Klon Kitchen

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Klon Kitchen

Klon Kitchen

@klonkitchen

Tech & national security. @AEI Senior Fellow.

Washington, DC Katılım Şubat 2013
1.4K Takip Edilen9.2K Takipçiler
Klon Kitchen
Klon Kitchen@klonkitchen·
6. Time to open a 301 digital trade investigation. Match EU policymaker ambitions with real consequences — and align U.S. trade posture with what a plurality of EU citizens already believe.
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Klon Kitchen
Klon Kitchen@klonkitchen·
5. Between the DMA, the DSA, and now explicit displacement timelines, EU industrial policy is creating discriminatory market conditions for U.S. companies. @USTradeRep has both the authority and the obligation to respond.
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Klon Kitchen
Klon Kitchen@klonkitchen·
1. New polling exposes the gap between Brussels and the people it claims to represent: 40% of EU citizens think replacing U.S. tech is realistic. 60% either disagree or don't know enough to say. 🧵 digitalpolitics.co/newsletter090f…
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Klon Kitchen retweetledi
Aakash Gupta
Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta·
A guy wanted to drive his vacuum with an Xbox controller. He ended up with live camera feeds from 7,000 homes in 24 countries. The US government spent two years debating whether DJI theoretically could spy on Americans. Congress passed the NDAA, triggered an automatic FCC Covered List placement, effectively banned new DJI products from the US market in December 2025. The entire argument was hypothetical. “Chinese drones could enable persistent surveillance and data exfiltration.” No public evidence of actual misuse. DJI challenged the designation in court and lost. They published security white papers. They offered to submit to audits. Nobody took them up on it. Then Sammy Azdoufal in February 2026 pulls his own auth token from a $2,000 DJI robot vacuum, and DJI’s servers hand him the keys to 7,000 units in 24 countries. Live camera feeds. Active microphones. Complete floor plans of strangers’ homes. IP addresses showing approximate locations. Every device phoning home MQTT data packets every three seconds. The authentication token was based on the device serial number with zero ownership verification. Any valid credential worked for any unit on the planet. He cataloged 6,700 devices and collected over 100,000 messages in nine minutes. Azdoufal used Claude Code to reverse-engineer his own vacuum’s protocol. He didn’t crack anything, didn’t brute force anything, didn’t bypass anything. DJI just never built the wall. And this is the second time in 18 months. In May 2024, hackers took over Ecovacs Deebot X2 vacuums across multiple US cities, yelling racial slurs through the speakers and chasing dogs around living rooms. That vulnerability was disclosed at a hacking conference in December 2023. Ecovacs acknowledged it, said users “do not need to worry excessively,” and shipped an insufficient patch. The pattern tells you everything about how Chinese IoT companies think about software. World-class hardware, authentication systems that wouldn’t pass a first-year security course. The PIN protecting Ecovacs’ video feed was only validated by the app, not the server. DJI’s MQTT broker accepted any authenticated client for any device topic. Someone designed these systems, reviewed them, and shipped them knowing cameras and microphones would be inside people’s homes. Washington spent two years arguing about whether DJI might collect your data. Azdoufal proved that DJI couldn’t even stop a hobbyist from collecting everyone’s data by accident. And 54 million US households have at least one smart home device installed, with that number growing every year. The question Congress should have been asking all along: does DJI know how to secure data in the first place? Now we have the answer.
Mark Gadala-Maria@markgadala

This story is actually insane: • dude drops $2000 on a DJI robot vacuum like a lunatic • refuses to use the normal app like a peasant • Sammy Azdoufal fires up Claude to crack the API so he can drive it with an xbox controller • Claude delivers the goods • pulls an auth token from their servers, connects successfully • except the system thinks he controls 7000 vacuums • checks again • yep, seven thousand • DJI built authentication with zero device ownership verification • any valid token works for any unit on the planet • Sammy now has eyes inside homes across 24 countries • live vacuum camera feeds everywhere • full floor plans from the mapping data • some guy in germany eating cereal at 3am, unaware his roomba is snitching • one API call away from being the most informed burglar in history • all he wanted was to steer his vacuum with a joystick • does the right thing and reports it • DJI fixes it in two days • back to normal life with his stupidly expensive floor cleaner • IoT companies stay undefeated at shipping garbage security

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Klon Kitchen
Klon Kitchen@klonkitchen·
Fearfully and wonderfully made.
Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet. 1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output. The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice. Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet. And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.” This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one. We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that. The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

