A federal judge reportedly said she will not rubber-stamp a settlement between Elon Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying the deal raises red flags and needs scrutiny over whether Musk is getting special treatment from the Trump administration.

As we reported last week, the Trump administration agreed to let Musk pay a $1.5 million fine to settle a lawsuit that originally sought at least $150 million. In 2022, before buying Twitter outright, Musk purchased a 9 percent stake in the social network and failed to disclose it within 10 days as required under US law. The SEC lawsuit filed during the Biden administration said the late disclosure allowed Musk to keep buying shares at artificially low prices and underpay shareholders by at least $150 million.

Under the settlement with the SEC, a trust in Musk’s name would pay a $1.5 million civil penalty to the government and not admit that Musk committed any violation. The deal requires court approval, and Judge Sparkle Sooknanan expressed skepticism at a hearing yesterday in US District Court for the District of Columbia.

“I am not going to rubber-stamp this settlement, and I cannot rubber-stamp this settlement," the judge said, Bloomberg reported. “Is Mr. Musk getting some kind of special treatment in this case?” Sooknanan was also quoted as saying.

Sooknanan said that dropping the demand for $150 million and imposing the settlement terms on a trust instead of Musk himself are both "red flags," a Reuters report said. "Sooknanan also noted that SEC lawyers at a prior hearing to discuss the case had appeared surprised when lawyers for Musk revealed that they had been in settlement talks with the agency," Reuters reported. Sooknanan called that fact another red flag.

Musk, SEC ordered to answer questions

After yesterday's hearing, Sooknanan issued a short order telling attorneys for Musk and the SEC to submit a brief by June 1 "addressing the Court's questions as stated on the record at today's hearing." Bloomberg's report said Sooknanan told attorneys that the brief should explain "how the parties reached the deal, including why the proposed settlement involves a trust tied to Musk instead of the billionaire himself."

SEC attorney Nicholas Grippo told the judge, “These are important, fair questions. Happy to answer them,” according to Bloomberg. The SEC historically operated with independence from the White House until Trump issued an executive order declaring that independent agencies must take orders from the president.

In a previous order last week, Sooknanan said that precedents require the court to consider whether "the settlement is fair, adequate, reasonable and appropriate under the particular facts," "whether it resolves the claims in the complaint, and whether it was tainted by improper collusion or corruption."

The SEC filed the lawsuit in January 2025 with only days remaining in the Biden presidency. In December 2024, SEC attorneys reportedly asked Musk to pay over $200 million to settle the allegations.

The disclosure rule that Musk was accused of violating is enforced under a “strict liability” standard, meaning that it doesn’t matter whether a rule violation was intentional or inadvertent. Musk unsuccessfully tried to get the lawsuit moved to a Texas court, and Sooknanan rejected his motion to dismiss the case in February 2026.

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Perhaps you remember Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, the 34-year-old twin brothers we profiled earlier this week. Although they had the tech chops to commit years of petty crimes (like stealing airline miles), what landed them in truly serious trouble was deleting 96 US government databases in the hour after both were fired last year by the same federal IT contractor, Opexus. (Opexus had just found out that both brothers had previously been in prison for cyberfraud.)

The pair come off less as cybercriminal masterminds than as galumphing galoots—that is to say, a pair of bumbling oafs who thought that asking AI how to cover their tracks was going to keep them out of federal prison.

One of the minor mysteries I encountered while writing the piece was that the government had a verbatim transcript of everything the brothers said to each other during their hour-long deletion spree. The two men lived together in Arlington, Virginia, so it made sense that they might be chatting in the same room rather than by text or instant message. But how the heck had the government gotten access to the audio? Supersecret software bugging? Crazy corporate spyware running on their company laptops? FBI agent in the bushes with a microphone?

I couldn't figure it out, and the answer didn't appear in any of the court documents I read. But a helpful source today pointed me to the answer. It is contained within a court filing that bears the unpropitious name, "UNITED STATES’ RESPONSE IN OPPOSITION TO DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO REVOKE THE DETENTION ORDER."

This is the kind of title that practically begs you not to read its contents. Yet the file turns out to be fascinating. And it reveals that our galumphing galoots were supersecretly recorded by… themselves.

On accident.

Because they forgot to stop recording the Teams meeting in which they were fired.

