Last Bakers missed these
Gabriel Sterling transcript and video…he was tweeted about by Lin Wood he got a $10 million grant while still working for Georgia Secretary of State. He was in charge of Voter deployment video is a twitch interview from August
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REBELLION DEFENSE New dig
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Rebellion Defense
https://hackerone.com/rebellion-defense?type=team
Introduction
Rebellion Defense is a new kind of defense company, built on the conviction that national defense is a shared responsibility. We take an unconventional approach to empower the mission of defense and national security through continual delivery of critical technology — because conventional methods aren't working.
The security and safety of our products and our customers' data is paramount. We work in an open partnership with the security community, and we recognize the critical work that white-hat hackers bring to securing the internet as a whole. To that end, this policy contains our guidelines and promises to you, the community, about how we will cooperate with good-faith security researchers that are providing us such critical support.
Scope
This vulnerability disclosure policy covers all systems created or operated by Rebellion Defense on the internet. This includes not only our publicly facing websites but also our development, staging, and production environments.
In addition, this vulnerability disclosure policy covers all exposure of code, documentation, or data marked "REBELLION INTERNAL", except information shared with you or your company under NDA.
This vulnerability disclosure policy excludes any services run entirely by our customers, or third-party vendors (such as e-mail providers, marketing providers, etc.). If you are unsure whether a particular item is in scope, please contact us prior to testing it at security@rebelliondefense.com.
Please do not send emails to the form on our Contact Us page (https://rebelliondefense.com/contact) unless 100% necessary for a PoC.
The scope is also limited to technical vulnerabilities in Rebellion Defense owned and operated systems only; please do not try to social engineer or phish our staff, break into our offices, send us threatening letters cut from magazines, etc. (Though if you have a video of a particularly cool lockpicking technique, we'd love to see it!)
For your target list, our second-level domains are as follows:
moochirp.io
mooch.rip
rebelliondefence.com
rebelliondefense.com
Our Promises To You
Rebellion Defense, and its subsidiaries, will not engage in legal action against individuals who submit vulnerability reports in accordance with this policy.
To the extent legally possible, if you abide by this policy we promise to:
Extend Safe Harbor for your vulnerability research that is related to this policy;
Work with you to understand and validate your report, including a timely initial response to the submission;
Work to remediate discovered vulnerabilities in a timely manner; and
Recognize your contribution to improving our security if you are the first to report a unique vulnerability, and your report triggers a code or configuration change.
When conducting vulnerability research according to this policy, we consider this research to be:
Authorized in accordance with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) (and/or similar state laws), and we will not initiate or support legal action against you for accidental, good faith violations of this policy;
Exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and we will not bring a claim against you for circumvention of technology controls;
Exempt from restrictions in our Terms & Conditions that would interfere with conducting security research, and we waive those restrictions on a limited basis for work done under this policy; and
Lawful, helpful to the overall security of the Internet, and conducted in good faith.
Guidelines
You are expected, as always, to comply with all applicable laws. Complying with this policy means obeying certain guidelines. If you are not sure whether something you want to try is covered, reach out to us at security@rebelliondefense.com and we'll give you guidance.
Rebellion Defense
Hacker One CONTINUED
https://hackerone.com/rebellion-defense?type=team
You promise to:
Play by the rules. This includes following this policy, as well as any other relevant agreements. If there is any inconsistency between this policy and any other relevant terms, the terms of this policy will prevail;
Report any vulnerability you’ve discovered promptly;
Avoid violating the privacy of others, disrupting our systems, destroying data, and/or harming user experience;
Use only the Official Channels to discuss vulnerability information with us;
Keep the details of any discovered vulnerabilities confidential until they are fixed, according to the Disclosure Policy;
Perform testing only on in-scope systems, and respect systems and activities which are out-of-scope;
If a vulnerability provides unintended access to data:
Limit the amount of data you access to the minimum required for effectively demonstrating a Proof of Concept; and
Cease testing and submit a report immediately if you encounter any user data during testing, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Personal Healthcare Information (PHI), credit card data, or proprietary information;
Only interact with test accounts you own or with explicit permission from the account holder;
Do not engage in extortion;
Publicly disclose the details of the vulnerability only after receiving permission to do so from us, OR after 30 days from the last communication from us, whichever is sooner.
Reporting Details and Process
We will triage submitted reports based on the CVSSv3.1 score as determined by the security team, prioritizing fixes for higher scoring issues.
All issues should receive a response within 3 days (excluding US federal holidays and weekends) that includes our estimated CVSSv3.1 score, and our timeline for remediation. We will remain in communication with you throughout the entire remediation process, as well as coordinate any public disclosure you wish to make after the remediation is complete.
If we are unable to resolve communication issues, or you are not satisfied with the quality of our response, we will bring in a neutral third-party (CERT/CC) to assist.
Reports will ideally:
be in well-written English
explain how you found the bug, your guess at the impact, and any recommendations for remediation
include proof-of-concept code, if possible
indicate whether you would like public credit
Last updated on August 29, 2020.View changes
Scopes
In Scope
Domain
*.rebelliondefence.com
Critical
Ineligible
Domain
*.rebelliondefense.com
Critical
Ineligible
Domain
*.moochirp.io
High
Ineligible
Domain
*.mooch.rip
High
Ineligible
Domain
www.rebelliondefense.com
Main public website, managed through Squarespace
Medium
Ineligible
Rebellion Defense article Aug 27 2020 PT1
https://medium.com/rebellion-defense/the-monolith-that-breaks-up-itself-c9513c732367
The Monolith That Breaks Up Itself
Marianne Bellotti
How small engineering teams can build distributive systems
I actually really love monoliths. But I’m the sort of engineer that wants my tool box to be full of tools, even weird looking ones that only become useful in very specific circumstances. The advice I typically give people about maintaining technology is to embrace the inevitability of Conway’s Law and factor in team structure, composition and size into architectural decisions. Small teams tend to build monoliths because small teams tend to be monoliths.
Monoliths also offer slightly better performance than service based architectures. At least at first. It’s only once products reach economies of scale that the benefits of being able to build, deploy and scale different components of a system separately outweigh the increased latency of making a network call when you could use a library. Of course when it’s time to make that switch the organization has reached a level of growth where its primary focus is competing, competing and more competing. Breaking up the monolith while also rolling out new features is like remodeling your house while having a dinner party at the same time. For a small company, new features and new sales will almost always win out. Once a small company has become a mature company the task of breaking up the monolith has been spread out over multiple teams and increased in complexity.
At Rebellion we had another reason to sometimes favor more monolithic approaches. Government networks can be complex and unfriendly to cloud. That can mean operating on a private, possibly “air gapped”, network with edge devices where we can reproduce a cloud like experience without connecting to a traditional cloud environment. An architecture that can be coupled or decoupled easily can offer advantages.
All Rebellion products are built on top of a framework called servicecore. At the heart of servicecore is a gRPC server, then built into servicecore are many of the tools engineers need to build good applications anyway. When engineers use servicecore they get monitoring for free, they get tracing for free, they get proper logging and health checks for free, ORM integrations and easier migrations too. They also get things that can be enabled as needed but are turned off by default, like an interface for Rebellion customers to manage access control roles in a self- service fashion. But each one of these options is itself built using the servicecore framework, meaning they can be run as separate services or combined into a tightly coupled monolithic application with no real code changes.
Rebellion Defense article Aug 27 2020 PT2
https://medium.com/rebellion-defense/the-monolith-that-breaks-up-itself-c9513c732367
The Monolith That Breaks Up Itself
Marianne Bellotti
How small engineering teams can build distributive systems
Bricks and Studs: Code like Legos
Much has been written about designing applications in order to facilitate microservices. For example, domain orientated architecture organizes like functionality together so that larger services can eventually be split up. But most advice in this space doesn’t help you reconfigure code easily. It’s hard to break services off and even harder to pull them back together if for some reason the division ended up being a mistake. You have to design solutions around places where functions can logically connect in order to have that level of flexibility.
When building a monolith that can break itself up the first question is how should two sets of functionality be coupled? The most basic way is for the code to exist in the same place, and then when the application has scaled to the size where it makes sense to maintain two different services the code must be moved into separate repositories and rebuilt to be run independently from one another.
