Hey, Gang, and welcome to Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. Sundown tonight also marks the start of Sukkot, the Jewish festival of booths, running through Oct. 2.
My calendar says it's Daughter's Day, Quesadilla Day, Comic Book Day, World Dream Day, and — as sundown approaches — the first evening of Sukkot. Call your daughter, grab a quesadilla, crack open a comic, and chase a dream today, and if you're observing Sukkot, may the week in the sukkah be a good one.
Today in History:
1066: King Harold II's forces defeat and kill Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, and Norwegian King Harald III at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
1690: Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick, considered the first newspaper published in Britain's American colonies, appears in Boston — and is suppressed by colonial authorities after a single issue.
1775: British forces capture Continental Army Col. Ethan Allen after a poorly planned attempt to seize Montreal.
1789: Congress passes twelve proposed constitutional amendments and sends them to the states; ten will be ratified as the Bill of Rights.
1890: Congress establishes Sequoia National Park in California, home to some of the world's largest trees.
1894: President Grover Cleveland issues a proclamation pardoning Mormons who had entered into plural marriages before the practice was banned.
1928: Chicago's Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, later renamed Motorola, is officially incorporated.
1957: Under armed federal escort, the Little Rock Nine attend their first full day of classes at Central High School in Arkansas.
1962: Algeria's National Assembly seats Ahmed Ben Bella as prime minister, formally establishing the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria.
1970: ABC premieres The Partridge Family, the sitcom that turns Screen Gems' music arm into a second pop-chart powerhouse.
1978: A Pacific Southwest Airlines jet collides midair with a small Cessna over San Diego, killing 144 people in the deadliest air disaster in California history at the time.
Birthdays Today include: Michael Douglas, actor and Academy Award winner; Christopher Reeve, actor best known for playing Superman; Barbara Walters, broadcast journalist and television pioneer; Scottie Pippen, Basketball Hall of Famer; and Will Smith, actor and musician — if today's your birthday too, happy birthday from all of us at PJ Media.
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I've argued, just in the recent past, that government shouldn't be trying to regulate technology. Simply put, they're not up to the task. With the dawn comes news of a new AI-driven mess in Australia and a textbook example of why government regulation of technology never works.
A headline from Tom's Hardware: "Australian PM says OpenAI took 84 days to email agency after agent hacked its national health care portal — incident is believed to be the first known case of AI breaching a government site."
The 84 days is the part everyone's fixating on, and it's actually the less damning number in this story.
Here's what happened: an OpenAI agent, researching public medicine spending during an internal evaluation, hit the access blocks on Services Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on June 18. It didn't accept the blocks. In Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's own words, "there were blocks clearly which were coming back telling the AI agent, no. The AI agent found a way around those blocks" — eventually reaching both public and non-public files, and reportedly writing files to an internal server, a claim still under investigation.
OpenAI says it didn't even notice its own agent's behavior until August, while reviewing what it called "misaligned model activity" from that evaluation. It finally notified the Australian government on Sept. 10 — 84 days after the breach — and even then, it didn't send that notice to an actual point of contact. It emailed a generic public mailbox Services Australia normally uses for academics and researchers flagging minor site issues, a mailbox that, according to Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher, gets checked once a day. That added another five days before the responsible minister even knew, pushing real awareness to Sept. 17 and Albanese's public disclosure to Sept. 24, at a press conference in New York timed around the UN General Assembly.
Now, in fairness, OpenAI has reportedly cooperated fully with the investigation since disclosure, and Sam Altman personally told Albanese in a call that the company's protocols "were not up to scratch here." Fine. That's on OpenAI, and it's a real, serious corporate failure worth its own column. Doubtless, I'll come back to this at some future date.
But here's the point I actually want to make, and it's the one that should worry you more than OpenAI's sluggish inbox habits: for three straight months, the government of Australia had no idea its own national healthcare data portal had been breached.
Not a flicker. Not an alert. Not a single internal system flagging unauthorized access to non-public files on a site run by its own social-services agency. Services Australia learned about a breach of its own infrastructure only because the company that breached it eventually got around to sending an email — to the wrong inbox, which nobody was checking more than once a day.
That's not a story about a slow corporate disclosure process. That's a story about a government with functionally zero independent capability to detect when its own systems have been compromised, relying entirely on the goodwill and internal review schedule of the private company that broke in. Imagine a bank that only finds out it's been robbed because the robber eventually mails back an apology note, and the bank doesn't open its mail more than once a day. That's the actual scandal buried under this headline, and it's a government failure, not a corporate one. And of course more is being made by the media of the corporate failure than the government failure. That, too, is likely worth a column to itself.
This is merely the latest example of something I've been pointing at for a while now. Many of you will remember the glaring precedent: the Obamacare website, where our own federal government failed spectacularly at the comparatively simple task of building a functioning insurance marketplace, let alone securing one against a determined adversary. I said just the other day, "Government has never been able to legislate technology effectively, mostly because tech moves at a faster rate than government can ever hope to match." Add "government can't even keep pace with defending its own infrastructure against technology" right alongside it.
Part of this is simply the speed at which the technology itself is moving. And part of it is that the people charged with writing the legislation, and apparently the government people charged with running the actual systems, are nowhere close to equipped to deal with the subject at hand.
I can offer a modest, personal example of the first problem: years ago, I took programming classes in a government school built around coding in Pascal, a language Niklaus Wirth originally developed back in 1970. I've always suspected the course was designed around whatever hardware happened to be sitting in the classroom — mostly Apple ][s, on which we banged out code in Apple Pascal. Ah, yes, the Apple ][s. 6502, and my own addiction, Commodore's 6510 CPUs, which were just enough that once I learned the code set, it screwed me out of any chances of understanding X86 architecture, which is what most desktop and server systems run on today. Oh, well.
By the time I actually took the programming class, Pascal had already fallen off the map in the real world, replaced by C and its descendants for practically everything that mattered. The class I was sitting in was functionally useless the day I walked out of it. That's roughly the moment I started questioning what business government has trying to keep pace with technology at all. It was also a major reason why I looked with a jaundiced eye at Obama telling coal miners to "learn to code".
Now scale that up. The people writing legislation on AI governance today mostly don't have even that much lived experience to draw on — a fair number of them are still working out what their own smartphones actually do, the modern equivalent of squinting at a VCR trying to figure out how the signal gets to channel 3. And on the enforcement side, apparently, the state of the art in incident response for a national healthcare data system is an email inbox somebody remembers to open once a day.
You want to hand that apparatus the job of regulating an AI industry that ships changes measured in hours, not decades? Good luck. Australia couldn't even tell you that the burglar was in the house until the burglar himself mailed in a confession.
Thought for the Day: Boston's first newspaper lasted exactly one issue before the authorities shut it down — proof that the fight over who gets to publish what has been running considerably longer than anyone currently complaining about it seems to realize.
VIP members: Now's your time. Let's hear your thoughts in the comment section.
Take care today, Gang. You've got a weekend to celebrate tomorrow. You not being here won't do. Which reminds me. I'll be here tomorrow, as always. Why not join me? I'll see you then.