Arcturus 🌥️

Cybersecurity and the Singularity This week's events have driven home to me and many others the importance of being ready for a few weeks of disruption to western civilization. The internet’s foundations are old and shaky. AI now finds the cracks faster than people can patch them and exploits them at a scale no human threat actor could match. Much of the system also runs through a few chokepoints: a short list of certificate companies, a handful of cloud data centers, a few pieces of shared plumbing. One failure at any of them cuts off millions at once. The answer isn’t panic; it’s making sure no single failure can cut you off from everything. If people suddenly can’t trust the internet, the economic effects will be real, and I expect stocks could take a significant hit. So far the market has gone the other way: security companies rose on the PHP news and the index was up on the day (Yahoo Finance). That could change quickly if a major breach or outage lands. As I write this, neither the Fox News nor the CNN homepage features any of this. That’s no accident: mainstream news has little incentive to cover something this scary to the mainstream population. There is some reporting here and there, but its scattered and below the fold, and almost nobody connects them into the bigger story: the rapidly degrading ability of the internet to serve as civilization’s backbone. What to do: be ready for two weeks of disruption The overall goal: no single failure should cut you off from your money, your accounts or the internet. Two weeks is a reasonable window for systems to be restored and life to stabilize, and it’s what West Coast earthquake planners have told households for years. With that cushion you can wait out a disruption instead of scrambling through it. - Turn on automatic updates for your phone, computer and browser. The eMudhra fix reached a billion browsers within days with no effort from their users. Everything that doesn’t update itself is still exposed. - Keep two weeks of supplies at home: food, water, medications. This gives you immense peace of mind in the situation that the supply chains are disrupted. - Keep gas tanks full and EVs charged. Pumps and chargers depend on power and card payments. - Spread your money across several banks, with a working card from each. If one goes down, you aren’t cut off from everything. - Rethink how much you keep in the market. The market disagrees with me today. I think it’s underpricing a major breach or outage, and the modest gains of the next few months may not be worth the risk of a sharp drop. In the more intense scenarios, the markets themselves could be inoperable for a time. It’s a judgment call, so weigh it against when you’ll need the money and the taxes on selling, but diversification is worth far more than it was a year ago. - Keep two independent ways online: Starlink on a battery or generator, plus a phone on a cell carrier. In a long outage, cell towers run out of backup power; Starlink on a generator keeps going. - Hold some crypto in a hardware wallet, as a hedge against banks specifically. The bugs that take down banks are different from the ones that threaten crypto you hold yourself, so the two are unlikely to fail together. It does not hedge an internet or power failure; cash does that. Buy the wallet from the manufacturer, keep the recovery phrase on paper or metal and offline, never type it into anything, and check every transaction on the device’s own screen. - Use a password manager and passkeys for email and banking, and print the recovery codes. Do email first; it can reset everything else. - Treat any urgent message about your money as suspicious: bank alerts, “security notices,” support messages, even a loved one who might be spoofed. Reach them through a channel you already trust, like the number on your card. Agree on a family code word. Video calls are harder to fake for the next few months; then they too will be fully fakeable. - Cash cannot be hacked. Worth having more than you typically do around. The future is beautiful, but there might be some bumps along the way as we adopt. I'm excited to help build it with all of you!