Commercial traffic through the Bab al-Mandab Strait dropped to 11 cargo vessels on Sunday, the lowest single-day count in months, following Houthi missile and drone strikes on Saudi Aramco facilities at Jizan and Yanbu. Transits through the Strait of Hormuz remained severely depressed across the same weekend, with fewer than 10 cargo vessels crossing on each of the three days. … [Read more...] about Bab al-Mandab Transits Fall to 11 Vessels After Houthi Strikes on Jizan and Yanbu, Hormuz Stays Below 10
Maritime Traffic OSINT: How to Analyze AIS, Satellite Imagery and Port Activity
Shipping is the most observable large-scale economic activity on the planet. Roughly 100,000 commercial vessels above 100 gross tons are trading at any moment, most of them broadcasting their identity and position continuously, in the clear, on VHF. That makes maritime traffic the richest open-source dataset available to a civilian analyst — and also one of the most … [Read more...] about Maritime Traffic OSINT: How to Analyze AIS, Satellite Imagery and Port Activity
Conferences Are a Terrible OSINT Channel and Still Worth Attending
I'll put my own position first, because it's harsher than the one I'm about to argue against. Conference programming is close to worthless as a source, and not for the reasons people usually give. The reason isn't that speakers are dull, though many are. It's that everything delivered from a stage has been cleared for release, and cleared for release to everyone in the hall at … [Read more...] about Conferences Are a Terrible OSINT Channel and Still Worth Attending
Cheap Visual Manipulation Does Not Need to Persuade Anyone to Work
Well-resourced intelligence services have been able to alter photographs convincingly since the 1930s and video since the 1990s. Nothing about the upper bound of the capability changed much in the last five years. What changed is the floor. A task that required a funded team, specialist software and weeks of effort now requires one motivated person and an afternoon, and the … [Read more...] about Cheap Visual Manipulation Does Not Need to Persuade Anyone to Work
Total Visual Coverage Will Make Open-Source Verification Harder, Not Easier
The design assumption underneath every open-source investigation of the last fifteen years is that an image is something a person eventually looks at. Collection was hard, footage was scarce, and the analytical work happened in a human head examining a frame. That assumption is expiring. Capture is being re-engineered around what a model needs rather than what an eye can use, … [Read more...] about Total Visual Coverage Will Make Open-Source Verification Harder, Not Easier
OSINT Tools and Methods: A Working Overview of the Modern Collection Stack
Most people who ask me about OSINT want a tool list. They want the twelve browser extensions and the one Python framework that turns a name into a dossier. I understand the impulse, and I will give you the list further down, but I want to say the uncomfortable part first: the tools are the least durable thing in this discipline. Half of what I used five years ago is dead, … [Read more...] about OSINT Tools and Methods: A Working Overview of the Modern Collection Stack
DeepSeek Pauses Its $1.5 Billion Second Round: The Leaked Liang Transcript and China’s Compute Gap
On 25 July 2026, DeepSeek verbally informed prospective backers in its second funding round that the investment agreements they expected to sign within days would not be signed. The round was targeting at least 10 billion yuan, roughly 1.5 billion dollars, at a pre-money valuation near 480 billion yuan — about 71 billion dollars, and a step-up of some 37 per cent over a first … [Read more...] about DeepSeek Pauses Its $1.5 Billion Second Round: The Leaked Liang Transcript and China’s Compute Gap
China’s Bid for an Alternative AI Order: WAICO, Open Models, and 5,000 Training Slots for Developing Countries
On 16 July 2026, representatives of twenty-nine states signed the founding agreement of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, one day before the opening of the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi signed for Beijing. UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended. The following morning, Xi Jinping … [Read more...] about China’s Bid for an Alternative AI Order: WAICO, Open Models, and 5,000 Training Slots for Developing Countries
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan Have Become AI Export Economies. Everything Else Is Shrinking.
The headline numbers coming out of north-east Asia in 2026 are the best in a generation. Taiwan grew 8.63% in 2025 and expanded at an annualized 13.69% in the first quarter of 2026. South Korean chip exports rose 180% year on year in the first twenty days of July, to $22.1 billion, with computer-related shipments up roughly 232%. Japanese exports are surging and the Nikkei has … [Read more...] about Japan, South Korea and Taiwan Have Become AI Export Economies. Everything Else Is Shrinking.
South Korea Signed $700 Billion in AI Deals While Its Retail Investors Were Liquidated. What Comes Next.
In the last week of July 2026, two things happened to South Korea at once. Its two largest companies signed the biggest supply commitments in the country's industrial history. And its domestic retail investors, the cohort that had funded the rally in those same two companies, were being forcibly margin-called out of the trade. Both facts are true. Neither is a correction of … [Read more...] about South Korea Signed $700 Billion in AI Deals While Its Retail Investors Were Liquidated. What Comes Next.