soulseeking77

At any moment, you have a choice, that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it. Digital Assets | Blockchain | FinTech | Community Develop

[0️⃣BlackBetty ⚓️ @BabyD1111229]

MICROSOFT JUST ADMITTED IT WAS WRONG — AND CANCELED EVERY SECRET NDA THEY SIGNED WITH YOUR LOCAL GOVERNMENT WORLDWIDE

Remember the story we told you about Meta hiding behind a shell company called “Balloonist LLC?” About mayors signing secret agreements? About communities finding out a billion-dollar data center was being built in their neighborhood only when the construction equipment arrived?

That story — which went viral across America — just produced the most remarkable corporate reversal in the entire history of the data center era.

On March 18, 2026 — two and a half months ago — Microsoft announced something no tech company has ever done before: they are canceling every single NDA — every single secrecy agreement — they have ever signed with every single local government in the entire world.

Not just new ones. Every existing one. Terminated. Gone.

And the reason they did it tells you everything about the power that communities have when they organize and fight back.

WHAT MICROSOFT ACTUALLY DID

Amid widespread blowback against the spread of data centers, Microsoft on March 18, 2026 announced it is abandoning its practice of secrecy with local governments when deploying new facilities worldwide. The company stated: “We’ve made the decision that being transparent with the communities where we operate or seek to operate is paramount. This shift is about strengthening public trust, enabling better dialogue, and ensuring that our growth is matched by meaningful engagement.” 

Abandoning its practice of secrecy. Those are Microsoft’s own words. An acknowledgment — quiet but unmistakable — that what they were doing was wrong.

Microsoft announced it will terminate any existing, active NDAs worldwide — coordinating with municipalities to end the agreements. Microsoft’s corporate vice president and general counsel of Infrastructure Legal Affairs, Rima Alaily, said: “Our neighbors deserve to know when we are coming to their community. They deserve transparency about what we are building and why.” 

Our neighbors deserve to know. Said by the company that was using shell companies and NDAs to make sure neighbors did NOT know. Said because the communities fought back hard enough that the alternative — continuing the secrecy — became more damaging than the transparency.

BUT HERE IS WHY COMMUNITIES ARE SKEPTICAL — AND RIGHT TO BE

Microsoft’s move won qualified praise from data center NDA critics. But environmental group Midwest Environmental Advocates captured the community mood precisely: “Companies typically don’t make announcements about building community trust unless those communities are already pushing back pretty hard.” 

They are right. Microsoft did not have a sudden change of heart. Microsoft did a calculation. And the calculation came out like this:

The secrecy is no longer working. Communities are finding the NDAs through FOIA requests. Wisconsin Watch is writing front-page stories about them. State legislators are introducing bills to ban them. And when communities find out they were deceived — as in Festus, Missouri — they vote out every politician who signed the deal.

Transparency became cheaper than secrecy. That is why Microsoft changed.

Wisconsin state Rep. Clint Moses — a Republican from Menomonie, where the city signed an NDA — put it bluntly: Microsoft “just realized that it’s not a successful formula when you come into a community under darkness.” But he also noted that his bill to ban data center NDAs stalled in the Wisconsin Legislature — meaning other companies can still use them. “Hopefully, the industry follows,” he said — but expressed doubt that it would without legislative mandates. 

Hopefully the industry follows. That is the hope. But hope is not a policy.

Amazon has not ended its NDAs. Meta — the company behind Balloonist LLC — has not ended its NDAs. Google has not ended its NDAs. Oracle has not ended its NDAs.

Microsoft made a move. The rest of the industry is watching. And communities should not mistake one company’s PR pivot for industry-wide reform.

THE COMMUNITIES THAT FORCED THIS CHANGE

Here is the story behind the story — the one Microsoft will never tell in its press releases.

The NDA terminations came after The Detroit News reported the existence of confidentiality agreements — obtained by filing public records requests with communities that had publicly fielded interest from data center developers. The News obtained copies of the agreements. Since reporting on four west Michigan communities’ confidentiality agreements with Microsoft, two more governmental bodies responded with copies of additional NDA agreements. The NDA scandal was spreading — and Microsoft knew it. 

Reporters. Filing public records requests. Obtaining the secret documents. Publishing them. That is what forced Microsoft’s hand. Not a change of heart. Not a new commitment to ethics. Journalists and community members armed with freedom of information laws.

Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders said data center developers’ use of NDAs in Wisconsin “did blow up in their faces” and contributed to projects facing increasing backlash. “Communities don’t like it when they find out that their public officials are meeting secretly with representatives of companies to change the character of their communities,” he said. “I’m also not surprised that a company like Microsoft would take a look at it and say, ‘Boy, that’s really not a good look.’” 

It blew up in their faces. That is the Freedom of Information Council’s official assessment. And it is exactly right.

Communities organized. Journalists filed records requests. Wisconsin Watch and the Detroit News and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published the documents. And one of the most powerful companies in the world had to stand up and say: we were wrong. We’re ending this. Worldwide.

AND HERE IS THE CATCH NOBODY IS REPORTING

While Microsoft is internally taking action to address community concerns — it was a key player in defeating Washington state legislation that would have mandated data center transparency and restrictions on environmental impacts. In other words: Microsoft ended its own NDAs voluntarily — while simultaneously working to block laws that would have forced the entire industry to do the same. 

Read that again. Microsoft ended its own NDAs. Then helped defeat the bill that would have required every data center company to end theirs.

They made the choice to be transparent. Then worked to make sure Amazon, Meta, and Google don’t have to make the same choice.

This is not a company that has seen the light. This is a company that is managing its reputation while protecting the industry’s ability to continue doing exactly what they were doing — just not Microsoft specifically.

Microsoft may still, in “certain limited circumstances,” share confidential trade secrets or “competitive sensitive information” about its data centers with local governments and will still try to protect that information from public records. The company’s corporate vice president acknowledged that land acquisition NDAs will continue — meaning the secrecy around purchasing land for data centers remains in place even as government NDAs end. 

Land acquisition NDAs continue. Meaning: the shell company phase — where Balloonist LLC buys land without anyone knowing it’s Meta — that can still happen. The NDA that covers the land purchase can still be secret. It’s only the government-level NDA — the one that binds your mayor — that Microsoft is ending.

The most important secrecy tool — buying land through disguised companies — remains intact.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Microsoft just did something no tech company has ever done: canceled every secret NDA with every local government in the world. Worldwide. All of them. Gone.

It happened because communities organized. Because journalists filed FOIA requests. Because Wisconsin Watch and the Detroit News published the documents. Because Festus, Missouri voted out every politician who signed a secret deal. Because the political cost of secrecy exceeded the commercial benefit.

That is how change happens. Not because corporations develop a conscience. Because communities force their hand.

But here is the truth that needs to be said plainly: Microsoft is one company. Amazon, Meta, Google, and Oracle are still using NDAs. The Washington state bill that would have mandated industry-wide transparency — Microsoft helped defeat it. Land acquisition NDAs — the tool that lets Balloonist LLC buy your neighbor’s farm without telling anyone — those continue.

One battle won. The war not over.

Share this for every community that fought back against the secrecy — and every community that is still fighting. Microsoft blinked. Now pressure the rest of them.

🎩 The StoicWay

📌 Source: GeekWire — “Microsoft nixes NDAs with local governments worldwide when deploying data centers” (March 18, 2026)
Read all about it! 😉
https://t.co/7IUMlrR15u

[Mark Link @MarkLink1962]

@theactualandyw @Vivek4real_ Of course not, but this video from 1993 should give you perspective on the comment: https://t.co/pnmIikhYGr

[Eleanor Terrett @EleanorTerrett]

Ways and Means Republicans rolled out six standalone bills and a discussion draft ahead of today’s crypto tax hearing at 2pm ET.

The bills address crypto donations, mining and staking taxation, reporting requirements, tax treatment parity, voluntary disclosure, and applying existing tax anti-abuse rules to digital assets. The discussion draft targets the use of offshore crypto tax shelters.

Witnesses include:

📌Sarah Reilly, Vice President and Senior Tax Counsel, @Fidelity

📌@LawrenceZlatkin, Vice President of Tax, @coinbase

📌@jasonsomensatto, Director of Policy, @coincenter

📌Mike Kaercher, Deputy Director,
Tax Law Center at @nyulaw

[Vaibhav Sisinty @VaibhavSisinty]

Okay this is genuinely insane.

SpaceX just unveiled a satellite whose only job is to run AI. Not internet. Not GPS. Just compute, floating in orbit.

It's called AI1, and the reason behind it breaks your brain.

AI data centers on Earth are hitting a wall, not a chip wall, a physics wall.

