Shares of Super Micro Computer are down over 15% heading into the cash open after the server company said it would be delaying its 10-K filing for FY 2024. The delay comes one day after short seller Hindenburg Research alleged “fresh evidence” of accounting manipulation at the company. 

“Additional time is needed for SMCI’s management to complete its assessment of the design and operating effectiveness of its internal controls over financial reporting as of June 30, 2024,” a filing from the company read. 

Yesterday shares plunged as much as 8% but finished the session only down 2%. Will they repeat the BTFD trend today…

In a report released on its website Tuesday morning, the short seller alleged that the semiconductor/server company, which has seen its stock skyrocket over the last few years during the AI bubble, could be engaged in accounting manipulation and self dealing among family members.

Among other points, Hindenburg wrote:

• Our 3-month investigation, which included interviews with former senior employees and industry experts as well as a review of litigation records, international corporate and customs records, found glaring accounting red flags, evidence of undisclosed related party transactions, sanctions and export control failures, and customer issues.

• Less than 3 months after paying a $17.5 million SEC settlement, Super Micro began re-hiring top executives that were directly involved in the accounting scandal, per litigation records and interviews with former employees.

• A former salesperson told us: “Almost all of them are back. Almost all of the people that were let go that were the cause of this malfeasance.”

• According to a lawsuit filed in April 2024, Super Micro waited only 3 months after the SEC settlement before restarting “improper revenue recognition,” “recognizing incomplete sales,” and “circumvention of internal accounting controls”.

• Even after the SEC settlement, pressure to meet quotas pushed salespeople to stuff the channel with distributors using “partial shipments” or by shipping defective products around quarter-end, per our interviews with former employees and customers.

• One former salesperson described pushing products to distributors based on made-up demand forecasts, completing a partial shipment, then later coming up with an excuse for why the rest didn’t happen. “And now you have a problem. Accounting problem maybe.”

“Beyond fresh questions around its revenue accounting, we found that Super Micro’s relationships with both disclosed and undisclosed related parties serve as fertile ground for dubious accounting,” the report says.

“For example, disclosed related party suppliers Ablecom and Compuware, controlled by Super Micro CEO Charles Liang’s brothers, have been paid $983 million in the last 3 years. Ablecom is also partly owned by Super Micro CEO Charles Liang and his wife.”

It continues: “The relationships seem oddly circular. Super Micro provides components to the entities which assemble them and sell them back to Super Micro. They also rent warehousing and factory space to Super Micro even though it has its own sprawling factory.”

“Multiple former employees and channel partners confirmed that after-sales service is undermining Super Micro’s ability to retain customers. One former salesperson said: ‘It’s their Achilles heel. It’s just horrible.’,” Hindenburg wrote.

“All told, we believe Super Micro is a serial recidivist. It benefitted as an early mover but still faces significant accounting, governance and compliance issues and offers an inferior product and service now being eroded away by more credible competition,” the report says.

You can read the full report here. 

Authored by Jesse Coghlan via CoinTelegraph.com,

“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli has been ordered to hand in any digital copies of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin — a physical one-of-one Wu-Tang Clan album — amid a legal fight with PleasrDAO. 

The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) has owned the physical album since 2021, when it bought it for $4.75 million from the Justice Department, which seized the album from Shkreli after his 2018 conviction for securities fraud.

The DAO is selling partial ownership to it via non-fungible tokens (NFTs) but has alleged Shkreli kept digital copies of the album, suing him in June.

On Aug. 26, a New York federal judge ordered Shkreli must “turn over all of his copies, in any form” of the rap group’s album to his lawyers and sign an affidavit stating he no longer possesses any copies by Aug. 30. 

Shkreli must also file an inventory by Sept. 30 of the album’s copies, information about the people it was shared with and any financial benefit he saw from distributing or playing the album.

The order is a win for PleasrDAO, which filed for a preliminary injunction against Shkreli on Aug. 19.

