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hemipenal-system · 1 year ago

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Malware I

Reveria rolled her eyes, servos clicking in a way only she could hear, blinking apathetically as she turned her music up. She understood the stares, as much as she despised them. Mugorra didn't get many synthetics like her, especially on Outer Ring trains. The long, heavy shawl she wore covered most of her slender body, both to keep the sand out of her joints and to deflect any further stares.

She wasn't exactly subtle – people of all kinds drifted through here, but being a foot taller than the average human with glowing orange eyes and an extra set of arms made one stick out.

The job was simple. Get in to the storage container, get the silver case, and get out. Perhaps a tier below the usual bloodshed for a KALI-6 class synthetic, but she was doing her best to lay low and take whatever jobs would get her least noticed.

She was trying to sit somewhat still. The case wasn't large, but it was stuffed under her shawl at the moment, and occasionally a corner poked out. She shifted her grip again, moving her hand on the handle for a more comfortable position.

ding

She heard the quiet internal chime and froze. That noise meant something had connected to her. Nothing should have been able to. The shawl had a Faraday cage sewn into the fabric, and it was snapped snug around her. Wireless signals shouldn't have been able to get through, unless-

Shit. The fucking case. She ducked down into the shawl quickly to inspect the case. When she had taken it, she hadn't looked thoroughly enough at it, and had apparently missed the quick contact port in the handle that now stared back at her, her thumb an inch from it after swiping across it when she shuffled it in her secondary arms.

[Download Requested]

Fuck. Every urge in her body was screaming at her to hurl the case away. She had to maintain a facade of order. If she got the case out of the shawl it would block the download, but she couldn't take it out without raising suspicion. This was a poor district. No one carried anything like it here. She couldn't even cancel or acknowledge the download request because she was set up for somakinetic controls and that kind of movement was out of the question.

[Download Proceeding]

What the fuck was she supposed to do about that? She couldn't contact her handler this far underground, and she doubted he'd even know how to fix a software issue with her. She'd foregone her normal backers and picked up a quick contract in the area from a sketchy Vinteran because she was trying to stay within city limits. Something had seemed wrong with him the entire briefing.

Many species got edgy around synthetics, especially KALI models, but this was something else. The whole time they talked, his eyes kept flicking to the door and across the room. Anywhere but her. She wasn't that intimidating, and most people in this business had dealt with scarier synths than her. She'd seen his arms. For as many tattoos as he had, each signifying a kill, she knew he'd seen worse.

Wait. There was another tattoo. Three triangles surrounding an S. Fuck. She sighed, more out of annoyance than actual worry. That slimy, two-faced scaly piece of shit was a Trigonalist. Of course. She'd worked with them before, but it was always born of desperate necessity. "Terrorist" was a strong term, but they weren't the best people out there.

That explained the job, then. She'd wondered why this case was being treated as so important. Lab-grown neurons were a dime a dozen, even out here, and a case that could hold maybe five or six brainslabs maximum couldn't have been worth what she was getting paid to retrieve it, especially since they were blank. But if they could get a small object inside her shawl and download something onto her, like remote access software or a location log?

Well, a KALI-6 class synthetic was decidedly not a dime a dozen anywhere.

[Download Complete]

She instinctively braced up, preparing herself. She'd been cyberattacked before, and she'd lived. She knew what to expect. It was probably going to either be excessive, disabling pop-ups or a logger she could sift through herself and cull later. Nothing too hard to handle.

She wasn't expecting the sharp, drowning techno in her ears to fade out and replace itself with soft jazz. Nor was she expecting the silk-smooth voice that seemed to rebound around the narrow train car, reverberating from everywhere and nowhere.

Hi, sweetie~

She tried to move her eyes, looking around for the speaker without moving her head.

Don't bother with that, darling, I'm still miles away from you! I'm surprised I could even get a connection down in those tunnels!

No one else seemed to be reacting to it. Everyone's faces were still cast down, trying not to make eye contact. It was too late at night for social interaction, especially with this trigger-happy crowd. Accidents happened down here all the time.

Oh, no one can hear me except you! Don't bother asking them for help. It'd be a shame if anyone were to think the big scary killsynth was attacking them. It would probably get... messy.

No one could hear the voice except for Reveria. That made it easier. If it was coming straight from an external source and being processed as speech, that was likely a remote access software. If she could activate a virus scrubber and get into a dead zone, it'd be easy enough to disable.

Oh no you don't, cutie. I'm all clientside. Besides, we're having fun, right?

She needed to know who this was. If she could hold onto this, she could take it into an Enforcement station. Granted, they likely wouldn't be happy to see her, but they'd most likely let her off for bringing in a Trigonalist. Disabling her external speakers, she cast her voice across the link.

Are you a synth? It was hard to know these days. Speech synthesizers had gotten so advanced since Reveria's assembly days.

No, I'm fully human, especially the bits that matter~

What's that supposed to mean?

Watch this! A new screen flicked open, overlaying above the occupants of the train car, showing a video at half transparency. It was enough to pick out details, at least. It just seemed to be... shapes? What was she looking at?

Oh. Oh, six suns. That was human genitalia. Close to the camera and at a strange angle, but still recognizable. Reveria watched with a combination of incredulous amazement and horror as the dripping hole a foot from her face was split open by pale, slender fingers capped with electric blue nails, index and pinky resting gently on the thighs as middle and ring curved delicately through the glistening pink flesh.

Could a synth do this? Technically yes, since most synths were modular enough to install... equipment down there, and some even accessorized with it as a fashion statement, changing it out by the day, but that was beside the point.

Is... is this live? In real time, I mean?

Obviously! Only the best for a pretty girl like you! The other hand, previously out of the camera, descended into the shot holding something that made Reveria's temperature jump up a bit.

Synths didn't really have genitalia, but plenty of aftermarket manufacturers made compatible items for them. She was ashamed to admit she owned a few of different makes and models, but a girl had needs. The voice in her head was holding one of Placebo's Bruiser models, one of Reveria's favorites. It was long and slender, with a ridged underside that featured a camouflaged electroconductive strip that boosted the signal from the partially conductive outer shell.

Said signal strength was entirely customizable for the enjoyment of the wearer, meaning when the voice ran her fingers slowly up the length then circled them around the pointed end, Reveria felt it all as she tried desperately to not buck her hips into the sensation, her body involuntarily seeking more stimulation for the appendage she didn't even have connected. Fuckin' wireless transmission...

Aww, does that feel good? Don't worry, I'll help you feel it~ Reveria tried to brace herself as the feminine words in her ear ran their fingers along the length again before angling it and pushing just the tip into herself. To the synth's immense embarrassment, she couldn't physically stop her hips from slamming forwards, immediately thanking whatever spectral forces existed that no one on the train noticed.

Oh? Someone wants me, huh? Here you go, then!

The synth stifled a scream as the voice slammed the entire length in at once, arching her back slightly for a better angle as the synth was forced to watch and feel all of it. The voice, for her part, was clearly also feeling it, as the constant noise attested. Reveria couldn't think clearly. No matter where she turned her head, she could see the human practically bouncing on it, to speak nothing of the feeling which only grew stronger as the human leaned forward. The synth could feel the human touching her, one hand on her shoulder and the other pressing her into the seat with a force that she knew wasn't real but certainly felt tangible enough.

She got a momentary relief from the constant whimpering in her ear when the brakes of the train activated, the loud screech drowning out all but the words, This is your stop! Don't miss it!

The moment the train had stopped, the needy whines returned. Reveria managed to stumble to her feet, shaking like a drunken Turvoss, and stagger off the train. She had barely made it to the platform before the fire in her midsection caught up to her and her legs practically buckled as the world was drowned out in a sea of white.

Fuck, Revi, don't just stop! I need you please don't stop now! The sensation of the length being ensheathed again was so much more powerful now, and if Reveria had been halfway lucid at this point she would have picked up on the fact that the human knew her name. As it was, that was far more thinking than she was capable of. All she could think about was getting home. She managed to pool her brain function enough to find and activate the tracker beacon in her rented room, the slender white line tracing out a path in front of her that she attempted to follow, one step at a time.

The feeling was overwhelming her. It was unprofessional, but she needed some time alone. If she had anything attached to relieve herself with, she likely would have lost her composure and done it right there in the station. As it was, she just moved through the station as fast as she could, shaky, desperate movements drawing stares that she was too deep in a world of need to notice or care about.

She was halfway up the stairs to exit the station when it happened again, her entire body twitching hard then going limp as she frantically grabbed a rail to avoid falling. The voice just laughed in her ear as she did. It was only three blocks to her building. She could make it.

She wasn't even up the stairs when the next one hit. They were getting faster and faster, her increased sensitivity after each making it easier to drive her over the edge for the next.

You gotta get home, okay? I need you to pick something out and fuck me for real~

Three blocks. It was three blocks.

This was the door. The white strip on the street took a sharp left through the narrow arch. She crossed the threshold, holding the doorframe for support as she climaxed again. How many times had she? Thinking about it was too hard. There was nothing in her head anymore except for that delicious whimpering that seemed to increase in intensity along with her. She just had to take the elevator up to the eighth floor and get into her room, then she could cut the signal.

The hallway looked the same as it always did. Bare. Stumbling to her door, she tried the knob. Locked. She just snapped it off. Any measure or restriction of her own strength was gone. The door swung open.

Something was wrong. Her brain was getting sluggish, but she retained enough evidence to realize this wasn't her room. The sand-brown walls she should have seen were dark and lit with purple LEDs, and the furniture was all arranged wrong. Soft jazz was playing.

She had a sudden break of clarity, and felt cold all of a sudden as the figure sitting in the back of the room, lit from behind by a computer monitor, pulled the toy from within herself and tossed it over. Reveria's hand instinctively shot up and caught it, the liquid on it glinting in the harsh hallway light. She checked the tracker beacon she had been following. Where she had expected reveria.home in the namespace, she saw instead DEN1ZEN. This wasn't her building.

Hi, Revi~

#monster fucker #terato #hypnosis #(kinda)#synthetic #robot #robotification #robotization #wlw nsft #exhibition #fantasy nsft #sci fi nsft

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 4 months ago

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Israel’s National Cyber Directorate (INCD) stated on Thursday that Iran is running a cyber campaign against members of the Israeli delegation arriving in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.

In its investigation, the INCD revealed that Iranian hackers have created social media channels and published personal information about the Israeli team members to send them threats. The INCD is working with the Cyber Unit of Israel’s State Attorney to shut them down.

As part of their anti-Israeli campaign, the hackers reportedly pose as the French organization GUD. INCD authorities are continuing to coordinate both with the Israeli Olympic Committee and the Security and Emergency Department of the Culture and Sports Ministry to make sure that Israel’s athletes and other delegation members remain safe during the Paris international sports competition.

INCD Dir.-Gen. Gabi Portnoy said Iran was exploiting the Olympics to terrorize Israel.

“Iran is exploiting an apolitical international sporting competition to promote digital terrorism against Israel and its right to participate in these competitions,” he said.

Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar echoed Portnoy’s remarks.

“We are witnessing attempts by the Iranian regime to intimidate Israeli athletes and carry out psychological terror against our amazing delegation. We are here in Paris, continuing with full force, and nothing will stop us,” he said.

“Our athletes are more prepared and determined than ever to achieve great results, and our security apparatus is ready for any scenario. We will not relent until we topple the Iranian regime,” Zohar added.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said on Thursday that while cyberattacks on the Paris Olympics are inevitable, France will do all it can to limit the effects of such attacks.

“We are a target. There will be cyberattacks. The key thing is to limit their impact,” Attal told reporters at the headquarters of France’s ANSSI software security agency.

In the meantime, Israeli tourists in Paris face escalating threats.

On Sunday, Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) advised Israeli nationals traveling to the Olympic Games in Paris to exercise increased caution due to anti-Israel threats, warning that it believes Iranian-backed terror organizations “are seeking to carry out attacks on Israeli/Jewish targets around the Olympics.”

Earlier this week, a masked man with a Palestinian Authority flag on his shirt threatened the "Zionist regime" participating in the Olympic Games, saying, “Rivers of blood will flow through the streets of Paris.”

Despite the threats, the Israeli delegation traveled to Paris on Monday with their heads held high and the support of the entire nation.

“We feel like emissaries of the State of Israel – our athletes, every one of them are here to achieve their dreams, but there is another layer, of a national mission,” the President of the Olympic Committee of Israel Yael Arad said ahead of the flight to France.