You can't make this stuff up, folks.

Here's how prosecutors put it:

On February 18, 2025, two human resources (HR) employees of Company-1 [Opexus] scheduled a Microsoft Teams meeting with Sohaib and Muneeb. Sohaib recorded the meeting starting at 4:48pm Eastern Standard Time. The HR personnel left the meeting approximately 2 minutes and 40 seconds into the recording. Apparently unbeknownst to the defendants, the meeting continued recording the next hour of interactions between the brothers.

And what did the pair discuss? Fortunately, this obscure document gives us a much fuller picture. If you've ever wondered what it sounds like to be in the room while cybercriminals do their thing, it sounds something like this:

SOHAIB: “Still connected? Still on the VPN?”

SOHAIB: “Delete all their databases?”

MUNEEB: “Eh, they can recover them…backups, I’m pretty sure.”

SOHAIB: “Daily backups?”

MUNEEB: “Yup.”

SOHAIB: “What’s the plan [then]? We gonna take care of severance or are we gonna do something about…” “Should we retort to whatever they send us by saying we need $25,000 each? Hm?”

MUNEEB: “We are doing petty shit now.”

MUNEEB: “I’m going to wipe my computer clean.”

SOHAIB: “I can’t access the system but I still have the email address for their customers for eCase and FOIAXpress.”

MUNEEB and SOHAIB discuss being compensated by Company-1.

MUNEEB: “I’m not gonna threaten them shit, that’s like could be shown as some sort of . . .”

SOHAIB: “It depends on how you write it. Just say, ‘according to our previous agreement, this is the tally of the amount that I’ve been [paid], if you pay it up front, then I have no reason to communicate with customers.’”

MUNEEB: “I’m good.”

SOHAIB: “Whatcha working on man?”

MUNEEB: “Nothing important, man.”

SOHAIB: “Why won’t you tell me? I ain’t gonna snitch.”

MUNEEB: “Don’t need to. Don’t worry about it.”

MUNEEB: “People are logged out for the day, this is the perfect time.”

SOHAIB: “How do you still have access? When did you connect to their VPN?”

MUNEEB: “10 minutes before their stupid meeting.”

SOHAIB: “You might still have access to it until the end of the day. Until at least 6 hours.”

MUNEEB: “Don’t worry about it man. Don’t worry about it.”

SOHAIB: “I see you are cleaning out their database backups.”

MUNEEB: “Don’t worry about it. You don’t do nothing. Don’t try nothin’. They are looking at you, they are not looking at me.”

SOHAIB: “[G]oing to RDP into their systems and delete all their data.”

[inaudible]

SOHAIB: “The ramifications for that would be worse though.”

MUNEEB: “What are you talking about? I didn’t do nothing. They closed my access when they had that meeting.”

SOHAIB: “Alright, if you have good plausible deniability.”

SOHAIB and MUNEEB then have additional discussion about deleting backups and changing DNS information.

MUNEEB: “Eh, they can recover from yesterday. [The IT manager] will have some work to do.”

MUNEEB and SOHAIB discuss Company-1 customers, including Veteran’s Affairs OIG, Education Department OIG, DHS OIG, and customer data.

MUNEEB: “DHS was a big [customer].”

SOHAIB: “Just go into each of them and start the delete process. It will take its time. . . It will eventually delete all their files.”

MUNEEB: “Sabes, don’t say nothin’, OK, don’t worry about it.”

SOHAIB: “I ain’t sayin’ shit.”

SOHAIB: “You should have thought about it prior, man.”

MUNEEB: “What do you mean? Like had a kill script, what do you mean?”

SOHAIB: “Blackmailing them in for some money would’ve been…”

MUNEEB: “No, you do not do that. That’s proof of guilt, man.”

SOHAIB: “No but the thing was you always have your opinion, I could just communicate with their customers.”

MUNEEB: “Communicate with their customers is a different thing!”

SOHAIB: “So you’re saying these are two separate things?”

MUNEEB: “There ya go. Go say that man, go argue for that, then they’ll think you’re the one behind this shit.”

SOHAIB: “. . . They’re gonna probably raid this place.”

MUNEEB: “Eh, I’ll clean this shit up. I don’t got shit.”

SOHAIB: “We also gotta clean stuff up from the other house man.”

MUNEEB: “Get rid of that shit.”

SOHAIB: “Deleting their filesystems would be a harder fix.”

MUNEEB: “Mhhmm, especially if you clear it out.”

MUNEEB: “Everything that I did, I’m making sure it’s protected. That it’s clean.”

MUNEEB: “Don’t worry, we’ll go to Texas.”

Neither brother is currently in Texas; both are in federal prison. Sohaib was found guilty at trial last week, while Muneeb pleaded guilty in April 2026—but has been furiously trying to take back his plea ever since through a series of handwritten letters to the judge.

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Donald Trump has very little leverage heading into two days of meetings with China's leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing this week, experts say.

The thinking goes that Trump came into office with a plan that has since largely failed. He hoped to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, settle things down with Israel and Gaza, launch his Liberation Day tariffs, and quickly diversify US supply chains, all of which would have given him substantial leverage over China.

But none of that happened, and instead, Trump's escalations in Iran have only handed China even more leverage heading into talks, and Xi knows it.

Unwilling to appear weak when negotiating with one of America's most critical trading partners and fiercest adversaries, Trump invited executives of some of the biggest US tech firms to tag along.

Among tech leaders joining Trump is Tim Cook, who Trump fondly calls "Tim Apple." The Beijing trip will likely be Cook's "final major diplomatic effort" as Apple's departing CEO, EuroNews noted. Elon Musk will also be there, suggesting that Trump still values the SpaceX CEO's input on foreign policy. And at the last minute, Trump confirmed that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will also be attending, which Reuters noted could help Nvidia finally convince China to start buying the high-end chips that Huang convinced the US would be safe to sell to China earlier this year.

Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan think tank, recently spent two weeks in Beijing discussing US-China relations with Chinese officials and businesses. At a recent press briefing, he provided insights that could help explain why Trump may have hastily formed this tech gaggle ahead of the summit.

Kennedy suggested that even though China has more leverage, both countries rely on each other at this pivotal moment in the AI race. Nvidia's chips are peerless, Reuters reported, and access to China's rare-earth exports is critical to leading US tech firms.

In the week before the summit, the topic of AI was suddenly added to the agenda, Kennedy noted, with both countries interested in discussing how to manage AI risks after China blocked Meta's acquisition of a Chinese company called Manus.

On Truth Social, Trump said it was an "honor" for tech executives to stand by his side in Beijing, while indicating that his hope was to convince Xi to "open up" China "so that these brilliant people can work their magic and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!"

Possibly, Trump invited the executives to remind China that it depends on US tech firms and can't afford to push Trump too far.

But that doesn't guarantee China will be intimidated by Trump's tech industry pals. Importantly, China has so far resisted buying Nvidia chips while prioritizing advancing chip tech at domestic firms in a bid to be less reliant on the US.

Trump's social media comments caused "deep concerns among China hawks in Washington," Reuters reported. They're worried that Trump will trade away too much, giving China a chance to beef up its military and catch up on AI.

Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former official in the Biden administration, told Reuters that Huang's invitation alone should raise eyebrows.

"Any deal that allows Nvidia to sell more chips to ⁠China means fewer Nvidia chips for US firms, and a smaller US lead in AI over China," McGuire said. "It is remarkable that President Trump keeps getting convinced to put Nvidia’s interest ahead of America's."

China wants Trump to pivot on Taiwan

China's top priority at the summit is clear: Xi wants to finally force Trump to discuss Taiwan.

Historically, China has maintained that Taiwan is part of its territory. And the US has treaded lightly, helping Taiwan maintain its self-defense, while cautiously avoiding upsetting China by officially recognizing Taiwan's independence.

In the recent past, China has pressured the US to change the language it uses from "does not support" Taiwan independence to "opposes," and it's possible that Xi sees an opportunity to push Trump to make that symbolic change during the summit, experts suggest.

For Taiwan, the language the US uses matters, as China might be more willing to take military action if Trump's resolve to shield Taiwan remains uncertain.

In an article criticizing Trump's inconsistent stance on Taiwan during his second term, a senior fellow at a progressive think tank called the Center for American Progress, Michael Schiffer, warned that "the administration’s signals on Taiwan have grown so contradictory that neither Beijing nor Taipei can reliably discern American policy."

