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Tech & AI · GSJ Original
Gates says the bio, cyber, jobs, psychosocial, and control tripwires are already behind us. The institutional response is still voluntary — and the exploited catalog is updating on its own schedule.
On Aug. 21, CISA added one vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog based on evidence of active exploitation: CVE-2026-73570, an OS command injection in Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS). Federal civilian agencies face a BOD 26-04 remediation due date of Aug. 24. The directive binds FCEB agencies; CISA encourages other organizations to prioritize the same KEV remediation habit.
Cyber & Digital Crime
AT&T and Verizon say their networks are secure. The Senate Commerce ranking member says the assessments that would let Congress test those claims have not been produced. A seven-day document request from this publication drew an AT&T out-of-office acknowledgment and a Verizon internal handoff — not the requested letters, and not written refusals. Commerce and Mandiant/Google still have not replied on the record. Who controls the evidence.
Tech & AI
A governed local box proves you can keep AI close. Open weights and open runtimes are what turn that box into operator infrastructure — and force a real decision about where inference runs.
Tech & AI
Anthropic sold the world a constitution. The market bought a platform. The IPO will force the world to price both.
Cyber & Digital Crime
We scan package manifests for poisoned code, then click four-year-old security links as if ownership, DNS and page content never change.
Tech & AI
The machines are getting larger, stranger and less wrong. That does not mean they are useful yet. A field guide to quantum computing's hardware race, error-correction problem, and possible place in the world after artificial intelligence becomes ordinary infrastructure.
Cyber & Digital Crime
State officials say all nine continued operating safely and no known public-health threat emerged. The systems, incident scope and attacker remain undisclosed.
Cyber & Digital Crime
Chinese state-linked operators reached deeply into U.S. telecommunications networks, collecting call records tied to millions of customers and communications from a much smaller group of political targets. Nearly two years after the breach became public, the government still has not produced a complete public accounting of its reach.
Tech & AI
NVIDIA's DGX Spark puts the DGX software-and-hardware standard on a desktop. For operations teams, its real role is controlled proof work before a workload earns production infrastructure.
Tech & AI
A 72-hour Grok Bot test beat a plausible human benchmark. Polling churn, false completion and remediation show why the model bill is only the first line of the ledger.
Tech & AI
Grok Bot opened in early beta on August 11. A 72-hour field test already shows what desktop agents can do — and why a written hold is not a control.
Cyber & Digital Crime
Coordinated attacks knocked 30-plus Minnesota water systems onto manual operations. The fix CISA wants is the one the industry has dodged for years.
On Aug. 19, NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA published joint Cybersecurity Advisory AA26-231A warning of an active cyber threat to Siemens S7 Series PLCs (S7-200/300/400/1200/1500). The agencies describe reconnaissance and capability development against Internet-exposed or poorly segmented controllers and urge inventory, patching, Internet isolation, stronger access controls, and monitoring. The advisory does not attribute the activity to a named actor.
In a July 31, 2026 Federal Register final rule (FCC 26-38; FR Doc. 2026-15601), the FCC adopted cybersecurity readiness requirements for Emergency Alert System participants under 47 CFR 11.35(d), including strong-password or alternative authentication controls, prompt security patching, and related equipment hygiene. The rule is effective September 29, 2026. The Commission framed the changes as protecting public trust in EAS against hijacking.
On July 16, 2026, the Michigan Public Service Commission opened Case No. U-22156 into Consumers Energy, DTE Electric, and Indiana Michigan Power responses to July 3 storms that left hundreds of thousands of customers without power over the Fourth of July holiday. The Commission directed the three utilities to file comprehensive reports by Aug. 27, 2026, covering crew and wire-down deployment, holiday staffing and mutual-aid limits, customer communications, and needed improvements. This is a utility storm-response investigation, not a cyber story.
The World Health Organization says a fast-moving Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed about 2,000 people and is on course to surpass the deadliest outbreak on record. WHO also says the epidemic began before it was officially declared, a delay coverage links to the difficulty of containing it.
Google says it is rolling out a setting that lets users disable visible watermarks on images, video and music created with Gemini and Flow, except where local law requires them. The company says invisible SynthID markers and C2PA metadata will remain embedded, and that Search support for the setting is planned. The change is a product control, not a claim that unmarked media is human-made.
Multiple outlets, citing sources, say former Disney CEO Bob Iger and investor Josh Kushner have agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers from Mark Walter at a $12.5 billion valuation, which would be a record for a U.S. sports franchise. Coverage has not yet pointed to a public confirmation from the team or the league.
Apple told a federal court it wants to charge developers 15% on external-link purchases for standard apps, 10% for certain partner programs and subscription renewals, and 5% for Small Business Program apps. Epic Games says the proposal exceeds the Ninth Circuit’s guidance and plans to oppose it, so the fee structure remains in litigation rather than a settled policy.
President Donald Trump said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will leave the job at the end of the month and continue as an outside adviser. National coverage treats the departure as confirmed after roughly 20 months in the role, with desks differing mainly on succession and political fallout.
A White House memorandum directs DOJ and DHS to establish a program under which vetted U.S. companies may conduct surveillance and disruptive cyber operations against foreign cyber-enabled criminal organizations. Each operation requires federal review, written approval and supervision, with implementation procedures due within 60 days. This is not a general license for companies to hack back.
The OpenAI Foundation announced a $100 million commitment to the Common Health Coalition for Breakthroughs to Follow-Through, a program that aims to at least double hepatitis C cure rates starting in Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana and Massachusetts. The Foundation says a highly effective cure has been available for more than a decade and that about two-thirds of Americans with the disease remain untreated; CDC’s 2013–2022 laboratory cascade found clearance evidence in about one-third of people with confirmed infection. Foundation officials told Nextgov the grants are not tied to one AI platform. Michigan is not in the first wave.
Twitch has added a setting that lets users exclude their streams, clips, chats and channel media from future training of Amazon generative-AI models, but accounts are opted in by default. The new control arrives more than two years after a Twitch executive publicly confirmed that Amazon was already using platform content for AI training, while Twitch has not said precisely how long the practice has been underway.
Valve is notifying Steam hardware customers after a breach at shipping and logistics firm Ceva Logistics exposed customer data including names and addresses, with reporting tying the incident to a wider Ceva intrusion. This is a third-party logistics compromise affecting Steam customers, not a reported breach of Steam accounts themselves.