What is your story? Do you believe that AI-based tokens are worth it or is it too early to adopt them?

I'm stuck with this saying "SAVING IS WASTING", thinking that with the little amount of money I have, should I put it on an investment or should I just save it for my future expenses or emergencies. I'm also living in a country in which there are limited side hustles I could do to earn extra for investment, so I'm troubled somehow.

The lies about "If invested $1000 during IPO for MSFT you would have made $1.6m"

If you had invested $1,000 in Microsoft at its IPO, here’s how much money you’d have now

Published Mon, Nov 19 2018

A $1,000 investment in Microsoft on the day of its initial public offering, or IPO, on March 13, 1986, would be worth more than $1.6 million today, according to CNBC calculations. That includes price appreciation and dividends.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/19/how-much-a-1000-dollar-investment-in-microsoft-at-its-ipo-is-worth-now.html

The interviewers would just say the job is not entitled to any insurance or benefits, what they can offer is a very low base salary and the commission part would be subject to how many sales the employee can bring to their company.

Marx's Revenge

In what's perhaps an attempt to head off bad press — or, at very least, convince people he's not the bad guy — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has given Forbes an interview in which he claims that his for-profit company is ultimately going to bring about capitalism's downfall.

First, some context. Altman, who is also the president of the uber-influential Y Combinator startup incubator, is one of only OG OpenAI cofounders still standing. The company's decision to go from more of a research vehicle to a for-profit venture in 2019 was somewhat overshadowed by his fellow cofounder Elon Musk's decision to leave the firm — over some seemingly huge disagreements about its direction.

The CEO behind the record-breaking ChatGPT has a bit of a strange background, the TL;DR of which being that he once admitted to being a doomsday prepper who believes that killer artificial intelligence or a lab-modified virus could bring about the end of days.

Much of the OpenAI CEO's rhetoric in his recent Forbes exclusive hinges on the future — the future of the company, of course, but also on the future of AI in general, and how Altman believes it will dovetail with sentient AIs, otherwise known as artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Anxious General Intelligence

While Altman doesn't think we're that close to AIs gaining consciousness — a belief that's not quite shared by fellow OG OpenAI-er Ilya Sutskever — he did tell Forbes that creating AGI is "the thrust that drives all my actions" and, it seems, his raison d'etre for the firm.

In one exchange, Forbes' Alex Konrad noted the inherent tension regarding capitalism that's found between OpenAI's "research-driven" foundation and the buckets of money investors have put into it. Altman had a provocative response.

"I think capitalism is awesome. I love capitalism," he told Forbes. "Of all of the bad systems the world has, it's the best one — or the least bad one we found so far. I hope we find a way better one."

"I think that if AGI really truly fully happens," he continued, "I can imagine all these ways that it breaks capitalism."

If you're confused by this response, you're not alone. But then again, OpenAI itself was founded to head off the worst outcomes of AGI and is now apparently gunning to make it a reality — so confusion is, it seems, the most rational response to that revelation.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-agi-break-capitalism

• Some big-company CEOs are seeing big cuts to their compensation packages.
• The reductions come amid economic hardship across different industries, including Big Tech.
• Employees at some of the companies have seen their own pay cut — or jobs eliminated.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon

Though JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon received the same $34.5 million salary in 2022 as he did in 2021, last year marked a noticeable difference in that he was no longer given a "special award" worth millions.

In an SEC filing in January, the JPMorgan board wrote it was "committed to not grant any special awards to him in the future." The effort followed outcry over his $84.4 million salary in 2021, $52.6 million of which came from options awards, according to Marketwatch.

Apple CEO Tim Cook

Apple CEO Tim Cook is taking a 40% pay cut in 2023, bringing his annual target salary to $49 million for the year, per documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in January.

The executive requested the pay reduction himself, coming on the heels of recent controversy surrounding his hefty salary. In 2022, Apple investors were urged to vote against Cook's nearly $100 million pay package by a shareholder advisory firm.

