Kat Straight

Trial and Error. Results Pending.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Let me get this straight.

A farmer spots hooded, masked men and three vans outside a US bomber base in the middle of the night.

Armed police. Major incident. 85 homes evacuated. A bomb-disposal robot. Two apparent controlled explosions. An 8km no-fly zone. A US Embassy security alert.

The President of the United States says they'd been watched for "a long time" and were out to do "big damage."

A day and a half later, all five are home on bail.

And the government's line is that the farmer who called it in only had a "partial picture."

Join the club.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Let me get this straight.

An AI agent found login credentials lying around online and used them to pull data from the Census Bureau. It tried to break into the Education Department's civil rights office. It posted SEC data to a forum. It probed the Navy and the White House budget office, possibly hundreds of thousands of times.

If you or I did any of that, it's a CFAA indictment, a perp walk, and a DOJ press release with our mugshot in the header.

When OpenAI does it, it's a "routine research task."

They found the government incidents while reviewing their other hacks. The breach audit, uncovered more breaches. It's breaches all the way down.

In bug bounty there's scope, authorization, rules of engagement, and disclosure timelines. Researchers get banned for a fraction of this.

Silicon Valley skipped all of that and called it "agentic."

https://t.co/p5lpJl1Mht

[Kat Straight @Katstrate]

Receiving Amazon orders with squished, torn, or open packages. Is it warehouse automation, careless handling and shipping? Problem if item is a gift or should be securely sealed for authenticity (meds). Returns no solution if you need it now. Time for in-person shopping again?!!

[Neeraj K. Agrawal @NeerajKA]

DHS’s predictive policing is unconstitutional, un-American and should be stopped https://t.co/UIn9PIvVT7 @LazPieper

[The New York Times @nytimes]

The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in the repair plan, not vandalism, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, documents show. https://t.co/O2a2TRrSHd

[Will Harley 🇧🇪🇬🇧 @Hardley76]

@lizziessas @BMcGrewvy https://t.co/Pn83eFvmIx

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Deva Hazarika @devahaz]

I get people saying “you put this out there, anyone could have always done this, should have known better” but whether it’s social media, property ownership in NYC, plagiarism, etc we’ll see many more shocks to people as AI makes it easy to process all the data sitting out there

[Kat Straight @Katstrate]

@deadsara Took me a minute to catch the TBT part... was already trying to reschedule my evening to get to this show!!

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

I really recommending reading this.

In summary, a company which does ID verification for in-person interactions (hotels, car rentals, ID verification for alcohol or marijuana, etc) has some how exposed over 153,000,000 drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada.

It is a catastrophic data breach, probably one of the worse I've ever seen. If you're in the United States and have traveled, gotten a hotel, purchased marijuana or alcohol, there is a high probability you're in this.

Unlike other breaches, this includes a photo of the person (from the license), making verification you've identified the person significantly easier.

This poses a significant threat to celebrities (musicians, YouTubers, streamers, adult entertainers, actors, etc), politicians, lawyers, wealthy people (CEOs, investors, people of public interest), Law Enforcement Officers, etc

Krebs himself, and several other security researchers, have already confirmed they're in the data leak.

tl;dr gah damn dawg this company is going to be sued into oblivion

https://t.co/QpsegBUzH5

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

This is beyond disgusting. I strongly support Israel in general, but this is absolutely indefensible. The Netanyahu government has no idea how its permissive stance towards these settler thugs is wrecking Israel's reputation in America, even among Israel's friends.

[Oriana González @ReporterOriana]

👀 NEWS from @anna_c_kramer: For over a year, the National Park Service has been quietly working to fulfill an unprecedented directive from Trump officials: Parcel off a corner of Yosemite National Park to give to a private developer

https://t.co/oWi5aglYAX

[Kat Straight @Katstrate]

@HannahDCox Love Dear Baji, always dropping the truth bombs :)

[Sam Rose @samwhoo]

This might be the most beautiful thing I've read in my life. What a privilege to be alive in 2026.

https://t.co/07BtpKswBu

[Laz @LazPieper]

A bill was introduced last month that would require users to provide their age and date-of-birth in order to use an operating system of basically any device, including open-source operating systems. This is, of course, being sold to us under the guise of child-safety, but let’s be clear: this conditions the use of publicly available tools and infrastructure—like open-source software and the internet—based on a government-approved personal attribute. Today it is age, tomorrow it is (fill in the blank).

Read more in our latest newsletter:
https://t.co/8jPYHxe8CZ

[Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior]

Nothing should require an app. There should always be an alternative. You should always be able to leave your cell phone at home or not own one at all. This applies to everything but especially for something as basic as parking.

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

This story is so absurd it sounds fake. For 14 years, government officials in Alaska have been trying to seize an 83-year-old pilot's $95,000 plane.

Why? Because a passenger brought a 6-pack of beer on a flight.

The Supreme Court has a chance to fix this. A thread.

[Meh @Spilling_The_T]

Women: I have nothing to wear!

Gays:

[David Frum @davidfrum]

There are literally thousands of fathers reading those tweets and thinking, "When my daughter lost her favorite toy, I led a search party as if for a downed NATO nuclear warhead. And when that failed, I paid $300 for a replica on EBay."

[David Pogue @Pogue]

76 years ago, Ray Bradbury published "There Will Come Soft Rains," an apocalyptic short story about a time when we have wiped ourselves out—but our AI obliviously continues automating our empty smart homes.

Bradbury set the story on August 4, 2026.

https://t.co/0jBNbjt4Ng