A short RAND piece on US defence innovation funding. Of most interest was this: ‘The U.S. intelligence community invests nearly $60 million in public funds each year through a venture capital fund called In-Q-Tel… Similarly, the United Kingdom invests more than $120 million annually and NATO plans to invest an additional $70 million per year in companies that build dual-use technologies.’

Using AI to track THAT Chinese balloon in satellite data.

‘China’s tech gurus embody and enforce the masculine norms of entrepreneurial success and individualistic competition in China’s tech sector.’

Censorship in China, from typos to cloud storage.

Baidu’s Ernie Bot: ‘while Baidu’s version is framed as China’s first public challenge to ChatGPT, Ernie Bot will also be trained mostly on Chinese materials and will not be a direct competitor to ChatGPT or other U.S. firms’ products’. Contributing factors to its lacklustre performance are a lack of suitable training materials, US chip constraints and, yes, concerns re censorship.

‘It is an often-hidden side of the AI-driven revolution in warfare that has now been set in motion and will not stop.’ Observations on AI in the Ukraine war.

‘…nation-state groups aligned with China are getting increasingly proficient at bypassing security solutions.’

The number of organisations hit by Clop’s mass ransomware is growing—mass because it affects a common file transfer software tool, GoAnywhere.—and includes Rio Tinto.

From Peter C Baker’s review of Kerry Howley’s book, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: ‘…American life since the early two-thousands has been increasingly marked by two developments. First: the mass collection of personal data by the state, with help from tech companies. Second: most individuals’ daily participation in this process, as we deposit more and more digital fragments of our life on the Internet, some of it notionally private, some posted publicly, accessible to the government. This creates a near-infinite well of details that can be used to tell stories about us. These stories—“sticky fiction” pieced together from facts, but not wholly true—get built to rationalize decisions about who gets charged with crimes, who gets tortured, who gets targeted by drone strikes, who gets imprisoned, and for how long.’

Rental-san, Japan.