‼️ Someone’s Bluetooth headphones kept refusing to hand audio back to their phone. He discovered the cause was an open AliExpress tab that was generating a tone you purposefully never hear, to secretly track you.
Alibaba's anti-abuse scripts use a fingerprinting technique with a hidden audio graph on the homepage — a sawtooth tone pushed through the browser's audio engine, then measured on the way out. CPU, OS and browser each process it slightly differently, and that variation results in a fingerprint they can track you with.
Gain is set to zero, so nothing is audible. But the audio graph stays wired to the system audio output, so the browser keeps processing live audio. Tab mute can't stop it, there's no media element to mute.
Some browsers like Firefox have already flattened the fingerprint itself. For example 99.24% of Firefox users return one of just three values. It doesn't stop the audio graph from running though.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's wife and adviser, Cami Clark, pitched Jeffrey Epstein on investing in her "free luxury porn company" in 2012, per DOJ-released emails.
Epstein, then already a registered sex offender, declined: "Can't do sex TV."
🦔Oracle is planning another round of layoffs this month, on top of the 21,000 jobs it already cut last year, a 13% drop in headcount. The reason isn't a failing business. Oracle spent $55.7 billion on AI data centers last year, up from $21 billion, and burned through $23.7 billion more cash than it made. To cover it, the company borrowed $43 billion, sold $5 billion in stock, and plans to raise about $40 billion more. Oracle openly tied some of the job cuts to AI. The stock is down 26% this year.
My Take
Oracle is cutting workers to help pay for its AI buildout. Revenue is growing, cloud is up 77%, and the company is still firing people, because the capex bill opened a $24 billion hole in its cash flow. Payroll is the fastest lever a company can pull to soften that, so the people go. Management gets to call it an AI efficiency story, which sounds better than admitting the spending outran the money coming in.
Oracle is also the customer at the other end of these AI financing deals. It borrowed tens of billions to build data centers for demand it's betting will show up, and a huge chunk of that bet rides on OpenAI honoring a $300 billion compute deal. If the demand arrives slower than hoped, Oracle is stuck with the debt, the depreciating hardware, and a workforce already cut to the bone. Larry Ellison told analysts the AI threat to software hits everyone but Oracle. Borrowing $40 billion more while cutting staff is a strange way to show confidence.
Hedgie🤗
We are witnessing the largest CapEx spending spree in history.
Hyperscalers have committed a record $2.6 trillion in future spending across data center leases and equipment purchases.
This includes leases for data centers and power infrastructure that have not yet commenced, and existing purchase contracts for equipment and services.
These obligations do not appear on company balance sheets and are disclosed only in limited accounting footnotes, despite their enormous size and duration.
Alphabet, $GOOGL, has the largest total, with $811 billion in purchase commitments and $85 billion in leases not yet commenced, bringing its combined obligations to ~$896 billion.
By contrast, Oracle, $ORCL, has committed $32 billion to purchases, but $260 billion to leases that have not yet commenced, the largest lease obligation among the group, bringing its total to ~$292 billion.
The AI buildout has become one of the largest long-term capital commitments in corporate history.
@Pirat_Nation "he still reviews it"
"he's surely reviewing it"
"the reviews are still happening"
"the reviewing hasn't changed"
So this is how liberty dies?
With thunderous cope.