It alleged in its June lawsuit that he retained digital copies of the album that he played on multiple livestreams, which caused “significant monetary and irreparable harm” to the group.

Shkreli’s lawyer, Bochner PLLC’s Edward Paltzik, told Cointelegraph the order “is merely a preliminary measure entered by the Court to maintain the perceived status quo before any discovery occurs — the Order has no bearing whatsoever on the final outcome of the case.”

“Crucially, the Court did not find that PleasrDAO is likely to succeed on the merits or that the DAO’s allegations are true, and instead ruled that Mr. Shkreli’s forthcoming motion to dismiss should proceed without delay,” he added.

PleasrDAO shared news of the order on X alongside a meme implying that it was puppeteering Shkreli.

Source: PleasrDAOPleasrDAO’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Wu-Tang Clan’s album was recorded between 2007 and 2013 and had at least 31 tracks across two discs, according to a track listing released by PleasrDAO in April.

A still image taken from a PleasrDAO promo video for the album supposedly showing its track listing. Source: PleasrDAO/X

In its June lawsuit against Shkreli, the group said its purchase of the album was supposed to be the only copy of it and is seeking a judge’s order to permanently seize Shkreli’s alleged copies and ban him from being able to financially exploit the album.

Shkreli had argued the alleged copies were made under his purchase agreement when he first bought the album before it was forfeited to the government, and as such, the copies are not under the forfeiture and he still has the right to use them.

Commercial real estate market challenges are more severe for older office towers in downtown metro areas than those outside city centers. The mismatch between funding needs and available credit in a high-interest-rate environment has also intensified the strain on building owners, as elevated tower vacancy rates persist across many markets due to the ongoing trend of remote work becoming the norm. 

Bloomberg penned a CRE note on aging business districts from Los Angeles to Chicago to Boston of zombie towers with high vacancy rates that have no use in today’s economy. 

Big landlords, including Brookfield, Blackstone, and Starwood Capital Group, have walked away from older downtown towers in recent quarters.

The latest data from MSCI shows office values in metro areas have crashed 52% from their highs. Some of the worst declines have occurred in San Francisco, Manhattan, Washington, and Boston.

Between 2019 and 2023, about $557 billion of value evaporated from US offices due to a multi-year slide in demand, with older towers quickly falling out of favor with companies, according to an estimate by economists at Columbia and New York universities. CBRE Group noted that only 2% of towers in the US are considered top-tier, with rents 84% higher than the rest of the market. 

Data from brokerage Savills shows office rents in business districts have grown slower than rents for similar buildings outside metro areas. 

The move to new towers highlights how, for decades, the bubbles in legacy downtown districts, fueling economies, have ended for now, and older towers will have to be torn down.

According to Ruth Colp-Haber, chief executive officer of Wharton Property Advisors, a New York brokerage, landlords of old towers are falling under severe pressure because finding financing in today’s high-rate environment for renovations is extremely tough.

“What we have left are older buildings, many in AAA locations, but facing a tsunami of trouble,” she said, adding, “It used to be there was plenty of business to go around. Now it’s a zero-sum game.”

X user Triple Net Investor provided color on an office tower in crime-ridden Baltimore City that sold at auction for only $4.4 million. The tower was built in the 1960s in a business district that has seen tower prices collapse over the last several years. 

Wow…

A 345k SF office tower in Baltimore sold for $4M

That’s a shocking $12 per square foot 😲 pic.twitter.com/vuS2fqaltj

— Triple Net Investor (@TripleNetInvest) August 23, 2024

Following a series of our reports highlighting the crash in tower prices in the Inner Harbor area, under the old leadership of the Baltimore Sun, the paper tried to convince everyone, “Drop in downtown Baltimore real estate values not a crisis.” 

To be very frank. It’s a crisis. Democrats running the crime-ridden metro area are delusional and blinded by their woke religion as the city’s population recently crashed to a 100-year low, and violent crime remains a major issue.