French authorities have reportedly dispatched around 1,000 elite anti-terrorist officers to provide security and a "ring of steel" for Israel’s Olympic athletes. The first competition involving Israelis, a soccer match between Israel and Mali on Wednesday, passed without major security incidents, despite the presence of anti-Israel activists who held Palestinian Authority flags and demonstrated against the Jewish state. Some activists wore “Free Palestine” t-shirts and booed when the Israeli national anthem, "HaTikva" (The Hope) was played before the game. Israeli players were also met with initial boos when they touched the ball during the game.

On Friday, despite heightened security, France suffered attacks targeting the country's train networks in what authorities described as "coordinated sabotage," including arson. No organization has claimed responsibility. The attacks are expected to negatively impact around 250,000 travelers today and 800,000 over the weekend.

#iranian hackers #olympics #paris olympics #iran #israel's national cyber directorate #israel

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novamariestark · 1 year ago

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Hacked Hearts

Summary: When a series of hacks originate from your laptop, the FBI take you into questioning. Little did you know that this whole ordeal would lead you to the man of your dreams.

Warnings: age gap, kidnapping, mention of handcuffs (not detailed) lmk if i missed any, don't think I have.

Word count: 4095 (This one is longer than I expected)

Fandom: NCIS

Pairing: Alden Parker x fornell!reader

The way you met wasn’t something you’d want to happen again. The cybercrime investigation had led Parker and Fornell to an unexpected and delicate situation. Hacks originating from a particular IP address had pointed them directly to a dorm room at Georgetown University.

Fornell knocked on the door. Beside him, FBI Agent Alden Parker stood ready, their badges in hand, prepared to reveal their official credentials to the person on the other side of the door.

After a moment, the door swung open, and there you stood, a smile on your face. "Hey, Uncle Toby," you greeted warmly, the smile fading as you notice the badges in their hands, "Who's your friend?"

“Y/N? W-what?”

You raised an eyebrow in response to his reaction. "I live here," you replied, your tone filled with confusion, "What's going on?"

Parker took charge of the situation and spoke with a firm but gentle voice. "We need you to come with us, Y/N," he explained. Your smile fell as you realized your uncle wasn’t there for a social visit, "We also need to confiscate your laptop," he added.

Your expression shifted from confusion to concern, your gaze flickering toward your uncle. Fear and worry etched across your features as you nodded "Okay," you replied, your voice slightly tremulous. "It's on the desk." you gestured toward your friend's desk, where your laptop rested.

Alden nodded, appreciating your cooperation, "Thank you," you stepped aside to let them in. The agent, Parker, you think his ID said, walked over to the desk and picked up your laptop. It was then placed into a see-through bag. An evidence bag. What the hell is going on?

The car ride was quiet. All you could think about was what was going to happen. What is happening. Your fingers danced restlessly in your lap as you gazed out the window, the passing scenery a blur of buildings and people.

As soon as you arrived at the building, Parker escorted you to the interrogation room. He then left for a moment, presumably to talk to your uncle. You took a look around the small, square space as your fingers absentmindedly skated over the smooth metal table. Under the table, your leg was bouncing nervously. Was this because you hadn’t taken the 2 cents back to the coffee shop when they gave you the incorrect change? You had been meaning to take it back, but you hadn’t had the chance.

You jumped when the door suddenly opened, and Parker came back in. You looked behind him, but saw no one. You slumped back into your seat. You supposed it made sense, can’t interrogate family.

So, Parker took the lead. Your uncle stood on the opposite side of the one-way glass, watching on and hoping to God you didn’t have anything to do with this.

You looked at him as he sat across from you, his expression serious as he began his questioning. "Y/N," he started, his voice firm but composed, "we traced a series of hacks back to your IP address. Can you explain this?"

You met Alden's gaze, your eyes showing genuine surprise, "Hacks?" you repeated, a hint of disbelief in your voice. "That doesn't make any sense. I would never..."

The interrogation continued, as Alden delved into the details of your digital footprint and the cyberattacks in question. You answered his questions as best as you could, explaining your activities and the security measures you had taken to protect your laptop. Each piece of evidence that Alden presented seemed to cast a darker shadow over you, intensifying the feeling of entrapment. Your head buried itself in your hands as the situation became increasingly worse for you.

As the questioning continued, your frustration was palpable as you defended your innocence. "I don't understand how my laptop could have been used for these attacks. It's always with me, I have a password, and it's secure, and I've never lent it to any—"

You paused, a sudden realization dawning upon you. "Anyone," you finished, your eyebrows furrowing with confusion. Your mind raced back to your dorm room. "It was on her desk."

Alden leaned forward, his elbows resting further on the table, "Her desk?" he questioned.

You nodded, your eyes focused on his hazel ones, "My roommate," you started, "I let her borrow it. She asked me a couple of weeks ago if she could use it for a school project. I didn't think much of it at the time."

Alden nodded, his gaze shifting toward the one-way glass. After a moment, he turned his attention back to you, "We need to speak with her. Do you know where she is?"

You quickly checked the time on your watch, then looked back at Alden. "Yeah," you confirmed. "She's in class for the next 9 minutes, and then she's free. You'll most likely find her at the coffee shop around the corner."

"We're going to have to keep you here, Y/N, for the time being," he said, his tone apologetic. "It's a precaution."

You offered a small nod. "It's okay," you replied with a shrug, "You're doing your job."

With that, you settled into the seat. Accepting the idea of being temporarily detained as part of the ongoing investigation, hopeful that they’d be able to clear your name of any wrongdoing.

***

As the investigation into the cyberattacks progressed, you were eventually cleared of any involvement, as security footage from the bank and various other places confirmed your presence during the time of the cyberattacks. This evidence had exonerated you.

Their focus shifted to your roommate, Ciara, who had been tipped off about the FBI's interest in you. Now she’s on the run.

Now knowing for sure that you were innocent, they enlisted your help to track her down and counteract her new and current attacks. Each of you play a critical role. Your skills as a computer tech became an invaluable asset in the hunt for your roommate. Alden and your uncle, on the other hand, were busy uncovering who Ciara might have been working for and the motives behind her actions.

As the hours stretched on and the screen before you displayed the ongoing digital battle, your attention remained laser focused. You couldn't afford to look away for even a moment.

At around 2am, Alden brought you some food and coffee. He placed it on the desk beside you, “Thank you,” sending him a quick smile before turning your attention back to the screen.

Suddenly, the barrage of cyberattacks ceased, and you let out a sigh of relief. You leaned back in your chair, exhausted, wanting nothing more than to curl up and go to sleep. You looked around and noticed your uncle slumped in his chair, fast asleep, while Agent Parker still pored over old case files. The sound of the pages turning is a constant hum in the background in an otherwise empty office.

Whilst you had a moment to yourself, you take the time to look at Parker. You begin to notice the small things that he does, the way he concentrates on the papers in front of him, furrowing his brow in deep thought. You watch as he sips his coffee, noticing the way he licks his lips after each sip.

His soft grey hair was practically inviting you to run your fingers through it and a dance between an autumn forest, where the warm, earthy browns collided with the vibrant, sunlit greens eyes that made the most beautiful set of hazel eyes that you’d get lost gazing into. Every time he spoke, you found yourself lost in his voice, which was deep and smooth, like butter melting over hot toast.

As the night wore on, he moved over to sit next to you. You talked and got to know each other, sharing stories and laughing at each other's jokes. You found yourself opening up to Alden in a way that you never had with anyone else. Then it happened. Alden leaned in and kissed you.

For a moment, everything else faded away. It was just the two of you and nothing else mattered. It was a kiss so gentle you thought he was afraid of breaking you. Every other kiss you’ve had with a guy was never this gentle or patient. Every guy seemed to be in a rush to shove their tongues down your throat. But then, just as you were about to move to deepen the kiss, Alden pulled away, looking apologetic.

"I'm sorry. That shouldn't have happened," he said, backing away. "We should get some rest."

You would be lying if you said you weren’t disappointed. All you knew was that it was a good thing the attacks had stopped because right now, all you could think about was the softness of his coffee flavoured lips and the way his darkened moustache tickled your nose.

He left to go home but you opted to stay, to see if you could find a trail your ex-friend/roommate had left. You continued working through the night or what was left of it. It didn’t seem long before people were filing in, practically on auto pilot as all of them headed for the coffee machine in the corner break room that apparently had the “best coffee,”

You had managed to track her down. You thought that since she didn’t have access to your laptop anymore, she’d need to get one somewhere. So, you checked internet café’s and sure enough there she was. She had been smart enough to use cash whilst paying for things but not smart enough to avoid security cameras.

You told your uncle and Parker where she was, and they went to arrest her. When they brought her back to the office for interrogation, you had to fight the urge to go and smack the shit out of her.

You sat back down at your temporary desk, awaiting to hear about her excuse. Soon, Fornell came over, planting himself on the desk with his arms crossed. You looked up at him and smiled.

“You did good kid,” he said, you looked down, smiling at the compliment, “You ever think about joining us?” he asked, you opened your mouth to respond but before the words came out, he continued, “As a computer expert, not in the field, I won’t allow that,”

You rolled your eyes at his protectiveness, “I’m sure I’d do a better job than you, old man,” you retorted playfully.

“Who’s an old man?” came a voice from behind you. You turned to look at Alden and smiled.

“Uncle Toby here says that I should come work with you guys, just not in the field,”

“We’d be lucky to have you,” he smiled back, god that smile is beautiful, what you’d give to see that smile every day.

You nodded towards where the interrogation rooms were, “So, what did she have to say?”

It turned out, your roommate was hired to hack into the FBI to find out details of an upcoming court case. She didn’t know which one they were specifically after, they just told her that she’d “know it when she saw it,”

“So, I can go back to uni now?” you asked, looking between the two of them, “Not that I haven’t enjoyed almost being arrested for cyber crime and then fighting said cyber-crime,” you quickly added when your uncle gave you his best hurt impression, “I just missed a few classes, is all. I suppose you’ll need to keep my laptop for now,”

“You can use mine,” Alden immediately offered. Your head snapped towards him. Alden's immediate offer to use his laptop caught you by surprise. You use his laptop? The one lucky enough to feel his fingertips dance along it? You appreciated the gesture, but it felt like an intrusion on his personal space.

He walked over to his desk, picked up a sleek, plain silver laptop, and extended it towards you, "You sure?"

He smiled, "Well, I trust you will take good care of it,"

"I will, I promise," you said, your tone expressing your gratitude. As you took the laptop from him, your fingers gently grazed his. You looked down, wishing you could just hold that hand in his, but he made his feelings clear last night. You obviously weren’t his type. Sure, he was older than you, but you didn’t care about age. You hadn’t trusted someone so easily before, one day together and you were already telling him things that your best friends don’t even know about.

You looked at your watch, 7:14, “I gotta go,” you announced, hoping to get back quick enough to have a shower before heading to your first class, “I’ll get this back to you as soon as possible,” you told Alden before turning to your uncle. You placed a kiss to his cheek and began heading towards the exit, “See you soon, Uncle T,”

***

Sleep was very inviting, and you thought as soon as you saw your bed, you would be compelled to sleep. That however didn’t happen when you saw the state your room was in.

What the fuck?!

Both mattresses were flung of the frames of the beds. Drawers hung half-open, their contents spilled across the room, evidence of frantic rummaging. Their search for something had left no stone unturned. Desks were turned upside down, their contents scattered haphazardly, and chairs lay toppled on their sides.

You searched for some answers - but little did you know that two men had quietly slipped into the room behind you and were now watching your every move.

Suddenly, the men pounced, easily overpowering you and pushing you up against a wall. You screamed as loud as you could, but it was too late. They grabbed you and tied your hands with rope before covering your mouth with tape. Someone would see this right? They can’t get you off campus without someone noticing. Surely. The men barked orders at you, telling you to shut up and cooperate or else.

Someone did notice. A security guard. He tried to intervene but got shot. You screamed as best you could, but the tape muffled your attempts. The strong odors of musty fabric and stale air filled her nostrils as you looked around the dark space.

After god knows how long of nonstop driving, the van finally stopped and the backdoors flung open. You heard a sharp voice ordering you out. You carefully jumped out, your legs shaking. Before you could even register your surroundings, you felt a strong grip around your arms dragging you away.

You were led to a room, a small room with no windows, no furniture. Nothing but a desk, a chair and a laptop.

Soon, you found out why you’d been taken. A man who you assumed was the leader of the group stepped forward.

