PNAS 2025: Detectable fraud is no longer anecdotal noise but a network phenomenon: < 1 % of editors enable ≈30 % of retractions; paper-mill articles double every 1.5 y—10× faster than legitimate science. Cutting-edge graph/statistical methods reveal modular “fraud supply chains” that hop between journals to evade de-indexing.

Fraud growth outpaces science 10:1. Current policing (≈100 journal de...

Central Thesis: The U.S. faces a substantial and growing disadvantage in its ability to produce sufficient quantities of advanced weaponry and munitions to deter or succeed in a potential conflict with China. This disadvantage, compounded by an overreliance on Chinese suppliers, outdated acquisition processes, and a potentially over-optimistic view of U.S. technological superiority, poses a signif...

POTUS Biden has approved a highly classified nuclear strategy, redirecting U.S. focus toward China’s rapidly growing nuclear arsenal, which is expected to match U.S. and Russian stockpiles by 2035.

The strategy, known as “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” prepares for simultaneous nuclear threats from China, Russia, and North Korea, reflecting new concerns over their increasing coordination.

Thi...

DJB July 2009 nth order attacks https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/On-n-th-Order-Attacks-Bilar/82f0bd634066530f7fca1745fa0773aaee364093

"Similarly, the PRC People Liberation Army’s emphasis on asymmetric warfare and ongoing push to develop modern “Assassin’s Mace” weapons within the doctrine of “The Inferior Defeats the Superiors”11 should give some pause. The Director of Foreign Military S...

DJB July 2016 "In a different time, in a different America, a similar warning was already given, and better, by Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng. His testimony concludes the transcript of the 106th Congress regarding China's accession to the WTO: 'The U.S. should recognize that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Communist China is democracy's most formidable adversary [..] If the United St...

We are being rapidly transitioned into a new system of centralised, authoritarian global governance. This system is designed to be a technocracy and it is truly totalitarian.

Totalitarianism is a form of government that attempts to assert total control over the lives of its citizens. It is characterized by strong central rule that attempts to control and direct all aspects of individual life th...

Jeremy Adams, an American high school teacher with twenty years classroom experience, gives a frightening glimpse of the hollowed out lives of today’s youth. He traces the parallel ever deepening descent into meaningless of the institutions that surround and shape them. Family, school, culture and the political system are all being progressively ‘hollowed out’ of any sense of objective, enduring t...

DJB July 2016: "Whereas the authoritarian CCP is implementing societal instrumentation, feedback and control systems to dampen instabilities, we have yet to demonstrate any pressing awareness, let alone articulate a compelling American counter-vision for the man-machine integration era. On the contrary, the “Disuniting of America”, of which US historian Arthur Schlesinger warned 25 years ago [65]...

DJB July 2016: 山雨欲来风满楼 - Coming events cast their shadows before them.

"27% of US college students assent to restricting offensive political views on campus. A recent Gallup poll July 3 rd , 2016 records a new low: Only 52% are “extremely proud” to be American. These are worrying signs, consistent with Zivilisationsmüdigkeit. [..] It is thus not inconceivable that US citizens may select a...

DJB June 2016 "Malaise of (Cyber-security) Science

Robust science has a few characteristics, among them reproducibility, repeatability, and internal as well as external validity. Due to misaligned incentive structures and poor methodology, much of scientific literature is suffused with ‘results’ that cannot be repeated by the same team, let alone be reproduced by others. [..] Tim Horton, EIC...

DJB 2016: "Since operational MTD by its nature introduces changes with system-wide information dissemination requirements (eg if you mutate service mapping to confuse the bad guys, the good guys still need to know the new mappings), the MTD modeling should be informed by concepts addressing these issues. Specifically, we recommend framing

[..] 3. MTD as asymmetric adversarial learning, with f...

DJB June 2016

"Malaise of (Cyber-security) Science

Robust science has a few characteristics, among them reproducibility, repeatability, and internal as well as external validity. Due to misaligned incentive structures and poor methodology, much of scientific literature is suffused with ‘results’ that cannot be repeated by the same team, let alone be reproduced by others. [..]

Tim Horton,...

We’re operating distributed microservice ecosystems on top of a deep stack of frameworks, abstractions and runtimes that are all running on other people’s servers (aka “the cloud”). The days of naming servers after Greek gods and sshing into a box to run tail and top are long gone for most of us.

The move to these modern architectures is for good reason. Engineering organizations are under cons...

6.5h outages due to cloud services automatic scaling chain reaction error propagations "Um 7:30 Uhr PST löste eine automatisierte Skalierung der Kapazität eines der im AWS-Hauptnetz gehosteten AWS-Services ein unerwartetes Verhalten bei einer großen Anzahl Clients im internen Netz aus. Genauer: Die Clients setzten ihre Anfragen aufgrund eines bisher unentdeckten Fehlers nicht wie sonst üblich zur...

Cloud MS 365 reduced to less than 4 nines SLA uptime just from this outage From the 2016 MMIE paper "A careful ‘cloud bug study’ (11 person/year effort) was undertaken to classify and manually annotate thousands of issues in six popular distributed systems (Hadoop MapReduce, HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Zookeeper, and Flume) along multiple dimensions. The study found that every implication, from fail...

The app uses facial recognition technology from a firm backed by Alibaba Group Holding to match faces with photo identification and cross-check pictures on different documents

The app also takes a host of other data points -- from electricity and smartphone use to personal relationships to political and religious affiliations -- to flag suspicious behavior, the report said.

IJOP is mainly a...

Machines powered by artificial intelligence increasingly mediate our social, cultural, economic and political interactions. Understanding the behaviour of artificial intelligence systems is essential to our ability to control their actions, reap their benefits and minimize their harms. Here we argue that this necessitates a broad scientific research agenda to study machine behaviour that incorpora...

"It now interacts with you, and takes the measure of you. It can determine just how ‘smart’ you are when it comes to your devotion and your grasp of the ideological essentials."

This is most evident in the points system employed by the “Xi Study Strong Nation,” app the way it is engineered to make demands, in actionable and measurable ways, on how Party members spend what might otherwise be con...

Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses have been labelled as untrustworthy on an official blacklist banning them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by air or train, as the use of the government’s social credit system accelerates.

The annual blacklist is part of a broader effort to boost “trustworthiness” in Chinese society and is an extens...

Xi is laying the groundwork for the coming war against Taiwan (and nations beyond)

To understand how this campaign works, it is important to place Xi’s speech in the context of all Chinese official and officially unofficial speaking about Taiwan and its allies. For example, soon after Xi spoke, General He Lei of the People’s Liberation Army delivered this wisdom for public consumption:

T...

"The challenge for us is that Xi’s project of total ideological control does not stop at China’s borders. It is packaged to travel with Chinese students, tourists, migrants and especially money." analysis and advice by @jgarnaut via @niubi

I want to make these broad points about the historical foundations of CCP ideology, beyond the fact that it is important:

Communism did not enjoy an...

“The internet is a giant Mechanical Turk: whether we know it or not, we have all become the people inside the machine.” https://twitter.com/shenmaxiu/status/1070895668711944192

Enter TLA+. TLA+ is a specification language that describes your system and the properties you want. This makes it a fantastic complement to testing: not only can you check your code, you can check your design, too! TLA+ is especially effective for testing concurrency problems, like crashes, race conditions, and dropped messages. This talk will introduce the ideas behind TLA+ and how it works, wit...

China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.

The capital city will pool data from several departments to reward and punish some 22 million citizens based on their actions and reputations by the end of 2020, ac...

Chinese search app for Android devices. The search system, code-named Dragonfly, was designed to remove content that China’s authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest.