1) If Iran’s government is involved, it is salient that the US president has repeatedly threatened to bomb Iranian water infrastructure, and some reports say US has done so. www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/w... 2) I’m watching for attribution to LLM tools… perhaps open Chinese ones… true or not.

Iran and Kuwait report attacks on water and power infrastructure as strikes escalate

Kuwait reported “severe damage” and advised civilians to ration power after Iranian attacks, while Iran said the U.S. struck a desalination plant that supplies water to thousands.

nbcnews.com

Dustin Volz@dustinvolz.bsky.social · 48m ago

NEW: Cyberattacks on U.S. water supply now being reported in 12+ states and 100+ municipalities, though some may be unrelated to wave of suspected Iranian attempts. The nationwide threat follows years of ignored warnings and neglect to water systems. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/u...

so much talk about the EU AI Act, but so little talk about the California AI watermarking provisions, SB 942, (extremely similar to the AIA) which became enforceable on the 2nd August

My ice-cold boring take that will definitely not go viral is that a primary result with a margin of victory of roughly 1 percent tells you precisely nothing about The Future Of The Party.

Watch as they try to construct the idea that ”anti-AI” is a Chinese op, and anyone skeptical is a traitor.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 13h ago

"They're spending a lot of money on promoting 'don't build" -- Trump suggests China is secretly running an influence campaign in the US to turn Americans against data centers

Why do election counts get released when they’re not done counting?

This is from 2016 but I hadn’t heard of it until now. WILD story. www.denverpost.com/2016/08/10/l...

Kansas home wound up with 600 million IP addresses and a world of trouble

The little Kansas house in the center of the country became the crossroads of the Internet, with unimaginable consequences.

denverpost.com

In light of the revelation today of DHS’s massive operation to spy on social media critics of their policies, remember this I posted a few months ago about the tech they bought that can do just this—and how the company markets itself to do political surveillance.

Matthew Guariglia@mguariglia.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Just learning that ICE has a $4.2 million contract for social media surveillance/AI analysis with Fivecast. A few years ago I came across a brochure of theirs which used as an example for potential police customers their ability to map left-wing groups. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

A nice walk up in the hills last month, with #kodakgold and #summilux50asph. #filmphotography

Huh

Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈@josephpolitano.bsky.social · yesterday

DSA-aligned Democrats are now the most pro-free-trade voting bloc in the United States, in an incredible turn of events www.theargumentmag.com/p/who-suppor...

It’s amazing that these tech companies can foresee what we will soon forget, that with the advance of AI slop and reliance on machines our memories will decay. The supply chain of human memories is under threat. Perhaps a dram would help, but Samsung is telling us no.

Eurogamer@eurogamer.bsky.social · 2d ago

Samsung says the memory shortage will continue to get worse in 2027. https://bit.ly/4vXiBP7

Is anyone aware of publications that have a well-articulated and publicized policy of rejecting AI-drafted (including assisted) copy from prospective contributors? I think DigiChina will need one.

Graham Webster@gwbstr.com · 2d ago

I’m craving a strong social taboo on publishing primarily AI-generated text as one’s own. I’d go in for corporal punishment (gentle, like a bop upside the head with an inflatable bat wielded by a toddler, whose future is at stake), especially if submitting to peer review or a volunteer editor.

the department of education today issued a 'national call to action' - which, in plain english, is a call for capitulation to trump administration's assault on higher ed. www.ed.gov/media/docume... note how this doc deploys recent yale & vanderbilt reports

I’m craving a strong social taboo on publishing primarily AI-generated text as one’s own. I’d go in for corporal punishment (gentle, like a bop upside the head with an inflatable bat wielded by a toddler, whose future is at stake), especially if submitting to peer review or a volunteer editor.

Here is what police-connected networks of surveillance cameras with "AI" (computer vision, face recognition, etc) can do in China. With Flock proliferation and documented abuses, we're well on our way. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/w...

How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners

An unsecured police dashboard was a rare window into how the authorities track foreigners by collecting and aggregating vast amounts of private data.

nytimes.com

A nice walk up in the hills last month, with #kodakgold and #summilux50asph. #filmphotography

Few subjects have stirred as much nationalistic debate across the Pacific as biotech. For our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks to Abigail Coplin and Chenjian Li about the power and limits of biotechnologies, and how the body becomes a geopolitical battleground and site for profit.

Episode 11 | To Feed and to Cure | Made in China Journal

The need for food and medicine is universal. Yet, few subjects have stirred as much nationalistic debates on both sides of the Pacific as the development and application of biotechnologies. Why, in a ...

madeinchinajournal.com

See also the NYT text. The language is really interesting. The “models” did the breaking in, but the “start-up” is able to speak about this as an entity. It has personhood to speak but not for purposes of responsibility.