For example, Trump has accused Taiwan of stealing the US semiconductor industry, but he also authorized the largest arms package the US has ever set aside to aid Taiwan's defense. Rather than align with past administrations' commitments to Taiwan's security, Trump has used the arms package as a bargaining chip to try to force Taiwan to move 50 percent of its semiconductor manufacturing into the US. Perhaps even more frustrating for Taiwan, Trump recently told reporters that whether Xi decides to invade Taiwan is "up to him," Schiffer's piece noted.

"This pattern of strategic flip-flopping broadcasts a dangerous signal to Beijing: For the right price, Taiwan’s security is an expendable line item," Schiffer's piece said. "But this transactionalism is a double-edged sword. Xi likely views any Trump administration commitment with the same skepticism one affords a month-to-month lease, knowing it is liable to reverse course on a whim."

It's important for Trump to clarify his strategic stance on Taiwan, Schiffer said, urging in his article that "strategic instability serves no one’s interests and significantly increases the risk of catastrophic miscalculation. The time to choose a coherent strategy is now, before contradictory signals generate the very crisis they purport to prevent."

In the US, the original strategy was to protect Taiwan to maintain access to its semiconductor industry, which produces over 90 percent of the world's most advanced semiconductor chips.

Trump's trade tactics have set Taiwan on edge. A deputy minister at Taiwan's China-policy-making Mainland Affairs Council, Shen Yu-chung, has confirmed that Taiwan has attempted to "intensify" talks with the US ahead of the meeting, Reuters reported. "We will be watching whether the US makes any changes to its position on Taiwan Strait issues as a result of that meeting," the official said.

Schiffer told Ars that the US shifting its position on Taiwan may not be the worst outcome for Taiwan. Since the COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that supply chains must be diversified, it's no longer practical for Taiwan to expect to maintain overwhelming dominance in the semiconductor industry, he suggested.

Likely, officials in Taiwan are having "complex conversations" about "how to placate Trump," Schiffer said, while coming to terms with the "new world" in which the US can't afford to defend Taiwan's "Silicon Shield" forever.

"Obviously Taipei wants to maintain market share," Schiffer said. "But Taiwan is a single point of failure for the chip market," and it's getting "harder and harder, no matter how well inclined you are towards Taiwan" to argue that the US and "most of the world should depend to that degree on Taiwan as the chip forge for the world."

Most likely, Taiwan will face pressure to move a certain amount of its semiconductor business elsewhere, but the "magic number" that would make that sustainable in the face of a Chinese military threat can't be predicted yet, Schiffer said.

Don't expect a big win for Trump

Experts agree that the US and China will likely extend the temporary trade truce established during Trump's last meeting with Xi, as both sides would benefit from that stability. But it remains unclear how much Trump might be willing to trade as China uses its leverage to push for its biggest asks. Those will likely include the shift on the US position on Taiwan, easing of export restrictions to give China access to more high-end tech, and possibly the removal of Chinese firms from US sanctions lists.

Notably, Trump no longer has emergency tariffs or even his global tariffs to intimidate China, so Xi may get more out of the bargain than Trump likes.

However, China doesn't even need to get any of its biggest asks to emerge as winners from the summit, Kennedy said. "As long as there’s not a blow up in the meeting and President Trump doesn’t go away and look to re-escalate, China basically comes out stronger," Kennedy said.

The best outcome for Trump might be coming out of Beijing with "some pomp and pageantry, but nothing of substance that harms the United States or harms our allies and partners," Schiffer told Ars.

"This may be sort of dialing expectations down, but I would consider that a win at this point," Schiffer said.

At the very least, Trump needs to secure symbolic wins coming out of Beijing, experts agreed, if he wants Republicans to have something to campaign on ahead of the midterm elections.

But if he's really invested in US dominance in AI, he can't actually afford to be short-sighted at the summit, especially after making "massive" cuts to US science funding and research, which drove China to start recruiting top US scientists last year, Kennedy suggested.

"That's really where the competition is going to be won or lost," Kennedy said.

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Following a quarter in which his company delivered record revenue, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announced that the company's latest round of layoffs begins today.

