UL NO. 465 | The SaaS Attack Vector, Project Stargate, and Undersea Cable Drones

Hey there!

• Spent like 20 hours over the past few weeks updating my Home, About, Projects, Telos (new), and Predictions pages on the new site! Highly recommend you 1) check mine out, and 2) make your own! The new front page and the About page took the longest by far.

• Highly recommend checking out two podcast episodes:

  • Dan Carlin on Alexander the Great MORE (Biographies are my favorite now! So happy Dan is back!)

  • An Acquired episode on TSMC MORE ← Super inspiring and informative

• My buddy Joseph has gone independent! So happy for him! He’s now a full-time bug-bounty hacker and entrepreneur! Can’t wait to see his 2025.

Have a great week!

Daniel

SECURITY

SaaS Attack Surface Growing 200 Apps Per Month Per 100 Employees
New research shows the average employee creates a new SaaS account every two weeks, which is creating massive security blind spots for companies. The 2024 Verizon DBIR found that web applications were involved in about 50% of all security incidents, and 80% of breaches now involve compromised SaaS credentials according to Crowdstrike.

Google's Automation of Threat Detection
Google just shared how they handle threat detection at massive scale, and they're doing some wild stuff around automation and response time. They went from response times of weeks to just hours, and they're doing it by automating 97% of their detection work.

Microsoft AI Red Team Shows How to Attack AI
Microsoft's AI Red Team published their findings from attacking over 100 AI products, sharing key lessons for identifying risks and vulnerabilities. Their most interesting insight is that basic techniques like prompt injection often work better than complex attacks, and that combining multiple simple techniques is usually the most effective approach.

DJI Removes All Geofencing from Its Drones
DJI just announced they're removing all geofencing restrictions from their drones in the US, meaning you can now technically fly them anywhere including airports, wildfires, and the White House. How is this not going to get them TikToked?

New Administration Announces Project Stargate
The new administration along with Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, and Masayoshi Son launched a new AI project called Stargate. It’s basically a new company and $500 billion-dollar investment designed to make sure the US wins the AI war with China.

Pentagon Using AI to Speed Up Military Planning
The Pentagon is now using AI from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to help identify and assess threats faster, but they're supposedly being careful to keep humans in control of any actual weapons. Narrator: “For now”.

Trump Dissolves DHS Advisory Committees Including CISA Board
The new Trump administration just terminated all DHS advisory committees, including CISA's Cyber Safety Review Board that was investigating critical infrastructure attacks. The CSRB was in the middle of investigating Chinese telecom hacks by Salt Typhoon, and Senator Ron Wyden called the move "a massive gift to Chinese spies."

AI-Powered Brad Pitt Scam Costs Woman €830k
A French interior designer lost €830k to scammers using AI to impersonate Brad Pitt in an online romance scam that lasted 18 months.

Trump Rescinds Biden's AI Safety Executive Order
Trump killed Biden's main AI safety executive order from 2023 that required companies like OpenAI to share safety test results with the government. And then he launched Stargate, which is all about moving fast to beat China.

NATO Deploys Sea Drones to Protect Undersea Cables
NATO has launched Operation Baltic Sentry, putting 20 autonomous boats in the Baltic Sea to protect undersea cables from Russian sabotage. Water drones. I don’t know why I didn’t think about that when I was commenting on it last week. Love it.

Anduril Building $1B Weapons Factory in Ohio
Palmer Luckey's defense tech company Anduril is building a massive 5-million-square-foot weapons factory in Columbus, Ohio called Arsenal-1. They're dropping close to $1B of their own money on this thing, and they picked the location partly because of the nearby Rickenbacker Airport's 12,000-foot runways.

AI / TECH

Companies Are Using Your Data to Charge You More
The FTC just released data showing companies are using your location, demographics, and even mouse movements to charge you different prices for the same products. According to FTC Chair Lina Khan, they're investigating eight companies that sell these "surveillance pricing" systems.

Trump Announces $500B AI Infrastructure Project (Stargate)
Trump just announced "Stargate", a massive $500 billion AI infrastructure project with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank as the main partners. The project aims to build data centers across the US and create 100,000 jobs, with Sam Altman, Masayoshi Son, and Larry Ellison all appearing at the White House announcement.

Perplexity Releases Sonar, a Real-Time AI Search API
Perplexity just launched an API that lets developers build their real-time AI search capabilities into their own apps, and Zoom's already using it in their video platform. And the pricing is really competitive at $5 per 1,000 searches for the base tier, with a Pro tier available for more complex queries. I was already using this API so I’m not sure how it’s different, though. And the docs don’t make it clear. 🤷🏼

Transformer² Introduces Self-Adaptive Language Models
Sakana AI just released a new approach that lets language models dynamically adjust their weights in real-time based on the task they're working on. Their method, called Transformer², uses reinforcement learning to enhance or suppress different parts of the model's "brain" components, leading to significantly better performance.

