GM 🌊🇺🇸 The White House announced its America First Seafood Strategy, emphasizing domestic production, import compliance, and combating seafood fraud. A particularly important development: stronger emphasis on substantiating seafood origin claims. As global supply chains grow more complex, verifiable documentation and traceability become essential to protecting producers, consumers, and fair trade. whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2…

GM ☕️ It’s another Fraud Friday: Nearly $1 million in Pokémon and sports cards stolen from a FedEx truck in California. But the bigger story is supply chain liability. Who had custody? When did responsibility transfer? Who bears the loss? And what evidence exists when insurers, carriers, and customers disagree? PSA has reportedly deactivated the stolen cards’ certificates and alerted marketplaces. That’s an important distinction: authenticating an asset is only part of the equation. Establishing a verifiable chain of custody matters just as much. Cargo theft isn’t just a security problem. It’s a trust, accountability, and liability problem. And it extends far beyond trading cards. abc7.com/post/1-million-wort…

GM 🔐 This week, a security incident involving India’s eMudhra exposed a surprising weakness in one of the internet’s most important trust systems. To understand why it matters, let’s look at how that system works. Every time you visit a secure website (HTTPS), your browser checks a digital certificate to help verify that you’re connecting to the intended website. Those certificates are issued by organizations called Certificate Authorities (CAs). They’re part of a global system called Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which relies on a chain of trust: • Root authorities trusted by browsers and operating systems • Intermediate authorities authorized to issue certificates • Individual certificates identifying websites So what happened? Researchers discovered that eight eMudhra intermediate certificates had private keys so weak they could effectively be guessed. These keys were supposed to be generated using cryptographically secure randomness. Instead, their values ranged from just 4 to 237. Why is that a problem? An attacker with one of these private keys could potentially forge certificates that appear legitimate, undermining the system browsers use to authenticate websites. Google and Mozilla moved to block the affected certificates. There’s no confirmed evidence that these keys were maliciously exploited, but the incident illustrates something important: The internet doesn’t just run on encryption. It relies on an entire ecosystem of delegated trust, secure processes, and independent verification. And most of us interact with that infrastructure every single day without realizing it.

GM ☕️ Manufacturing Monday 🇺🇸 Some encouraging news for American manufacturing this week: 🏭 $21B in semiconductor investment in NY 🚢 $3B shipyard investment in TX 🚜 $1B equipment manufacturing expansion in NC ⚙️ $700M new steel mill in CA More domestic capacity. More resilient supply chains. More opportunities for American manufacturing. Source: IMTS

GM ☕️ A product can be authentic and still be compromised. Recent reports of tampered Ledger devices sold through a third-party reseller highlight a broader supply-chain challenge. Even genuine products can be vulnerable after leaving the manufacturer. Who handled them? What changed? What was verified? This is why genealogical traceability matters. The supply chain has a memory problem. coindesk.com/tech/2026/10/13…

GM ☀️ There are fewer than 1,000 Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) worldwide, each capable of transporting roughly 2 million barrels of crude oil. With shipping costs surging and security threats disrupting the Strait of Hormuz, smaller shuttle tankers are moving oil through high-risk waters before transferring it to VLCCs offshore. Think about what that means for the documentation. A shipment can change vessels, operators, and custody before ever reaching its destination. Bills of lading. Certificates of origin. Inspection records. Quantity and quality attestations. Every handoff introduces another point where information must remain consistent, authentic, and verifiable. The cargo may change hands. Trust in its documentation shouldn’t have to start over. This is why standards-based, interoperable verification infrastructure matters to global trade.