In a blog post yesterday, Robbins was quick to boast that Cisco’s fiscal Q3 2026 earnings saw revenue increase 12 percent year-over-year to $15.8 billion. He told employees that he and the rest of Cisco’s executive leadership team “could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco.”

But that pride could apparently not save the company’s successful employees from unemployment.

"We are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs, representing less than 5 percent of our total employee base," he wrote. "Most notifications will begin on May 14 and continue globally in alignment with applicable local laws and regulations."

As with many layoffs at tech companies recently, Cisco’s job losses are attributed to the growth of AI. Robbins' blog noted that companies that “will win in the AI era” need to demonstrate the “focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest.”

“This means making hard decisions—about where we invest, how we’re organized, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us,” Cisco’s chief said.

Cisco plans to turn the layoffs into investments in “silicon, optics, security, and in our employees’ use of AI across the company,” according to Robbins.

In its earnings report released on Wednesday, Cisco said it sold $5.3 billion in AI infrastructure from hyperscalers so far this fiscal year. It is now expecting orders for the fiscal year to reach $9 billion, up from $5 billion, and revenue to reach $4 billion instead of $3 billion.

During a call with investors on Wednesday night, Cisco executives discussed the layoffs further, with CFO Mark Patterson saying, “This was really not a savings-driven restructure,” according to a transcript of the call.

"Things are moving incredibly fast right now," he said. "And this is more realigning from an already strong base, as you're seeing in our financials, but really realigning resources around silicon, optics, security, and AI. And so being able to move fast, we don't always have the exact resources that we need going forward in the right places. And so that's really what this is about versus savings."

Due to the layoffs, Cisco expects to “recognize up to $1 billion of pre-tax charges with $450 million to be recognized in the Q4 FY '26 and the remainder during FY '27," Patterson added.

“These [layoffs] are building from a position of strength and focusing on the technologies that will accelerate our growth, deliver unmatched innovation to customers and partners, and define our future,” Robbins said on the call.

Bonuses and training for laid-off workers

Robbins’ blog post said that affected workers will receive “pro-rated payment” of fiscal 2026 bonuses. The company also says it will offer services to help laid-off employees find new jobs.

“We will provide support in finding new opportunities, whether internal or external, through Cisco’s placement services—a program that has seen 75 percent of participants discover their next role," Robbins said. "We are also committed to continued personalized learning and will provide one year of access to all Cisco U courses and certifications, covering AI, security, networking, and more.”

This round of layoffs follows the dismissal of 4,245 employees, or 5 percent of the workforce at the time, in February 2024, and about 6,000 people, or about 7 percent of the workforce, in August 2024. Cisco also attributed the latter layoffs to the need to restructure around AI and security, The Register reported at the time.

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In the US, fired and laid-off workers often have their digital credentials deactivated before they learn about the loss of their jobs; indeed, the inability to log in to a corporate system may be the first an employee knows of the situation.

Although not a generous or humane approach to staff reduction, it does follow from the simple fact that a fired employee with access to company systems is a security risk.

Just ask the Akhter twin brothers, accused of wiping out 96 databases hosting US government information in the minutes after both were fired last year from their shared employer.

DROP DATABASE

Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, now both 34, had been in trouble before. Back in 2015, the brothers pled guilty in Virginia to a scheme involving wire fraud and computers. Muneeb was sentenced to three years in prison, while Sohaib got two.

After their stints in jail, the brothers worked their way back into the tech world. In 2023, Muneeb got a job with a Washington, DC, firm that sold software and services to 45 federal clients; Sohaib got a job at the same company a year later.

According to the government, however, the two couldn't stay out of trouble. For instance:

On Feb. 1, 2025, Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password of an individual who submitted a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Public Portal, which was maintained by the Akhters’ employer. Sohaib Akhter conducted a database query on the EEOC database and then provided the password to Muneeb Akhter. That password was subsequently used to access that individual’s email account without authorization.

This was not a one-off. Muneeb had been assembling usernames and passwords—5,400 of them taken from his own company's network data. He then built custom Python scripts to try these logins against common websites; for instance, his "marriott_checker.py" application tested the logins against Marriott's hotel chains. Muneeb managed to log in successfully hundreds of times, including to DocuSign and airline accounts. Sometimes, if victims had airline miles stored, Muneeb would book travel for himself.

