You know, when I see the phrase "CIA funding" I expect something like "the CIA put a backdoor in NeXT computers destined for Hungary" or something, not "NeXT made computers and the CIA bought and used them."
You know, when I see the phrase "CIA funding" I expect something like "the CIA put a backdoor in NeXT computers destined for Hungary" or something, not "NeXT made computers and the CIA bought and used them."
Did you know about the CIA's DECADES-LONG FUNDING of Coca-Cola? I have a hot tip from my good friend the soda machine technician that the CIA regularly funnels THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS a month into the pockets of BIG SODA when they restock their office kitchens and vending machines with Coca-Cola products!
This insidious relationship goes ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, my friend!
Your satire probably isn't that far off:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/colombia0106/inde...
Whoa. This is weird. My friend's dad was an FBI agent for over 20 years. I remember him telling us a story about a case he worked in the early-90s where a Coca Cola exec was embezzling millions from the company. The exec was caught, basically red-handed. After working with his lawyer, the exec provided a story about some South American gang that strong-armed him into washing money for them (threatened to kill him and his family; I think he said they even kidnapped his daughter). My friend's dad said his team worked with the exec for several months to corroborate the story about the South American gang. Apparently he was telling the truth. Then, after gathering intel on the gang, they came up with a plan to go after them. However, a few days before they were set to act on their plan, they were told to stand down. Actually, no, before that they were told by their leadership that there would be no capture (of the gang), only kill. Then the plan was cancelled altogether.
My friend's dad rarely, if ever, talked about his work. However, he got loose lips after retiring, and if he had a few beers in him.
This is a little indirect? A Colombian bottle company 25% owned by Coke suppressed union activity. awful but hardly what the headlines are stating
I was also going to mention this - unfortunate example they chose!
More like CIA decades long funding of Crypto AG, Swiss company specialising in communications and information security.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
I don't think this is a good reply to a very funny and appropriate comment, but it's always important to keep mentioning that the CIA probably definitely murdered the founder's son: https://inteltoday.org/2020/02/15/crypto-ag-was-boris-hageli...
Definitely a great candidate for being a intelligence agencies resource, either cooperatively or without their knowledge.
They have a ridiculously large network for their vending machines, and a massive global footprint.
They're putting poison in the sugar water!
It’s a good point
I’m not sure why we shouldn’t hold other brands accountable for their public relations.
I served a long time and if no pizza place would deliver to a military base because they were protesting military action, it would have actually made an impact. To what degree is unknown but I know every dominos in a 20 mile radius from our base was on call to deliver 8000 pizzas from time to time.
That aint nothing
The Civil Reserve Pizza fleet always amazed me. About once a quarter, the Air Force Academy would get dominoes pizza for all 4000 cadets. every cadet + staff and some visitors gets a medium pizza for dinner. that's about 4000 pizzas stuffed into the back seats of honda civics from around colorado springs arriving in a 2 hour span. I dont know how they did it but boy could they mobilize
We used to have pizza day at my elementary school and every kid would get their own personal sized dominos pizza. It's impressive how they can deliver on 600+ pizzas all warm and delivered at the same time.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a fully laden Honda Civic
Yeah that’s my school
Google Maps has 16 Dominoes locations around Colorado Springs. 4000 means each location is making about 125 pizza/hour for 2 hours. (For just the Academy.)
Google's AI figures that doing pizzas assembly-line style, a pizzeria can make about 30 pizzas per employee per hour.
Unless the Academy is hitting them with surprise orders, it doesn't sound too challenging.
Anyone here been in this space, to talk specifics?
I used to work for Domino's Pizza in the mid to late 80s. Our piemakers were trained for speed and could usually slap dough, sauce, cheese and throw down toppings in around 30-40 seconds per pie. The ovens were super hot and cooked pizzas in 3-4 minutes. The whole goal was to get the pizza out the door so the driver didn't have to speed. This was still during the "30 minutes or less or it's free" period.
Our franchisee held competitions between stores to see how fast employees could make six large pepperonis. Winning times were less than two minutes. And it wasn't just slop, the pies had to met a minimum quality level (proper saucing and cheesing, the right number of pepperoni slices per pie).
I helped out occasionally at a store in Garden Grove by Disneyland that often did ~1500 pizzas on Friday nights. And as a DUMP (Dayshift Manager), did a few 40-50 pie lunch orders by myself, with a couple drivers helping out on ovens, for schools or companies. Stores kept daily records so knew how many employees to schedule based on past sales - pizza sales were surprisingly consistent over time. And we required advance notice for the really big orders so we could schedule appropriately.
Dominos uses a special dough that allows them to make a pizza in like 5 (?) minutes.