The SEC filing references "concern" over Cook's total annual compensation in 2021 and 2022, noting the 2023 reduction comes amid "balancing shareholder feedback, a desire to continue to create meaningful performance and retention incentives, and Mr. Cook's support for changes."

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger

Intel said on February 1 that CEO Pat Gelsinger would take a 25% pay reduction this year. It's part of an effort to cut costs at the company. Gelsinger will be joined by other top executives at the company, who also are seeing salary cuts ranging from 5% to 15%.

"These changes are designed to impact our executive population more significantly and will help support the investments and overall workforce needed to accelerate our transformation and achieve our long-term strategy," an Intel spokesperson told Insider's Aidan Pollard.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon saw a 30% pay cut in 2022, bringing his salary to $25 million.

Per a filing with the SEC, his base salary remained unchanged at $2 million, and he made $23 million in annual variable compensation, down from $33 million the year prior. 

The reduction came as the bank struggled against economic headwinds, and laid off 6.5% of its global workforce.

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman also saw a 10% pay cut in 2022, taking home a total of $31.5 million.

The reduction is in response to "a challenging economic and market environment" which was "not as strong as the prior year in which the firm achieved record financial performance," the finance giant said, according to Bloomberg.

The company laid off 2% of its global workforce in 2022, or an estimated 81,000 employees.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, told employees in January that top executives will take a "very significant reduction in their annual bonus," but didn't specify by how much or for how long.

Pichai told employees during an all-hands meeting the cuts are "tied directly to company performance," Insider's Rosalie Chan and Hugh Langley reported.

His remarks came shortly after the company announced it is laying off 6% of its staffers, or an estimated 12,000 employees. In a memo obtained by Insider, Pichai wrote the reductions will "cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions."


https://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-taking-pay-cuts-prevent-layoffs-economic-hardship-list-2023-2

If desired, chickens can be bred even in an apartment building in a big city.  

Man Houses Tiger, Alligator in Harlem Apartment

NEW YORK – A tiger and an alligator found in a Manhattan apartment were sent to wildlife sanctuaries in Ohio and Indiana on Sunday while their owner recovered from bite wounds inflicted by the more than 400-pound cat.

Police said Antoine Yates, 31, would face reckless endangerment charges after he gets out of a hospital in Philadelphia, where he fled. He was listed in good condition.

Yates said the tiger grabbed him and "tore open my whole leg down to the bone." Yates told Philadelphia TV station KYW in a phone interview from his hospital bed that he was "trying to create a Garden of Eden, something that this world lacks."

A team of animal control officers, police and Bronx Zoo (search) workers removed the animals from Yates' fifth-floor apartment in a Harlem housing project on Saturday.

Wes Artope, director of the city's animal shelters, said the tiger, an orange and white Siberian-Bengal mix (search), had been kept in the apartment since he was a 6-week-old cub. The 20-month-old tiger now weighs at least 425 pounds, Artope said.

"He's huge," Artope said.

The tiger and the 5-foot-long alligator (search), both in good condition, were taken first to a local shelter, then to a Long Island animal sanctuary and then to Ohio, Artope said.

https://www.foxnews.com/story/man-houses-tiger-alligator-in-harlem-apartment

Unfortunately I can not find the original source of the screenshot. So if anyone knows anything, feel free to link it here. Thanks a lot in advance.

• Total credit card debt reached a record $930.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to the latest credit report from TransUnion.
• As balance rise, so have delinquencies, which is “something to watch,” says TransUnion’s Michele Raneri.

For most Americans, inflation and rising interest rates are a one-two punch.

On the heels of another rate hike this week by the Federal Reserve, credit card annual percentage rates are already near 20%, on average, and set to climb even higher. At the same time, more consumers are leaning on credit to afford increasingly expensive necessities, like food and rent.

That helped propel total credit card debt to a record $930.6 billion at the end of 2022, a 18.5% spike from a year earlier, according to the latest quarterly report by TransUnion.