We’ve had conversations with multiple folks at wealth management and investment banking firm Stifel Financial about the latest shift of operations outside the dying business district to a new tower in a much safer and newer district. At first, Stifel contemplated leaving the city for the suburbs because far-left Democrats in City Hall could not enforce law and order.

In a recent note, Goldman’s Vinay Viswanathan told clients some welcoming news about where the CRE downcycle could potentially be… “From a macro perspective, we think commercial property valuations are getting closer to their bottom.” 

Let’s not forget the comments from Rebel Cole, a finance professor at Florida Atlantic University who advises Oaktree Capital Management, who warned early last month, “Compared with the Savings & Loans crisis and 2008, we’re still in the first or second innings” when it comes to distressed CRE assets.

Come on, Jerome Powell, the CRE market needs some sizeable interest rate cuts.

Authored by Jake Johnson via Common Dreams,

Leftist parties in France on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of election theft and announced mass protests after he rejected Nouveau Front Populaire’s proposed candidate for prime minister, even though the left-wing coalition won the most seats in a snap parliamentary contest last month.

The left-wing parties that formed NFP in June to fight off the surging far-right expressed outrage at Macron’s decision, with the Jean-Luc Mélenchon-led La France Insoumise (LFI) Party condemning Macron’s dismissal of a leftist government as a “coup” and urging a “firm response from French society.”

Backing demands from youth-led organizations, the party specifically called for “a large demonstration against Macron’s coup on September 7” and expressed “hope that the political, union, and allied forces committed to the defense of democracy will join this call.”

Marine Tondelier, the leader of France’s Green Party, said Tuesday that “this election is being stolen from us” and declared that “the people must get rid of Macron for the good of democracy.”

“He is chaos and instability,” Tondelier added. The French political system has been engulfed in chaos since Macron called snap elections in June after his party performed dreadfully in European Parliament elections in June as Marine Le Pen’s far-right, xenophobic National Rally surged.

While the French left and Macron allies successfully teamed up last month to prevent the National Rally from seizing control of the nation’s government, NFP’s stunning victory in the snap election created a new dilemma for Macron, who has been openly hostile to the left since taking office in 2017.

“Facing a hung parliament in which each of the three almost equal groupings—the left, Macron’s centrist bloc, and the far-right National Rally—have ruled out forming a coalition, the president appeared to be back to square one,” Reuters reported.

Macron claimed Monday that a leftist-led government “would immediately have a majority of more than 350 MPs against it, effectively preventing it from acting.”

So Macron called snap elections. The left won. Macron refuses to honor the election results. How is this not a coup? How is France not now a dictatorship? Where the f**k is our so-called, famous free press on this? Not a peep.

— Eve Ottenberg (@OttenbergEve) August 26, 2024

“In view of the opinions expressed by the political leaders consulted, the institutional stability of our country means that this option should not be pursued,” said Macron, ruling out the NFP’s candidate for prime minister, Lucie Castets.

Protesting Macron’s decision, leftist leaders boycotted a fresh round of negotiations on Tuesday, with Tondelier saying that “we’re not going to continue these sham consultations with a president who doesn’t listen anyway… and is obsessed with keeping control.”

“He’s not looking for a solution, he’s trying to obstruct it,” said Tondelier.In a social media post on Monday, Mélenchon pledged to move ahead with an impeachment motion against Macron, calling for a “swift and firm” response to the French president.

What’s so fascinating about what Macron has been doing these past few days is how contradictory and bizarre everything is.

1) The arrest of Durov. Macron’s flagship economic measure was to make France into a «start-up nation». He’s been rehashing this over and over since the… https://t.co/mATlgVj5Wl

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) August 27, 2024

“The president of the republic has just created a situation of exceptional gravity,” Mélenchon wrote.

