06 Jun 2026
QoTD: Carl von Clausewitz
Another very useful, though more limited, way of gaining familiarity with war in peacetime is to attract foreign officers who have seen active service. Peace does not often reign everywhere in Europe, and never throughout the whole world. A state that has been at peace for many years should try to attract some experienced officers—only those, of course, who have distinguished themselves. Alternatively, some of its own officers should be sent to observe operations, and learn what war is like.
However few such officers may be in proportion to an army, their influence can be very real. Their experience, their insights, and the maturity of their character will affect their subordmates and brother officers. Even when they cannot be given high command they should be considered as guides who know the country and can be consulted in specific eventualities. — Carl von Clausewitz (In On War, chapter 8, as translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret) (PDF)
Bonus links
Europe’s
New Tech Strategy Puts Open Source Front and Centre from Mastodon.
Right now, Europe depends on non-EU tech providers for over 80% of
critical digital infrastructure, and that’s a problem.
(Related: European
social media newbies step forward as users drift from X by Anupriya
Datta, The
Internet Has Become Too American to Trust by Cory Doctorow)
Enshittification,
Despotification, and the Open Internet by Mike Masnick. The
problem of centralized systems is that they create an irresistible
temptation to control and exploit.
(It’s not just temptation,
though. The market expects the Big Tech companies to keep
growing at startup-like rates even as they dominate a larger
fraction of a slower-growing market. The increased value extraction—and
the increasingly
dubious schemes to defend it—are non-optional.)
Wrench
Attacks by David Rosenthal. why the crypto-bros are having to
spend vast sums on defending against the threat of HODL-ing
(It’s
not just the threat to existing cryptocurrency owners, though. A
kidnapper prepared to hold a hostage long enough could require their
family to transfer the ransom into cryptocurrency. More: I’m taking a Bitcoin risk
even though I don’t hold Bitcoin. Please regulate me.)
Have a
Seat. by George Tannenbaum. In its zeal to answer procurement, in
its eagerness to cut costs and
return shareholder value
(and
eight-figure payouts to the c-suite–none of whom have ever created an
ad) agencies left the table.
World
War Fraud: AI-Driven Identity Crime by Mike Cook. The problem is
bigger than most people realize. AI-accelerated fraud is organized,
automated, and deployed at scale by adversaries who are often just as
technically sophisticated as the companies they target.
(And the
largest companies choose to participate
on the side of fraud.)
“Morally
repugnant shortsightedness”: Why open source security leaders say
companies must stop freeloading on maintainers by Adrian Bridgwater.
Kat Cosgrove, head of developer advocacy at cloud container security
protection specialist Minimus, tells The New Stack that, despite all the
best efforts playing out in the open source security space, there’s
still a lot of white noise out there. She underlines this statement and
thinks that
it’s no longer hyperbole
to say open-source software
is the foundation of almost everything we build today. Despite this,
many companies refuse to actively participate in the support or
maintenance of the very projects they’re using to get rich,
Cosgrove
says. They leave open source maintainers to build and secure their
products for them, and they carelessly task their own engineers with the
responsibility to operate without the standards or tooling necessary to
fill in the gaps.