EFF: “Last month’s unprecedented global IT failure should be a wakeup call. Decades of antitrust inaction have made many industries dangerously reliant on the same tools, making such crises inevitable.
We must demand regulators break up the digital monocultures that are creating a less competitive, less safe, and less free digital world. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) solicited public commentslast year on the state of the cloud computing market. EFF made it clear that the consolidation of service providers has created new dangers for everyone and urged the commission to encourage interoperability so customers could more easily switch and mix cloud services. Microsoft cautioned against intervention, touting the benefits of centralized cloud services for IT security.
A year later, a key cloud-based cybersecurity firm released a bug unique to Microsoft systems. Vital IT systems were disrupted for millions worldwide. This fragility goes beyond issues at a specific firm, it results from power being overly concentrated around a few major companies.”
ProPublica: The Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans – As Donald Trump tried to disavow the politically toxic project, its director, Paul Dans, stepped down. But the plans and massive staffing database that he prepared — to replace thousands of members of the “deep state” with MAGA loyalists — remain…But then again, his resignation was at least partly symbolic: The work of Project 2025 is largely done. Under Dans, the project has assembled a database of more than 10,000 names — job candidates vetted for loyalty to Trump’s cause — who will be ready to deploy into federal agencies should he win the 2024 election. Project 2025 has delivered a toolkit, ready for use, to create a second Trump administration that would be decidedly more MAGA than the first.
The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire…”