With strong Western backing, and having received many tens of billions of dollars over the past 2+ years, Ukraine has continued to achieve advances in its domestic military-industrial capabilities, even while it is getting pounded by unrelenting Russian aerial assaults.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday announced for that for the first time ever his armed forces have conduced a successful test of a domestically-produced ballistic missile.

“What other developments are there in Ukraine? I thought it was too early to talk about it, but… There was a positive test of the first Ukrainian ballistic missile. I congratulate our military production complex on this,” he said at a press conference in Kiev. No evidence or video of the launch was provided.

The timing of the development is surprising given the last 48 hours of heavy Russian missile and drone bombardment, which has by and large targeted energy infrastructure, resulting in nationwide blackouts and a state of emergency.

There were no other details revealed other that it was ‘positive’. But Zelensky said he shared what he did, even though he has to keep details secret, “so that Ukrainian society would know and appreciate domestic defense producers working 24/7.”

Among the long-term aims of Western support to Ukraine is that it would one day establish its own robust weapons manufacturing capability. 

Ukraine has a program called the “ZBROYARI” initiative, which is dedicated to attracting Western funding for a domestic defense and technology sector. If Zelensky’s claims of achieving a ballistic domestic missile are accurate, this would provide confirmation that these efforts are paying off.

While the vast majority of aid given to Ukraine is in the form of direct weapons shipments, the countries of the Netherlands, Denmark, and Canada have lately led to way in providing funds for Ukrainian factories to push out weapons for the nation’s armed forces.

🚀Zelensky says Ukraine has successfully tested an indigenously developed ballistic missile. pic.twitter.com/kzMxCUj0N2

— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) August 27, 2024

One key and dire need remains artillery shells. Ukraine has been blowing through them so fast, that Western stockpiles are expected to take years to replenish. On the other side, Russia is in a much better position to unleash regular shelling along the front lines, and this is one of the reasons Ukraine keeps losing ground in the Donbass.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The World Health Organization (WHO) is launching a global strategy to halt the transmission of mpox, formerly called monkeypox. The plan, announced on Aug. 26, will entail a “strategic vaccination” campaign.

The U.N. health agency, which declared a public health emergency of international concern two weeks ago, said that the plan will last six months—September 2024 to February 2025—and will receive $135 million in funding.

“Strategic vaccination” efforts will target people at the highest risk such as “close contacts of recent cases and healthcare workers, to interrupt transmission chains,” the agency said.

The WHO plan will focus on “implementing comprehensive surveillance, prevention, readiness, and response strategies; advancing research and equitable access to medical countermeasures like diagnostic tests and vaccines; minimizing animal-to-human transmission; and empowering communities to actively participate in outbreak prevention and control,” according to a statement.

Officials say that a subvariant of the virus has caused global concern because it seems to spread more easily through routine close contact.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in the Aug. 26 statement that the mpox outbreak, which originated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, “can be controlled and can be stopped.”

“Doing so requires a comprehensive and coordinated plan of action between international agencies and national and local partners, civil society, researchers and manufacturers, and our Member States,” he said.

More Cases Confirmed Outside Africa

The Philippines has confirmed two more mpox virus infections of the milder Clade II variety, its health ministry said on Aug. 26, bringing the number of active cases to three.

“We continue to see local transmission of mpox Clade II here in the Philippines, in Metro Manila in particular,” Secretary of Health Teodoro Herbosa said in a statement.

He added that newly confirmed cases were a 37-year-old male in Metro Manila who had a rash on his body and was brought to a government hospital and a 32-year-old male from the capital who had lesions on his skin.

The Philippines announced last week that it had detected a case of the mpox virus’s milder variant in a 33-year-old male who had no travel history outside the Philippines.

The Philippines has had 12 laboratory-confirmed cases since July 2022. The World Health Organization earlier this month declared mpox a global public health emergency, its highest form of alert, for the second time in two years, because of an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo that had spread to neighboring countries.

Since January 2023, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has reported more than 27,000 suspected mpox cases and more than 1,300 deaths.

