Hello again, and welcome back to Five Things Tech!

China is apparently binge-winning the cyberwar while America’s critical infrastructure plays “whack-a-mole” with leaks and malware. Beijing’s hackers have gone full Bond villain, slipping spy gear into U.S. telecoms, energy grids, and water systems—because who doesn’t want Insta-access to America’s most embarrassing moments? The U.S. government’s answer? Build virtual “digital twins” and hope someone remembered to install a firewall this time. Meanwhile, China is busy flexing its engineering muscles along the Tibetan plateau, building a hydro-powered monument to self-reliance. It’s $167b worth of tunnels, turbines, and “neighbor? What neighbor?” attitude, with output so big it’ll light up half the country and probably outrage every nation downstream. Never mind earthquakes; loyalty-buying mega projects are in.

While China powers up its rivers, Western couch potatoes are discovering that streaming services have gone from bingeable to barely-worth-the-buffering. Subscription prices soar, libraries shrink, and suddenly pirating feels like the morally superior option—especially if you want to watch Medici without mortgaging your house. As Silicon Valley’s AI army cuts tech jobs faster than you can say “prompt engineer,” fresh-faced computer science grads are left chasing burritos instead of bugs—guess you’d better learn to code, or maybe just learn how to work for the code. At least, if quantum computing lives up to Deloitte’s prophecies, tomorrow’s MBAs will optimize their portfolios, discover new drugs, and calculate the exact time to panic—just as soon as someone finds a few hundred reliable qubits and the world’s last quantum workforce.

Also, on a more personal node: on Friday some technicians showed up and wanted to connect our apartment to fiber, but of course it didn’t work out as there was no fiber yet in our part of the building. I would have been surprised if this had worked out on the first attempt. Now we’ll wait until somebody will come back to pull some fiber up an old chimney. I can smell the future already…

Enjoy! ...