Politics | Sanika S. Khadkikar

A New Cold War

Fri, 06 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Of all the headlines I expected to read this year, “hackers are attacking refrigerators” was not one of them. But here we are. Freezers at US military commissaries mysteriously defrosted, hundreds of supermarkets in France had their fridges cranked up to oven temperatures overnight, and yesterday the US government issued an official warning about it. Apparently fridges are the new frontier of cyberwarfare.

The commissary mystery

Commissaries are the grocery stores on US military bases, run by the Defense Commissary Agency. In late August, within days of each other, the refrigeration at at least six commissaries failed, at Fort Irwin and Travis Air Force Base in California, F.E. Warren in Wyoming, Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island and Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi. Some of the appliances had switched themselves into defrost mode, spoiling thousands of dollars of meat, dairy, produce and frozen food. The stores stayed open, but only for dry goods.

At first it just sounded like bad luck. But Army and Air Force criminal investigators opened cases, and the Pentagon is now treating the outages as a possible cyberattack. Officials have not confirmed that anyone actually got into the systems, but the timing of what happened next in Europe made a lot of people suspicious.

Meanwhile, in France

On the night of October 11, someone broke into the refrigeration controllers of up to 700 French supermarkets, including hundreds of Intermarché, Carrefour and Coopérative U stores, and switched them all into defrost mode with the food still inside. The alarms were disabled first, so nobody noticed until staff showed up the next morning. Fridges had reached about 50°C, one store in Normandy reported 80°C, and some equipment actually melted or caught fire. Whole aisles of food went in the bin, with damage estimated at €10 million or more.

Then on November 2 it happened again, this time at supermarkets across Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Estonia and Portugal. Worst of all, attackers also targeted three French blood banks and tried to heat stored plasma to 110°C. Thankfully their monitoring alarms worked and staff stepped in before anything was destroyed.

How do you even hack a fridge?

This is the part that got me. Big commercial fridges are not like the one in your kitchen. They are run by small computers called controllers, which let a store manage the temperature of every freezer from one place, often remotely over the internet. The attacks targeted controllers made by Danfoss, a major supplier, and some of the models involved are ancient by computer standards. One reached its end of life in 2016 and another in 2021, meaning they no longer get security updates. Security researchers at Claroty had already reported in 2025 that some of these controllers could be logged into with the username “admin” and a hidden daily code that could be worked out from the device’s own date. Many of them were simply sitting on the open internet for anyone to find.

The US military seems to have the same problem. NPR reported that commissaries use older Danfoss controllers, including some from the mid-2000s that can no longer be updated with secure software.

Who did it?

Nobody knows yet. US officials reportedly suspect Iran-linked hackers were behind the commissary outages, and one industry analyst said the pattern closely matches Iranian groups. But no government has officially named anyone, and one security expert in France even suggested it could have been kids messing around. When the door is left this wide open, it does not take a nation state to walk through it.

Why this is not actually funny

It is easy to laugh at the idea of a fridge being hacked, and I did at first. But refrigeration keeps a lot more than ice cream cold. Food supplies, medicines, vaccines and blood all depend on it, which is exactly why the blood bank attack is so chilling (sorry). Yesterday, CISA, the FBI and the Departments of Health, Agriculture and Transportation issued a joint warning telling businesses to take refrigeration controls off the public internet, change default passwords, install updates and retire equipment that is no longer supported. And the head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warned that this is just the beginning, since AI now makes it much easier to find and exploit old, forgotten technology like this.

So the next time someone tells you their smart fridge is the future, maybe ask them when it last got a security update.

Betting on Everything

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With the midterm election results coming in tomorrow, I got into predictive modelling. People like Nate Silver put a percentage on each candidate’s chance of winning, built from polls, surveys, historical data and past win rates. I am just a gravitational wave data analyst, but I do work with time series and forecasting every day, so it made me wonder whether I, or really anyone who knows some probability, could do the same.

A bazillion ads

That rabbit hole led me to prediction markets, specifically Kalshi and Polymarket, mostly because of the bazillion Kalshi ads I kept getting on YouTube. There are plenty of memes about the ridiculous things people bet on there, like whether the US government will confirm that aliens exist, or whether Jesus Christ will return before GTA VI comes out, both on Polymarket, the platform founded by Shayne Coplan. Kalshi, co-founded by Tarek Mansour, has its own endless list, and both have an entire section for the midterms.