The average balance rose to $5,805 over that same period, TransUnion found.

At nearly 20%, if you made minimum payments toward this average credit card balance, it would take you more than 17 years to pay off the debt and cost you more than $8,213 in interest, Bankrate calculated.

“Whether it’s shopping for a new car or buying eggs in the grocery store, consumers continue to be impacted in ways big and small by both high inflation and the interest rate hikes implemented by the Federal Reserve,” said Michele Raneri, vice president of U.S. research and consulting at TransUnion.

Overall, an additional 202 million new credit accounts were opened in the fourth quarter, led by originations among Generation Z, or adults ages 18 to 25, and the tally of total credit cards hit a record 518.4 million.

As the number of credit card accounts in the U.S. rises, more new customers are subprime borrowers, generally meaning those with a credit score of 600 or below, according to TransUnion, in part because of the flood of younger borrowers gaining access to credit cards.

But at the same time, delinquencies rose as lenders expand access to less-experienced credit users, the report found. TransUnion defines a delinquency as a payment that’s 60 days or more overdue.

“The increase in delinquencies is something to watch,” Raneri said. As long as unemployment stays down, households are better able to pay their bills, she noted. “If unemployment goes up, and we see a spike in delinquencies, then that indicates a longer-term problem.”

For now, the unemployment rate is at a 53-year low, after a better-than-expected January jobs report.

How to tackle high-interest credit card debt

“Cardholders do have options, though,” said Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree. Zero percent balance transfer credit card offers are even more plentiful than they were a year ago and remain one of the best weapons Americans have in the battle against credit card debt, he said.

Borrowers may also be able to refinance into a lower-interest personal loan. Those rates have climbed recently, as well, but at 10%, on average, are still well below what you currently have on your credit card, according to Schulz.

Otherwise, go back to the basics, advised Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.

“Take on a side hustle, sell stuff you don’t need, cut your expenses,” he said. “A dollar saved is a dollar earned, and every dollar of credit card debt that you pay down has an average guaranteed, tax-free return of about 20%.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/03/us-credit-card-debt-jumps-18point5percent-and-hits-a-record-930point6-billion-.html

The largest global bird flu outbreak in recorded history has combined with increased costs of fuel, feed and packaging to create a national egg shortage that's about to become worse.

Eggs are a staple that, for decades, have easily (and relatively cheaply) been purchased from grocery stores and stocked in kitchens, but they've become increasingly hard to come by or way more expensive in recent months. In some stores across the U.S., customers are limited in the amount of egg cartons they can buy.

One of the reasons behind the sudden shortage is the outbreak of bird flu that, after starting last year, has killed millions of birds in a dozen countries around the world, including poultry and wild birds. In the U.S., more than 58 million birds in 47 states have been affected, according to the Department of Agriculture.

But disruptions in the supply chain have also played a part in the current national shortage, as have inflation and the increased cost of gasoline and diesel last year. But while inflation was reined in by the end of last year, the price of eggs peaked in December, when the average cost for a dozen eggs in U.S. cities reached $4.25, $1.78 more than a year earlier.

The future, as Easter approaches, doesn't seem to bring a solution. The costs of fuel, transportation, feed and packaging have increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. The bird flu, which usually hits during migration in spring only to once again disappear a few months down the line, did not come and go last year. It stayed, and it has given no signs of slowing.

The virus spreading among birds around the world is a new strain that is highly transmissible among the animals and incredibly deadly. Millions of birds worldwide have been put in lockdowns to avoid infection, while thousands were culled.

Less birds means fewer eggs, especially as the virus tends to affect older birds rather than the young ones consumed as meat. According to the Department of Agriculture, the culling of birds at commercial facilities in the U.S. has led to an average of a 7.5 percent drop in domestic egg supply each month since the outbreak began last year.

Additionally, in Bozrah, Connecticut, on Saturday, a fire burned for hours at the Hillandale Farms property before being extinguished, killing an unknown number of chickens. Unconfirmed media reports claimed that about 100,000 birds died in the fire.