The disease leads to flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions. It is usually mild but can be fatal. Children, pregnant women, and people with weakened immune systems, such as those with HIV, are all at higher risk of complications.

Other countries outside the African continent that have confirmed mpox cases in recent days include Sweden and Thailand.

“We have now also during the afternoon had confirmation that we have one case in Sweden of the more grave type of mpox, the one called Clade I,” Swedish Minister for Social Affairs and Public Health Jakob Forssmed said at a news conference at the time.

No Lockdowns

Earlier in August, a WHO official stressed that mpox would not cause lockdowns or closures or restrict other activity.

“Are we going to go in lockdown in the WHO European region, it’s another COVID-19? The answer is clearly: ‘no,’” Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, said days after the WHO declaration was issued.

“Two years ago, we controlled mpox in Europe thanks to the direct engagement with the most affected communities of men who have sex with men.”

In an update around the same time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that mpox currently poses a low risk to the United States and that no cases of Clade I mpox have been found in the country.

Reuters contributed to this report.

We reported earlier this month that Gaza recorded its first case of polio since the highly contagious virus was eradicated there 25 years ago.

The Gaza Health Ministry has said that an 10-month-old infant in the central city of Deir al-Balah “who has not received any polio vaccine dose” tested positive for the virus. The baby has since reportedly been paralyzed by the type 2 polio virus, which can be fatal. The ministry has since indicated that “a number of children” have presented with symptoms consistent with polio.

On Tuesday European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has warned that the spread of polio threatens all children in Gaza. He is calling for an urgent polio ceasefire.

Borrell has announced the need for an “immediate 3-day humanitarian ceasefire” to enable vaccination, and emphasized that “Our humanity demands it.” He said that the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF must be allowed full access to be able to vaccinate the Gaza Strip and this should happen “independent of wider negotiations.”

These efforts have already begun, but distributing vaccines in an active war zone and with bombs falling will certainly be an uphill battle. The New York Times details of where the campaign stands:

More than 1.2 million doses of the polio vaccine arrived in Gaza on Monday, in preparation for an expansive effort to inoculate more than 640,000 Palestinian children and curb a potential outbreak, the United Nations, Israel and health authorities in Gaza said.

…UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund, said it was delivering the vaccines in cooperation with the World Health Organization, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA; and other groups. UNRWA officials said they hoped to deliver the first vaccines to Gazan children starting on Saturday.

But the campaign will be “a very difficult operation and its success will depend very much on the conditions on the ground at the time,” Sam Rose, a senior official from the agency, said at a news briefing on Monday.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has been calling for a voluntary ceasefire to allow health workers to conduct their work.

For weeks now he has implored Israeli and Palestinian forces to lay down their arms to at least allow the Strip to be vaccinated. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign,” he previously told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York.

The quick spread of polio threatens all children in Gaza, already weakened by displacement, deprivation & malnourishment.

I urge an immediate 3-day humanitarian ceasefire to enable vaccination by @WHO & @UNICEF – independent of wider negotiations.

Our humanity demands it.

— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) August 27, 2024

“Let’s be clear: The ultimate vaccine for polio is peace and an immediate humanitarian cease-fire,” Guterres stressed. “But in any case, a polio pause is a must.”

At this moment the IDF military’s campaign to rescue the hostages is still in full force, and there is unlikely to be a complete pause in fighting; however, it’s possible there could be a slow down in fighting in some locales.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The Pavel Durov saga is a gift that will keep on giving for a long time to come. This is what hot information war is all about. So let’s attempt to connect several loose ends.

A high-level Russian analyst makes the case that Durov’s arrest is connected with “anti-French protests in its former colonies, withdrawal from its traditional ‘sphere of influence’ where Telegram infrastructure was used to push anti-colonial and anti-Macronist narratives”.

Add to it an “attempt to influence narratives on Ukraine both in Russian and the international media field, which is highly dependent on Telegram infrastructure.”