Another solution is for one service to be implemented as a package and imported by a host service. This keeps the code for each domain separate and means multiple services can reuse the same parts, but often requires the host service to build out endpoints and interfaces that interact with the package logic. As soon as we need a database, or a frontend, importing a package isn’t so convenient.
But by building the framework that allows those elements to either be run on their own server, or injected into another server, we can couple and uncouple sets of functions as needed.
Pic 1 One service injected via the servicecore framework into the gRPC Server of another
One service injected via the servicecore framework into the gRPC Server of another
At the heart of servicecore is an application object (well… this being Go and all it is in fact a struct, but object is a more familiar term to most programmers). An engineer looking to build a service on top of servicecore need only specify the configuration they want in the application object and pass that into servicecore. Servicecore iterates through all the application objects, gathers and sorts the configuration, creates the gRPC server and passes the full configuration on to that server.
Image for post Servicecore parses application object + plus built in applications for logging, auth, etc into a gRPC server
For even the most basic service, there are multiple application objects, because the tooling that makes servicecore valuable to developers are all themselves application objects as well. Therefore, servicecore makes it possible to couple services together in two different ways: either we can use the application object to attach the endpoints and all their logic and dependencies to the same server, effectively extending it. Or the application objects can inject middleware to change the functionality of the server’s endpoints.
Rebellion Defense article Aug 27 2020 PT3
https://medium.com/rebellion-defense/the-monolith-that-breaks-up-itself-c9513c732367
The Monolith That Breaks Up Itself
Marianne Bellotti
Middleware Is Back in Style
Admittedly, I cut my teeth as a software engineer during a period where middleware was the villain of architectural patterns. Middleware was “software glue” that in the wrong hands could change the behavior of a function in a way that was hidden from the software developer debugging it. But modern day web services have a lot of overlapping needs. Behaviors like logging and authentication have to be executed for every single request, every single time. Who wants to throw a good tool out of the toolbox just because other engineers might misuse it? I remember working with frameworks where to avoid the middleware curse the architect wanted you to use boilerplate code calling those functions in a transparent way at the top of each endpoint. Leave off the line that checks if the user is logged in? Guess that page is now public.
The opportunities to add middleware fit into two categories. They either execute before the function (pre-hooks) or after the function (post-hooks). We can determine some of the options a framework like servicecore could expose by tracing the path of a typical request through the application. No matter what the particular endpoint is supposed to do, a request moves through the following stages:
PIC Stages of a request: transmission, authorization, execution, and response.
Every endpoint must receive a request, confirm that what is sending the request has permission to do so, execute the function tied to the endpoint (potentially triggering queries to other services or databases) and deliver a response.
Since we’re using gRPC we have a built in way of hooking into the transmission and response stages via interceptors. Even if we’re streaming data, we can attach logic that is executed before the request data is passed to the actual endpoint. This turns out to be a good way to implement that authorization phase. It can also be used to add logging for easy debugging.
Then there are hooks related to the lifecycle of the service itself. We definitely want to allow configuration to be passed between the host service and the extension. We’re using Cobra to do command line interfaces for our services, so servicecore can include hooks to add commands either when Cobra is initialized or at runtime for the server.
These connection points give us a lot of flexibility to add functionality to products without scaling up the overhead on the engineering team by asking them to both maintain the code and an ever growing fleet of servers in clusters per service. The complexity of distributed systems is ultimately valuable, but only once the usage levels on the products themselves have scaled up enough to justify it. Before then running services decoupled is just another set of responsibilities added to the work load of a small team.
Rebellion Defense article Aug 27 2020 PT4
https://medium.com/rebellion-defense/the-monolith-that-breaks-up-itself-c9513c732367
The Monolith That Breaks Up Itself
Marianne Bellotti
Great Power and Great Responsibility
One of the things that servicecore does is enforce conventions. By creating a framework that packages up configuration and creates a gRPC server for you, we can add validation logic that ensures how things are named and some aspects of how they behave are consistent.
But the other side of building a framework like this is that it could be used to produce bloated services that are difficult to understand and debug. One big issue is the order in which applications are loaded into servicecore. Duplicates are ignored and hooks are executed in order. Changing that order might impact outcomes in ways not obvious to all engineers. The potential problems of middleware have not gone away.
