Quartz

Thanks to everyone who sat down with us to explain The Grid.

You can find the reporting behind every episode at qz.com slash powerplay.

The grid problem that we just talked about, the warning after warning after warning.

Here's one from Quartz, news source.

Small time utilities are going to have the biggest problem with AI and with being spoofed and having them taken over by the bad guys and nefarious people.

They're the most vulnerable to AI cyber attacks.

This week we're talking about the woes of the Metro and Standard in London.

The rise of the creator journalists and the demise of a once proud journalism brand, Quartz.

And joining me to discuss these developments on the Press Gazette sofa is UK editor Charlotte Tobitt.

Hi, Charlotte.

Well, thanks to our reporting on Press Gazette about sort of fake people, et cetera, et cetera, people often come to me and go, this person's a bit weird and whatever.

And sometimes it is a real person who is actually just a bit weird.

But in this case, I sort of started looking at this reporter called Chris Tolomia and And there was just a lot of, I mean, you know, Quartz was this mega business publication, tens of millions in revenues, all that stuff.

And there was just something completely off about this reporter from the very moment I started looking at it.

Battery makers, car makers, and chip firms.

Jayujyoti Mulik at the American Bazaar, following Bloomberg's reporting via Quartz.

Co-founder Asher Specter told Bloomberg that the company believes demand for AI will outpace the available supply of computing resources and data.

He argued that companies capable of extracting greater performance from existing infrastructure could gain a significant economic advantage.

The company is Flapping Airplanes, $1 billion at a $6 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, with Sequoia, GV, and Kleiner Perkins in, and NVIDIA among the backers.

It was founded in late 2025, and, per Quartz, the valuation has quadrupled since January, when it raised $180 million.

It's one of the so-called NeoLabs.

Research first, no product yet.

It was just kind of terrifying and not really my wheelhouse.

And so I knew I was going to come back to California, and I worked here for a little while for the New York Times, did a bunch of environmental science stories, and then worked for a company called Quartz, which was part of the Atlantic doing science environment stuff.

I recently produced ANOVA, the PBS television show on science.

I did a three-hour series on engineering with some other producers.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity firm NorForge reported a hacking campaign in which an attacker used AI agents to target more than 100 websites, coordinating their activities through exposed control panels for a system called Cairn.

According to Quartz, the firm linked more than 1,100 attack projects across 14 panels to a Chinese language cluster targeting organizations in the United States, Japan, and Australia.

The campaign allegedly aimed to establish persistent access to e-commerce and payment systems, with AI agents instructed to find ways to execute code on online stores, attracting hundreds of thousands to 1.5 million visitors.

Now to Idaho, where schools in Jerome closed on October 20th after a weekend cyberattack targeted district networks, with attackers reportedly attempting to ransom data and gaining control of connected systems, including cameras, door locks, and climate controls.

There's a fantastic article by Nikhil Sonand.

This was written in 2017 on Quartz.

called if i can remember all of the wellness products americans love to buy are sold on both infowars and goop and so they go through this in this very extensive listicle where it's like it's not just like one or two or three items it's like a dozen items it's like 20 different items like ashwagandha reiki mushrooms bacopa selenium all of this different stuff and so it's the active ingredient that is in like you know, ultra masculinity red pill formula, but also in the like super femme, you know, vagina candle formula, they're marketing the same active ingredient for his and hers, like two kind of different brands that you can wrap it in.

So to me, that represents that there's a kind of, you know, unexpected material overlap in their politics.