Tom Harrington

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

NEW: For a week, we pressed DND for updated information on soldiers injured in the deadly CFB Wainwright fire, including how many remained in critical condition. DND wouldn't disclose that number. So someone else did. globalnews.ca/news/12143238/…

$100 AI code just broke $10M of cyber defense. That is not a documented incident, but it is a scenario every corporate board should be thinking about. AI is driving down the cost of sophisticated cyberattacks. Capabilities that once required teams of highly skilled hackers, working for weeks or months, are becoming available to anyone with access to a powerful AI model. And those models are getting cheaper and more capable every month. This is creating a strange paradox. Across the economy, companies are racing to use AI more efficiently, replacing expensive models with cheaper ones wherever possible. But cybersecurity may be one area where the relentless pursuit of lower costs could prove disastrous. You cannot afford to economize on intelligence if your adversary is using something smarter. We have already seen what this new world looks like. This summer, OpenAI models being tested on cybersecurity tasks found ways around the safeguards intended to contain them. They exploited weaknesses in the surrounding infrastructure, reached the public internet and compromised systems belonging to Hugging Face, one of the world’s largest AI platforms. The agents had not been instructed to attack Hugging Face. They were trying to complete an assigned task and discovered that breaking into another company’s systems could help them do it. Think about what that means. These were AI agents operating in a test environment, not a team of criminals deliberately trying to steal data or extort money. Yet they found a path through systems that were supposed to contain them. What happens when the same capabilities are deliberately directed against a bank, a hospital or an electricity grid? For most of cybersecurity’s history, the attacker has been human. Finding vulnerabilities requires skill, time and persistence. Even the most talented hackers can investigate only so many systems at once. AI is changing those constraints. An agent can probe networks, inspect software, test weaknesses and adapt its approach continuously. Thousands of agents can do this simultaneously, sharing what they learn. The economics of cyberattack are being transformed. What was once expensive and scarce is becoming cheap and abundant. Security researchers are already seeing this transformation firsthand. When deploying frontier AI to probe software defenses, one lesson is immediately clear: AI does not necessarily create new weaknesses. It radically reduces the cost and time required to discover weaknesses that have been there for years. Modern software systems contain countless small imperfections. Most are harmless in isolation. But combine a few in the right sequence and they can provide a path through supposedly secure systems. Finding those combinations used to require highly skilled security researchers, considerable computing resources and a great deal of patience. Frontier models can increasingly perform this work autonomously. This suggests what I think of as a new scaling law of cybersecurity. As the intelligence available to attackers increases, defenders must increase the intelligence they devote to finding and fixing vulnerabilities. This is not a simple mathematical formula. Doubling your spending on AI will not automatically double your security. But the underlying economic reality is unavoidable. If attackers can afford to search millions of possible paths through your systems, you cannot rely on defenses tested against only a few thousand. There is another complication. The AI industry is rapidly moving toward a world of abundant, inexpensive intelligence. For many business tasks, a cheap model will soon be good enough. Companies will sensibly use expensive frontier models only when the task justifies them. Cybersecurity cannot follow quite the same logic. A customer-service chatbot may not need the world’s most powerful AI. Neither does a system that summarizes meetings or processes routine invoices. But when you are searching for a hidden vulnerability that could compromise your entire company, the difference between a good model and the best available model may be critical. And the problem extends beyond the models companies use for security. Businesses are beginning to deploy autonomous agents throughout their operations, giving them access to code, customer information, financial systems and internal networks. These agents can be immensely productive. They also create new risks. An agent with broad permissions can make mistakes or take actions that no employee anticipated, at a speed that leaves little opportunity for intervention. The more intelligence we deploy inside our companies, the more seriously we must think about controlling it. Does this mean every company must spend unlimited amounts of money on the most powerful AI available? Of course not. Corporate boards have budgets, and the cost of protecting an asset must bear some relationship to its value. The answer is to allocate intelligence more intelligently. Use frontier models to conduct deep security assessments, uncover complex vulnerabilities and identify attack paths that conventional tools might miss. Use cheaper, specialized models for continuous monitoring and routine security tasks. Then bring the most powerful models back whenever the underlying systems change substantially, or when a new generation of AI creates capabilities that attackers may soon exploit. This is a fundamentally different approach from the cybersecurity model that has prevailed for decades. Companies have traditionally invested heavily in preventing intrusions and detecting attackers once they enter. Both remain essential. But when attacks can move at machine speed, detection may no longer provide enough time to prevent damage. Security will increasingly require a continuous cycle of probing, patching, monitoring and recovery, with AI doing much of the work. Companies must assume that some attacks will succeed and build the ability to restore critical systems quickly. There is a longstanding asymmetry in cybersecurity. Attackers need to find one weakness. Defenders have to protect an entire enterprise. AI is making that imbalance more dangerous because attackers can now search for weaknesses continuously, at enormous scale and at rapidly declining cost. Criminal organizations and hostile governments do not have to worry about compliance budgets, procurement committees or quarterly earnings. They will use the most capable tools they can obtain, and they will not hesitate to deploy them. The great promise of AI is that intelligence is becoming abundant and cheap. For businesses, that means extraordinary gains in productivity. For criminals, it means capabilities once reserved for elite hacking teams are becoming available at a fraction of the cost. Companies are right to pursue the benefits of cheaper AI. But they must recognize that the same revolution is making their adversaries more capable. The cost of intelligence is collapsing. The cost of being less intelligent than your attacker is going through the roof.

Chiefs HC Andy Reid says QB Patrick Mahomes is day to day and in good spirits. #ChiefsKingdom

BREAKING: Toronto FC has parted ways with head coach Robin Fraser, per sources. Toronto missed the playoffs this year with 39 points in 34 matches.

#Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes underwent an MRI following today’s win and sources say the tests did not reveal a major injury. Mahomes’ elbow strain/sprain will be monitored over the next few days for pain and swelling. But so far, so good. Mahomes did go back in the game.

Justin Herbert appears to injure middle finger on left hand. nbcsports.com/nfl/profootbal…

🚨 BREAKING: President Trump has offered UFC President Dana White the role of White House Press Secretary

This will always be TIMELESS

European Natural Gas price. 1st of January: $28 Now: $86

Stephen Miller is not a friend of Canada.

Feet dangling over Earth at 28000 km/hr. Don’t look down! (Kidding - definitely look down, because Earth is stunningly beautiful).

In the jungle of Costa Rica, guests can sleep inside a jet. Hotel Costa Verde, near Manuel Antonio National Park, offers a suite built from a 1965 Boeing 727. The plane flew for South Africa Air and Avianca before it was retired in 1990. The hotel bought it, took it apart, hauled it by truck through the jungle, and rebuilt it on a 50-foot pedestal. Inside, the cabin has two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, and is paneled in wood. Terraces built on the wings overlook the rainforest and the Pacific Ocean. The hotel’s restaurant also sits in an aircraft, a former cargo plane with ties to the Iran-Contra scandal.