Servicecore is called servicecore because it’s meant to serve as the core of services, not full products, but it’s also easier to maintain products when you’re able to give ownership of a set of functions to a 1 or 2 person team and not burden them with separate monitoring, on-call rotations, and deploys.
We’re a small team now, but we’re growing fast. Check out our open positions.
Rebellion Defense
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/09/exclusive-former-dod-hacker-chief-wants-make-defense-software-delightful-use/159861/
PT1
Pentagon’s Former Top Hacker Wants His Startup to Inject Some Silicon Valley into the Defense Industry
"If the nerds don’t show up and work on the mission of national defense…then I’m not sure who will," says Chris Lynch, of Rebellion Defense.
Chris Lynch arrived at the Pentagon as an exotic outsider — the department’s resident hoodie-wearer, as Ash Carter put it. Now he and two co-founders have a defense-software startup with its own exotic aims.
Then-SecDef Carter hired Lynch in 2015 to start up the Defense Digital Service and infuse the Pentagon with some Silicon Valley-style agility and innovation. At DDS, Lynch attacked longstanding bottlenecks with a “SWAT team of hackers” who ran successful bug bounty programs and helped reshape IT policies — including helping DOD leaders to launch the gigantic Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, cloud program.
Now Lynch, who left DDS in April, has launched Rebellion Defense, a D.C.-based firm that seeks to sell software for defense and national security applications. It has financial backing from an array of Silicon Valley stars, including former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Founders Fund, the venture capital outfit of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Facebook co-founder Sean Parker.
We talked to Lynch and co-founders Oliver Lewis and Nicole Camarillo about Rebellion’s efforts to make working on Pentagon projects appealing to the Stanford sneaker set.
D1: There are lots of defense contracting companies, many that sell software. How is Rebellion different?
Lynch: We really wanted to build a place that's a strategic partner for software and technology, that just simply works, in defense. And we want to work on things that are very important to where we see the Department heading.
We self-fund all of our own products. We have capitalized and built Rebellion in such a way that we can choose what we work on and what we build. That gives us a lot of opportunity to create things that are impactful to the mission.
Lewis: One of the really big differences is the people. We’re pulling Silicon Valley software engineers into this problem. So if you're graduating out of Stanford computer science, you look at the offers on the table, you’re looking at Microsoft, Netflix, all the big tech companies.
We want to position Rebellion as the alternative to that kind of mission. So if you want to go and optimize food delivery, great, you can change the world. But if you really want to do something that is about defending democracy, you can come to Rebellion. We want to be a first choice for that kind of incredible world-leading talent. And that's different to a lot of the existing companies.
Camarillo: We’re trying to lay some kind of foundation so that Silicon Valley actually starts to care about working on these problems with DOD in this space. For them, it’s not a lucrative proposition right now. If we can do anything to facilitate the process of working with DOD as a customer easier, then maybe we can open the aperture to Silicon Valley jumping in and stepping up to these problem sets.
Rebellion Defense
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/09/exclusive-former-dod-hacker-chief-wants-make-defense-software-delightful-use/159861/
PT2
Pentagon’s Former Top Hacker Wants His Startup to Inject Some Silicon Valley into the Defense Industry
D1: DOD has tried to become a more attractive customer in recent years, but startups still worry about lengthy contracting cycles and intellectual-property issues. What else?
Lynch: If you have a software-as-a-service product that you offer to commercial customers, they can just swipe the credit card and you're making money on day one. Here, you have to know different types of things. You have to know what the [Federal Acquisition Regulation] is, you have to know what DoD 5000 is. You have to know what an [Other Transaction Authority] is. These different avenues are all very complex.
In defense, we talk quite a lot about the future. But there's also the now. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, autonomy, all these things are not really future problems; they're problems that are occurring at this moment. We're dealing with these things right now.
Who does the Department turn to for those types of technologies, now? We wanted to provide the place where the individuals who literally build those technologies that we think about every day to come and work in defense, where we could actually have nerds show up at the table and work on problems of impact and be proud of what they're working on, and not get caught up in the drama of, should we even be working with defense? If the nerds don't show up and work on the mission of national defense, then we have a huge other problem because if we don't show up and work on these things, then I'm not sure who will.