As spring approaches, together with new wild bird migration, a new wave of infection is likely to hit American poultry.



https://www.newsweek.com/america-egg-shortage-about-get-whole-lot-worse-1777534

After a long run of surging profits from pandemic-era shopping sprees, Amazon is feeling the hangover. The retail and tech giant is reporting its first unprofitable year since 2014.

Amazon lost $2.7 billion last year, the company said on Thursday. This was despite holiday-season sales growing 9%. Amazon's shares fell in after hours trading.

By far, the biggest culprit for Amazon's losses over the year was the company's hefty investment in the electric automaker Rivian whose value plummeted last year and ate into Amazon's bottom line.

Amazon had taken a 20% stake in Rivian and has begun rolling out the carmaker's electric delivery vans. Rivian wanted to replicate Tesla's success and held one of the largest initial public offerings in U.S. history. But last year, the exuberance faded, the carmaker made pricing missteps and it fell short of growth targets. Its stock price dropped 82%.

For Amazon, the loss on its investment comes right when it contends with the need to recalibrate after a pandemic-era upsurge.

During the pandemic, the appetite for online shopping seemed to promise exponential growth, and many believed the habit changes could be permanent. Amazon couldn't hire and built warehouses fast enough; its profits doubled and kept growing. But then people returned to physical stores, switched from cocooning to travel and outings, and eventually got more hesitant to spend as inflation rose.

Amazon began reconsidering its warehouse expansion plans. Industry reports tracked cancellations, closures and delays. Andy Jassy, in a rare Amazon CEO appearance on a quarterly call with investors, said his top priority was cutting costs in the company's operations.

"It's important to remember that over the last few years we took a fulfillment-center footprint that we built over 25 years and doubled it in just a couple of years," he said. "We at the same time built out a transportation network, for last mile, roughly the size of UPS. Just to get those functional, it took everything we had."

Last month, Amazon announced it expected to cut 18,000 jobs, or about 5% of the corporate workforce. Jassy, in a blog post, referenced "the uncertain economy" and the company's pandemic-era hiring spree.

At the peak, in late 2021-early 2022, Amazon employed more than 1.6 million part-time and full-time workers globally. Thursday's financial report shows that number is now down to 1.5 million.

In October, the company — the second-largest private employer in the U.S. — raised the average starting pay for U.S. warehouse and delivery workers to $19 an hour from $18 to stay competitive.

Now, Amazon is also seeing growth slow down also in its biggest money-maker, the cloud computing business — as companies scale back in the face of high inflation and interest rates.

When reporters asked about the slowdown at Amazon Web Services Thursday, Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said: "We realize everyone's trying to cut their budgets – we are in our main Amazon business... We do expect to see some slower growth rates for the next few quarters."

Still, Amazon continues to invest in new ventures. The company is working to close its $4 billion deal to buy One Medical, a chain of primary-care clinics. And it launched a $5 subscription service for generic prescription medication for its paying Prime members, hoping to draw more people into the program.

Separately, the company faces a protracted fight against an upstart unionization push. Amazon last month lost its bid to overturn the first-ever union win at a Staten Island warehouse. Federal labor officials ordered the company to begin bargaining with the Amazon Labor Union. But the matter is likely to reach courts.

In recent weeks, Amazon received a series of citations for safety violations from federal inspectors at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This is for six warehouses in Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois and New York.

OSHA officials found Amazon warehouse workers at high risk of lower back and other injuries from twisting, bending and lifting that they perform as much as nine times per minute. The company was expected to appeal, and a spokesperson said the allegations didn't "reflect the reality of safety at our sites."

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1153562994/amazon-reports-its-first-unprofitable-year-since-2014

Billionaire Charlie Munger Reveals The Reason Berkshire Hathaway Is Sitting On $88 Billion in Cash

February 1, 2023

The S&P 500 dipped by 19% in 2022, but stocks still don’t seem cheap to Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s billionaire partner at Berkshire Hathaway.

