Apple turns 50 this week. To mark it, I'm sharing never-before-published material from my forthcoming book, Steve Jobs in Exile.

The material: an internal strategy document from Chiat/Day, the ad agency behind Apple's most famous campaigns, dated November 1983. I found it in the Stanford Apple Archive.

With Steve Jobs's backing, the agency was planning what would become the most iconic tech advertisement ever made: 1984.

Much gratitude to the archivists at Stanford for preserving it. When I was researching Steve Jobs in Exile, this material shaped my grasp of Steve's vision and his team's brilliance.

They took existential commercial pressure and turned it into art that looked, to everyone else, like destiny. The Chiat/Day document shows you how they did it.

BREAKING: New @ProPublica investigation by @Renee_Dudley and Doris Burke reveals @Microsoft omitted from its Pentagon security plan that China-based engineers were maintaining highly sensitive U.S. Defense Department cloud systems.

Big omission. First, read the story from the fearless muckrakers at @ProPublica: propublica.org/article/micros…

The hackers who breached America's nuclear security agency last month may have had help from an unlikely source: Microsoft.

The company had quietly entrusted maintenance of SharePoint, the very software exploited in the attack, to engineers based in China, where cooperation with state intelligence is the law.

Must-read piece by @Renee_Dudley First, read the excellent @propublica piece at propublica.org/article/micros…

@business reports Microsoft is investigating the possibility that its vulnerability sharing program tipped off Chinese hackers: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

And a deep dive analysis from Natto Team at substack.com/home/post/p-16…

🚨With today's Supreme Court ruling, TikTok is preparing to shut down its app on Sunday.

So why are American Big Tech companies Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon working with Chinese parent company ByteDance? Why are they casting aside the government's alarm over the privacy and security of Americans?

In a sweeping 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the bill that will separate @TikTok from its Chinese parent company. The court found that the national security concerns are grave.

Many of us have warned for years about the privacy and security of Americans' data in the hands of TikTok and ByteDance. Employees in China are required, under Chinese law, to hand that data to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

I was even kicked out of China for my investigative reporting into China's surveillance dystopia, built with the help of US and Chinese Big Tech.

Here's the story of the American corporations that have worked with the CCP-connected firm ByteDance. They've repeatedly chosen market access in China over the safety and security of the citizens of their own country.
1. TikTok paid Microsoft almost $20 million a month as of last March to gain access to powerful AI algorithms created by OpenAI.

This wasn't smalltime business. The deal made up one-quarter of the revenue of Microsoft's cloud computing division, which has a huge presence in China.

Could TikTok be trusted? Absolutely not.

The Verge reported that ByteDance was "secretly using" OpenAI technology to create its own large language model.

OpenAI suspended ByteDance's account.

theverge.com/2024/7/31/2421…

Today, @Microsoft President Brad Smith @BradSmi will testify before Congress about a devastating hack of its cloud software used by the federal government.

Over the last year, China and Russia have been behind aggressive cyberattacks against America, many of them targeting Microsoft software.

If you're using Microsoft software—and especially cloud services—you have every reason to fear for your privacy.

Microsoft has spent decades making concessions to the Chinese Communist Party—a hostile authoritarian body that oversees the world's largest police state—in exchange for market access.

The company seeks easy profit in China but tosses out the privacy and national security of Americans. Here's why you should be worried. 1. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a US government body:

Microsoft has 238,000 associated vulnerabilities with its products
Apple has 11,000
Google about 12,000
Amazon at 127
Oracle at 9,500
Adobe at 5,300
Cisco at 6,000
Samsung 950

The numbers are searchable from NIST here: nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search