When you think about, the Department has lots of people and companies it can turn to go for certain types of solutions. But once you get down to AI, or any number of other different types of technologies, it's not quite clear who they turn to.
D1: It sounds a little bit like what you were doing at the Defense Digital Service but now with more people and with VC funding.
Lynch: When I showed up and started DDS, I came from a background with no family or real connection to either military or government. So I had a lot to learn. One was, top talent makes all the difference. Having incredibly competent people who are mission-driven show up and actually get shit done, work on real things, that can change the world. But it's also about having competent people that are building incredible products that are delightful to use, which is not something you normally hear about when you think about products for defense.
D1: What product lines are you working on?
Lynch: We're very interested in technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision…We’re also interested in products that offer high scalability, the ability to process very large sets of information and aid the incredible military and civil servants that are working on the mission inside the Department.
Rebellion Defense
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/09/exclusive-former-dod-hacker-chief-wants-make-defense-software-delightful-use/159861/
PT3
D1: How does that overlap with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, (JAIC)?
Lynch: When you look at things like the JAIC, it's important to remember that all of these technologies that the Department relies upon now—and will rely upon in five, 10, 15, 20 years—Those will be built by a group of people who may never come and directly serve in the military, and may never have an opportunity to come work directly as a federal employee.
If there's a new technology that is on the horizon that we see could aid a warfighter, or could help in the national defense mission, we can just simply choose to start up a product line working on that with some of the greatest engineering talent in the entire world. That's a super power. That's not a super power that will be found in the Department of Defense, no matter what. There are just different rules, restrictions and regulations that they have to abide by.
D1: Are you competing with Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, which are actively acquiring Silicon Valley startups?
Lynch: We see ourselves as a software and technology company building products as a strategic partner for the national defense space, not as a defense contractor.
The venture model has a number of different outcomes to it. One of which is, a company could be bought. I think that it is absolutely fantastic that these companies like Lockheed Martin are setting up venture offices and investing. But we want to build something that is not here today. We don't want to build a company that gets acquired too soon. We don't want to build a company that is acquired when it's small. We want to build a company that can go public or is much bigger. We want to build something that is enduring.
I think that that's important because if we don't have companies like that in this space, then I don't think that we're [as in the United States] is going to continue to attract the talent that we need in order to be successful and to protect that we love about the United States and our allies and our partners.
Camarillo: Also, acquiring startups doesn't make you a software company. And it doesn't inherently change the DNA of your business, or what you are, or what you’re good at. Because even if you acquire the technology, you're not acquiring the talent along with it to grow those things. I think that's a huge challenge for those companies.
D1: Can we talk about who your backers are?
Lynch: We have Venrock and we have Innovation Endeavors as our co-leads for Rebellion. We have Eric Schmidt on our board of directors, and we have a host of other amazing VCs and investors [including Founders Fund] in the round as well.
One of the most interesting and unique things here is that we are a venture-backed company, building an organization that is focused on national defense, in Washington, D.C., that sees selling to defense as the primary business that we are in, and commercial [products] is an opportunity at some point down the line. That’s is very different than how most companies are built.
Rebellion Defense
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/09/exclusive-former-dod-hacker-chief-wants-make-defense-software-delightful-use/159861/
PT4
D1: What are investors’ expectations of Rebellion? Are they different from what VCs typically expect from Silicon Valley startups?
Lynch: I feel like big ideas take patient capital. If you want to disrupt something, you have to be willing to try something new. There are a number of companies that have made headways into defense and we talk a lot about companies like SpaceX, right? I think that when you look at companies like that, it just takes a slightly different approach to what you're looking at as the horizon on the investment.
If we can build products at an order of magnitude faster than what the Department is used to, then we also get to be a part of helping them in their goal. Because we can actually show results after a month, after two months, after three months. Where in some cases, the Department has expectations that run on timelines closer to years.
Lewis: And it's showing the Department that they can demand as much from technology as the rest of the world already knows it can.
D1: What’s coming in the next year?