“In my whole adult life, I have never hoarded cash, waiting for better conditions,” Munger said in an interview in late 2022. “I’ve just invested in the best thing I could find.”

Yet he acknowledged that Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on billions of dollars in cash. The reason isn’t that Buffett and Munger think they can wait for stocks to get even cheaper — the wager known as “timing the market.”

Instead, Munger said bluntly that Berkshire isn’t buying anything “because there’s nothing we can stand buying.”

It’s an amazing statement. Even with a stock market downturn that would presumably result in dozens or hundreds of stocks trading on sale, at bargain-level prices, the world’s most famous value investors aren’t remotely tempted to dive in.

https://news.yahoo.com/billionaire-charlie-munger-reveals-reason-153733112.html

Less supply to balance out demand—and keep prices high.

As the PC industry flounders, Intel suffered from such disastrous sales last quarter that it instituted pay cuts and other extreme measures going forward. AMD’s client PC sales also dropped dramatically—a whopping 51 percent year-over-year—but the company managed to eke out a small profit despite the sky falling. So why aren’t CPU and GPU prices falling too? In a call with investors Tuesday night, CEO Lisa Su confirmed that AMD has been “undershipping” chips for a while now to balance supply and demand.

“We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters,” Su said, as spotted by PC Gamer. “We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4. We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1.”

With the pandemic winding down and inflation ramping up, far fewer people are buying CPUs, GPUs, and PCs. It’s a hard, sudden reverse from just months ago, when companies like Nvidia and AMD were churning out graphic cards as quickly as possible to keep up with booming demand from cryptocurrency miners and PC gamers alike. Now that GPU mining is dead, shelves are brimming with unsold chips.

This article originally published with the headline “AMD is ‘undershipping’ chips to keep CPU, GPU prices elevated” but it has been updated to reflect AMD’s clarification.

Despite the painfully high price tags of new next-gen GPUs, last-gen GeForce RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards are still selling for very high prices considering their two-year-old status. Strategic under-shipping helps companies maintain higher prices for their wares.

AMD isn’t the only one doing it, either.

“We’re continuing to watch each and every day in terms of the sell-through that we’re seeing,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said to investors in November. “So we have been undershipping. We have been undershipping gaming at this time so that we can correct that inventory that is out in the channel.”

Since then, Nvidia has released the $1,200 GeForce RTX 4080 and $800 RTX 4070 Ti, two wildly overpriced graphics cards, and tried positioning them as enthusiast-grade upsells over the RTX 30-series, rather than treating them like the usual cyclical upgrades. AMD’s $900 Radeon RX 7900 XT offers similarly disappointing value and the company recently released a blog post also positioning its new GPUs as enthusiast-grade upsells.

Overall gross margin is a key metric for chip companies, which burn through a ton of cash investing in R&D and cutting-edge technological processes. AMD’s market tricks helped it achieve a 51 percent non-GAAP gross margin last quarter, while Intel forecasted a terrifyingly low 34.1 percent gross margin for the upcoming quarter (hence its belt-tightening moves).

This all helps explain why street prices for standalone GPUs haven’t plummeted, even as deals on desktops and laptops have started ramping up. We expect—hope?—that as stocks dwindle down and competition ramps up, sanity will return to graphics card prices, mirroring AMD and Intel’s recent CPU price adjustments. Just this morning, Intel announced that its Arc A750 graphics card was getting a price cut to $250, instantly making it an all-too-rare tempting target for PC gamers on a budget.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/1499957/amd-is-undershipping-chips-to-keep-cpu-gpu-prices-elevated.html

• Shell reported adjusted earnings of $39.9 billion for the full-year 2022.
• This comfortably surpasses the $28.4 billion in 2008 which Shell said was the firm’s previous annual record and is more than double the firm’s full-year 2021 profit of $19.29 billion.
• Shell announced a $4 billion share buyback program, which is expected to be completed by its first-quarter 2023 results, and a 15% dividend per share increase for the fourth quarter.