Paris is indeed desperate to make itself relevant when it comes to psy ops and influencing/special warfare in Ukraine.

However, as the analyst notes, the French don’t have the tech means to accomplish it. So this may have led to Macron deciding to “exercise a personal pressure campaign against Durov himself. French authorities must be rather desperate in trying to keep their heads in the game of global politics. And Telegram today is (his italics) global politics.”

Paris was just waiting for a big break. When the pilot of Durov’s Embraer private jet submitted his flight plan, there was no warrant for his arrest in France. Only when the jet was on its way to Le Bourget, Paris filed the warrant in haste. Durov was clueless all along.

In a nutshell: Paris got a fateful heads up he was flying into France – could have been via Durov’s Dubai-based, post-obsessive, social climbing girlfriend – and laid out the trap in a flash.

An Eminence in Jail

There’s a myth that the FSB in the past asked Durov for Telegram’s encryption keys. False. The FSB wanted Telegram to provide top access on investigations of serious crimes, on a case-by-case basis. That’s an enormous difference compared to what the US Government does with Meta or Twitter/X via their totally open backdoors.

Durov though got drunk on NATOstan’s “freedom and democracy” propaganda, rebuffed Russia, and left.

And that brings us to President Putin.

Putin had better things to do than to meet Durov in Baku, and the Kremlin has gone on the record to deny the meeting. Durov was doing a tour of Central Asia and the Caucasus, they happened to cross their paths in Azerbaijan.

There’s one thing that Putin never tolerates: betrayal of Russia. And that applies to the letter to Durov.

When Durov went to the US, the Americans, predictably, demanded Telegram’s backdoors to surveil everybody. So he set up shop in Dubai and later applied for French citizenship.

Durov became a French citizen only 3 years ago – significantly, before the launch of the SMO – via a special “eminent foreigner” program set up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Very few are eligible; only a “French-speaking foreigner who contributes through their eminent action to the influence of France and the prosperity of its international economic relations”.

Well, no “eminent action” was enough to keep him away from a French slammer.

How to Get Those Keys

The European Commission (EC) in Brussels can be summarily described as a notorious bunch of EUrocrat cowards and/or psychopaths cheerfully praising “our values”.

Predictably, the EC refuses to comment on Durov’s arrest, saying it’s a “national investigation”.

An “investigation” which happens to have been “encouraged” by the US Deep State, carried out since July 8 by vassal Macronist police, to the benefit of NATO and… the European Commission itself.

The charges against Durov revealed by France’s Prosecutor of the Republic should be destroyed in court by any crack legal team. Essentially, the claims are that Durov himself is responsible for those abusing Telegram. He is “complicit” of every misdeed under the sun – from organized fraud to drug-trafficking – all the way to a hazy accusation of providing encrypted services without a “certified declaration”.

The accusations about Telegram’s lack of moderation are false. For instance, Telegram actively censors correspondence inside the EU; EU residents cannot access countless chats and channels. Moreover, Telegram is not concerned by the recent, hardcore neo-Orwellian EU law against mega social networks, because it harbors less than 45 million European users a day.

Now let’s focus on motive.

The current liberal-totalitarian Euro-gulag, or EuroLag, is a massive power bloc that does not have access to Telegram’s content.

Telegram maintains its own servers around the world, and routing goes via Amazon, Cloudfare and Google. Since the start of Telegram, US intel/surveillance has the means to easily block it – if they feel like it.

The EU is a different ball game. So here we have Brussels, via Paris, trying to acquire at least some control over Telegram – and social networks in general. A crucial reminder – which could be billed under the Pathetic Tech department: Europe has no (italics mine) social networks.

Hence the non-stop threats against Twitter/X and the neo-Orwellian Digital Services Act over the responsibility of platforms in terms of content, which applies to all of them, and not only Telegram.

The EU and France desperately want what the hegemonic power already has, in droves: access to everything, right here, right now, with no legal documentation whatsoever.