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Erick Erickson
Erick Erickson@EWErickson·
Some of your data center fear is fueled by Chinese propaganda designed to get us to turn on the machines so they can get ahead of us. twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…
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Klon Kitchen
Klon Kitchen@klonkitchen·
Energy, tech, and national security aren't converging. They've converged. Beacon Global Strategies is the employer of choice for those who know how to get things done, and we're hiring a Senior VP who doesn't need to be convinced—and who's spent 15+ years building the expertise, relationships, and judgment to operate where billion-dollar decisions get shaped. This isn't policy work. It's not government relations. It's strategic counsel for companies navigating an era of geopolitical competition, critical infrastructure risk, and supply chain warfare. If you already know why this matters—and you've already built a career proving you can operate at this level—apply. linkedin.com/jobs/view/4371…
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Klon Kitchen
Klon Kitchen@klonkitchen·
Watch this space. @RyanFedasiuk @AEI @AEIfdp
Ryan Fedasiuk@RyanFedasiuk

The gap between “technical” and “non-technical” observers of what is happening with AI and chips right now is growing extremely quickly. You really need to have a decent systems-level grasp of the interplay between hardware, software, and energy to understand anything meaningful about where the world is going, how to evaluate China’s progress in any one of these fields, how new breakthroughs will affect the geopolitical balance of power between the United States and China, or how the Trump administration is preparing for these changes. It’s not as simple as counting who has more chips or better-performing AI models. Tracking only one of these variables in isolation would be like trying to understand the rise of coal, shipbuilding, or British-French rivalry in the 19th century without looking at either of the other two variables. The single most important thing for a “non-technical” foreign policy analyst to understand in February 2026 is this: China’s “frugal” AI models aren’t necessarily going to beat U.S. competitors at the frontier. Huawei’s chips still suck, and they can’t make enough of them. But China is succeeding in doing “more” with “less” in a very big, world-reconfiguring way. Companies like Zhipu (Z. ai)—a much, MUCH better version of DeepSeek—have raised the “floor” for AI and a whole suite of related technologies. Their models are not as smooth to use as Claude or ChatGPT. They use “limited attention”—literally less memory. They’re hard-coded with Xi Jinping Thought are probably full of security vulnerabilities, and are trained to censor political output. But they can do 80% of the job of most white-collar professionals in the world today—while consuming much less energy—and up to a third of San Francisco is using them to write computer code: aei.org/foreign-and-de… We @AEIfdp will be releasing some work in the coming weeks designed to upskill the conversation on this issue in Washington. But I am begging foreign policy talking heads to move away from “Whose models are performing the best?” and “Who’s making the most chips?” As AI transitions from a technical capability into an enterprise commodity, the conversation will increasingly be about its distribution and cost-competitiveness. Just as cloud computing became the backbone of global Internet infrastructure, inference compute and energy availability will fuel AI’s adoption and become an essential element of national sovereignty and power. A parallel competition will unfold to fully leverage AI for scientific discovery. If deployment is a horizontal race, this one is probably more vertical. It will require centralizing copious amounts of data, compute, and energy to unlock rungs in a progressively unfolding technology tree—and the qualitative, strategic advantages they might confer upon societies and militaries. There are reasons to think either China or the United States is better-positioned to “win” in either dimension of this competition—but they extend far beyond the metrics many analysts today are conversant in. Pay attention to the South Korean memory chip market. Pay attention to alternate, “sparse-attention” model architectures and token efficiency. Pay attention to grid install capacity and interconnection delays. And pay attention to data availability and grid reliability. These will become increasingly relevant determinants of national power as the 2020s continue to unfold.

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Klon Kitchen
Klon Kitchen@klonkitchen·
This is the way.
Anduril Industries@anduriltech

Today we’re announcing the AI Grand Prix. The fully autonomous drone racing competition inviting the boldest engineers from around the globe to compete for $500,000 and a job at Anduril. No human pilots. No hardware mods. Identical @neros_tech drones. Software is the only path to victory. If you win, it’s because your autonomy stack is better. Full stop. Season 1 kicks off this spring, leading up to the AI Grand Prix Ohio.

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Eric Sayers
Eric Sayers@DEricSayers·
Very bizarre for @WSJ to give so much time and space to the advocacy of one person, in this case for advanced chip sales to China.
Eric Sayers tweet media
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