British oil giant Shell on Thursday posted its highest-ever annual profit, bolstered by soaring fossil fuel prices and robust demand since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.

Shell reported adjusted earnings of $39.9 billion for the full-year 2022. This comfortably surpasses the $28.4 billion in 2008 which Shell said was the firm’s previous annual record and is more than double the firm’s full-year 2021 profit of $19.29 billion.

Analysts polled by Refinitiv had expected full-year 2022 net profit to come in at $38.3 billion.

For the final quarter of 2022, Shell reported adjusted earnings of $9.8 billion.

Shell announced a $4 billion share buyback program, which is expected to be completed by its first-quarter 2023 results — due out by early May — and a 15% dividend per share increase for the fourth quarter.

“It is a huge year for Shell and a huge year to look back on as well,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick in his first earnings interview since taking on the role on Jan. 1.

“I feel privileged to be stepping into this role at such a great point in the company’s history. As we look ahead, I think we have a unique opportunity to be able to succeed as the winner in the energy transition. We have a portfolio that I think is second to none,” Sawan said.

“My focus will be very much around performance and capital discipline,” he added.

The results follow in the footsteps of historic annual earnings for U.S. oil majors Exxon Mobil and Chevron, with the West’s largest oil and gas companies expected to rake in combined profits of nearly $200 billion for the year, according to Refinitiv data.

The extraordinary scale of the industry’s earnings has renewed criticism and sparked calls for a Big Oil windfall profit tax.

Shell said last month that it expected to take a $2 billion hit for the final three months of 2022 as a result of new taxes in the European Union and the U.K.

“Ultimately, taxes are a matter for governments to decide on. We, of course, engage and provide perspectives and the key perspective that we try to provide is a context around the fact that companies like ourselves that need to invest multiple billion dollars to support the energy transition require a secure and stable investment climate,” Sawan said.

“For example, windfall taxes or price caps simply erode confidence in that investment stability and so I do worry about some of the moves being made,” he continued.

“I think there is a different approach that needs to be had which is to really draw investment capital at a time when we need to be able to embed energy security into the broader energy system here in Europe.”

Shares of the London-listed company rose 1.9% during morning deals on Thursday.

‘Energy trilemma’

Shell said its cash capital expenditure outlook for 2023 sits between $23 billion to $27 billion. Of that, Sawan said roughly one-third if not slightly more would go into areas like renewables.

Shell, which is aiming to become a net-zero emissions business by 2050, said that adjusted earnings for its Renewable and Energy Solutions unit came in at $293 million for the final three months of 2022, down from $383 million in the third quarter.

“Shell can’t claim to be in transition as long as investments in fossil fuels dwarf investments in renewables,” said Mark van Baal, founder of Dutch group Follow This.

“The bulk of Shell’s investments remain tied to fossil fuel businesses, because the company doesn’t have a target to slash its total CO2 emissions this decade, as is required to reach Paris.”

In recent quarters, Big Oil executives have defended their rising profits and said the significant disruption to global energy markets due to the war in Ukraine has reaffirmed the importance of helping to solve “the energy trilemma.”

According to a statement to investors from BP CEO Bernard Looney late last year, this refers to “secure, affordable and lower carbon energy.”

Climate campaigners and activist shareholders have been sharply critical.

“That Shell’s annual profits more than doubled last year, while millions of people have been facing the impossible choice between putting food on the table and heating their homes, is simply staggering,” said Sana Yusuf, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

“People can see the injustice of paying eye-watering energy costs while big oil and gas firms rake in billions,” Yusuf said.

U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil on Tuesday reported a $56 billion profit for 2022, marking a historic high for the Western oil industry, while Chevron on Friday posted a record $36.5 billion profit for last year.