TSMC Starts Making 4nm Chips in Arizona
TSMC has officially started making 4nm chips at their new Arizona plant, which is a massive win for US semiconductor manufacturing. I wonder how many people are thinking that Arizona is Plan A if China takes Taiwan. Seems like the obvious move. The US is in tremendously good position right now.

TSMC Resumes Production After Taiwan Earthquake
Speaking of TSMC, they had to temporarily halt chip production after a 6.4 magnitude earthquake hit the southern part of the island, but they're already back up and running.

Meta Cutting 5% of Workforce for Performance
Zuck just announced they're letting go of about 3,600 people by February 10th, but they're planning to refill those positions with new hires.

Meta's 'Seamless' Brings Us Closer to Universal Translators
Meta just released a new AI translation system called Seamless that can translate speech between 36 languages while preserving the speaker's voice and emotional tone. We’re getting closer to the Universal Translator! MORE

New Laser Tech Measures 100km Within Nanometers
Scientists have created a new laser measurement technique that can measure distances of over 100km with nanometer-level precision, which is absolutely wild. That's like measuring the distance between two cities with the precision of 1/1000th the width of a human hair.

RSS Is Making a Comeback
RSS is having a renaissance because it lets you get all the good stuff from social media without the algorithmic manipulation. You follow your sources, and you’re good. This article shows how to use RSS to follow everything from YouTube channels to Reddit (filtering for high-quality posts only). MY RSS FEED BTW

Github Actions Falls Short for Complex Projects
A developer shares his frustrating experience with Github Actions breaking down in larger, more complex environments like monorepos with multiple teams. The main issues include broken required checks for PRs, overly complex YAML configurations, and a complete lack of local testing capabilities.

HUMANS

Japan's Elderly Women Choose Prison Over Loneliness
Japanese elderly women are increasingly choosing to commit petty crimes to get into prison, where they get meals, healthcare, and community they can't find outside. This is horribly depressing to me.

US Worker Job Satisfaction Hits 10-Year Low
A new Gallup poll shows American workers are more checked out than they've been in a decade, with only 31% saying they're engaged at work. The biggest drops were among younger workers and those in tech, with remote work satisfaction also taking a surprising dive from 69% to 48% since 2021.

Sweden to Spend €104M Bringing Back Print Textbooks
Sweden is reversing its 2009 all-digital education initiative by bringing back printed textbooks to classrooms after seeing declining reading and writing skills among students.

Study Shows Undocumented Immigrants Commit Far Less Crime
A comprehensive study in Texas from 2012-2018 found that undocumented immigrants commit violent and drug crimes at less than half the rate of native-born citizens, and property crimes at just 25% the rate of native-born citizens.

Healthcare Giants Caught Marking Up Cancer Drugs 1000%
The FTC just released a report showing UnitedHealth and other major healthcare companies were marking up cancer drugs by over 1,000%, affecting drugs like Imatinib for leukemia treatment.

Medicare to Negotiate Prices for Ozempic and Other Major Drugs
Medicare just added 15 more drugs to their price negotiation list, including the super-popular Ozempic and Wegovy.

Greenland Sharks Can Live for Over 500 Years
Scientists discovered Greenland sharks are the longest-living vertebrates on Earth, with some potentially being alive since before Columbus.

IDEAS

Stoicism’s Gift
The greatest gift that Stoicism has given me is the ability to enjoy something I still have as if I no longer have it. It’s the ultimate frame.

DISCOVERY

sshcont: SSH Into Throwaway Docker Containers
A new open source tool lets you instantly spin up disposable Docker containers via SSH for quick testing and development. It's super lightweight and works with various distros including Debian, RHEL, and Alpine, with the containers getting automatically cleaned up when you're done.

A bunch of my buddy Joseph Thacker’s favorite lists

Getting People’s Names Right With Raycast

What I Wish I Knew Before Quitting My Job
Michael Drogalis shares his raw experience of how quitting his job to work on his own turned out way harder than expected. He talks about the brutal reality of going from a $425K tech salary to making basically nothing, and how isolation and loss of structure hit him particularly hard.

How Hypothesis Sheets Can Guide Startup Ideas
Michael Bock shares a really practical framework called "Hypothesis Sheets" for validating B2B startup ideas before committing to them.

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Try something different with your meditation for the next few weeks.

Make a list of the relationships and other good things you have in your life. Things like:

• Your husband/wife

• A particular kid you have

• A close friend

• The fact that you aren’t hungry or cold

Now imagine that thing gone. But really imagine it. Like put yourself in that mental mode of being without your spouse, or that friend.

Imagine what you would do next. What does a day look like. Imagine watching TV. Imagine brushing your teeth. But without that person on the planet.

Then wake up. And realize they’re still here.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

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