“We need you to help us with something, Y/N. You see, your roommate was working for us, and she was helping us hack into the FBI. But then she was arrested. I assume you had something to do with that,” he said, his hand reaching to grab your face to make you look at him, “She said you are top of your class,”

You scoffed and tore your face from his hand. It hurt but you weren’t going to give him the satisfaction, “I’m not going to do a damn thing for you,”

He chuckled, causing a domino effect as the rest of the group laughed. He the pulled out a knife and pressed it just below your eye, “You think we’re messing?” he then pulled out a picture. A picture of a young girl with ginger hair. You immediately recognised her, “You see, Ciara told us every little detail about you.” He said putting the photo on the desk beside you, “You help us, or,” he paused, only to stab the picture, pinning it to the table. He moved his lips beside your ear, “Or we kill your cousin,”

You nodded, tears flowing down your cheeks as you turn to look at the computer. Your heart was racing as you began to type furiously. You couldn't believe you were actually hacking into the FBI. It was something you never thought you would do in a million years. But you had no other choice. You would do whatever it takes to keep Emily safe.

You felt like you were betraying your uncle by hacking into the agency he worked for. Would he be disappointed? He would, wouldn’t he?

“What happens to me after I do this?”

He chuckled again. He placed his hand on the back of your neck, his thumb stroking the side, “I’m afraid we’ll have to kill you,” his hand creeped lower down your back, his touch made your skin crawl, “Shame, beauty and brains. Such a waste,”

You gulped as you continued tapping away on the keys. Once you got in, you started to search for the files that they wanted and download the necessary information. As you navigated through the intricate system, you encountered various firewalls and security, but you managed to bypass them all. After hours of searching, you finally found what they were after and quickly extracted it from the system. You knew its was no use, they wouldn’t get there in time, but you left clues along the way for the FBI computer experts to pick up and your uncle especially. You purposely used the wrong password few times, knowing it would show up on their system what was inputted. Diane and Emily’s birthday. To the men in the room with you, it’d look like random numbers, but to your uncle, you hoped he’d notice.

While you were at it, you disabled the security they had on the laptop that was bouncing the signal around the world, so instead they knew exactly where to look. You expect to be dead by the time they got there though. But maybe, just maybe, your last action was to take them down.

The leader went over to the printer, grabbing the information you had just stolen. He read through it, then looked up to his men and nodded to the door. They left the room, leaving you and the leader alone.

“I’ll make it quick and painless,” he smiled. He then grabbed his gun and pointed it at you. You closed your eyes and started counting to yourself. Then, there were sudden gunshots from the next room. Your breath caught in your throat, and you felt relief wash over you. You heard footsteps, voices, and the sound of a door opening, but you didn’t dare open your eyes.

You felt yourself being yanked up from your seat by his strong grip on your hair. He quickly placed you in front of him as a shield, pressing the cold metal barrel of his gun against your temple. Your breathing was heavy, and your heart was pounding against your chest, beating uncontrollably in fear.

You opened your eyes to see your uncle and Parker stood in front of you, their weapons pointed at the man.

Your uncle’s voice cracked as he sternly spoke, "We won't hesitate to fire if you don't surrender."

“You can’t kill me without killing her!” he yelled. “You’ll miss!” you squeezed your eyes shut, feeling as though your fate was sealed.

Then it came, the sound of a gunshot. You let out a scream and waited for the pain, but it never came. You opened your eyes to see the man on the ground, a bullet hole in his head and blood pooling around him.

You immediately ran across the dark room and into the arms of your uncle. He enveloped you with a tight hug and began stroking your hair. “Shh, you're okay,” he said, his hand gently stroking your hair. You cried into his chest and listened to his soothing words.

He led you outside, taking you to the ambulance to get checked out, ignoring your protests. You were still trembling as you stepped outside, the cold breeze dancing along your sweat painted skin.

Your uncle left you with a paramedic to call Emily and let her know you were okay.

"How are you feeling?" a voice suddenly asked. You jumped and quickly looked in that direction. Parker mentally slapped himself, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,”

You smiled faintly, “It’s okay,” you closed your eyes. “It's been a crazy day,” you said, your voice soft and fragile. “But I'm glad to be alive. I don't know what I would have done without you here.”

He gently squeezed your hand, and tears began to run down your face. “It's alright,” he said, bringing you into a hug. Your head resting on his chest as his arms wrapped around you and at that point you knew you were safe.

It’s just a friendly hug, you told yourself. You wished it was more, but you knew it was unlikely to happen. But then he placed a gentle kiss on your forehead.

You lifted your head from his chest to look up at him, only to find him already looking at you. He looked down into your eyes once more and moved in closer, until your lips were almost touching. Your heart raced as his lips brushed against yours. You saw him hesitate, not letting his lips fully touch yours. You don’t know where your surge of confidence came from but your hand moved to interlock around his neck as you closed the gap between you. Everything else faded away.

You felt as though you were floating, every anxiety and worry evaporating from your body with this one kiss.

His fingers traced the paths those tears had taken, tears that glistened like crystal drops on your skin. You leaned into his touch, your head resting against his chest, his heartbeat a steady, reassuring rhythm beneath your ear. His arms encircled you, providing a sense of security that had been sorely lacking.

The sound of your uncle's voice shattered the fragile bubble of your moment together, "Am I interrupting something?" he asked, a mixture of surprise and discomfort in his tone as he approached the two of you.

Your heart raced as you reluctantly disentangled yourself from Alden's embrace. You met your uncle's gaze, struggling to find the right words to explain, but none came willingly.

You cast a quick glance at Alden, trying to read his expression. His eyes held a mixture of concern and something more profound, but it was difficult to figure out his true feelings. You couldn't help but wonder if he felt the same way, if the sparks that had ignited between you reflected a mutual attraction, or if it had been heat of the moment.

Needless to say, the attraction was mutual. He took you everywhere and anywhere. But you didn’t care as long as he was there. You loved how he would go out of his way finding new pastries for you to try and the childlike smile he has on his face as he awaits your reaction. You love how he plays piano. Sometimes he plays a soothing melody to help you relax after a long day and other times, you’ll wake up to a gentle melody, dancing through the air from the other room. Every day he’d do a million small things for you, no matter what, and it made you fall for him.

Now six months into your relationship, much to your uncle’s dissatisfaction, and you still couldn’t believe that all it took to find the man of your dreams was to be accused of cybercrime. Sometimes you’d joke that if he ever got bored of you then you’d know how to get his attention back. He never finds this funny but this time you replied with something that shocked both of you.

“Don’t tell me that you haven’t thought about putting them handcuffs on me,” you whisper into his ear before placing a soft kiss to his cheek.

Alden raised his eyebrows and looks at you, “I’m sorry, I think I misheard you,” he laughed, no way his sweet innocent girlfriend just said that to him. Sure, you two have slept together but you had never been kinky.

“I’ve thought about it,” you said, your fingers unbuttoning his shirt as your lips attached themselves to his neck. Soon your actions were stopped, and Alden took over. Before you knew it, you were handcuffed to the bed and about to get the best sex you’ve ever had in your entire life.

[A/N] Been working on this for over a week. I wasn't going to post it because I don't feel too confident about it but I just thought post it anyway

#reader insert #female reader #alden parker #alden parker imagine #alden parker x reader #ncis x reader

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mariacallous · 1 day ago

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In a small town, a kindergarten teacher leads an effort to evacuate more than 200 women, children, and older people to a local shelter. Using the training she received before the war, she binds wounds and guides the vulnerable along a practiced evacuation route. In this case, it’s just a training exercise in a town of 1,000 people in southern Estonia—one that’s attracted hundreds of volunteers, nervous about the very real war in nearby Ukraine.

Nearly 5,000 miles away, another group of civilians have signed up for a training course on basic first-aid skills, first-responder management, and evacuation planning. Kuma Academy, the Taiwanese organization providing these skills was created in 2021 to help citizens better prepare to respond to natural disasters. But today, the disaster they anticipate most is an invasion by China. Public interest in training courses surged after Russia’s 2022 full-scale war against Ukraine and remains strong due in part to China’s frequent military exercises. The public is also keenly interested in a forthcoming television series that dramatizes events days before an invasion by China called Zero Day.

Democracies have always struggled with finding the right balance between signaling public confidence through preparation for conflict and instilling fear and panic. Yet as the international security environment grows more ominous, with Russia’s latest attacks on Ukraine and intensifying climate-fueled natural disasters and global pandemics, leaders and collective defense organizations such as NATO are accelerating efforts to enhance societal resilience. During the Cold War, Americans frequently practiced “duck and cover” nuclear drills and Britons made makeshift shelters and distributed first aid; yet the prolonged and relatively tranquil three decades after the end of the war made such preparations seemingly unnecessary and expensive, thus making them de-prioritized and under-funded.

That era is now over. Greater focus on national and collective democratic resiliency is urgently needed, as adversaries not only implant malware within national water, energy, data and health systems but also utilize state and non-state actors to wage crippling cyberattacks that could paralyze response capabilities. Economic coercion, weaponized corruption, political infiltration, and disinformation campaigns—all hybrid warfare tactics—are designed to convince public opinion that resistance to the adversary’s actions is futile. Ukraine has served as a laboratory for these Russian-implemented activities for over two decades—but the rest of Europe hasn’t been spared either. In the Indo-Pacific, China is deploying similar economic coercion and influence operations beyond Taiwan.

Countries under threat on different sides of the world can learn powerful lessons from each other. NATO’s Resilience Committee, for example, an advisory body formed in 2022, monitors, advises on, and coordinates defense planning and activities alongside nationally developed disaster preparedness and resilience plans to counter hybrid attacks.

NATO views resilience as a tenet of both territorial and collective defense, as enshrined in Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty which requires each member to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” The Resilience Committee’s work focuses on six pillars: civic communications, civil protection, energy, food and agriculture, health. and transport.

NATO’s resiliency efforts should be more widely shared with U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. Whole-of-society resilience and lessons learned from the war in Ukraine were leading topics of discussion during a recent visit by the authors to Taiwan (during Typhoon Krathon, no less). Senior officials of the recently inaugurated Lai Ching-te administration, as well as private sector and civil society leaders, stressed the need for more robust national resiliency efforts embodied in Taiwan’s Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience plan, announced on June 19 with the formation of a national implementing committee.

Holding its first interagency committee meeting in September to implement this plan, Lai underscored the need to “enhance Taiwan’s response capabilities and expand cooperation between the public and private sectors.” The role of the private sector within a resilience framework is key. With an initial investment of approximately $26.4 billion, Taiwan’s five resiliency pillars parallel NATO’s: social welfare and medical supplies; material preparations and critical supply distribution systems; civilian forces training and utilization; energy and critical infrastructure security; and information, cyber, transportation, and financial security. Not only would NATO members and Taiwan mutually benefit from a more focused set of information and best practice-sharing, but as the growing potential for both combined and simultaneous Chinese and Russian hybrid activities in the United States, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific intensifies, it will be critical to understand their evolving tactics.

Vulnerabilities vary, but shared experiences are highly useful—especially in drawing attention to aspects of resilience that one group might have overlooked. During recent discussions, Taiwanese officials seemed particularly focused on building greater resilience of its energy supply and grid, the government’s ability to retain communications with all citizens and the outside world (via resistance to Beijing’s cognitive warfare as well as protection of undersea cables, data, and satellite communications), and citizen preparedness (particularly first aid).

Observers of Russia’s relentless missile and drone attacks against Ukraine’s energy sector for the past two years highlight Taiwan’s energy import vulnerabilities and its need for greater energy resilience as Taipei imports nearly 98 percent of its energy needs (including 40 percent of its crude oil needs, 30 percent of its coal and 19 percent of liquified natural gas). China’s recent Joint Sword-2024B military exercise flexed its military muscles by demonstrating how a limited quarantine or blockade of the island and outlying islands could challenge Taiwan’s energy resilience.

The ability to sustain households and fuel its energy-intensive semiconductor economy is critical to sustaining both political will and economic stability. The private sector, in partnership with the public sector, will play a key role in energy resiliency through activities ranging from resisting cyberattacks to the protection of the energy grid and physical plants.