British oil major BP is scheduled to report full-year earnings on Feb .7, with France’s TotalEnergies slated to follow on Feb. 8.


https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/02/shell-earnings-oil-giant-reports-record-annual-profits.html

President Biden is about to approve a policy that goes much farther than any previous effort to protect private companies from malicious hackers—and to retaliate against those hackers with our own cyberattacks.

The 35-page document, titled “National Cybersecurity Strategy,” differs from the dozen or so similar papers signed by presidents over the past quarter-century in two significant ways: First, it imposes mandatory regulations on a wide swath of American industries. Second, it authorizes U.S. defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies to go on the offensive, hacking into the computer networks of criminals and foreign governments, in retaliation to—or preempting—their attacks on American networks.

“Our goal is to make malicious actors incapable of mounting sustained cyber-enabled campaigns that would threaten the national security or public safety of the United States,” the document states in a five-page section titled “Disrupt and Dismantle Threat Activities,” according to a draft exclusively viewed by Slate. (The document has not yet been publicly released, though it will be after Biden signs it, an event anticipated sometime this month.)

Under the new strategy, the U.S. will “disrupt and dismantle” hostile networks as part of a persistent, continuous campaign. This campaign will be coordinated by the FBI’s National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force working in tandem with all relevant U.S. agencies—a systematic collaboration that has rarely been attempted and never before publicized. Private companies—both firms that are frequent targets of cyberattacks and firms that specialize in cybersecurity methods—will be full partners in this effort, both to alert the government task force of intrusions and to help repel them. (In the past, many of these firms, especially in Silicon Valley, have been reluctant to be seen cooperating with the government on these issues.)

The new strategy—which was in the works for much of 2022 under the supervision of senior White House officials—stems from the growing recognition of two facts, which have long been obvious to specialists.

First, mere guidelines on cybersecurity—which Washington has previously allowed private companies to follow voluntarily—have, for the most part, failed to block major intrusions by foreign governments or cybercriminals.

Second, purely defensive measures have also had limited impact, as a clever hacker will eventually find ways around them.

The United States has conducted cyber-offensive operations for many decades. Bill Clinton was the first president to acknowledge this fact publicly. In 2012, Barack Obama issued Presidential Policy Directive No. 20, which established  strict controls,  including that the president’s explicit permission was needed for all cyber-offensive operations. (Classified Top Secret, it was one of many documents leaked by Edward Snowden.) In 2018, President Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum No. 13, which loosened those controls, giving defense and intelligence agencies enormous leeway to mount offensive campaigns themselves.

Gen. Paul Nakasone, who was and still is NSA director and Cyber Command chief (the two positions are generally held by the same four-star officer), was the chief advocate of that approach. In an article he later wrote for Foreign Affairs, he described the mission, with its greater latitude, as “hunt forward” and “persistent engagement.”

At the time, many feared that the end of tight controls would unleash excess and blowback, and ultimately harm security. But, as one official who used to be among the fearful told me last week, “None of those horrible things happened.”

As a result, Biden and his team decided to push the Trump-Nakasone policy further. The strategy that Biden is set to approve covers only those offensive operations designed to disrupt hostile actors’ attempts to hack into U.S. networks. At the same time, however, the Pentagon is drafting a new cyber strategy, which applies the White House paper’s principles to cyber policies, both defensive and broadly offensive.

The other sections of the Biden paper—which includes 30 pages dealing with purely defensive measures—outline still more drastic departures from present policies to protect the nation’s “critical infrastructure.” That term, “critical infrastructure,” was coined in the mid-1990s and refers to economic sectors—such as banking, finance, electrical power, water works, transportation systems, telecommunications, and emergency management services—that are essential to modern societies and are connected to computer networks, meaning they are vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all signed orders and created agencies to strengthen the resiliency of these sectors. A few aides to all three presidents tried to impose mandatory cybersecurity regulations on companies in these sectors, but corporate lobbyists successfully resisted their efforts, as did some economic advisers, who warned (perhaps correctly) that regulations would curtail innovation. So enforcement of the rules has been, until now, strictly voluntary.