The key question now is: will they get it by applying pressure over Pavel Durov? There’s no evidence he has Telegram’s encryption keys. What if they got the wrong guy?

Nikolai Durov, Pavels’ ultra-discreet brother, is the prime genius architect of Telegram: math master, two PhDs, gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad. The French would rather cut a deal – thus the extended interrogation: but that would imply breaking Pavel so he would influence Nikolai to hand over those fabled keys.

Why Now? And Who Profits?

Predictably, Durov’s interrogation goes on with zero transparence. France is an excruciatingly secretive society, prone to absolute silence on serious matters, nerve-wracking slow, punctuated by rare formal declarations. It’s all about procedure – and the bureaucracy is stultifying.

Yet French bureaucracy may have given a precious hint on what really bothers them. They simply cannot accept that anyone uses – or provides – the means of “obfuscation” in terms of financial transactions, bypassing censorship and bypassing surveillance.

So this may go way beyond the obsession to get some or all of Telegram’s encryption keys. The French bureaucratic apparatus wants to go no holds barred to suppress any possibility of any bypassing – while retaining the power to punish anyone.

If the saga goes on and on, leading to a trial and eventually a 20-year prison sentence, that means Durov would not be broken facing the bureaucratic apparatus, and he will always remain “an accomplice”.

Hardly likely. Bye bye to unlimited glitz and glamour, in exchange for a daily stale baguette in a French gaol?

Two more inevitable questions. Why now? Because the EU needs it, badly. And who profits? The leading candidates are the “esprit de corps” of ultra-regimented French bureaucracy and their Franco-European oligarch connections. Envy is also in the cards. Durov is Russian, an outsider, and Telegram – with a billion users worldwide – is a resounding success.

Anything can happen further on down the road – including the blocking of Telegram in France and the EU. The Global Majority could not care less. Meanwhile, multitudes marvel at how a narcissist tech globalist could be so naïve to believe that liberal totalitarianism would ever protect his freedom.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

As most people are aware, this month there was a sweeping internet outage across the US which led to a failure in roughly 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices. Disruptions included banks, airline networks, emergency call centers, online retailers and numerous corporate networks. The outage is estimated to have caused at least $5.4 billion in profit losses and it only lasted about a day.

The alleged cause of the breakdown was Crowdstrike, a cyber-security company that uses large scale data updates to Microsoft Windows networks to counter cyber threats. Instead, the company uploaded bugged code and caused a cascading outage. Mac and Linux machines were not affected.

The scale of the shutdown was immense – Over 25% of Fortune 500 companies were frozen. Travel essentially stopped. Business transactions for many companies ceased. Some banks including Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, TD Bank and Wells Fargo could not function and customers could not access their accounts.

The event reminded me of the panic surrounding the Y2K scare 25 years ago. Of course, that was all nonsense; US systems were definitely not digitized to an extent great enough to cause a disaster should there be an internet crash or a software crash. But today things are very different. Nearly every sector of the American (and European) economy and many utilities are directly dependent on a functioning internet.

The fear that prevailed during Y2K was unrealistic in 1999. Now, it makes perfect sense.

I often hear preppers talk about the impending danger of an EMP leading to a grid down scenario. However, this kind of attack is highly overblown. Even major solar storms have not caused the kind of electrical breakdown that theorists suggest might happen. Instead, I would recommend worrying a lot more about cyber threats. I believe these events will become far more common in the next few years for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, there is the potential for random error like the Crowdstrike incident. Then there’s the potential for a foreign attack on US and European digital infrastructure. Then, there’s the potential for a false flag event BLAMED on random error or a foreign government in order to foment war or economic collapse.

In 2021 in my article ‘Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?’ I warned that if the pandemic crisis failed to achieve the centralization goals of the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions, they may use a cyber crisis instead. WEF head Klaus Schwab incessantly compared the idea of a “Cyber Pandemic” to the covid pandemic. He suggested that governments would have to respond to both in a similar fashion (i.e. lockdowns and extensive controls on individual freedoms).

