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Suspected Iranian hackers have hit water utilities across at least seven states, with more than thirty Minnesota community systems among the targets. Some treatment plants briefly went offline, forcing towns onto manual operations. CISA had issued a warning just four days before the attacks, and while no U.S. agency has formally attributed them, leaked intelligence assessments point to Iranian-affiliated actors.
Shifting to a story about state control over technology, Russia has announced that starting in two thousand twenty seven, every gadget sold in the country must come preloaded with a mandatory set of applications. The move continues a years-long push by the Kremlin to assert sovereignty over the digital environment its citizens inhabit, with state-approved software effectively built into the hardware from day one.
And on the question of whether AI companies can simply pay their way out of the ethics problem they created, a new model is emerging where artists receive compensation for having their work used in training data. But many illustrators argue that licensing deals arrived only after the damage was done, and that a check doesn't resolve the underlying question of consent.
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