Lynch: We're going to continue to build amazing things. We're going to hire some of the best talent that there is in the entire country. We're a really big company that just happens to be smaller right now. We've already been well underway on our research lab around a bunch of things on artificial intelligence, looking to hire the lead of the AI lab. We've got other product lines that are going to be starting. There's a lot to do. It's a big mission.
D1: What will the Pentagon’s plans for enterprise-level cloud do for the things you’re working on?
Lynch: Consider that a 16-year-old who is looking to create a new software-as-a-service application in their spare time, can go swipe a credit card and have access to something that is very difficult for nearly anybody at the Department of Defense to have access to.
D1: But wouldn’t a system of smaller cloud contracts be more lucrative for a software-supplying defense contractor, in that it would need more work and more fixes?
Lynch: I think that the Department needs a very simple, strong vision and strategy in which the capabilities in software and technology that it needs, consumes, builds, deploys, work in a very simple and elegant way. And the more complicated any solution is to provide that service I think is a terrible idea.
Lewis: If you're going to attract the best technical minds in the world, surprise surprise, you need to have intellectual integrity.
From left to right, Nicole Camarillo, Chris Lynch, and Oliver Lewis, the co-founders of Rebellion. CHRIS LYNCH
Lupa Systems
James Murdoch
BIG BIG
Next-gen James Murdoch joins the fight against fake news
https://www.campdenfb.com/article/fb-roundup-lego-haidilao-and-lupa-systems
James Murdoch (pictured) has reportedly invested a seven-figure sum in a startup which aims to tackle digital disinformation only weeks after criticising his father Rupert’s media empire for its scepticism over climate change.
Lupa Systems is the New York-Mumbai private investment company set up by James Murdoch after he departed with his $2 billion share of the proceeds from Rupert’s $71 billion sale of the family-controlled 21st Century Fox to Disney in 2019. Lupa has partnered with US seed-stage venture capital firm Betaworks to launch Betalab to fund early stage startups that aim to “fix the internet,” John Borthwick, Betaworks chief executive and co-founder, said.
“With Betalab we want to crank up the speed of innovation around this broad area of humane tech and specifically around nefarious uses of synthetic media, AI and computer vision. It’s time to get real about reality and fix things.”
Lupa and Betaworks plan to invest $100,000 into each early-stage start-up, with the goal of finding 10 to 20 companies to fund in the next year, the Financial Times reported.
In January, James Murdoch, 47, described his “frustration” with some of the coverage of the Australian bushfires by his father’s News Corp and Fox media outlets.
Murdoch and his wife Kathryn “are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary,” they said in a statement to The Daily Beast.
Swiss connection remember Swiss electronic voting connection
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/james-murdoch-mch-group-art-basel-lupa-systems-1202693977/
James Murdoch’s Firm to Invest in Art Basel Owner Amid Tumult
Amid coronavirus-related delays for two of its top art fairs, MCH Group, the Swiss live marketing company that owns Art Basel, is set to have a new anchor shareholder. That new shareholder will be Lupa Systems, an investment company founded and run by James Murdoch. The deal will see Lupa Systems take on around one-third of shares at the company, and it is likely to be finalized at a general meeting on August 3.
“MCH Group’s long history of innovation for customers, civic commitment to economic and cultural life, and deep investment in its platforms and communities make for a long-term business that can grow, invest, and flourish,” Murdoch said in a statement. “At Lupa we are grateful for the opportunity to work with the Board, alongside our fellow shareholders, to help drive forward the business and create value for all stakeholders.”
https://www.mch-group.com/en/news/2020/settlement-between-the-mch-group-and-shareholders-advised-by-amg/
LUPA Systems involved in a Swiss project with Canton of Basel-Staadt
Lupa systems a foreign liability company
https://newyork-company.com/co/lupa-systems-llc
Lupa Systems
https://www.zoominfo.com/c/lupa-systems/468141524
LUPA electronics AI deep learning
https://lupa-electronics.com/#welcome
LUPA buys Tribeca Film
https://www.screendaily.com/news/james-murdochs-lupa-systems-attention-capital-snap-up-controlling-stake-in-tribeca-enterprises/5141730.article
Lupa invests in Indian education system
https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/james-murdoch-led-lupa-systems-makes-first-india-investment-picks-majority-stake-in-harappa-education/story/393372.html
LUPA Technologies Germany - related?