They need staggering amounts of power and water just to stay cool, and we're running out of grid and land to build them.

So Musk's answer is: stop building them on Earth.

In orbit, the sun never sets. Free power, 24/7. No water for cooling, you just radiate heat into the vacuum of space. The two things choking AI on the ground barely exist up there.

And here's the wild part: Musk says it's easier to build than a Starlink satellite. Strip out the complex antennas and it's "a lot of solar cells, a radiator, and some laser links."

One AI1 carries the compute of an Nvidia GB300 rack, the same hardware data centers fight over down here.

AI1 is just the first one. The plan is a constellation of up to a million of them.

And the timing isn't an accident, SpaceX goes public this week at a ~$1.75 trillion target. This isn't a rocket company anymore. It's positioning itself as the power grid for AI, in space.

The race for AI compute just left the planet. Literally.

@SpaceX

[D'CENT Wallet @DCENTWALLETS]

Big news for the $XLM community 🪐

D'CENT has been selected for the Stellar Community Fund by @StellarOrg.

We've been building for $XRP Army.

Now we're excited to begin a deeper journey with Stellar and bring that experience to XLM holders.🫡

More to come👀

[Diligent Denizen 🇺🇸 @DiligentDenizen]

Today I will be dropping a thread on how Israel intelligence Unit 8200 has completely INFILTRATED US' tech sector at a CATASTROPHIC level.

What we've discovered will chill you to the bone. 👀🇺🇸

[Ian Carroll @IanCarrollShow]

It is often overlooked that the dancing Israelis didn’t just take celebratory photos (and video that was never recovered) of the burning towers on 9/11 with apparent foreknowledge of the attack.

They actually took photos from the same vantage point the day before holding up lit lighters to the tower (like burning it down)

It’s all documented in fbi reports- just a coincidence that a bunch of ex-Israeli intelligence officers were working at Israeli moving companies surveilling the attacks the day before and day of. Then they were caught with explosive residue found in their van and prepurchased plane tickets for each of them to different foreign countries scheduled for the day after (9/12).

When the fbi went to go raid the offices- they were abandoned, the Israeli owner had vanished and left everything (except some electronics) there.

All just normal coincidental Jewish behavior before being sent back to Israel and saying their purpose there was to “document the events”

The actually retarded 9/11 conspiracy theory is that osama bin Laden carried out the world’s most sophisticated terror attack from some mud cave in the mountains with no internet and a small handful of Arabs that couldn’t fly planes caused three controlled demolitions in NYC (including one building they didn’t hit), a physically impossible flight path at the pentagon, and a disappearing plane crash in shanksville. And we know it was them because they had indestructible passports and Mohamed atta decided to leave a briefcase with their detailed plans and personal information in the airport so the Americans could know all about them.

If you have not yet learned the truth about 9/11- or more accurately, the lies, you’re falling behind.

Catch up.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The planet's most fanatical Israel loyalists now own and control (or are about to) Paramount, CBS, TikTok, Warner Brothers, CNN: all acquired in the last two years by Netanyahu's close friend, Larry Ellison, right as public support for Israel in the US and the west collapses:

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

A teenager in the United States started publishing software at 14 in 1998, built the entire online infrastructure for the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, joined Google as a software engineer, quit in 2018, and then spent five years writing a C library that does something the entire industry said was impossible.

Then she combined it with llama.cpp and shipped the easiest way on the planet to run a large language model on any computer.

Her name is Justine Tunney.

Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the low level systems world knows what one engineer has built.

Justine was born in 1984. She started writing and publishing software at 14, back when distribution meant uploading binaries to BBS systems and chat networks. She picked up the handle jart, which she still uses on GitHub today. She did the work most teenagers her age were not doing. She read the systems programming literature. She studied compilers. She fell in love with C.

In July 2011 she registered the @occupywallst Twitter handle and the occupywallst dot org domain. Within weeks the protest movement that began in Zuccotti Park in New York had become a global phenomenon, and her infrastructure was the digital backbone of the entire thing. She handled the social media, the website, the donations, the coordination. She built the platform that pushed the movement to reach millions.

After Occupy she joined Google as a software engineer. She worked on TensorBoard, the visualization tool for TensorFlow, and on site reliability for Google infrastructure. She stayed for years. Then in 2018 she left Google Brain to work on a personal project.

The project was called Cosmopolitan Libc.