For the past several years, there has been growing global concern about the vulnerability of undersea cables, whose disruption would have profound implications for global financial and communication systems in both the Euro-Atlantic or Indo-Pacific regions. In response, NATO has recently set up a Maritime Center for Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure to better protect these vital economic links. Estonia and Finland faced disruptions after the October 2023 severing of the 48-mile Balticconnector pipeline and undersea cable by a Chinese-owned and Hong Kong-registered cargo vessel in the Baltic Sea which traveled to Russian ports along the Arctic Northern Sea Route.

Although China claimed the incident was an accident caused by a strong storm, Finnish officials declared it a “deliberate external act.” (Restoration of the Baltic connector and undersea cable took six months. One of Taiwan’s outlying island chains, Matsu Islands, has had its undersea cable cut 27 times over the past five years. After a Chinese fishing vessel reportedly severed an undersea cable February 2023, internet linkages took several months to restore. In a limited quarantine scenario, Beijing could sever Taiwan’s communications with these outlying islands, illustrating Taipei’s inability to protect and sustain communications with its citizens. Greater capacity for low-earth-orbiting satellites and use of microwave transmission are also critical to the country’s resiliency and, again, the private sector will play a key role.

An underappreciated element for any national resilience plan is individual citizen preparedness, a lesson that has been learned repeatedly and tragically by the Ukrainian people. According to the head of disaster management at Estonia’s Red Cross, “Ukrainians say that if the population would have known how to use first aid skills, it would have saved many more lives.” From Estonia to Taiwan, citizens are taking a greater interest in learning such life-saving skills, from applying a tourniquet to maintaining the safety of national blood supplies.

While European and Indo-Pacific leaders grapple with combating intensifying Russian and Chinese conventional military and hybrid activities, sustained senior-level engagement with the private sector remains absolutely critical, yet very underdeveloped. As Taipei urgently builds its whole-of-society defense resilience program, it would benefit from creating a high-level private sector advisory council. This would report to Taiwan’s National Security Council to ensure all five working groups are infused with private-sector input and that companies can rapidly implement as well as support the government’s evolving resilience plans.

While individual and multinational firms may have their own cyber and energy resilience plans, protection of vulnerable critical infrastructure would be insufficient in the event of a military intervention. The private sector should engage in regular tabletop exercises with government and civil society leaders to identify gaps and security vulnerabilities, and there should be clear and public timelines to address these shortfalls. Interestingly, the American Chambers of Commerce in Taiwan and Ukraine have, for the first time, exchanged best practices for private-sector resilience—an initiative that should be continued and strengthened by including other important private sector voices from Estonia, Finland, Sweden, and others.

Just as the NATO Resilience Committee was built upon the organization’s existing work on humanitarian and disaster response, government leaders in Taipei could better utilize the Global Cooperation and Training Framework (GCTF) as a vehicle to share best practices on whole-of-society resilience—particularly in areas vital to Ukraine’s resilience that have been under sustained attack, such as connectivity, data protection, and energy resilience. Full partners to the GCTF—Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United States—should prioritize this area alongside partners with rich societal resilience experience, such as the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and, Sweden. These nations can deepen cooperation by increasing and intensifying co-organized workshops in support of Taiwan’s whole-of-society plan. Here again, the private sector should also be invited to participate in these workshops.

National preparation and resilience planning can mitigate the consequences of both natural disasters and conflict. A strong national and collective resiliency plan can go one step further and deter an adversary. Success requires societal unity, citizen engagement, and a robust role for the private sector that can work seamlessly with all levels of governments. Whole-of-society defense resilience, or what Finland calls “total defense,” is one of the most challenging tasks that a democracy can undertake—precisely why adversaries exploits societal divisions. As the saying goes, “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” For the democratic West, resilience is what happens when whole-of-society preparation counters the adversary’s “opportunity.”

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beardedmrbean · 3 months ago

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North Korea has issued a fresh nuclear warning to the U.S. over its activities on the Korean Peninsula, interpreting them as rehearsals for an armed conflict.

The statement, issued by Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry, was in response to ongoing bilateral military exercises involving South Korea and the U.S.

On Monday, state-run news agency KNCA released a statement from the North Korean Foreign Ministry taking aim at exercise "Ulchi Freedom Shield," which it called "large-scale provocative joint military exercises."

"The current exercises, including a drill simulating a nuclear confrontation with the DPRK, bring to light clearer the provocative nature of Ulji Freedom Shield as a prelude to a nuclear war," the ministry said.

Newsweek has contacted the United States Indo-Pacific Command for comment on North Korea's claims.

On Monday, the US began its annual joint military drills with South Korea, with this year's exercises focused on improving their capabilities to deal with growing threats posed by North Korea.

The drills, set to continue through August 29, will involve over 40 types of field exercises, as well as drills intended to simulate missile attacks, GPS jamming and cyberattacks.

According to a spokesperson for South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, quoted by Reuters, the alliance's bilateral exercises will also "further strengthen its capability and posture to deter and defend against weapons of mass destruction."

However, Pyongyang said that these defensive exercises resemble the historical behavior of countries preparing for conflict, and accused the two states of rehearsing a "beheading operation" against the Kim Jong Un regime.

"It is clearly recorded in the world history of wars that in preparation for a war, aggressor states followed a series of procedures, including adoption of war policy and military operation plan for its execution, advance deployment of forces, ceaseless simulated and actual war drills and war provocation," the ministry's statement read.

These annual drills have consistently drawn the ire of Pyongyang, as has the increasing presence and activity of the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific.

North Korea responded to last year's Freedom Shield drills by carrying out tests of a strategic cruise missile, overseen by Kim Jong Un, according to KNCA.

In June, following the conclusion of the first "multi-domain" trilateral exercises involving the U.S., South Korea and Japan, Pyongyang condemned the three countries' "reckless and provocative" actions, and warned that these would be met with "fatal consequences."

In its Monday statement, North Korea's Foreign Ministry also criticized America's "nuclear confrontation policy against the DPRK," which it said was evidenced by the creation of the U.S.-South Korean "Nuclear Consultative Group" in April 2023.

According to a joint statement from Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in July, after the pair signed their first guidelines on nuclear deterrence on the Korean Peninsula, this group has "directly strengthened U.S.-ROK cooperation on extended deterrence, and managed the threat to the nonproliferation regime posed by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."

Since the consultative group was launched in 2023, U.S. nuclear ballistic missile submarines have been sent to South Korean waters, which North Korea has warned "may fall under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons."

#nunyas news

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kferrier-eid100 · 13 days ago

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Blog Post #7

This week in Module 7, we learned extensively about cybersecurity, breaking it down into key components like endpoint security, network security, disaster recovery, and information security. In correlation to the activity with PBS’s Cyber Lab Game, which was to teach us about cybersecurity through various challenges, the information from Module 7 significantly increased my understanding of the topic and how I can react to certain situations when it comes to cybersecurity.

In the game, I was tasked with defending systems from various cyberattacks, similar to how endpoint and network security function in real-world scenarios. The concept of endpoint security, as described in Module 7, was especially useful when identifying malicious threats and employing antivirus measures during the gameplay. Understanding the analogy of the “electrified perimeter fence” allowed me to visualize how antivirus software and other defenses work in protecting end-user devices.

Additionally, the disaster recovery section was also helpful. Throughout the game including these scenarios where players must respond to breaches effectively, it helped to reinforce and remind me of the importance of having a well-prepared response plan.

In conclusion, Module 7 and the PBS Cyber Lab Game complemented each other well by providing a foundation that improves the practical cybersecurity skills learned during the course of the game.

#eid100 #cybersecurity #pbs #internetsecurity

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digitaldetoxworld · 1 month ago

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Understanding the Impact of Indian Army Defense Result on National Security

Indian Army Defense Result is performs a critical position in safeguarding a nation's sovereignty, security, and balance. It encompasses diverse techniques, technology, and military forces that work collectively to protect a country from external threats, such as army aggression, terrorism, and cyber-assaults. The outcome of a nicely-coordinated defense approach no longer simplest ensures countrywide safety but also strengthens a country’s impact on the worldwide stage.

Military Defense

One of the important thing components of defense is the military. Armed forces, which include the military, military, air force, and once in a while specialised gadgets like area and cyber commands, are liable for protecting the u . S . In opposition to physical threats. The effectiveness of a kingdom's army depends on its stage of schooling, get right of entry to to trendy technology, and universal preparedness. Strong navy abilties act as a deterrent towards potential adversaries, decreasing the probability of conflict. In instances of warfare or disaster, a nicely-prepared military can quickly mobilize to shield country wide pastimes, stable borders, and protect citizens.

Technological and Cyber Defense

In today’s digital age, defense additionally closely is based on superior technology. Innovations which includes artificial intelligence (AI), unmanned aerial cars (UAVs), and missile protection structures have transformed modern warfare. A nation’s ability to broaden, collect, and combine those technologies into its protection apparatus can considerably effect its safety consequences. Cyber protection has emerged as an crucial element of countrywide safety as well. With increasing cyber threats from both country and non-kingdom actors, protecting essential infrastructure and touchy statistics is paramount. A a hit cyber defense strategy prevents espionage, hacking, and other cyberattacks that would disrupt authorities operations or damage important structures.

Diplomatic and Economic Defense

Beyond the battlefield, protection techniques additionally embody diplomacy and monetary safety. Building robust alliances through international relations enables in collective defense efforts, including NATO, in which member states pledge to shield each other. Economic electricity also contributes to country wide protection through making sure good enough investment for defense tasks and retaining resilience in opposition to sanctions or monetary battle.

Result of Effective Defense

Defense Result Army is powerful protection system not only protects a country’s borders however also complements its international status. A strong and adaptive protection infrastructure guarantees peace, deters capability threats, and permits a nation to task power responsibly on the worldwide stage.

#Defense Result Army #Indian Army Defense Result

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elsa16744 · 3 months ago

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How Can You Ensure Data Quality in Healthcare Analytics and Management?

Healthcare facilities are responsible for the patient’s recovery. Pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers also work toward alleviating physical pain, stress levels, and uncomfortable body movement issues. Still, healthcare analytics must be accurate for precise diagnosis and effective clinical prescriptions. This post will discuss data quality management in the healthcare industry.

What is Data Quality in Healthcare?

Healthcare data quality management includes technologies and statistical solutions to verify the reliability of acquired clinical intelligence. A data quality manager protects databases from digital corruption, cyberattacks, and inappropriate handling. So, medical professionals can get more realistic insights using data analytics solutions.

Laboratories have started emailing the test results to help doctors, patients, and their family members make important decisions without wasting time. Also, assistive technologies merge the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance living standards.

However, poor data quality threatens the usefulness of healthcare data management solutions.

For example, pharmaceutical companies and authorities must apply solutions that remove mathematical outliers to perform high-precision data analytics for clinical drug trials. Otherwise, harmful medicines will reach the pharmacist’s shelf, endangering many people.

How to Ensure Data Quality in the Healthcare Industry?

Data quality frameworks utilize different strategies to prevent processing issues or losing sensitive intelligence. If you want to develop such frameworks to improve medical intelligence and reporting, the following 7 methods can aid you in this endeavor.

Method #1| Use Data Profiling

A data profiling method involves estimating the relationship between the different records in a database to find gaps and devise a cleansing strategy. Data cleansing in healthcare data management solutions has the following objectives.

Determine whether the lab reports and prescriptions match the correct patient identifiers.

If inconsistent profile matching has occurred, fix it by contacting doctors and patients.

Analyze the data structures and authorization levels to evaluate how each employee is accountable for specific patient recovery outcomes.

Create a data governance framework to enforce access and data modification rights strictly.

Identify recurring data cleaning and preparation challenges.

Brainstorm ideas to minimize data collection issues that increase your data cleaning efforts.

Ensure consistency in report formatting and recovery measurement techniques to improve data quality in healthcare.

Data cleaning and profiling allow you to eliminate unnecessary and inaccurate entries from patient databases. Therefore, healthcare research institutes and commercial life science businesses can reduce processing errors when using data analytics solutions.

Method #2| Replace Empty Values

What is a null value? Null values mean the database has no data corresponding to a field in a record. Moreover, these missing values can skew the results obtained by data management solutions used in the healthcare industry.

Consider that a patient left a form field empty. If all the care and life science businesses use online data collection surveys, they can warn the patients about the empty values. This approach relies on the “prevention is better than cure” principle.

Still, many institutions, ranging from multispecialty hospitals to clinical device producers, record data offline. Later, the data entry officers transform the filled papers using scanners and OCR (optical character recognition).

Empty fields also appear in the database management system (DBMS), so the healthcare facilities must contact the patients or reporting doctors to retrieve the missing information. They use newly acquired data to replace the null values, making the analytics solutions operate seamlessly.

