> they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
This is demonstrably false.
ISIL’s explosives training material in particular is produced with great professionalism and is of extremely high quality.
Al Qaeda’s was a bit more hit an miss, some of it was mostly ideological propaganda and some of it was outstanding but it was otherwise well structured with clear learning outcomes and assessment activities.
Most of this material was produced well before AI was a thing.
Any role I advertise at the little known company I work for will routinely get 600-1000 completely unsuitable applicants within a couple of weeks, mostly with +91 phone numbers.
I hit the safety filters with almost every meaningful task I tried to test it against, and these all happened to be benign tasks that Opus 4.8 does reasonably well.
> The obvious counterexample is NOBUS[0] vulnerabilities, and intentional backdoors like the Clipper Chip[1] or Dual_EC_DRBG[2]: if you genuinely believe you are the only one who could possibly exploit it, there's no reason to avoid using it.
The problem with these examples is that they weren't used in national security systems, which are the systems for which NSA has a legislated defensive responsibility.
Clipper was designed for use by the public; it was not intended to ever be used to protect classified (or even sensitive unclassified) information at all.
Likewise with Dual_EC_DRBG. The CSfC component requirements drew from the Common Criteria Protection Profiles, where Dual_EC_DRBG was never an option.
One thing you can do is have your adversary put their money where their mouth is and use the very same products, sourced independently, that they use to protect their own sensitive information.
There are limits to this of course. You can’t buy a TACLANE[1], but you can buy many of the other products[2] USG uses to protect its own classified information.
The big 4 Australian banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank and Westpac) all employ pretty much the same number of people now as they did 25 years ago, but their workforce composition has changed. More software developers, fewer branch staff.
None of these things on macOS are difficult. You can mostly treat a Mac like an iPhone and have a pleasant time.
A problem Windows admins often face is that there are lots of knobs to tweak, and because they can tweak a knob in GPO, they (or their bosses) start believing that they automatically should.
The downside of it being so easy is that many talentless hacks got jobs maintaining Windows environments for a living, including in your IT department.
Most businesses of any sophistication need specialised software developed only for Windows.
The local car dealership runs factory diagnostic software on Windows.
The two-way radio shop tunes and programs radios using vendor software written for Windows.
Your dentist runs their practice management software runs on Windows, and they Windows software to control other expensive equipment like X-ray machines and 3D scanners.
> I've had the good fortune to fly on the top deck of the 747. I highly recommend it.
I used to fly frequently between SYD-LAX in business class on Qantas B744s. 11K (top deck, right hand side exit row window seat) was one of the best seats in the house.
The only passengers who had it better were those downstairs in First, where the curvature of the nose pretty much let them see out the front of the aircraft through the “side” windows.
This is demonstrably false.
ISIL’s explosives training material in particular is produced with great professionalism and is of extremely high quality.
Al Qaeda’s was a bit more hit an miss, some of it was mostly ideological propaganda and some of it was outstanding but it was otherwise well structured with clear learning outcomes and assessment activities.
Most of this material was produced well before AI was a thing.