Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 22, 2025 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
DOGE Understands Something the US Policy Establishment Does Not: Technology is the Spinal Cord of Government
Tech Policy Press “I was a founding member of the US Digital Service, the organization that as of January 20 became the US DOGE Service following an executive order under President Donald Trump. I have remained fairly silent over the past few weeks, largely because I have been processing the reality of an organization dedicated… Continue Reading
Financial Times – America has turned on its friends
Editorial Board – Financial Times [unpaywalled]: “Winston Churchill is credited with saying that America does the right thing after exhausting the alternatives. Donald Trump has turned that aphorism on its head. In the past 10 days, he has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership. Those who thought America was a friend or… Continue Reading
The untold history of how the internet almost didn’t happen
Inc. Magazine: “My name is Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan, and my dad is a founding father of the internet. From 1979 through 1981, my father, Major Joseph Haughney, ran one of the earliest versions of the internet, called the Arpanet. Back then, the Arpanet was a military-run project that allowed academics to do research if they… Continue Reading
Researcher Captures Contents of ‘DEI.gov’ Before It Was Hidden Behind a Password
404 Media [unpaywalled] “A German researcher captured the contents of the White House’s “DEI.gov” during a brief period when it was not password protected. The capture shows that the site contains a list of vague, alleged government-funded tasks and their costs, without sources or context, like “$1.3 million to Arab and Jewish photographers,” “$1.5 million… Continue Reading
Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy
EXECUTIVE ORDER February 19, 2025. By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1. Purpose. It is the policy of my Administration to dramatically reduce the size of the Federal Government, while increasing its accountability to the American… Continue Reading
America’s Last Best Thing
Frederick Joseph, On Trump’s National Park Layoffs and the Erosion of America’s Public Land: “…The national parks, they tell us, were created to preserve America’s most beautiful places. This is the story, the myth of preservation, the thing Ken Burns made into poetry. But what they do not tell you—at least, not loudly—is that these… Continue Reading
Public Library Ebook Service to Cull AI Slop After 404 Media Investigation
404 Media: “Hoopla, a service that provides public libraries around the country with ebooks, announced that it will do more to prevent the spread of low quality AI-generated books after a 404 Media investigation showed that they were common on its platform. “At hoopla, customer satisfaction is at the core of everything we do, and… Continue Reading
Trump expected to take control of USPS, fire postal board, officials say
Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “This is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people. That goes for everything else they’re trying to steal too.” The move threatens to upend trillions of dollars in e-commerce business and the 250-year-old Postal Service. President Donald Trump is preparing to… Continue Reading
AI can now model and design the genetic code for all domains of life with Evo 2
“Arc Institute researchers have developed a machine learning model called Evo 2 that is trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across the entire tree of life. Its deep understanding of biological code means that Evo 2 can identify patterns in gene sequences across disparate organisms that experimental researchers would need years to uncover.… Continue Reading
Falsehood of DOGE savings tracker that wants you to think it’s transparent
Fast Company: “The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has updated its website, and in theory, it’s a model of government transparency. The site lists savings the department claims to have made from cuts, along with bar charts and tables that purport to show the department’s work and the size and scope of the federal government.… Continue Reading
Were you fired by President Trump?
The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Democratic Staff, is surveying the impact of the Trump Administration’s mass firings of federal employees from science agencies. If you were terminated from your position since January 20, 2025, please fill out this brief survey. While anonymous submissions will be helpful to the Committee’s efforts, we encourage you… Continue Reading