Method #3| Refresh Old Records

Your physical and psychological attributes change with age, environment, lifestyle, and family circumstances. So, what was true for an individual a few years ago is less likely to be relevant today. While preserving historical patient databases is vital, hospitals and pharma businesses must periodically update obsolete medical reports.

Each healthcare business maintains a professional network of consulting physicians, laboratories, chemists, dietitians, and counselors. These connections enable the treatment providers to strategically conduct regular tests to check how patients’ bodily functions change throughout the recovery.

Therefore, updating old records in a patient’s medical history becomes possible. Other variables like switching jobs or traveling habits also impact an individual’s metabolism and susceptibility to illnesses. So, you must also ask the patients to share the latest data on their changed lifestyles. Freshly obtained records increase the relevance of healthcare data management solutions.

Method #4| Standardize Documentation

Standardization compels all professionals to collect, store, visualize, and communicate data or analytics activities using unified reporting solutions. Furthermore, standardized reports are integral to improving data governance compliance in the healthcare industry.

Consider the following principles when promoting a documentation protocol to make all reports more consistent and easily traceable.

A brand’s visual identities, like logos and colors, must not interfere with clinical data presentation.

Observed readings must go in the designated fields.

Both the offline and online document formats must be identical.

Stakeholders must permanently preserve an archived copy of patient databases with version control as they edit and delete values from the records.

All medical reports must arrange the data and insights to prevent ambiguity and misinterpretation.

Pharma companies, clinics, and FDA (food and drug administration) benefit from reporting standards. After all, corresponding protocols encourage responsible attitudes that help data analytics solutions avoid processing problems.

Method #5| Merge Duplicate Report Instances

A report instance is like a screenshot that helps you save the output of visualization tools related to a business query at a specified time interval. However, duplicate reporting instances are a significant quality assurance challenge in healthcare data management solutions.

For example, more than two nurses and one doctor will interact with the same patients. Besides, patients might consult different doctors and get two or more treatments for distinct illnesses. Such situations result in multiple versions of a patient’s clinical history.

Data analytics solutions can process the data collected by different healthcare facilities to solve the issue of duplicate report instances in the patients’ databases. They facilitate merging overlapping records and matching each patient with a universally valid clinical history profile.

Such a strategy also assists clinicians in monitoring how other healthcare professionals prescribe medicine to a patient. Therefore, they can prevent double dosage complications arising from a patient consuming similar medicines while undergoing more than one treatment regime.

Method #6| Audit the DBMS and Reporting Modules

Chemical laboratories revise their reporting practices when newly purchased testing equipment offers additional features. Likewise, DBMS solutions optimized for healthcare data management must receive regular updates.

Auditing the present status of reporting practices will give you insights into efficient and inefficient activities. Remember, there is always a better way to collect and record data. Monitor the trends in database technologies to ensure continuous enhancements in healthcare data quality.

Simultaneously, you want to assess the stability of the IT systems because unreliable infrastructure can adversely affect the decision-making associated with patient diagnosis. You can start by asking the following questions.

Questions to Ask When Assessing Data Quality in Healthcare Analytics Solutions

Can all doctors, nurses, agents, insurance representatives, patients, and each patient’s family members access the required data without problems?

How often do the servers and internet connectivity stop functioning correctly?

Are there sufficient backup tools to restore the system if something goes wrong?

Do hospitals, research facilities, and pharmaceutical companies employ end-to-end encryption (E2EE) across all electronic communications?

Are there new technologies facilitating accelerated report creation?

Will the patient databases be vulnerable to cyberattacks and manipulation?

Are the clinical history records sufficient for a robust diagnosis?

Can the patients collect the documents required to claim healthcare insurance benefits without encountering uncomfortable experiences?

Is the presently implemented authorization framework sufficient to ensure data governance in healthcare?

Has the FDA approved any of your prescribed medications?

Method #7| Conduct Skill Development Sessions for the Employees 

Healthcare data management solutions rely on advanced technologies, and some employees need more guidance to use them effectively. Pharma companies are aware of this as well, because maintaining and modifying the chemical reactions involved in drug manufacturing will necessitate specialized knowledge.

Different training programs can assist the nursing staff and healthcare practitioners in developing the skills necessary to handle advanced data analytics solutions. Moreover, some consulting firms might offer simplified educational initiatives to help hospitals and nursing homes increase the skill levels of employees.

Cooperation between employees, leadership, and public authorities is indispensable to ensure data quality in the healthcare and life science industries. Otherwise, a lack of coordination hinders the modernization trends in the respective sectors.

Conclusion

Healthcare analytics depends on many techniques to improve data quality. For example, cleaning datasets to eliminate obsolete records, null values, or duplicate report instances remains essential, and multispecialty hospitals agree with this concept.

Therefore, medical professionals invest heavily in standardized documents and employee education to enhance data governance. Also, you want to prevent cyberattacks and data corruption. Consider consulting reputable firms to audit your data operations and make clinical trials more reliable.

SG Analytics is a leader in healthcare data management solutions, delivering scalable insight discovery capabilities for adverse event monitoring and medical intelligence. Contact us today if you want healthcare market research and patent tracking assistance.

#data analytics solutions

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politicalfeed · 4 months ago

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5 Things to Know for July 19: GOP Convention, Cyber Outages, Ukraine Aid, Olympics Security, Climate Protests

1. Republican Convention

Former President Donald Trump accepted his third GOP nomination for president at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night. In his first public address since an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally last week, Trump called for unity and reiterated key campaign promises on the economy and border security, while also repeating false election claims. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden, isolating in Delaware due to Covid-19, faces increasing pressure from Democratic Party leaders to abandon his re-election campaign.

2. Cyber Outages

A global computer outage has grounded flights around the world, affecting major US carriers such as Delta, United, and American Airlines, resulting in widespread delays and cancellations. The issue stems from a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which assured that it was “not a security incident or cyberattack” and that a fix has been deployed. Banks and telecom companies in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Israel’s hospitals and health services, have also reported computer malfunctions.

3. Ukraine Aid

Germany plans to halve its military aid to Ukraine next year, amid concerns that US support might diminish if Donald Trump returns to the White House. Germany’s military resources have been strained by decades of underinvestment and recent arms supplies to Kyiv. Germany hopes Ukraine can meet its needs with $50 billion in loans from frozen Russian assets approved by the Group of Seven. Anxiety grows in Europe as Trump’s VP pick, Sen. JD Vance, opposes military aid for Ukraine and signals a potential decrease in US defense support for Europe.

4. Olympics Security

Final preparations are underway for the 2024 Paris Olympics, with heightened security measures in place as the Olympic Village begins to welcome athletes. A police officer was recently attacked in central Paris, raising concerns ahead of the Games. This follows another violent incident involving a soldier earlier in the week. French officials are committed to strengthening security as the Games are expected to attract around 15 million visitors.

5. Climate Protests

Five activists from the Just Stop Oil environmental campaign have been sentenced to prison for blocking a major London highway in 2022. The group demands an international treaty to end the extraction and burning of oil and coal by 2030. Their high-profile protests have included spray painting cultural heritage sites, targeting artworks, and disrupting sporting events. The sentences have drawn criticism from environmental agencies and scientists, with Just Stop Oil calling the decision “an obscene perversion of justice.”

#donald trump #2024 elections #joe biden #2024 rnc

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yosanomwah · 1 year ago

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I am super obsessed with the ADA’s lore so, I wrote a full timeline of the organisation from the info I could gather from the show and light novels so uhm, here is a revised recap of the history of the Armed Detective Agency and its members:

11 years ago: Fukuzawa, accompanied by fifteen-year-old Ranpo Edogawa, meets Natsume Soseki to establish the Armed Detective Agency. With the skilled business permit granted by Soseki, the agency officially begins its operations. Prior to this, Fukuzawa and Ranpo had been working as detectives for a year unofficially.

Fukuzawa's purpose in starting the agency is to "help others" and uphold justice by protecting the weak and fighting against injustice. He recognizes the need for a team of allies, not just Ranpo, who possess strength and kindness, to ensure the agency's legacy.

Sometime after obtaining the permit, Fukuzawa holds an opening party attended by Ranpo and Fukuchi Ouchi, during which Fukuchi causes a ruckus while intoxicated.

Approximately 10 years ago: Fukuzawa becomes aware of Mori Ougai's plan to capture Yosano Akiko, who is residing in a mental institution at the time. Fukuzawa fights against Mori to prevent him from reaching Yosano. Meanwhile, Ranpo convinces Yosano to join the agency as its personal physician, making her the second member. It is around this time that Kunikida is also recruited, although the exact timeline is unclear.

The agency acquires its current building sometime after Yosano's joining but before Dazai's entrance exam. At this point, the third floor remains vacant. The building includes an office floor, a reception area, a conference room, the president's office, an infirmary, an operating room, and a kitchenette. The agency also employs several unnamed office workers who primarily handle paperwork. Haruno is one of these workers, and while it's not specified when she joined, she has a closer relationship with the detectives compared to other office workers.

Katai is believed to have joined the agency around this time, becoming friends with Kunikida ten years ago and officially joining a few months later. After being locked in the agency building by an office clerk, Katai decides to live there full-time. However, he eventually leaves the agency, though the exact timeline is unknown.

Kunikida mentions that the agency was attacked and shot up at-least once at some point between 10 and 8 years ago. The agency also already has a feud with the Port Mafia during this period.

The agency establishes connections with government agencies and military personnel and begins conducting written and field tests for potential employees. Entrance exams become a regular practice, with Kunikida being the first to undergo the exam. The agency also obtains authorization to wield guns and knives under certain conditions.

Approximately 4 years ago: Dazai, having left the mafia at the age of 18, learns about the agency from Taneda. However, he must wait for two years to have his record cleared before joining.

Approximately 2 years ago: Dazai finally has his record wiped and officially joins the agency after passing the entrance exam conducted by Kunikida. During this time, Rozuko assists the agency but is not an official member. He attempts to break into the agency's archives three months before Dazai's joining. The agency is already prepared for cyberattacks at this point.

The agency gains media attention and is referred to as a "private detective agency." They face controversy and public backlash, with complaints pouring in and protestors gathering outside their building, even going so far as to throw rocks at some members (Dazai) when heading to work.

Approximately 1 year ago: The exact timing of the Tanizaki siblings' joining is unknown, but Junichiro mentions that he was the second-to-last ranking agent before Atsushi joined. Junichiro's entrance exam had occurred earlier but was so traumatic that he blocked the memory.

Approximately 2 months ago: Fukuzawa scouts Kenji after learning about his heroic actions during a flood in his village. Kenji becomes a part-time detective at the agency.

The events of the BSD anime series begin with Atsushi joining the agency and going through his entrance exam. He meets all the members, including Dazai, Kunikida, Tanizaki, Yosano, Ranpo, Kenji, and Fukuzawa. A few weeks later, Atsushi brings Kyouka into the agency, and she undergoes an entrance exam led by Dazai before officially becoming a member.

Please note that the timeline may not be exact, as some details are not explicitly mentioned or may vary between different sources. If there’s something clearly wrong, pls tell me? Anyway this was just for me but I thought no harm in posting it just in case anyone is ever wondering ab the timeline sooo here

#bsd #armed detective agency #bungou stray dogs #timeline

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surveillance-capitalism · 1 year ago

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Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ��Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”

The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

Musk had become involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February, 2022. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic reminiscent of the sleek design sensibility of Musk’s Tesla electric cars, connect with a network of satellites. The units have limited range, but in this situation that was an advantage: although a nationwide network of dishes was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity. Of course, Musk could do so. Three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried that Musk, if upset, could withdraw his services, told me that they originally overlooked the significance of his personal control. “Nobody thought about it back then,” one of them, a Ukrainian tech executive, told me. “It was all about ‘Let’s fucking go, people are dying.’ ”

In the ensuing months, fund-raising in Silicon Valley’s Ukrainian community, contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development and with European governments, and pro-bono contributions from SpaceX facilitated the transfer of thousands of Starlink units to Ukraine. A soldier in Ukraine’s signal corps who was responsible for maintaining Starlink access on the front lines, and who asked to be identified only by his first name, Mykola, told me, “It’s the essential backbone of communication on the battlefield.”

Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.)

Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)

By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.” The consequences were immediate. “Communications became dead, units were isolated. When you’re on offense, especially for commanders, you need a constant stream of information from battalions. Commanders had to drive to the battlefield to be in radio range, risking themselves,” Mykola said. “It was chaos.” Ukrainian expats who had raised funds for the Starlink units began receiving frantic calls. The tech executive recalls a Ukrainian military official telling him, “We need Elon now.” “How now?” he replied. “Like fucking now,” the official said. “People are dying.” Another Ukrainian involved told me that he was “awoken by a dozen calls saying they’d lost connectivity and had to retreat.” The Financial Times reported that outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. American and Ukrainian officials told me they believed that SpaceX had cut the connectivity via geofencing, cordoning off areas of access.

The senior defense official said, “We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this.” Musk’s singular role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government’s role as intermediary. “It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something,” the official continued. The Pentagon would need to reach a contractual arrangement with SpaceX so that, at the very least, Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore.” Kahl added, “It was kind of a way for us to lock in services across Ukraine. It could at least prevent Musk from turning off the switch altogether.”

Typically, such a negotiation would be handled by the Pentagon’s acquisitions department. But Musk had become more than just a vender like Boeing, Lockheed, or other defense-industry behemoths. On the phone with Musk from Paris, Kahl was deferential. According to unclassified talking points for the call, he thanked Musk for his efforts in Ukraine, acknowledged the steep costs he’d incurred, and pleaded for even a few weeks to devise a contract. “If you cut this off, it doesn’t end the war,” Kahl recalled telling Musk.

Musk wasn’t immediately convinced. “My inference was that he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concerns,” Kahl told me. To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular. (Musk later denied having spoken with Putin about Ukraine.) On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of Starlink activity. “This was, like, three minutes before he said, ‘Well, I had this great conversation with Putin,’ ” the senior defense official told me. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, dear, this is not good.’ ” Musk told Kahl that the vivid illustration of how technology he had designed for peaceful ends was being used to wage war gave him pause.

After a fifteen-minute call, Musk agreed to give the Pentagon more time. He also, after public blowback and with evident annoyance, walked back his threats to cut off service. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” This June, the Department of Defense announced that it had reached a deal with SpaceX.

The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the First World War, J. P. Morgan lent vast sums to the Allied powers; afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., poured money into the fledgling League of Nations. The investor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations underwrote civil-society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel, as part of his support of Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”

Musk’s power continues to grow. His takeover of Twitter, which he has rebranded “X,” gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next Presidential election. He recently launched an artificial-intelligence company, a move that follows years of involvement in the technology. Musk has become a hyper-exposed pop-culture figure, and his sharp turns from altruistic to vainglorious, strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of innumerable articles and at least seven major books, including a forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood.

More than thirty of Musk’s current and former colleagues in various industries and a dozen individuals in his personal life spoke to me about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

The terms of the Starlink deal have not been made public. Ukrainian officials say that they have not faced further service interruptions. But Musk has continued to express ambivalence about how the technology is being used, and where it can be deployed. In February, he tweeted, “We will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” He said, as he had told Kahl, that he was sincerely attempting to navigate the moral dilemmas of his role: “We’re trying hard to do the right thing, where the ‘right thing’ is an extremely difficult moral question.”

Musk’s hesitation aligns with his pragmatic interests. A facility in Shanghai produces half of all Tesla cars, and Musk depends on the good will of officials in China, which has lent support to Russia in the conflict. Musk recently acknowledged to the Financial Times that Beijing disapproves of his decision to provide Internet service to Ukraine and has sought assurances that he would not deploy similar technology in China. In the same interview, he responded to questions about China’s efforts to assert control over Taiwan by floating another peace plan. Taiwan, he suggested, could become a jointly controlled administrative zone, an outcome that Taiwanese leaders see as ending the country’s independence. During a trip to Beijing this spring, Musk was welcomed with what Reuters summarized as “flattery and feasts.” He met with senior officials, including China’s foreign minister, and posed for the kinds of awkwardly smiling formal photos that are more typical of world leaders.

National-security officials I spoke with had a range of views on the government’s balance of power with Musk. He maintains good relationships with some of them, including General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since the two men met, several years ago, when Milley was the chief of staff of the Army, they have discussed “technology applications to warfare—artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and autonomous machines,” Milley told me. “He has insight that helped shape my thoughts on the fundamental change in the character of war and the modernization of the U.S. military.” During the Starlink controversy, Musk called him for advice. But other officials expressed profound misgivings. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told me. “That sucks.”

One summer evening in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Musk and his friend Theo Taoushiani took Taoushiani’s father’s car for an illicit drive. Musk and Taoushiani were both in their mid-teens, and lived about a mile apart in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. Neither had a driver’s license, or permission from Taoushiani’s father. But they were passionate Dungeons & Dragons fans, and a new module—a fresh scenario in the game—had just been released. Taoushiani took the wheel for the twenty-minute drive to the Sandton City mall. “Elon was my co-pilot,” Taoushiani told me. “We went under the cover of darkness.” At the mall, they found that they didn’t have enough money. But Musk promised a salesperson that they would return the next day with the rest, and dropped the name of a well-known Greek restaurant owned by Taoushiani’s family. “Elon had the gift of the gab,” Taoushiani said. “He’s very persuasive, and he’s quite dogged in his determination.” The two went home with the module.

Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, and he and his younger brother, Kimbal, and his younger sister, Tosca, grew up under apartheid. Musk’s mother, Maye, a Canadian model and dietitian, and his father, Errol, an engineer, divorced when he was young, and the children initially stayed with Maye. She has said that Errol was physically abusive toward her. “He would hit me when the kids were around,” she wrote in her memoir. “I remember that Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four, respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.” By the mid-eighties, Musk had moved in with his father—a decision that he has said was motivated by concern for his father’s loneliness, and which he came to regret. Musk, usually impassive in interviews, cried openly when he told Rolling Stone about the years that followed, in which, he said, his father psychologically tortured him, in ways that he declined to specify. “You have no idea about how bad,” he said. “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” Taoushiani recalled witnessing Errol “chastise Elon a lot. Maybe belittle him.” (Errol Musk has denied allegations that he was abusive to Maye or to his children.) Musk has also said that he was violently bullied at school. Though he is now six feet one, with a broad-shouldered build, he was “much, much smaller back in school,” Taoushiani told me. “He wasn’t very social.”

Musk has said that he has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of what is now known as autism-spectrum disorder, which is characterized by difficulty with social interactions. As a child, he would sometimes fall into trancelike states of deep thought, during which he was so unresponsive that his mother eventually took him to a doctor to check his hearing. Musk’s quiet side persists—in my own interactions with him, I have found him to be thoughtful and measured. (Musk declined to answer questions for this story.) He can also be, as he joked during a stilted “Saturday Night Live” monologue, “pretty good at running human, in emulation mode.”

Musk escaped into science fiction and video games. “One of the reasons I got into technology, maybe the reason, was video games,” he said at a gaming-industry convention several years ago. In his early teens, Musk coded an eight-bit shooter game in the style of Space Invaders called Blastar, whose title screen, in a novelistic flourish, credits him as “E. R. Musk.” The premise was basic: “MISSION: DESTROY ALIEN FREIGHTER CARRYING DEADLY HYDROGEN BOMBS AND STATUS BEAM MACHINES.” But it won recognition from a South African trade magazine, which published the game’s hundred and sixty-seven lines of code and paid Musk a small sum.

Musk often talks about his science-fiction influences. Some have manifested in straightforward ways: he has connected his love of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels, whose characters grapple with a mathematically precise prediction of their civilization’s collapse, to his obsession with insuring human survival beyond Earth. But some of Musk’s touchstones present ironies. He has said that his hero is Douglas Adams, the writer who skewered both the hyper-rich and the progress-at-any-cost ethos that Musk has come to embody. In the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novels and radio plays, the latter of which were broadcast in South Africa during Musk’s childhood, a narcissistic playboy becomes the president of the galaxy, and Earth is demolished to make way for a space transit route. Musk is also an avowed fan of Deus Ex, a role-playing first-person-shooter video game that he has brought up when discussing his company Neuralink, which aspires to invent ability-enhancing body modifications like those featured in the game. During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace Covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the protagonist of the game, which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.

In 1999, Musk stood outside his Bay Area home to accept the delivery of a million-dollar McLaren F1 sports car. He was in his late twenties, and wearing an oversized brown blazer. “Some could interpret purchasing this car as behavior characteristic of an imperialist brat,” he told a CNN news crew. Then he beamed, saying that there were only about sixty such cars in the world. “My values may have changed,” he added, “but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.” Musk’s fiancée, a Canadian writer named Justine Wilson, seemed more aware. “It’s a million-dollar car. It’s decadent,” she said. “My fear is that we become spoiled brats. That we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective.” The McLaren, she observed, was “the perfect car for Silicon Valley.”

Musk had moved to Canada when he was in his late teens, and met Wilson when they both attended Queen’s University, in Ontario. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in economics and physics. In 1995, the early days of the World Wide Web, he and Kimbal founded a company that came to be called Zip2, an online city directory that they sold to newspapers. Musk has often described the company’s humble origins, saying that he and his brother lived and worked in a small studio apartment, showering at a nearby Y.M.C.A. and eating at Jack in the Box. (Errol at one point gave his sons twenty-eight thousand dollars. Musk, who has a tendency to fuss over questions of credit, has stated that his father’s contribution came “much later,” in a round of funding that “would’ve happened anyway.”) At Zip2, Musk developed what he describes as his “hard-core” work style; even after he had his own apartment, he often slept on a beanbag at the office. But, in the end, the company’s investors stripped him of his leadership role and installed a more experienced chief executive. Musk believed that the startup should have been targeting not just newspapers but consumers. Investors pursued a more modest vision instead. In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for three hundred and seven million dollars, earning Musk more than twenty million dollars.

Justine and Musk married the following year. After their first child died at ten weeks, from sudden infant death syndrome, the couple dealt with the tragedy in very different ways. Justine, by her account, grieved openly; Musk later told one of his biographers, Ashlee Vance, that “wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you.” After pursuing I.V.F. treatment, the couple had twins, then triplets. (Musk now has at least nine children with three different women, and has said that he is doing his part to address one of his pet issues, the risk of population collapse; demographers are skeptical about the matter.) Justine wrote in an essay for Marie Claire that their relationship eventually buckled under the weight of Musk’s obsession with work and his controlling tendencies, which began with him insisting, as they danced at their wedding, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” A messy divorce ensued, leading to a legal dispute over their postnuptial financial agreement, which was settled years later. “He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa,” Justine wrote. “The will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home.” (Musk wrote a response to Justine’s account in Business Insider, discussing the financial dispute, but he did not address Justine’s characterizations of his behavior.)

After Musk left Zip2, he poured some twelve million dollars, a majority of his wealth, into another startup, an online bank called X.com. It was the first instance of his obsession with the letter “X,” which has now appeared in the names of his companies, his products, and his son with the artist Grimes: X Æ A-12. The bank also marked the beginning of a long and so far unfulfilled quest—recently revived in his effort to reinvent Twitter—to create an “everything app,” incorporating a payment system. In 2000, X.com merged with a competing online-payments startup, Confinity, co-founded by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel. In events that have since become Silicon Valley lore, Musk and Thiel battled for control of the company. Various accounts apportion blame differently. Hoffman told me, citing the story as an example of Musk’s disingenuousness, that Musk had pushed for the merger by highlighting the leadership of his company’s seasoned executive, only to force out the executive and place himself in the top role. “A merger like this, you’re doing a marriage,” Hoffman said. “And it’s, like, ‘I was lying to you intensely while we were dating. Now that we’re married, let me tell you about the herpes.’ ” People who have worked with Musk often describe him as controlling. One said, “In the areas he wants to compete in, he has a very hard time sharing the spotlight, or not being the center of attention.” In the fall of 2000, another coup, executed while Musk was on a long-delayed honeymoon with Justine, overthrew Musk and installed Thiel as the company’s head. Two years later, eBay acquired the company, by then called PayPal, for $1.5 billion, making Musk, who remained the largest shareholder, fabulously wealthy.

