID-19 bailout!), can misuse Windows in all sorts of ways. Will any supposed "savings" be passed to Microsoft as bailouts? For the mythical "hey hi arms race"? With a regime this crazy... anything goes. █