The brothers' employer appears to have learned about their criminal past at some point in February. On February 18, 2025, the brothers—who lived together in Virginia—were both called into a Microsoft Teams meeting and summarily fired.

The call took place at the end of the day, wrapping up at 4:50 pm. Five minutes later, Sohaib was already trying to access his (now former) employer's network—but found that his VPN access and Windows account were terminated.

Muneeb's account had been overlooked, however, and he immediately embarked on a campaign of destruction.

At 4:56 pm, Muneeb accessed a US government database that his company maintained. He "issued commands to prevent other users from connecting or making changes to the database, and then issued a command to delete the database," the government said.

At 4:58 pm, he wiped out a Department of Homeland Security database using the command "DROP DATABASE dhsproddb."

At 4:59 pm, he asked an AI tool, “How do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases?" He later asked, “How do you clear all event and application logs from Microsoft windows server 2012?"

In the space of a single hour, Muneeb deleted around 96 databases with US government information. He downloaded 1,805 files belonging to the EEOC and stashed them on a USB drive, then grabbed federal tax information for at least 450 people.

Smart ideas

While this was going on, the brothers held a running conversation. (The government is not clear about whether this took place over text, instant message, or in person.)

“I see you cleaning out their database backups," Sohaib said as he watched Muneeb's work. As the database casualty list grew, Sohaib said, "Alright—if you have good plausible deniability."

Muneeb didn't appear to consider his actions a big deal. “Eh, they can recover from yesterday,” he said, referring to daily database backups.

"Yeah, they could," Sohaib agreed.

Muneeb noted that an employee they knew would "have some work to do" when the destruction was revealed.

Sohaib fed Muneeb more suggestions.

“Delete their filesystem as well?” he said.

"Smart idea," said Muneeb.

Sohaib then wondered if they had been too hasty. Perhaps, he said, "You shoulda had a kill script. Like, blackmailing them for some money would have been—”

"No, you do not do that, that's proof of guilt, man," Muneeb said.

“No, but the thing was, you always have your opinion," Sohaib complained, and the two then bickered about whether they might try to blackmail their company's customers instead.

As the data destruction went on, Sohaib said, “They’re gonna probably raid this place.”

"I’ll clean this shit up," Muneeb said.

After wiping out the databases and event logs, the brothers reinstalled the operating systems on their corporate laptops with the help of an unnamed co-conspirator.

God guide my words

Sohaib was right—the feds did raid them. It just took three weeks.

On March 12, 2025, a search warrant was executed at Sohaib's home in Alexandria. Agents grabbed plenty of tech gear but also turned up seven firearms and 370 rounds of .30 caliber ammunition. Given his former crimes, Sohaib should have had none of this.

The brothers remained free for another nine months as the investigation proceeded, but both were eventually arrested on December 3 and indicted for a host of crimes (you can read the indictment here).

Muneeb signed a plea deal on April 15, 2026, admitting to the major allegations in the indictment.

Sohaib took his case to trial. He lost. On May 7, 2026, a jury found him guilty of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, password trafficking, and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. He will be sentenced in September.

The cases would seem to be basically over, except that Muneeb has begun filing handwritten petitions from jail, arguing that his lawyer has been ineffective. More recently, the filings have taken aim at his signed guilty plea.

One of Muneeb's letters from prison.

"God guide my words," he wrote in a one-paragraph letter to the judge on April 27. "I am uncomfortable with my plea and the pace with which the government expected it signed during pretrial motion deadlines limiting my ability to challenge the evidence against me... I stand with my brother in his innocence." (As mentioned above, Sohaib was found guilty several days later.)

Another brief handwritten letter, filed on May 5, claims that Muneeb is innocent of count 10, "since accessing DocuSign account does not grant anything of value nor did he obtain or intend to obtain anything of value from it." It says nothing about deleting the 96 databases.

A third letter, also filed on May 5, asks for permission to proceed pro se—that is, with Muneeb functioning as his own lawyer. This is generally the "kiss of death" for federal cases. Still, like many intelligent-but-overconfident defendants with plenty of time on their hands, Muneeb wants to give it a shot. It may well turn out to be one more of his "smart ideas."