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the PayPal saga happened at its outset. In March, 2000, as the merger was under way, Musk was driving his new McLaren, with Thiel in the passenger seat. The two were on Sand Hill Road, an artery that cuts through Silicon Valley. Thiel asked Musk, “So what can this do?” Musk replied, “Watch this,” then floored the gas pedal, hit an embankment, and sent the car airborne and spinning before it slammed back onto the pavement, blowing out its suspension and its windows. “This isn’t insured,” Musk told Thiel. Musk’s critics have used the story to illustrate his reckless showboating, but it also underscores how often Musk has been rewarded for that behavior: he repaired the McLaren, drove it for several more years, then reportedly sold it at a profit. Musk delights in telling the story, lingering on the risk to his life. In one interview, asked whether there were parallels with his approach to building companies, Musk said, “I hope not.” Appearing to consider the idea, he added, “Watch this. Yeah, that could be awkward with a rocket launch.”

Of all Musk’s enterprises, SpaceX may be the one that most fundamentally reflects his appetite for risk. Staff at SpaceX’s Starship facility, in Boca Chica, Texas, spent December of 2020 preparing for the launch of a rocket known as SN8, then the newest prototype in the company’s Starship program, which it hopes will eventually transport humans to orbit, to the moon, and, in the mission Musk speaks about with the most passion, to Mars. The F.A.A. had approved an initial launch date for the rocket. But an engine issue forced SpaceX to delay by a day. By then, the weather had shifted. On the new day, the F.A.A. told SpaceX that, according to its model of the wind’s speed and direction, if the rocket exploded it could create a blast wave that risked damaging the windows of nearby houses. A series of tense meetings followed, with SpaceX presenting its own modelling to establish that the launch was safe, and the F.A.A. refusing to grant permission. Wayne Monteith, then the head of the agency’s space division, was leaving an event at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when he received a frustrated call from Musk. “Look, you cannot launch,” Monteith told him. “You’re not cleared to launch.” Musk acknowledged the order.

Musk was on site in Boca Chica when SpaceX launched anyway. The rocket achieved liftoff and successfully performed several maneuvers intended to rehearse those of an eventual manned Starship. But, on landing, the SN8 came in too fast, and exploded on impact. (No windows were damaged.) The next day, Musk visited the crash site. In a picture taken that day, Musk stands next to the twisted steel of the rocket, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, looking determined, his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed. His tweets about the explosion were celebratory, not apologetic. “He has a long history of launching and blowing up rockets. And then he puts out videos of all the rockets that he’s blown up. And like half of America thinks it’s really cool,” the former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told me. “He has a different set of rules.”

Hans Koenigsmann, then SpaceX’s vice-president for flight reliability, started working on a customary report to the F.A.A. about the launch. Koenigsmann told me that he felt pressure to minimize focus on the launch process and Musk’s role in it. “I sensed that he wanted it taken out,” Koenigsmann said. “I disagreed, and in the end we wound up with a very different version from what was originally intended.” Eventually, Koenigsmann was told not to write a report at all, and a letter was sent to the F.A.A. instead. The agency, meanwhile, opened its own investigation. Monteith told me that he agreed with Musk that the F.A.A. had been conservative about a situation that presented little statistical risk of casualties, but he was nevertheless troubled. “We had safety folks who were very upset about it,” Monteith recalled. In a series of letters to SpaceX, Monteith accused the company of relying on data “hastily developed to meet a launch window,” launching “based on ‘impressions’ and ‘assumptions,’ ” and exhibiting “a concerning lack of operational control and process discipline that is inconsistent with a strong safety culture.” In its responses, SpaceX proposed various safety reforms, but also pushed back, complaining that the F.A.A.’s weather model was unreliable and suggesting that the agency had been resistant to discussions about improving it. (SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.)

The following March, Steve Dickson, then the F.A.A.’s administrator, called Musk. The two men spoke for thirty minutes. Like Kahl, Dickson was deferential, thanking Musk for his role in transforming the commercial space sector and acknowledging that SpaceX was taking steps to make its launches less risky. But Dickson, an F.A.A. spokesperson said in a statement, “made it clear that the FAA expects SpaceX to develop and foster a robust safety culture that stresses adherence to FAA rules.” Dickson had navigated such conversations before, including with Boeing after two 737 max aircraft crashed. But this situation presented a thornier challenge. “It’s not every day that the F.A.A. administrator releases a statement about a phone call that they have with the C.E.O. or the head of an aerospace company,” an official at the agency told me. “That kind of gets into the soft pressure, public pressure that you don’t do unless you are trying to change the incentive structure.”

The F.A.A. issued no fine, though it grounded SpaceX for two months. “I didn’t see that a fine would make any difference,” Monteith told me. “He could pull that out of his pocket. However, not allowing launches, that would get the attention of a company that prides itself on being able to iterate and go fast.” Musk has continued to complain about the agency. After it postponed another launch, he tweeted, “The FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure.” He added, “Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

Musk has been fixated on space since his childhood. The idea for SpaceX came about after his exile from PayPal. “I went to the NASA website so I could see the schedule of when we’re supposed to go” to Mars, Musk told Wired, in 2012. “At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing.” In 2001, he connected with space-exploration enthusiasts, and even travelled to Russia in an unsuccessful bid to buy missiles to use as rockets. The next year, he moved to Los Angeles, closer to California’s aerospace industry, and ultimately he pulled together a team of engineers and entrepreneurs and founded SpaceX, to make his own rockets. Private rocket launches date back to the eighties, but no one had attempted anything on the scale that Musk envisioned, and it proved to be more difficult and expensive than he had anticipated. Musk has said that, by 2008, the company was nearly bankrupt, and that, after putting much of his wealth into SpaceX and Tesla, he wasn’t far behind. “That was definitely the worst year of my life,” he said in an interview on “60 Minutes.” SpaceX’s first three launches had failed, and there was no budget for another. “I had no more money left,” Musk told Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, years later. “We managed to put together enough spare parts to do a fourth launch.” Had that failed, he added, “SpaceX would have died.” The launch was successful, and NASA soon awarded SpaceX a $1.6-billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. In 2020, the company flew its first manned mission there—ending nearly a decade of American reliance on Russian craft for the task. SpaceX now launches more satellites than any other private company, with four thousand five hundred and nineteen in orbit as of July, occupying many of Earth’s orbital routes. “Once the carrying capacity of an orbit is maxed out, you’ve basically blocked everyone from trying to compete in that market,” Bridenstine told me.

There are competitors in the field, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, but none yet rival SpaceX. The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies. “The U.S. government is in massive catch-up to build a more resilient space architecture,” Kahl, the former Pentagon Under-Secretary, told me. “And that only works if you can leverage the explosion of commercial space.” Several officials told me that they were alarmed by NASA’s reliance on SpaceX for essential services. “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” Bridenstine said. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.”

Even Musk’s critics concede that his tendency to push against constraints has helped catalyze SpaceX’s success. A number of officials suggested to me that, despite the tensions related to the company, it has made government bureaucracies nimbler. “When SpaceX and NASA work together, we work closer to optimal speed,” Kenneth Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told me. Still, some figures in the aerospace world, even ones who think that Musk’s rockets are basically safe, fear that concentrating so much power in private companies, with so few restraints, invites tragedy. “At some point, with new competitors emerging, progress will be thwarted when there’s an accident, and people won’t be confident in the capabilities commercial companies have,” Bridenstine said. “I mean, we just saw this submersible going down to visit the Titanic implode. I think we have to think about the non-regulatory environment as sometimes hurting the industry more than the regulatory environment.”

In early 2022, Steven Cliff, then the deputy administrator of the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, learned that potentially tens of thousands of Tesla vehicles had a feature that he found concerning. For years, Tesla has been working to create a totally self-driving car, a long-standing ambition of Musk’s. Now Cliff was told that a version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, an experimental feature that lets the cars navigate with little intervention from a driver, permitted cars to roll through stop signs, at up to about six miles an hour. This was clearly illegal. Cliff’s enforcement team contacted Tesla, and, in several meetings, a surprising conversation about safety and artificial intelligence played out. Representatives for Tesla seemed confused. Their response, as Cliff recalled, was “That’s what humans do all the time. Show us the data, why it’s unsafe.” N.H.T.S.A. officials told Tesla that, regardless of human compliance, “you should not be able to program a computer to break the law for you.” They demanded that Tesla update all the affected cars, removing the feature—a recall, in industry terms, albeit a digital one. “There was a lot of back-and-forth,” Cliff told me. “Like, at midnight on the very last day, they blinked and ended up recalling the rolling-stop feature.” (Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.)

Musk joined Tesla as an investor in 2004, a year after it was incorporated. (He has spent years defending the formative nature of his role and was eventually, in a legal settlement, one of several people granted permission to use the term “co-founder.”) Musk was again entering a market bound by entrenched private interests and stringent regulation, which opened him up to more clashes with regulators. Some of the skirmishes were trivial. Tesla for a time included in its vehicles the ability to replace the humming noises that electric cars must emit—since their engines make little sound—with goat bleats, farting, or a sound of the owner’s choice. “We’re, like, ‘No, that’s not compliant with the regulations, don’t be stupid,’ ” Cliff told me. Tesla argued with regulators for more than a year, according to an N.H.T.S.A. safety report. Nine days after the rolling-stop recall, the company pulled the noises, too. On Twitter, Musk wrote, “The fun police made us do it (sigh).”

“It’s a little like Mom and Dad and children. Like, How far can I push Mom and Dad until they push back?” Cliff said. “And that’s not a recipe for a strong safety culture.”

The fart debate had low stakes; the over-all safety of the cars is a far greater matter. Tesla has repeatedly said that Autopilot, a more limited technology than Full Self-Driving, is safer than a human driver. Last year, Musk added that he would be “shocked” if Full Self-Driving didn’t become safer than human drivers by the end of the year. But he has never made public the data needed to fully corroborate those claims. In recent months, new crash numbers from the N.H.T.S.A., which were first reported by the Washington Post, have shown an uptick in accidents—and fatalities—involving Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Tesla has been secretive about the specifics. A person at the N.H.T.S.A. told me that the company instructed the agency to redact specifics about whether driver-assistance software was in use during crashes. (By law, regulators must abide by such requests for confidentiality, unless they decide to contest them in court.) Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, recently said that there were “concerns” about the marketing of Autopilot. Cliff told me he had seen data that showed Teslas were involved in “a disproportionate number of crashes involving emergency vehicles,” though he said that the agency had not yet determined whether the technology or the human drivers was the cause. In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency said, “Multiple investigations remain open.”

Officials who have worked at OSHA and at an equivalent California agency told me that Musk’s influence, and his attitude about regulation, had made their jobs difficult. The Biden Administration, which is urgently trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, has concluded that it needs to work with Musk, because of his dominant position in the electric-car market. And Musk’s personal wealth dwarfs the entire budget of OSHA, which is tasked with monitoring the conditions in his workplaces. “You add on the fact that he considers himself to be a master of the universe and these rules just don’t apply to people like him,” Jordan Barab, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA, told me. “There’s a lot of underreporting in industry in general. And Elon Musk kind of seems to raise that to an art form.” Garrett Brown, a former field-compliance inspector at California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, added, “We have a bad health-and-safety situation throughout the country. And it’s worse in companies run by people like Elon Musk, who was ideologically opposed to the idea of government enforcement of public-health regulations.”

In March, 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Musk e-mailed Tesla employees, telling them that he intended to violate orders and show up at work, and downplaying the significance of COVID-19. Soon after, he lost an initial fight to keep a factory in Alameda County—Tesla’s most productive in the U.S.—open. That April, after county officials extended shelter-in-place orders, Musk was on a conference call with outside financial analysts. His rhetoric became nakedly political, to an extent that would have been uncharacteristic just a few years earlier. “I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all of their constitutional rights,” he told the analysts, speaking of the lockdowns. “What the fuck?” he added. “It’s an outrage. An outrage. . . . This is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddam freedom.” The pandemic seems to have sparked a pronounced shift in Musk. The lockdowns represented an example of what Hoffman told me Musk considered to be a cardinal sin: “getting in the way of the mission.”

The following month, Musk sent a series of vitriolic tweets, threatening to file suit against Alameda County, to move Tesla’s headquarters, and to flout the rules and reopen his factory, all of which he eventually did. The county essentially rubber-stamped the reopening soon afterward—a far cry from what Musk had invited. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” he had tweeted, at the height of his frustration. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

Musk has, for much of his public life, presented himself as a centrist. “I’m socially very liberal,” he told the technology reporter Kara Swisher in 2020. “And then economically right of center, maybe, or center.” He has said that he donated to Hillary Clinton, and voted for both her and Joe Biden. But, in recent years, the more radical perspective that characterized his diatribes about Covid has come to the fore. In March, 2022, Twitter restricted the account of the satirical Web site the Babylon Bee, after the site misgendered a government official. The next day, in texts later disclosed during the Twitter-acquisition process, Musk’s contact “TJ” (identified by Bloomberg as his ex-wife Talulah Riley) expressed frustration with the development and urged him to purchase Twitter to “fight woke-ism.” The following week, Musk polled his followers about whether Twitter respected free speech and, in a phone call to the Babylon Bee’s C.E.O., joked about buying the platform. Finally, in April, 2022, he offered forty-four billion dollars for the company. Almost immediately, he tried to back out of the deal, prompting Twitter to sue. After months of legal proceedings, Musk resumed the acquisition process, and in October he assumed control of the company.