Before COVID, for a few years the Dominos in my city had a policy where they'd deliver the pizza to your door in 20 minutes or the pizza would be free. This led to a lot of traffic accidents so eventually they had to stop :+)
It is surprise orders often
At least back in 2003-2004 there would be some random thing happen and make it impossible to get the staff on the hill
So they would do these massive dominos orders
It’s a free country. This sort of boycott would just result in Black Rifle Pizza.
Black Riffle Coffee was founded because Starbucks pledged to hire 10,000 refugees, not because they boycotted the military.
The moral of the story as I see it is: not acting because you don't want a backlash is a loosing game - they'll find a reason to backlash anyway.
It was a bit more than they bought computers with a purchase order, like the part where it describes how CIA brought in a team of ex-Sun people to help scale manufacturing.
CIA agents also longed for a decent interface. understandable. relatable.
Given Apple's involvement in PRISM while running ads about privacy and security... All tracks.
Or explicit investment, as with the many companies that were partially funded through In-Q-Tel. This is a strange article. All government agencies acquire computers for normal operations.
It is a worthwhile question to ask "why is the foreign intelligence service funding a private company?"
It's worth reading the article and understand "funding" in this case means "they bought NeXT computers like everyone else who bought a NeXT...they just bought a lot of them". This is an article about commerce, not covert activities, other than "we're going to use the computers we bought for things we're not going to tell you about".
Strange comment. The comment you're replying to is pointing out that the CIA bought computers for its own use. Am I confused and they also "provided funding" other than buying computers?
You're reading their comment in isolation. The thread starts with "I assumed something completely different."
You replied to a "still, good to ask in order to seek clarity" type point.
Comment hierarchy is part of the overall context.
Another strange comment, this time from an account made 15 hours ago. My entire point was contextual and not in isolation!
There's no conspiracy, I think people just disagree with what "funding" can mean. A bulk sale in the realm of ~20,000 units is equivalent to stakeholder funding when you're at NeXT's scale. It doesn't inherently mean that anything nefarious happened, but there was a B2B contract written up with the feds, and Jobs accepted it.
The root comment is a perfectly valid question. Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts, it's a bit weird that they'd single-out NeXT to sell them an off-the-shelf shell. I'm guessing that Steve's number was in a lot of government Rolodexes after Michael Dell and the others.
Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts
Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.
Sure, and that would be a reasonable thing to reply to the main comment here, but the actual comment was just muddying the waters and a total non sequitur, as written.
ai bots on hn? naaaaa.....
This is AI. I can see the signature in what it thinks good argument looks like @seizethecheese
The levels of clickbait in that headline are absurd. It's like seventh hell of clickbait.
Also it doesn't come from the source. WSJ headline is: “The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA”
So someone's running experiments of some sort on HN, driven by AI, is my read. Hope they snub that shit out.
Welcome to our collective future; enjoy your stay.
At least we can still spot the deception. That won't last forever.
The CIA and NSA have provided money to a lot of private companies, including Signal. They have multiple startup funding programs. Nothing special about it, they expect to benefit from what the company will research or sell. It’s not necessarily with strings attached
No, but it's always with an aligned agenda.
When the CIA funneled money to modernist artists, they weren't expecting spy devices in paintings. They're waging a cultural war.
Is signal funded to put backdoors? Maybe, but probably not. It's probably something more vague - A tool for anti-gov actors in countries that are our enemies, or to sell us all the idea that we are able to freely communicate while our devices are tapped by other means.
Yes-ish. I think there is also the element that an agency as massive and well funded as the CIA is not that far from being its own mini-state, and one way to use the budget (because it has to be used!) is to fund projects that might be useful or provide some form of return in the future, even if it’s just good for the CIA public image, or a way to attract and develop a network of talents
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A guy from the CIA told me that they bought a ton of early sun boxes to keep them afloat, seeing American-made technology as a key national security interest.
He signed the visitor log as working for 'the company'. The CIA bit was a well-trod inference.
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But that sort of analysis would prevent you from dropping a wikipedia link about something only somewhat related, and then implying that EVERYTHING is backdoor'd by the government.
Most never dealt with procurement to realize choosing an operating system for an organization requires everyone agreeing to use vendors that support the os.
Three-letter agencies often keep on life support the kind of cool niche computers thst don't benefit from economies of scale. There are clandestine government projects that required Lisp machines and Connection Machines years after you or your employer were no longer able to buy one.
You NeXT and Krispy Kreme are in the same category?!
I'd trust my own intuitive suspicions more than official claims by the CIA.
But of course. Doesn't mean they're right, but you're right to acknowledge you probably do trust them more.
Yep, same expectation, but it's just click bait. I never learn.
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