Palmer Luckey, the Trump-loving defense contractor who looks increasingly like Kenny Powers, has long been preoccupied with dystopian visions. In addition to warning us all about the future of killer artificial intelligence and spouting dreams of a “virtual” border wall for Trump, he has also said he’d one day like to create a VR/video game headset that will incinerate you if you lose. Now, he seems to have succeeded in translating at least one of his science fiction fantasies into reality—that of turning America’s soldiers into cybernetic killing machines.
This week, Luckey’s company, Anduril Industries, announced that it had partnered with Microsoft to bring its adaptive digital software platform, Lattice, to the U.S. Military. According to a press release from Anduril, the collaboration will help advance the U.S. Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Program, a unique headset created by Microsoft that seeks to pipe digital intelligence directly into the head of America’s fighting cadres. Luckey’s software product, which has been integrated into the headset, will give soldiers a “significantly enhanced capacity to detect, track and respond to threats in real time,” the press release states.
In essence, Luckey and Microsoft have managed to create an interface for American soldiers not unlike Tony Stark’s helmet in Iron Man. Soldiers can allegedly see real-time intelligence and AR displays that are supposed to make them more aware of the battleground/environment that they’re in. The data that will be fed into those headsets will come from a variety of sources, with WIRED reporting that it will be “pulled from drones, ground vehicles, or aerial defense systems.”
“This project is my top priority at Anduril, and it has been for some time now,” said Luckey, in Thursday’s press release. “It’s one of the Army’s most critical programs being fielded in the near future, with the goal of getting the right data to the right people at the right time.”
Robin Seiler, Corporate Vice President of Mixed Reality at Microsoft, called the headset a “fighting goggle” and said it would bring a “full picture of the battlefield to every soldier, enabling safer and more effective operations.”
In an interview with WIRED, Luckey elaborated on the product: “The idea is to enhance soldiers. Their visual perception, audible perception—basically to give them all the vision that Superman has, and then some, and make them more lethal.”
Luckey is obviously a pretty weird guy. He rose to prominence in 2014 after selling Oculus, his VR firm, to Facebook for some $2 billion. Anduril was founded several years after that, in 2017. Since then, in addition to proudly being the face of the military-industrial complex, he has also become an avid MAGA freak and Trump proponent. “My big league support for Donald Trump is no secret,” Luckey tweeted earlier this year. In the past, Luckey has donated liberally to Trump’s political machine. Anduril focuses mostly on drone technology, and has launched a number of projects designed to bring automated aerial technology to the U.S. defense community.
Like many of the other deep pocketed swamp creatures who donate liberally to Trump, Luckey has claimed to be a libertarian (he once said he was a Gary Johnson supporter), despite the fact that his entire business revolves around making the U.S. government more powerful. That makes him more than passingly similar to Peter Thiel, another so-called “free market” guy who loves Trump and who has similarly desecrated J.R.R. Tolkein’s legacy by naming one of his companies after part of the fantasy writer’s mythology. As a group, you could lump both of these two in with Elon Musk as the world’s most powerful nerds, all of whom seem to have partially (or fully) misread the seminal tomes of sci-fi and fantasy that inspired their careers.
On Monday, Apple released its latest computer operating system update called macOS 15, or Sequoia. And, somehow, the software update has broken the functionality of several security tools made by CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft, and others, according to posts on social media, as well as messages posted in a Mac-focused Slack channel.
At this point, it’s unclear exactly what is the issue, but appears to affect several products made by companies that provide software for macOS users and enterprises, which has caused frustration among people who work on and with macOS-focused security tools.
“As a developer of macOS security tools, it’s incredibly frustrating to time and time again have to deal with (understandably) upset users (understandably) blaming your tools for breaking their Macs, when in reality it was Apple’s fault all along,” said Patrick Wardle, the founder of Mac and iOS security startup DoubleYou, and a longtime expert on macOS security.
“I get it, that writing bug free software is challenging, but maybe if Apple spent less time and money on marketing, and more time on actually testing their software, we’d all be better off!” Wardle told TechCrunch.
On the day of macOS Sequoia’s release, a CrowdStrike sales engineer said in a Slack room for Mac admins that the company had to delay support for the new version of Mac’s operating system. “I’m very sorry to report that we will not be supporting Sequoia on day 1 in spite of our intention (and previous track record) to support the latest OS within hours of [General Availability],” the engineer said in the message, seen by TechCrunch.
The engineer also said CrowdStrike sent out a “Tech Alert” to customers, adding that “there’s quite a lot going on with the changes in the network stack.”
”We’re also tracking some similar issues with other vendors, and have feedback and a case in to Apple. While we would love for there to be a fast-follow patch that resolves this for us, we’re acting under the assumption there won’t be and we’ll need to fix it in our code with a sensor release,” the sales engineer wrote.
Do you work at a cybersecurity company whose products are affected by the macOS update? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.
“Please trust me when I say this was looked at through every angle, to see if there was any way to continue to provide the best protection to our customers on this new OS without having to delay,” the CrowdStrike engineer wrote. “Ultimately it was decided that the best course to protect our Mac fleets is to wait until this is resolved.”
Also, several people on Reddit reported having issues with CrowdStrike’s security product on the new macOS.
CrowdStrike spokesperson Kevin Benacci told TechCrunch on Thursday that the company is “currently waiting for a macOS Sequoia update and will provide official support. We respectfully refer you to Apple for any additional questions.”
Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
On Monday, a SentinelOne Support account warned customers in the same Mac-focused Slack channel: “Do not upgrade your endpoints until you have a supported SentinelOne Agent,” citing a series of issues with the new macOS version.
SentinelOne did not respond to a request for comment.
ESET also alerted customers of a network connection issue after upgrading to macOS Sequoia. An ESET representative did not respond to our request for comment.
Other people in the same Slack reported having issues with Microsoft Defender for macOS after the Sequoia update. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
Security researcher Will Dormann wrote on Mastodon that he was having issues with DNS and running his firewall on his macOS machine. Another security researcher, Wacław Jacek, wrote in a blog post that, “it seems the OS firewall can sometimes start blocking access to web browsing after upgrading to macOS Sequoia,” and shared a potential workaround.
The problems with macOS Sequoia appear to have caused issues with Firefox browser users, too, according to a separate Reddit thread.
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