When I search I find shit like this but no result when link is followed
lupa systems team - the-3rdforce.org
Search domain the-3rdforce.org/docs/goobo.php?192507=lupa-systems-teamhttps://the-3rdforce.org/docs/goobo.php?192507=lupa-systems-team
A consortium led by James Murdoch's Lupa Systems will acquire a controlling stake in Tribeca Enterprises, the company behind the iconic film festival and other events. Because the company can model and detect not just common occurrences, but also the rare, high-impact, high-risk edge cases, they can accurately detect threats and red flags that would have eluded models trained on traditional …
WEIRD SHIT HERE Message board? Check it out
Lupa Loud archive of our own
https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Lupa%20Loud
Check this out ALL THE NAMES INVOLVED
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-voting-elections-massachusetts-f294b787a30b851939b8490119fecd8f
Boston (AP) — Supporters of a ballot question that would have dramatically changed the way votes are cast and tallied in Massachusetts raised nearly $10 million to persuade voters to adopt the change — but ultimately failed at the ballot box Tuesday.
Question 2 organizers had hoped to create a ranked choice voting system intended to help avoid the “spoiler effect” by guaranteeing a candidate couldn’t be declared a winner without eventually gathering the support of a majority of voters.
“We came up short in this election, and we are obviously deeply disappointed,” Cara Brown McCormick, campaign manager for the Yes on 2 Campaign, said in a statement Wednesday.
“We were attempting to do something historic in Massachusetts and fell short, but the incredible groundswell of support from volunteers and reformers that assembled behind this campaign is reason enough to stay optimistic about the future of our democracy,” McCormick added.
Massachusetts voters rejected the change in an election dominated by the presidential contest pitting Democrat Joe Biden against Republican Donald Trump.
The loss came despite the backing of deep-pocketed donors including the Houston, Texas-based nonprofit Action Now Initiative — a project of Texas philanthropist couple John and Laura Arnold.
Others who gave hefty sums include Kathryn Murdoch, wife of James Murdoch, the younger son of Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Soros, son of billionaire George Soros; Katherine Gehl, president of Wisconsin-based Gehl Foods; and Maximillian Stone, managing director of the New York-based investment management first D.E. Shaw & Co.
The Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance helped lead the opposition to the question, raising less than $10,000.
“Out of state billionaires spent over $10 million to try to make Massachusetts a guinea pig for their ranked-choice experiment,” Paul Diego Craney, a representative of the group, said in a statement Wednesday.
Opponents received a boost from Gov. Charlie Baker, who spoke out against the question last week.
“At a time when we need to be promoting turnout and making it easier for voters to cast their ballots, we worry that Question Two will add an additional layer of complication for both voters and election officials, while potentially delaying results and increasing the cost of elections,” Baker said in joint statement with fellow Republican, Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito.
Advocates of the ballot question were able to enlist some of their own high-profile supporters including U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and state Attorney General Maura Healey, both Democrats, who collaborated on a video explaining how ranked choice voting works.
The campaign also won the support of two former Massachusetts governors — Democrat Deval Patrick and Republican William Weld — and former Democratic U.S. Sen. and Secretary of State John Kerry.
The system would have significantly altered the way elections are conducted in Massachusetts, giving voters the option of ranking candidates on the ballot in order of their preference — one for their top choice, two for their second choice, and so on.
If a candidate received a majority of first-place votes, that candidate would win. If no candidate received a majority of the first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes would be eliminated. Voters who ranked the eliminated candidate as their first choice would have their votes counted instead for their second choice.
The process would have repeated until one candidate received a majority of the vote. The new system would have applied to state and federal elections and primaries in Massachusetts beginning in 2022. It would not have been used in presidential elections.
The system is similar to the ranked choice voting system currently used in Maine.
JAMES and Kathryn Murdoch RANKED CHOICE VOTING Pt1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathryn-murdoch-election-reform/2020/08/31/d3945772-e943-11ea-bc79-834454439a44_story.html
The name Murdoch is probably not one that you associate with compromise and bipartisanship in politics.
