Saw the new Superman movie the other day with my better half. We didn't plan to go see it; more of a spontaneous thing when we were out and about, and b/c neither of us had been to a movie theater in almost a decade. The movie was okay. Spoiler alert: You can't kill Superman, but you can cancel him. Meh.
Anyway, on the way home my wife asked, "So what's your Kryptonite?" Before I even knew I said "paperwork," and we both laughed. I've been stewing on my hasty answer, but I still think it's right. I'm staring at two giant stacks of mail and paperwork on my desk right now and finding the will to live draining from my soul.
This administration's recently redoubled efforts to kill federal funding /approval for wind and solar projects would seem to be directly at odds with the tech industry's insatiable need for more power to feed AI. How is this not glaringly obvious to everyone, including reporters who write about these topics?
bottom line: the administration's actions will almost certainly result in Americans paying a LOT more for power in the coming years, as demand exceeds supply and major infrastructure investments are needed just to accommodate data center needs.
from an IEA report earlier this year:
"In the United States, power consumption by data centres is on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them."
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2025/05/13/ai-needs-more-abundant-power-supplies-to-keep-driving-economic-growth
From the IMF:
"The world’s data centers consumed as much as 500 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, according to the most recent full-year estimate by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. That total, which was more than double the annual levels from 2015-19, could triple to 1,500 terawatt-hours by 2030, OPEC projects."
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2025/05/13/ai-needs-more-abundant-power-supplies-to-keep-driving-economic-growth
This administration's recently redoubled efforts to kill federal funding /approval for wind and solar projects would seem to be directly at odds with the tech industry's insatiable need for more power to feed AI. How is this not glaringly obvious to everyone, including reporters who write about these topics?
I wouldn't get anything done without reminders!
“Instead of politicians, let the monkeys govern the countries; at least they will steal only the bananas!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan
JD Vance’s team had the army corps of engineers take the unusual step of changing the outflow of a lake in Ohio to accommodate a recent boating excursion on a family holiday, the Guardian has learned.
The request from the US Secret Service was made to “support safe navigation” of the US vice-president’s security detail for an August outing on the Little Miami River, according to a statement by the US army corps of engineers (USACE).
Vance was spotted in the south-western Ohio area on 2 August, his 41st birthday, according to social media posts that noted he was seen canoeing on the river, a tributary that Caesar Creek Lake feeds into.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/jd-vance-ohio-lake-water-levels
In May, I published a deep dive on a Pakistani firm that had just been charged w/ shipping fentanyl analogs to the US and was behind a sprawling empire of scam ghostwriting, app and logo design companies that were spending millions on Google ads to promote their scam businesses.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/pakistani-firm-shipped-fentanyl-analogs-scams-to-us/
The story received a decent amount of attention, but it almost immediately dropped off Google search entirely. Searching for the headline brought only links to other sites covering my report. This persisted for almost two weeks and I never got a satisfactory answer from Google about why the story dropped from search.
Just read a story at Ars Technica about how a tech CEO who was trying to quash reporting about his alleged misdeeds used a feature in Google known as Refresh Outdated Content to trick Google into deindexing the unflattering stories about him. The method he reportedly used was working until last month. Makes me wonder how widely known this bug was.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/google-tool-misused-to-scrub-tech-ceos-shady-past-from-search
https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/114512527951494345
Darknet Diaries just interviewed Hieu Minh Ngo, a reformed Vietnamese hacker I first wrote about in 2011. A fed later told me they became focused on luring him out of Vietnam after that story, which they did.
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/162/
The 2011 story was called "How Much is Your Identity Worth," and it looked at an ID theft service advertised in the underground that sold full personal and in some cases financial data on tens of million of US residents. Ngo got access to info on >200M Americans by posing as a private investigator based in Singapore, and paying data brokers via wire transfers for years before he got busted.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/how-much-is-your-identity-worth/
The story generated many follow-ups with Hieu's dramatic arrest, revelations of Experian's involvement, and a personal redemption story for Hieu..
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/experian-sold-consumer-data-to-id-theft-service/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/experian-hit-with-class-action-over-id-theft-service/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/experian-breach-tied-to-ny-nj-id-theft-ring/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/04/an-allegation-of-harm/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/id-theft-service-customer-gets-27-months/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/id-theft-service-proprietor-gets-13-years/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/confessions-of-an-id-theft-kingpin-part-i/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/confessions-of-an-id-theft-kingpin-part-ii/
I learned a new word today (via HackerNews) that still makes me chuckle b/c it's so convoluted and meta that it's definitely an apt candidate for a 2025 time capsule: "Slopsquatting."
Per Wikipedia:
Slopsquatting is a type of cybersquatting. It is the practice of registering a non-existent software package name that a large language model (LLM) may hallucinate in its output, whereby someone unknowingly may copy-paste and install the software package without realizing it is fake.[1] Attempting to install a non-existent package should result in an error, but some have exploited this for their gain in the form of typosquatting.[2]
The name is a portmanteau of "AI slop" and "typosquatting".[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slopsquatting
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44810695
I was blown away reading this new research from the site Muckrack.com, which finds a rapid decline in the number of local journalists per resident across the United States. I knew the situation wasn't great with more news sites relying on AI-based news gathering for more content, but this drop is way more precipitous than I thought:
"Using data that’s never been tapped before, we now know just how severe this local journalist shortage has become. Less than a quarter-century ago, the United States had about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents on average. Now, the equivalent number is 8.2 Local Journalist Equivalents, about a 75% decline. (Local Journalist Equivalent is a new measure we’re introducing, akin to a Full Time Equivalent or FTE).
https://muckrack.com/research/local-journalist-index
Linkedin seems to be sending me a lot more notifications via email lately. I've never used the app, as LinkedIn likes to remind you constantly that they can harvest your data way more effectively if you use the app. IDK if they changed something or I did somehow, but I set my profile to private mode a while back mainly because I was getting inundated with connection requests. Now I'm suddenly getting the connection request emails. Is this happening to any other LI users here?
BrianKrebs