Jacob Silverman@jacobsilverman.com · 5d ago

Did Anthropic's models hack rival companies, or did Anthropic, where humans make and oversee the models, do it? www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

Fascinating hazard of using LLM-generated text in “your” writing.

John Scalzi@scalzi.com · 5d ago

1. Newer writers, just don't fucking use "AI" for anything, ever 2. How odd that being an established writer with a firm "no 'AI'" stance and ample pre-"AI" IP will become a definite competitive advantage over "new, hot, and possibly copyright compromised" deadline.com/2026/07/ai-q...

"The 25-year-old built the firm around the idea that increasingly powerful AI systems would require a vast expansion of chips, memory, data centers and electricity generation." www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/l...

AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner forced to unwind all public stock positions after steep losses, sources say

Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund has sold all of its public stock holdings, according to people familiar with the matter.

cnbc.com

Extend the franchise to legacy extractors!

Delighted to join the @techpolicypress.bsky.social podcast alongside Vinh Nguyen. The OpenAI breach of Hugging Face inescapably engages issues around Chinese open models and their potential ban—and therefore also US labs' concerns about revenue. Tangled times! www.techpolicy.press/how-the-open...

How the OpenAI-Hugging Face Hack May Affect the Geopolitics of AI Governance

A conversation with Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Vinh Nguyen and Stanford researcher and DigiChina Project lead Graham Webster.

techpolicy.press

NEW from me and @kevinxu.bsky.social… Moonshot released Kimi K3 openly as promised, but they are requiring inference providers to cut separate deals, presumably including revenue sharing. We explain why this might make Kimi easier for the US to ban. herecomes.transpacifica.net/p/kimis-tigh...

Kimi’s Tightrope: Openness and Revenue at Once, but New US Ban Risks

Adopting a new license, with revenue comes regulability

herecomes.transpacifica.net

NEW from me and @kevinxu.bsky.social… Moonshot released Kimi K3 openly as promised, but they are requiring inference providers to cut separate deals, presumably including revenue sharing. We explain why this might make Kimi easier for the US to ban. herecomes.transpacifica.net/p/kimis-tigh...

Kimi’s Tightrope: Openness and Revenue at Once, but New US Ban Risks

Adopting a new license, with revenue comes regulability

herecomes.transpacifica.net

Delighted to join the @techpolicypress.bsky.social podcast alongside Vinh Nguyen. The OpenAI breach of Hugging Face inescapably engages issues around Chinese open models and their potential ban—and therefore also US labs' concerns about revenue. Tangled times! www.techpolicy.press/how-the-open...

How the OpenAI-Hugging Face Hack May Affect the Geopolitics of AI Governance

A conversation with Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Vinh Nguyen and Stanford researcher and DigiChina Project lead Graham Webster.

techpolicy.press

Thanks to the anonymous colleague who sent me the countdown. huggingface.co/moonshotai/K...

moonshotai/Kimi-K3 · Upcoming release · Hugging Face

The latest model from Moonshot AI.

huggingface.co

Graham Webster@gwbstr.com · last wk.

In China there’s 2.5 hours left in 7/27, the day by which Moonshot said Kimi K3 weights would be released. Are they out?

In China there’s 2.5 hours left in 7/27, the day by which Moonshot said Kimi K3 weights would be released. Are they out?

My voice available ⬇️ Hugging Face breach investigated with open Chinese models when US model guardrails got in the way. We discuss how this is inescapably entangled with US-China and safety and bubble discourse.

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · last wk.

Hugging Face said a July breach was "driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system." That system, it turned out, was operated by OpenAI. Vinh Nguyen and Graham Webster joined the Tech Policy Press podcast to discuss what the incident may mean for the geopolitics of AI governance.

It’s depressing that we can’t have this discussion on the basis of what’s good for people, rather than a bunch of money and geopolitics and ideologically charged futurisms.

Ron Deibert@rondeibert.bsky.social · 2w ago

Not a single genuine public interest based argument here. It's entirely corporate players framing their competing private commercial interests with window-dressing allusions to "safety" or "innovation" or "democratization" www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/t...

Ask me 20 years ago when One Laptop Per Child was the new equalizer initiative if I could imagine the “digital divide” inverting… Hard to conceive then. Maybe by 2011 or so I’d buy it.

Frank Pasquale@frankpasquale.bsky.social · 2w ago

Well-heeled school districts offer “minimal-screen experiences to children, while resource-starved school districts maximize screen time...The prevalence of technology in education is a class marker, but perhaps not in the direction that anyone could have guessed” hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-f...

The new universality of the agreed truth that there will be an AI crash now makes me, a skeptic of group think, wonder whether actually somehow there will not be one. substack.com/home/post/p-...

This is nuts. When's the crash?

Also: accosting an pop-economist, benchmarking private investments, gambling at Wetherspoons, and burying the dead

substack.com