Cosmopolitan does something most C programmers would tell you is mathematically impossible. It lets you compile a C program once and have the resulting binary run natively on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD with no modification. One file. Six operating systems. No virtual machines. No interpreters. No recompilation. The technique she invented is called Actually Portable Executable.

The implications are wild. Cosmopolitan binaries violate every assumption about how operating systems load programs. They are at once a Windows PE file, a Linux ELF binary, a macOS Mach-O binary, and a shell script. The same bytes run on every platform.

For five years she worked on it mostly alone. She funded the development partly through Mozilla's MIECO program, which sponsored her work on Cosmopolitan 3.0, released on October 31, 2023.

A month later she shipped llamafile.

llamafile is what happens when you combine Cosmopolitan with llama.cpp. You take any LLM weights file in the standard GGUF format, you wrap it in Justine's binary, and you get a single file that runs on six operating systems without installation. No Python. No CUDA setup. No dependency hell. Just one file that you double click and it works.

Mozilla launched it as an official project of their innovation group on November 29, 2023. It went viral immediately. The repository, hosted at github .com/mozilla-ai/llamafile, now has 24,600 stars. The license is Apache 2.0.

Justine kept shipping. She added GPU support to Cosmopolitan, a task systems engineers thought would require rewriting the whole thing. She added dlopen support, another thing nobody else had figured out. She wrote whisperfile, a single file version of OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model based on the same architecture.

Her GitHub profile lists projects most engineers would consider impossible. sectorlisp, a Lisp interpreter that fits in a boot sector. blink, the tiniest x86-64-linux emulator on Earth. bestline, a teletypewriter command session library. redbean, a complete web server inside a single zip file.

A teenager who shipped software in 1998 grew up to write the C library that the entire local AI movement now runs on top of.

She did most of it alone, and most people scrolling AI Twitter cannot name her.

[Cypress Demanincor @CDemanincor]

Behind the scenes, some of the world's largest financial institutions are quietly rebuilding the plumbing.

Bank of America just announced a real-time cross-border payment system connecting SWIFT to multiple instant payment networks around the world. Real-time tracking. Instant settlement. 24/7 money movement.

The average person won't pay attention because the front-end experience looks the same.

But the back-end is changing.

Banks aren't spending billions modernizing infrastructure because nothing is happening. They're preparing for a world where money moves globally in seconds, not days.

[IanMalcolm84 @IanMalcolm84]

Life found a way…

In a superb space yesterday, @DiligentDenizen had @grok affirm my entire thesis on “their” subversion of our tech sector

[Stellar @StellarOrg]

Numbers that leave an impression.

@The_DTCC is the "premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry," and it's coming onchain with Stellar.

[Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_]

WEF EXECUTIVE: “WATER, SOIL, AND OXYGEN SHOULD NOT BE INFINITELY ACCESSIBLE. THEY’RE ASSETS THAT SHOULD BE INCLUDED IN OUR GLOBAL ECONOMIC BALANCE SHEETS.”

THEY WANT TO MONETIZE BREATHING...

AND CHARGE YOU FOR AIR WHILE THEY OWN YOUR LUNGS?

THIS ISN’T A CONSPIRACY THEORY ANYMORE.

[Eleanor Terrett @EleanorTerrett]

🚨NEWS: Administration officials will host law enforcement groups at the White House Wednesday as part of ongoing efforts to address concerns that certain provisions in the Clarity Act, including developer protections derived from the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, could make it harder to combat illicit finance, according to three sources familiar with the meetings.

The issue, along with ethics, remains one of the major sticking points that must be resolved before lawmakers can bring the bill to the Senate floor. Several Democrats have signaled they will not support the legislation unless law enforcement believes its concerns have been adequately addressed.

The meetings come on the heels of a broader industry push to win support for the bill from lawmakers and law enforcement, including a town hall and a fly-in featuring former law enforcement officials now working in crypto.

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

"Too Many Red Flags": BofA Tells Clients To "Take Profits" Amid Spike In Dot Com Bubble Similarities https://t.co/uHokJAIqgF

[ALLINCRYPTO @RealAllinCrypto]

🚨HUGE BANKING NEWS!

JPMorgan, Citi, BofA & Wells Fargo are reportedly building tokenised deposit network by 2027 to fight stablecoin migration.

They may use private DLTs, but public rails like $HBAR, $XLM, $XRP, $LINK, or $ALGO could also be involved!