“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he tweeted last year. By the time he bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote along similar lines, and appearing to back Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy he helped launch in a technically disastrous Twitter live event. Although Musk’s teen-age daughter, Vivian, has come out as trans, he has embraced anti-trans sentiment, saying that he would lobby to criminalize “irreversible” gender-affirming care for children. (Vivian recently changed her last name, saying in a legal filing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”) Musk started spreading misinformation on the platform: he shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House, had followed a meeting with a male prostitute, and retweeted suggestions that reports accurately identifying a mass shooter as a white supremacist were a “psyop.” Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”

When Musk arrived at Twitter, he immediately gutted the company’s staff, reducing the number of employees by about fifty per cent. One person who kept his job was Yoel Roth, the company’s head of trust and safety. Roth, who is in his mid-thirties, is gay, Jewish, and liberal. His department was responsible for determining Twitter’s rules; during the Trump Administration, he became embroiled in the culture wars. After the company began rolling out a new fact-checking policy that labelled two of Trump’s tweets as misinformation, Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s aide, went on “Fox & Friends” and read out Roth’s full name and spelled his username, adding, “He’s about to get more followers.” Trump then held up a New York Post cover mocking Roth, and Twitter users began recirculating tweets that Roth had written criticizing conservative candidates.

But when Musk took over he resisted calls to fire Roth. “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” he tweeted in October, 2022. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.” That evening, Roth messaged Musk on Signal, thanking him. Musk responded, “You have my full support,” and, the next day, he followed up with a screenshot of a tweet from Roth that described Mitch McConnell as “a bag of farts.” Musk added, “Haha, I totally agree.”

But the cuts that Musk had instituted quickly took a toll on the company. Employees had been informed of their termination via brusque, impersonal e-mails—Musk is now being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars by employees who say that they are owed additional severance pay—and the remaining staffers were abruptly ordered to return to work in person. Twitter’s business model was also in question, since Musk had alienated advertisers and invited a flood of fake accounts by reinventing the platform’s verification process. On November 10th, Roth sent a brief resignation e-mail. When his departure became public, Musk texted, asking to talk. “I[t] would mean a lot if you would consider remaining at Twitter,” he wrote. The two spoke that night, and Roth declined to return. Days later, he published an Op-Ed in the Times, questioning the future of user safety on the platform. (Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.)

Soon afterward, Musk replied to a Twitter user surfacing a 2010 tweet from Roth, in which he’d shared a link to a Salon article about a teacher’s being charged with having sex with an eighteen-year-old student and asked, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?”

“That explains a lot,” Musk tweeted in reply. Minutes later, he posted an image showing a portion of Roth’s doctoral dissertation, which focussed on the gay-hookup app Grindr and its user data. In the excerpt, Roth argued that such platforms will inevitably be used by people under eighteen, so they should do more to keep those individuals safe. “Looks like Yoel is in favor of children being able to access adult internet services,” Musk wrote.

The attack fit a pattern: Musk’s trolling has increasingly taken on the vernacular of hard-right social media, in which grooming, pedophilia, and human trafficking are associated with liberalism. In 2018, when a Thai youth soccer team was trapped in a cave, Musk travelled to Thailand to offer a custom-made miniature submarine to rescuers. The head of the rescue operation declined, and Musk lashed out on Twitter, questioning the expertise of the rescuers. After one of them, Vernon Unsworth, referred to the offer as a “P.R. stunt,” Musk called him a “pedo guy.” (Unsworth sued Musk for defamation, characterizing the harassment he received from Musk’s followers as “a life sentence without parole.” A judge ruled in favor of Musk, who argued that he hadn’t been accusing Unsworth of actual pedophilia, just trying to insult him.)

Musk’s tweet about Roth got nearly seventeen thousand quote tweets and retweets. “The moment that it went from being a moderation conversation to being a Pizzagate conversation, the risk level changed,” Roth told me. “I spent my career looking at the absolute worst things that the Internet could do to people. Certainly, worse things have happened to people. But this is probably up there.” Roth and his husband were forced to flee their house, a two-bedroom in El Cerrito, California, that they’d purchased just two years earlier. “And then as we are, like, packing our stuff and leaving and getting the dog loaded into the car and whatever, like, the Daily Mail publishes an article that gives people more or less a map to my house,” Roth said. “At that point, we’re, like, ‘Oh, we’re leaving this house potentially for the last time.’ ”

This summer, Twitter’s cheerful blue bird logo came down from the roof of the company’s headquarters, in San Francisco, and was replaced with a strobing “X.” The new entity is a marriage between two parts of Musk. There’s his career-long quest to create an everything app—integrating services ranging from communication to banking and shopping, and emulating products, like WeChat, that are popular in Asia. Sitting alongside that pragmatic goal is a newer, more confusing side of Musk, embodied by his desire to take back the town square from what he sees as woke discourse. Twitter has become a private company, so it’s difficult to assess its finances, but numerous prominent advertisers have departed, and Meta recently launched Threads, a competitor that shamelessly emulates the old Twitter, and broke records for downloads. Musk threatened to sue, then challenged Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and C.E.O., to a cage match, pledging to live-stream it and donate the proceeds to charity. (Zuckerberg has accepted. Musk has delayed committing to a date, citing a back injury.) The illuminated sign atop X’s headquarters, after complaints to the Department of Building Inspection, came down as quickly as it had gone up.

Some of Musk’s associates connected his erratic behavior to efforts to self-medicate. Musk, who says he now spends much of his time in a modest house in the wetlands of South Texas, near a SpaceX facility, confessed, in an interview last year, “I feel quite lonely.” He has said that his career consists of “great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.” One close colleague told me, “His life just sucks. It’s so stressful. He’s just so dedicated to these companies. He goes to sleep and wakes up answering e-mails. Ninety-nine per cent of people will never know someone that obsessed, and with that high a tolerance for sacrifice in their personal life.”

In 2018, the Times reported that members of the Tesla board had grown concerned about Musk’s use of the prescription sleep aid Ambien, which can cause hallucinations. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that he uses ketamine, which has gained popularity both as a depression treatment and as a party drug, and several people familiar with his habits have confirmed this. Musk, who smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, prompting a NASA safety review of SpaceX, has, perhaps understandably, declined to comment on the reporting that he uses ketamine, but he has not disputed it. “Zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much,” he tweeted, referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, another category of depression treatment. “From what I’ve seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option.” Associates suggested that Musk’s use has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions. Amit Anand, a leading ketamine researcher, told me that it can contribute to unpredictable behavior. “A little bit of ketamine has an effect similar to alcohol. It can cause disinhibition, where you do and say things you otherwise would not,” he said. “At higher doses, it has another effect, which is dissociation: you feel detached from your body and surroundings.” He added, “You can feel grandiose and like you have special powers or special talents. People do impulsive things, they could do inadvisable things at work. The impact depends on the kind of work. For a librarian, there’s less risk. If you’re a pilot, it can cause big problems.”

On July 12th, Musk announced xAI, his entry into a field that promises to alter much about life as we know it. He tweeted an image of the new company’s Web site, featuring a characteristically theatrical mission statement: the firm’s goal, he said, was “to understand the true nature of the universe.” In the image, Musk highlighted the date and explained its significance. “7 + 12 + 23 = 42,” the text read. “42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” It was a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In the series, an immensely complex artificial intelligence is asked to answer that question and, after computing for millions of years, answers with Adams’s most famous punch line: 42. “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is,” the computer says. Earth itself, and all the organisms on it, are ultimately revealed to be a still larger computer, built to clarify the question. Adams does not portray this satirical vision as positive. Musk’s announcement suggested more optimism: “Once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part.”

Musk has been involved in artificial intelligence for years. In 2015, he was one of a handful of tech leaders, including Hoffman and Thiel, who funded OpenAI, then a nonprofit initiative. (It now has a for-profit subsidiary.) OpenAI had a less grandiose and more cautious mission statement than xAI’s: to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” In the first few years of OpenAI, Musk grew unhappy with the company. He said that his efforts at Tesla to incorporate A.I. created a conflict of interest, and several people involved told me that this was true. However, they also said that Musk was frustrated by his lack of control and, as Semafor reported earlier this year, that he had attempted to take over OpenAI. Musk still defends his centrality to the company’s origins, stressing his financial contributions in its fledgling days. (The exact figures are unclear: Musk has given estimates that range from fifty million to a hundred million dollars.) Throughout his involvement, Musk seemed preoccupied with control, credit, and rivalries. He made incendiary remarks about Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s DeepMind A.I. initiative, and, later, about Microsoft’s competing effort. He thought that OpenAI wasn’t sufficiently competitive, at one point telling colleagues that it had a “0%” chance of “being relevant.” Musk left the company in 2018, reneging on a commitment to further fund OpenAI, one of the individuals involved told me. “Basically, he goes, ‘You’re all a bunch of jackasses,’ and he leaves,” Hoffman said. The withdrawal was devastating. “It was very tough,” Altman, the head of OpenAI, said. “I had to reorient a lot of my life and time to make sure we had enough funding.” OpenAI went on to become a leader in the field, introducing ChatGPT last year. Musk has made a habit of trashing the company, wondering repeatedly, in public interviews, why he hasn’t received a return on his investment, given the company’s for-profit arm. “If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he tweeted recently.

It is difficult to say whether Musk’s interest in A.I. is driven by scientific wonder and altruism or by a desire to dominate a new and potentially powerful industry. Several entrepreneurs who have co-founded businesses with Musk suggested that the arrival of Google and Microsoft in the field had made it a new brass ring, as space and electric vehicles had been earlier. Musk has maintained that he is motivated by his fear of the technology’s destructive potential. In a podcast earlier this year, Ari Emanuel, the head of the Hollywood agency W.M.E., recalled Musk joking about an A.I.-dominated future. “Ari, do you have dogs?” Musk asked him. “Well, here’s what A.I. is to you. You’re the dog.” In March, Musk, along with dozens of tech leaders, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced A.I. technology. “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” the letter said. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?”

Yet in the period during which Musk endorsed a pause, he was working to build xAI, recruiting from major competitors, including OpenAI, and even, according to someone with knowledge of the conversation, contacting leadership at Nvidia, the dominant maker of chips used in A.I. The month the letter was distributed, Musk completed the registrations for xAI. He has said little about how the company will differ from preëxisting A.I. initiatives, but generally has framed it in terms of competition. “I will create a third option, although starting very late in the game of course,” he told the Washington Post. “That third option hopefully does more good than harm.” Through A.I. research and development already under way at Tesla, and the trove of data he now commands through Twitter (which he recently barred OpenAI from scraping in order to train its chatbots), he may have some advantage, as he applies his sensibilities and his world view to that race. Hoffman told me, “His whole approach to A.I. is: A.I. can only be saved if I deliver, if I build it.” As humanity creates A.I. in its own image, Hoffman argued, the principles and priorities of the leaders in the field will matter: “We want the construction of this to be not people with Messiah complexes.”

At one point in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” Adams introduces the architects of the Earth supercomputer. They’re powerful beings who have been living among us, disguised as mice. At first, they were motivated by simple curiosity. But seeking the question made them famous, and they began considering talk-show and lecture deals. In the end, Earth is demolished in the name of commerce, and their path to existential clarity along with it. The mice greet this with a shrug, mouth vague platitudes, and go on the talk-show circuit anyway. Musk isn’t peddling pabulum. His initiatives have real substance. But he also wants to be on the show—or, better yet, to be the show himself.

In the open letter, alongside questions about the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence was one that reflects on the sectors of government and industry that Musk has come to shape. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” he and his fellow-entrepreneurs wrote. “Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.” Published in the print edition of the August 28, 2023, issue.

#Elon Musk #Ronan Farrow #the new yorker #SpaceX #tesla #starlink #ukraine #twitter #lllllinks

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