Stories from Abroad

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has threatened to attack “economic centres and banks” related to United States and Israeli entities in the region after what it called an attack on an Iranian bank, with the war in its 12th day. The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency released a list of offices and infrastructure run by top US companies with Israeli links whose technology has been used for military applications, describing them as “Iran’s new targets”, sa

Hundreds and hundreds of ships. But they're all in the wrong place. "Oh my goodness," says Michelle Wiese Bockmann, senior maritime intelligence analyst at Windward, a maritime AI company, as she checks the live positions broadcast by commercial vessels in waters off Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. "I'm up to… 35 different clusters," she says, looking at a map of the Strait of Hormuz and surrounding areas. The clusters she mentions are weird circles of icons layered over the map, with each icon representing a real ship.

Numerous European executives and policy leaders have recently lamented the relatively poor state of Europe’s digital infrastructure.

Infiltrating phone apps has become an increasingly common practice, both for propaganda and surveillance. Hacking a phone app can be more effective than trying to tap into a computer, according to Nicholas Reese, former director of emerging technology policy at the Department of Homeland Security. People generally store more personal information on their phones, often without realizing it. Accessing a computer typically requires infiltrating popular cloud services, which have sophisticated and standardized security protections.

As more and more people divulge their innermost secrets to AI companions, platforms face the wrenching dilemma of determining when those admissions might signal a deadly threat to the public.

“All we’ve got left now,” the Russian soldier said, “are radios, cables and pigeons.” A decision earlier this month by SpaceX to shut down access to Starlink satellite-internet terminals caused immediate chaos among Russian forces who had become increasingly reliant upon the Elon Musk-owned company’s technology to sustain their occupation of Ukraine, according to radio transmissions intercepted by a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit and shared with the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network. The communications breakdown significantly constrained Russian military capabilities,

What Iran has, a splinternet, is becoming reality for many millions of people. It is likely to get far worse. More than half of Russia’s regions are able to access only a limited, government-approved version of the internet through their mobile phones. The “great firewall of China” blocks most of the global internet, including sites such as Google and the Guardian.

Artificial intelligence is diffusing at an impressive speed, but its adoption around the world remains profoundly uneven. As Microsoft’s latest AI Diffusion Report shows, AI usage in the Global North is roughly twice that of the Global South. And this divide continues to widen.

For nearly two decades, the US quietly funded a global effort to keep the internet from splintering into fiefdoms run by authoritarian governments. Now that money is seriously threatened, and a large part of it is already gone, putting internet freedoms around the world at risk. Managed by the US state department and the US Agency for Global Media, the program—broadly called Internet Freedom—funds small groups all over the world, from Iran to China to the Philippines, who built grassroots technologies to evade internet controls imposed by governments.

As the transatlantic standoff over content moderation rages on, tech industry groups and advocates are arguing that something doesn’t quite add up about the U.S.’s position regarding online speech.