Jacob Judah
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Jacob Judah
@jacobjudah.bsky.social
Journalist.

Find me in The Economist, The New York Times, Haaretz, The Times, and elsewhere.
Pinned
SCOOP: We got hold of a top secret Russian counterintelligence report on China. It reveals an intensifying intelligence battle.

The FSB worry China is spying on the Arctic, recruiting pilots and scientists, learning from Ukraine, and could even covet land in the Far East.

More reveals here:
Secret Russian Intelligence Document Shows Deep Suspicion of China
www.nytimes.com
AI and Wikipedia are sending the most vulnerable languages into a harmful linguistic doom loop.

Wikipedia is used to train AI to speak vulnerable languages. But users are now flooding Wikipedia with shoddy AI translations.

Latest in @technologyreview.com: www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...
How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral
Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?
www.technologyreview.com
September 26, 2025 at 12:18 AM
Alaska is only three miles from Russia. They are so close that you can see Russian soldiers from Little Diomede, where sixty- four Inuit keep watch over America's forgotten frontier. But Little Diomede is now on borrowed time.

I went to this strange, and sad, place for The Economist:
The Alaskan island on the front lines of the Arctic scramble
The Inuit on Little Diomede are watched over by Russian soldiers. But that’s not their biggest problem in these icy badlands
www.economist.com
August 15, 2025 at 3:45 PM
There will be many unexpected consequences of climate change. But one of them will be that it becomes harder to find submarines stalking beneath some parts of the oceans. That matters.

I explain how here: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/c...
Submarines Are Hard to Detect. Climate Change Might Make It Even Harder.
www.nytimes.com
June 13, 2025 at 1:42 AM
The Air India disaster is being felt particularly painfully in Leicester. But nowhere more so than the street where two brothers that were flying home from Ahmedabad were from. One, the sole survivor, called his father moments after the crash. He said: "I don't know how I am alive."

Latest by me:
‘I Don’t Know How I Am Alive,’ Air India Crash Survivor Tells Family
www.nytimes.com
June 13, 2025 at 1:37 AM
SCOOP: We got hold of a top secret Russian counterintelligence report on China. It reveals an intensifying intelligence battle.

The FSB worry China is spying on the Arctic, recruiting pilots and scientists, learning from Ukraine, and could even covet land in the Far East.

More reveals here:
Secret Russian Intelligence Document Shows Deep Suspicion of China
www.nytimes.com
June 7, 2025 at 11:15 AM
I spent time with a group of men from Ivory Coast that thought they were finally going to be footballers in Europe. They ended up stranded, alone, and lost in Transnistria.

www.economist.com/1843/2024/08...
The strange case of the disappearing football team
Nine young men left Ivory Coast to play professional football in Europe. They ended up in the surreal world of Transnistria
www.economist.com
August 16, 2024 at 1:33 PM
🚨 Scoop: San Marino has appointed figures deeply connected to Putin's Russia to its diplomatic service. Sources in Rome tell me Russia and China use San Marino as a haven and 'logistics base' for espionage against Italy.

Latest in The Economist, w/ John Hooper:

www.economist.com/europe/2024/...
The tiny republic of San Marino is alarmingly friendly to Russia
Intelligence sources fear the country, surrounded by Italy, is a haven for spies
www.economist.com
April 24, 2024 at 7:49 PM
Niue, a tiny Pacific island, is fighting a make-or-break legal battle in Sweden over its internet domain. It claims it is the first ever victim of 'digital colonialism' and that winning could propel it into the United Nations.

Latest in @nytimes.com: www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/w...
The Two-Decade Fight for Two Letters on the Internet
The South Pacific island of Niue says it was cheated out of .nu, a domain that turned out to be very lucrative on the other side of the world.
www.nytimes.com
February 21, 2024 at 2:01 PM
Tokelau, a remote necklace of Pacific atolls, has only 1,400 people. It had, until recently, the largest internet domain on earth. How? Almost all its users were spammers, phishers, and even spies. Tokelauans were barely aware. They now want to clean up '.TK' ahead of a sovereignty bid.

My latest:
How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime
Despite having a population of just 1,400, until recently, Tokelau’s .tk domain had more users than any other country. Here’s why.
www.technologyreview.com
November 3, 2023 at 7:17 PM