For 28 years: a journalist @ CBC, POLITICO, CP. Next: getting a master’s in Artificial Intelligence management at Georgetown.
Washington, D.C.
Joined June 2009
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The 'love' portion of my love-hate relationship with AI -->
I'll be even more insufferable than usual over the next bowl of mercimek. 🇨🇦
Curious about the story behind #Türkiye’s famous lentil soup? There’s a good chance the lentils in your bowl are Canadian. We grow millions of tonnes each year, making us one of the world’s largest producers. Talk about a delicious fact! What’s your fave lentil dish?
ALT Raw of legumes (chickpeas, red lentils, Canadian lentils, beans, bulgur) on wooden table.
Alexander Panetta retweeted
News: Canada barred its diplomats from meeting with, attending events with or even being anywhere near US midterm candidates until the election, as part of a "risk-averse" approach to avoid any Trumpworld allegations of interference. Story via @btaplatt & me on @TheTerminal.
Alexander Panetta retweeted
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions. axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
A wave of cybersecurity incidents gives life to a no-longer-hypothetical fear about AI: the automation of hacking. My daily AI briefing sums up this cascade of events – with simple steps to protect yourself. The incidents fall into two categories: 1) A widescale attack on architecture supporting much of the internet, with potentially millions of compromised websites including some carrying people's personal and payment info. This is why certain utilities websites were down yesterday for maintenance. 2) AI agents can hoover up data you've left exposed – as illustrated by a story from my former colleagues at the CBC. It's about the wildly popular new Meta app, Muse – designed to give grandma, grandpa and the grandkids their own AI agents. Meta made this thing so, so easy to use and connect to... everything. In this case, it made a sale on Facebook Marketplace – and gave out the home address – without permission.
The daily AI briefing I created for myself has a list of tips for both – including links to shut off those data-sharing permissions.
"Putin's brain is stuck in that 19th-century Tsarist Russia pipe dream of 'expanding territory.' ... On the eve of the dawn when AI tech explodes worldwide, everyone's racing like mad to build compute power and snag tickets to the new industrial revolution—while Russia's big boss drags hundreds of thousands of people into a hundred-year-old World War I-style trench slog in the mud."
Critiques of Putinism from Chinese observers hit especially hard because they are so clear-eyed. While the scathing indictments of Putin's authoritarianism and rapacious imperialism that you see in European and American contexts are certainly not "wrong," they are prone to repetition, thought-terminating cliche about Hitler 2.0, and wishcasting, all of which are perfectly understandable (particularly when coming from Ukrainians and other East Europeans), but can produce inadequate analysis.
The Chinese just cut straight to the quick about Putin's absurd 19th century imperialist cosplay as it plays against both Russian human capital and geographic position advantages and end up painting an even bleaker picture of Mother Russia's 21st century prospects than even the angriest Ukrainian can often manage.
Alexander Panetta retweeted
now is a good time to repost Andrej Karpathy's blog post on digital hygiene: karpathy.bearblog.dev/digita…
Alexander Panetta retweeted
The NSA just told companies to pull their websites offline if they can't patch them right away.
The reason is a bug that's been sitting in the code behind 70% of websites for 14 years. Last Friday a guy found it in one evening by typing five words into an AI.
Those five words were "find bad vulnerabilities in PHP." He's Dan Lorenc, CEO of a security company called Chainguard, and all he had going in was a rumor that something big was coming in PHP.
A small firm called Calif had already found the same flaw back on August 1 using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. Wiz, the security company Google bought, found it on its own less than three weeks later with Gemini and GPT. Since then OpenAI, Wiz, Calif and PHP's maintainers have been quietly building a fix that Lorenc himself called "crazy."
You'd think a bug this bad would've gotten caught sometime since 2012. PHP is open source, so anyone on earth could read this code. Wiz says turning the flaw into a working attack took a chain of steps right at the edge of what human researchers could realistically pull off. For 14 years the sheer amount of work was doing most of the protecting.
AI made that work cheap enough to knock out on a Friday night, for anyone who knows where to point it.
And the rumor got out. Bug ID numbers started floating around online Tuesday. Hours later one of the research teams posted a video of the exploit by mistake, and PHP moved its release up a day. Early Wednesday, Chainguard pushed its fix out more than six hours ahead of everyone else, saying people were already getting attacked, and Lorenc says his company's decoy servers caught IP addresses from China and Russia going after the flaw.
Here's why the NSA went straight to "unplug it." VirusTotal counted about 758,000 exposed servers running old PHP versions, 5.4 through 8.1, that don't get security updates anymore. Only around 272,000 are on versions that do. So for roughly three out of four servers that show their version number, there's no patch to install, and pulling the plug is the only fix they've got.
This is happening everywhere at once, too. Microsoft just fixed 1,413 vulnerabilities in a single month, more than in any full year on record. OpenAI says it expects finds like this one to jump sharply over the next few months.
Every company sitting on a secret bug now has until the first rumor leaks and somebody with an AI subscription goes looking.
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
Alexander Panetta retweeted
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
Be funny if someone in Ottawa quote-tweeted this: 'Wanna see interference?' .... and just posted a link to foreign holdings of U.S. treasuries: ticdata.treasury.gov/resourc…
Alexander Panetta retweeted
Some Government of Canada websites have been temporarily taken offline as a precaution to protect government systems and Canadians' information, following guidance from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security.
This is in response to a vulnerability identified in PHP, software used by websites around the world. This is a global issue, and other governments and organizations are also taking protective measures.
If your organization uses PHP, apply the latest security updates as soon as possible and follow @cybercentre_ca for updates.
We take this situation extremely seriously. Thank you to the cyber security teams working to protect the services Canadians rely on. Affected websites will be restored once patches are applied.
Alexander Panetta retweeted
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
Alexander Panetta retweeted
Larkin's new list by current Stanley Cup betting odds: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, T11th (excluded: Edmonton 4th, Montreal & Ottawa T11th)
Basically: "Whoever I have to do the least amount of work with, but also not Canada"
Dylan Larkin has given Detroit Red Wings 10 teams as trade options, but it may take a multi-team trade to leave everyone satisfied
freep.com/story/sports/nhl/r… via @freep
This is a tour de force. Been working on, thinking about, AI almost every working hour for a year now and have been grappling with the 'utopia' described here -- spend more time worrying about this than the downside risks making headlines. Many parts of it hit home, like this about his mathematician dad:
"I am not a mathematician, but my father is. The area of math he worked in had to do with the way electrons move through disordered crystals. Sitting at the center of his field were two problems that were more than just unsolved; they were, my father says, 'totally out of reach — nobody had any idea how to solve them.' OpenAI’s systems solved them in an afternoon. 'It is the end of mathematics as we know it,' he texted me. 'It is the first time I am glad I have retired.'"
The most revealing part of this conversation between Jon Stewart and Jacob Coxon wasn't Coxon's warning about A.I. doom, but his description of A.I. utopia, and Stewart's incredulous response. I wrote about it — and Francis Fukuyama's "Last Man," and A.I. easily solving the problems that bedeviled my father's field of mathematics for decades — here: nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opini…
Alexander Panetta retweeted
“Now we find out???” Bombardier has had a presence in Kansas since 1990
Trump on Bombardier: “I always viewed them as a Canadian company. You know what I’m talking about. But now we find out they have a presence here, and we’re not hurting them if they’re in Kansas.”
By @jendlouhyhc:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