In the past I have mentioned a very interesting event that was barely covered by the corporate media called the “Fastly Outage.” I examined the implications of this and more in my article ‘Obama’s Weird New Movie And America’s Extreme Vulnerability To Cyber Attack’.

In June of 2021 there was an internet outage that led to large swaths of the web going completely dark, including a number of mainstream news sites, Amazon, eBay, Twitch, Reddit, etc. A host of government websites also went down. All this happened when content delivery network (CDN) company Fastly experienced a “bug.” Although Amazon had its website back online within 20 minutes, the brief outage cost the company over $5.5 million in sales.

A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. They make up what is known as the “backbone” of the internet. Only a handful of these company’s support a vast majority of internet activity. All it would take is for a few to go down, and the internet goes down, taking our economy with it.

The recent Crowdstrike situation is perhaps the worst web disruption of all time, and that was just a bug in a software update. Imagine if someone wanted to deliberately damage internet functions for an extended period of time? The results would be catastrophic.

With supply chains completely dependent on “just-in-time” freight deliveries and those deliveries dependent on efficient digital communications and payments between retailers and manufacturers, a web-down scenario for more than a few days would cause an immediate loss of consumer goods. Stores would empty within hours should the public realize that new shipments might not arrive for a long time.

Keep in mind, I’m not even accounting for payment processing between customers and retailers. If that shuts down, then ALL sales shut down. Then, whatever food you have left in your pantry or in storage is what you will have to live on until the problem is fixed. If it is ever fixed…

Network attacks are difficult to independently trace, which means anyone can initiate them and anyone can be blamed afterwards. With the increasing tensions between western and eastern nations the chances of an attack are high. And corrupt government officials could also trigger an internet crisis and blame it on foreign enemies – Either to convince the public to go to war, or to convince the public to accept greater authoritarianism.

I believe a cyber attack is the next most likely global disaster. We weathered covid and defeated the draconian mandates. The economy is in the midst of a stagflation crisis but the system is still operating. But what if the next ploy is a complete shutdown of the web and a fast moving financial collapse?

Figuring out who triggered the breakdown would be nearly impossible. We could suspect, but proving who did it is another matter. In the meantime, western officials controlled by globalist interests could lock down internet traffic and eliminate alternative media platforms they don’t like, giving the public access to corporate news sources only.

There are millions of Americans out there ready for a systemic collapse. According to surveys around 30% of adult Americans now consider themselves preppers. But that leaves 70% of the population in a daze, unaware and panicking should the supply chain break. Will they care who was behind the attack? Probably not. They’ll be far more concerned with simple survival.

What are the most practical solutions to this? As always we can store necessities to protect our families and friends. To protect data, I recommend shutting OFF Windows Updates to prevent something like a Crowdstrike error from affecting your devices. You can also set up a Linux-based device with all your important data storage secured.

You can purchase an exterior hard drive and clone your computer data, then throw it in a closet or a waterproof case. Then there is the option of building a completely offline device (a computer that has never and will never connect to the internet).

These options protect you and your valuable files, but there’s not much that can be done to prevent a national scale cyber attack and the damage that one could cause. Organizing for inevitable chaos and violence is all you can do.

With a cyber-event there is the distinct danger of communications disruptions – No cell phones, no email, no social media, nothing. So, having knowledge in ham radio and radio communications is a must. I’m a general class ham and I’m still finding there’s more to learn, but a basic knowledge of radios, frequency bands and repeaters will help you to at least listen in on chatter and get important information outside of controlled news networks.

The people who used to claim it’s “doom mongering” to examine the threat of cyber attacks have been proven utterly wrong this past month. We just witnessed one of the worst internet implosions of all time and more are on the way. Prepare accordingly and remember that technological dependency is a double-edged sword. Use your tech wisely and don’t let it run your life.

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