But it is a name that both opens doors and makes people a little wary of Kathryn Murdoch. She is a daughter-in-law of conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch, whose international empire of news outlets includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
Kathryn Murdoch, 48, is married to James, the younger of Rupert Murdoch’s two sons, who in July abruptly resigned his seat on the board of family-controlled News Corp because of what he claimed were “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
Her surname “makes it hard for people to quantify who and what I stand for, and that, for me I think, is mostly an advantage,” she told me recently. “Because then they have to listen to the substance of what you’re saying.”
What she has been saying is that the real problem with politics may not be the people we elect. It may be the way we go about electing them.
On Wednesday, she and a group of like-minded “political philanthropists” will convene a Zoom meeting in which they hope to enlist other wealthy people to start putting their resources into reforming a system that currently fosters polarization and rewards those who hew to the extremes.
Among the co-hosts of the private gathering are Texas billionaires Laura and John Arnold; Marc Merrill, a founder of the video game developer Riot Games; and Kent Thiry, former chief executive of DaVita, a leading provider of kidney dialysis.
It is being organized by the nonpartisan group Unite America, which says upward of 140 people have signed up to attend the session. The group did not disclose the guest list, but said it includes major philanthropists, executives of large companies and former elected officials.
Unite America advocates a number of reforms it claims could end what it calls “the doom loop” of political dysfunction. Among them: turning the job of redistricting over to independent commissions, rather than allowing gerrymandering by politicians; nonpartisan primaries in which the top two finishers, regardless of their party affiliations, go to the general election; and ranked-choice voting, in which voters do not pick just one candidate but rank names on the ballot by preference. Together, these changes could bypass entrenched political structures and make elections more responsive to the broader interests of ordinary voters.
JAMES and Kathryn Murdoch RANKED CHOICE VOTING Pt2
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathryn-murdoch-election-reform/2020/08/31/d3945772-e943-11ea-bc79-834454439a44_story.html
They are being tried out in cities and states across the country. More than a dozen states have taken redistricting out of the hands of their legislatures. In 2010, California voters opted to become the third state to do away with traditional partisan primaries and have all candidates for an office appear on the same ballot. New York City will move to ranked-choice voting for its mayoral and council elections next year.
A ranked-choice system is also known as an instant runoff: If no candidate receives a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated and his votes are redistributed to the contender his supporters ranked as their second choice. The process is repeated until someone tops 50 percent.
The idea behind all of these reforms is to create systems that encourage candidates to appeal to the largest cross-section of the electorate, not the extremes of either party. These changes might also discourage slash-and-burn campaigning, because every candidate will have his eye not only on mobilizing his own supporters but also on winning over some of those who are behind his opponents.
As more and more states and local jurisdictions try new ways of running their elections, “eventually you have a tipping point,” Kathryn Murdoch said.
Murdoch, who describes herself as a “radical centrist,” decided to become involved in politics after she heard former vice president Al Gore give a presentation on climate change in 2006. At first, she did it the way rich people traditionally do — by setting up a foundation to advocate on the issue, and by donating to candidates who shared her point of view.
But Murdoch began to realize “we weren’t getting any kind of bipartisan work on legislation that was really important because there’s no ability to have bipartisan communications any more,” she said. “And so I started looking at what’s the cause of our dysfunction: How do we figure out why that doesn’t work? We know we have the majority of the American public interested in solutions to the climate crisis — and in everything, actually. The majority of the public can agree on a lot of the solutions for most of our complex problems, but our politicians can’t agree amongst themselves to get anything done.”
Of course, the drivers of political polarization have broad, deep roots. They include the growing cultural divide between urban and rural voters, the influence of special-interest money and the increasing reach of media organizations — including ones run by Rupert Murdoch — that stoke our divisions.
Against these larger forces, skeptics say, electoral reform will bring only changes at the margin. But even if that is the case, they are worth trying.
The alternative is what we have now. If we want better leaders, the place to start is by building a better democracy that fosters consensus and rewards those who can achieve it.
BIDEN LOADS UP WITH REBELLION DEFENSE
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/joe-biden-transition-team-war-hawks
Victor Garcia lists Rebellion Defense as his most recent employer. This software company says it helps “our defense and national security agencies unlock the power of data across all domains.” It was founded by former defense officials and “analyzes video gathered via drone,” according to the New York Times.