What I am actually interested in is whether these platforms should exist at all. Billions of dollars are being traded on them, billions of dollars are being made, and Google Finance now shows their odds right next to stock prices.

Why now?

I kept coming back to three questions. Why do these markets exist now and not twenty years ago? Why are they allowed to operate with so little transparency about who is betting and how much, when we already struggle with that in places like hedge funds? And most of all, how is any of this legal?

The idea itself is not new. In 1988, faculty at the University of Iowa set up the Iowa Electronic Markets, small real-money markets to study how people predict presidential elections. Of course the odds depend on who is betting, how much money they have and how many of them there are. But when researchers compared the market with 964 polls across five presidential elections, the market was closer to the final result 74% of the time. Polymarket made a similar point in 2024, when it strongly favoured Donald Trump while most poll-based models called the race a toss-up.

How the internet saw Polymarket's 2024 forecast. Image via smartcontract.tips.

The catch is that Iowa was only allowed to run because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal regulator for futures markets, agreed not to step in as long as the markets were used for academic research, run not-for-profit and capped at $500 per person. So what changed? Mostly the courts. Kalshi sued the CFTC, and in September 2024 a federal judge ruled that Kalshi could list contracts on US elections. When the CFTC dropped its appeal in May 2025, the floodgates opened.

Not gambling, apparently

Let’s be honest about what these are. Launching a gambling business in the US means getting a licence in every state you operate in, which is slow and expensive, and that is exactly why sports betting companies spend so much on lawyers. Prediction markets found a shortcut by calling themselves something else. Their bets are structured as event contracts, a kind of financial derivative in the same family as futures and options, which means they answer to the CFTC instead of state gambling regulators. Tarek Mansour has argued that every new financial product gets called gambling at first, going all the way back to grain futures in the 1800s, and told Axios that “if we are gambling, then I think you’re basically calling the entire financial market gambling.”

But then how is “Will Jesus return before GTA VI” a financial derivative? This is regulatory drift. You start somewhere legal that follows the rules and makes sense, and then, one market at a time, you drift. And for platforms that insist they are completely different from sportsbooks, about 89% of Kalshi’s 2025 fee revenue came from sports, rising above 90% by the end of the year. The courts can’t agree on it either. Appeals courts have split on whether states can regulate Kalshi’s sports contracts as gambling, and the question may end up at the Supreme Court.

A lopsided game

Betting can be fun, and I think adults should be allowed to do it. My problem is with how lopsided these markets are. In a New York Times op-ed, Kyla Scanlon argued that big traders have outsized influence and could be profiting from insider information, and ahead of the midterms Polymarket itself reportedly investigated dozens of trades for insider trading and manipulation. The more money or information you have, the more the market bends towards you. In 2024, a single French trader known as Théo bet tens of millions of dollars on Trump and walked away with an estimated $85 million.

That becomes dangerous once people start treating the odds as truth. A powerful person could quietly put money behind an outcome to test the waters, or to make it look more likely than it is, and the market would report it as consensus. It does not help that the news is now part of the loop. CNN has had a data partnership with Kalshi since December 2025, and ahead of the midterms CBS, CNBC and Dow Jones all signed deals with Kalshi or Polymarket.

And then there is the moral side, which bothers me the most. When the US and Israel struck Iran this year, Reuters found hundreds of millions of dollars riding on contracts about the timing of the attacks and on Ayatollah Khamenei’s removal, and Polymarket paid out to the people who bet he would be gone. Critics started calling these death markets, and Polymarket only pulled a bet on whether a nuclear weapon would be detonated after a huge backlash. When a war becomes something you can win or lose money on, people’s attention shifts from the people dying to their own profit and loss. It reminds me of the crowds at the Colosseum, paying to watch fatal fights. That kind of desensitisation is a moral disaster waiting to happen.

So am I betting?

Whatever these markets are, with the rules this up in the air, and with me being far more informed about JWST observing cycles than about world politics, I am not taking part right now. Betting with half the knowledge is how you end up on the wrong side of the people who have all of it. Regardless, the markets are giving Democrats a 78% chance of taking the Senate and 95% for the House, so they are calling a blue wave tomorrow, and I cannot wait to see if they are right.