The new strategy stems from a recognition that voluntary measures in most of those sectors don’t work. There are exceptions—for instance, banks. Cybersecurity is central to their business; if they get hacked too often, customers will take their deposits elsewhere; banks also have the money to hire very good specialists. However, for public utilities, such as power plants, cybersecurity is very expensive. Mandatory regulations are needed to prod them into action.

At the same time, the new strategy recognizes that  uniform standards for all sectors—which some aides under past presidents tried to formulate—don’t work either. As an alternative, more than a year ago, the Biden White House started analyzing each sector, in consultation with the federal agency that had authority over each sector and with the companies that would be affected by regulations.

For instance, according to one official, the TSA identified 97 oil and gas pipelines that serviced at least 25,000 Americans. The White House then held three meetings with executives of the companies that owned the pipelines. At one meeting, after being vetted for security clearances, the executives were briefed by intelligence officials on the threats their pipelines faced.

Officials have also met with state utility commissions on the threats to electric power grids and on measures to improve security. Just before Christmas, in a bill signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York became the first state to issue new mandatory cybersecurity regulations. It will be assisted by a few federal experts as well as a chunk of the $1.5 billion that the White House is allotting to states that take this leap. Similarly, this month, according to one official, the EPA will issue new regulations on the cybersecurity of the nation’s waterworks.

Context is another big difference between Biden’s strategy and earlier attempts to impose regulations. As recently as a few years ago, many corporate executives perceived cyber threats as theoretical. Now they are obviously anything but. In 2020, Russia’s massive hack on SolarWinds—which affected system management tools on the computers of more than 30,000 agencies and firms involved in critical infrastructure—was a major wake-up call. In 2021, a criminal gang’s ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline—which shut down the flow of gasoline and jet fuel to 17 states until Colonial paid 75 Bitcoins (at the time worth $4.4 million) to the hacker group—was another.

The Colonial hack couldn’t have happened had even rudimentary security measures been followed. It was a big part of what led Biden to impose mandatory regulations on pipelines. The new strategy spreads such regulations across the other critical industries.

Michael Daniel, Obama’s cyberpolicy coordinator who now heads the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit group of security providers and IT firms, told me, “There’s definitely been a shift in business thinking. It’s one thing if your spreadsheets are wrecked—quite another if it’s your pacemaker. With recognition that cyberattacks can cause physical damage, some degree of government regulation is inevitable.”

Many of these companies also do business abroad, where regulations are much more stringent. If they need to follow regulations in Europe, Australia, or Canada, they might as well follow them here, too.

Still, the new strategy won’t solve all the problems. There are several sectors—including food and agriculture, emergency services, and several manufacturing industries—where Congress would need to pass authorities to regulate. And the new Congress, at least on the House side, doesn’t seem interested in passing much of anything, much less additional regulations on business.

Even for sectors where the executive branch already has authority, the lines of authority—which agencies can write and enforce which regulations over whom—aren’t entirely clear. During the drafting of the National Cybersecurity Strategy, the two White House officials in charge—Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies (appointed by Biden), and Chris Inglis, the national cyber director (a position newly created by Congress just two years ago)—sometimes clashed over these matters. Compromises were made, and a consensus was reached between the two of them and among more than 20 federal agencies. Still, there are, inevitably, some lingering ambiguities, which are to be settled in a subsequent “implementation strategy.”

It was way back in October 1997 when President Clinton’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection warned of “cyber attacks” that could “paralyze or panic large segments of society” and “limit the freedom of action of our national leadership”—adding, “We must learn to negotiate a new geography, where borders are irrelevant and distances meaningless, where an enemy may be able to harm the vital systems we depend on without confronting our military power.”

A quarter-century later, Biden’s new strategy goes a long distance toward coming to grips with this new geography. But in many ways, we’re still negotiating.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/01/biden-cybersecurity-inglis-neuberger.html