Update: The company that employed the brothers went unnamed in court documents but was identified in the press as Opexus. An eagle-eyed Ars reader points out that, back in December, the company gave a series of quotes to Cyberscoop about the entire incident. Though Opexus did background checks, the company admitted that "additional diligence should have been applied," it acknowledged that "the terminations were not handled in an appropriate manner," and it said that "the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus." Clearly, the failure here was all-encompassing.

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Olympic weightlifting consists of three basic movements performed on a barbell: the snatch, the clean, and the jerk (with the latter two executed in combination). At such an elite level, athletes seek to exploit every possible advantage, including how a barbell bends and recoils in response to loaded weight and applied force—a property known as flexural bending in physics and dubbed the "whip" by Olympic athletes. Scientists are learning more about the underlying mechanisms of the whip, according to a presentation at this week's meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia.

Joshua Langlois, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, competes in Strongman competitions as a hobby. He also has friends who compete at the national level in Olympic weight-lifting events. "They told me how they use the whip," Langlois said during a media briefing. "When they dip down, they can feel when the bar flexes back up and use that to accelerate the movement upward to increase the amount they can lift."

Langlois decided to conduct a modal analysis, i.e., how an object moves or vibrates, to quantify the whip and better understand the mechanics, as well as what makes for a good barbell at the elite level. He suspended four 20-kg men's barbells (women use 15-kg barbells)—with 50 kg loaded on each end—from elastic resistance bands so that the bar was essentially floating in space. Then he attached accelerometers at each end of the bar where the vibrational mode patterns occur. Next, he tapped set locations across the bar with a small hammer, measuring the acceleration at the endpoints, which enabled him to map out how the bars moved in response. He compared the vibrations of different barbells, as well as a single barbell loaded with different weights.

Sleeves or no sleeves?

Langlois found that the standard motion of a bar floating freely in space has a higher frequency without sleeves—i.e., the outer, thicker area of the bar that holds the weights and can rotate independently of the central shaft—than with sleeves. This was an expected result, per Langlois, since adding mass to the ends of a bar will typically decrease the rate of oscillation and also shift the nodes (the points where the bar is stationary).

The surprise came when he looked more closely at the higher bending (flexural) modes: in that case, the frequency increased at higher loads. "The bar becomes more fixed so the actual wavelength of the bar is less," Langlois explained. "With a set wave speed, wavelength is inversely proportional to the rate of oscillation, so we get a higher frequency. This is something we did not foresee happening. So the barbell is likely to matter."

The experimental setup used to determine the vibrations of barbells used in Olympic weightlifting. Credit: Joshua Langlois

Granted, it's a small effect, in the range of a single percent, per Langlois. "But for elite sports, a single percent makes all the difference," he said. "I am not an expert Olympic weightlifter. I have a hard time timing the whip, it's hard for me to feel it exactly. There's a similar thing with golfers. The best golfers in the world can actually feel how the golf club bends as they swing, and they can use that to change how the balls hit. So I don't expect casual lifters to be able to use this very well. It's just for the very elite level."

Precisely which features make for the best barbell is still a puzzle. Olympic barbells have the same weight, diameter, and length, but other aspects can differ from brand to brand, such as the materials used. Most are made of some sort of steel, with stainless and chrome-coated being the most common, and the respective mechanical properties can make a small difference to a given bar's whip, according to Langlois. Specifically, the stiffness of the bar (the Young's modulus) can vary quite a bit. "We don't have a good feel for this because no barbell manufacturers will tell you exactly how they make the bar," he said. "It's all proprietary."

There can also be variation in the coupling mechanism between the shaft (where you hold onto the bar) and the sleeve (where you load the plates), which can affect how much the bar bends. Sleeves can be bearing (with moving bearings inside for faster rotation), bushing (a solid piece with no moving parts), a hybrid of the two, or just bare steel. Barbell manufacturers typically recommend bushing sleeves for slower, heavy lifts and bearing sleeves for faster Olympic lifting. "The coupling mechanism varies between bushings, bearings, or bare steel," said Langlois. "Bearings seem to have the best coupling, and that's what most expensive barbells use."

So what's next? "We know that the bar matters," said Langlois. "We know that it changes shape, changes frequency, with load. So now we're going to take data with real Olympic weightlifters [men and women] so we can see exactly how they use the whip and how the bar matters for them."

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