GM ☕️ Fascinating research from @NIST By analyzing 4,563 drug samples across 17 states, researchers are identifying chemical fingerprints, tracking changes in composition, and studying how dangerous fentanyl adulterants emerge across geographic regions. Using mass spectrometry, compounds can be identified in seconds. This is an extraordinary example of how analytical science, traceability, and timely data can help reveal patterns that would otherwise remain invisible. The implications extend well beyond illicit drugs, from public health to supply chain intelligence. Research: doi.org/10.1002/dta.70164

GM ☕️ Manufacturing Monday 🏭 95% of U.S. semiconductor equipment and materials spending goes to suppliers headquartered in the U.S., Europe, or Japan. Yet only 68% is tied to production in those regions. That 27-point gap highlights a critical challenge: knowing who supplies a product isn’t the same as knowing where it was made. As semiconductor supply chains grow more complex, traceability, provenance, and verifiable documentation become increasingly important. Source: @SIAAmerica

GM! ☕️ While part of our team is in Washington, DC this week for @ASTMIntl meetings, our COO had the opportunity to attend a fantastic lecture yesterday by Dr. Eugene Spafford (@TheRealSpaf) of Purdue University. “AI: Cybersecurity Panacea or Existential Threat?” is a timely discussion as emerging technologies continue to reshape how we approach security, trust, and digital infrastructure. A big thank you to Spaf and @cerias for making these important conversations accessible to the broader community! 🔗 cerias.purdue.edu/news_and_e…

GM from DC 🇺🇸 Back with ASTM International this week for F49, working on the standards behind trusted, verifiable information across global supply chains. Standards first. Infrastructure follows. (📸 : Minh Phan)

GM. It’s a strong ‘Manufacturing Monday’. 🇺🇸 The latest ISM data shows U.S. manufacturing expanding for the ninth consecutive month. September Manufacturing PMI: 54.5 New Orders: 55.3 Production: 56.7 Employment: 52.7 Backlog of Orders: 51.1 Prices: 77.9 Five of the six largest manufacturing industries expanded during the month. But more manufacturing also means more materials, suppliers, testing, certifications and documentation moving through increasingly complex supply chains. As manufacturing scales, so does the need to establish what a product is, where its inputs came from, whether requirements were met and whether the evidence supporting those claims can be trusted. Manufacturing capacity matters. So does the integrity of the data behind it.

GM. Let this sink in… 🥁 In May, @CBP seized 93 ceramic sinks at the Port of Norfolk bearing counterfeit certification marks. Four months later, officers at the same port seized another 1,000 ceramic sinks bearing counterfeit UPC certification marks. That’s 1,093 sinks where the mark meant to signal conformity couldn’t be trusted. Counterfeit certification isn’t just a branding problem. It undermines the trust infrastructure behind global trade. A mark only works if you can verify who issued it, what it applies to, and that it hasn’t been tampered with.

GM. 🇺🇸 🤝 🇨🇳 This is an interesting development in U.S.-China trade. The newly created U.S.-China Board of Trade has released its first “30-for-30” proposal: roughly $30B of goods in each direction that could receive reduced tariff treatment. On the U.S. export side, the list includes agricultural products, medical devices and other goods and represents roughly 30% of current U.S. exports to China. Coming the other direction, the U.S. list includes toys, small appliances, tableware, bedding and other consumer goods. No tariff reductions or implementation dates have been finalized yet. Both countries still have to work through their respective domestic processes. But the bigger story may be the mechanism itself. The Board is intended to continuously monitor bilateral trade and potentially expand favorable treatment to additional products over time. A pretty interesting experiment in managing trade between the world’s two largest economies.

🐴 🪪 This one caught our attention from Dr. John Spink (@FoodFraud) and the Food Fraud Prevention Think Tank. Europol recently uncovered a suspected horse trafficking scheme involving forged passports and manipulated microchips that effectively gave horses new identities. More than 1,000 horses were checked across Belgium, France, Ireland and the Netherlands. Why does this matter for food fraud? A horse passport isn’t just paperwork. It establishes identity, history and whether an animal is eligible to enter the food chain. If both the document and the physical identifier can be manipulated, everything can appear to match while the underlying information is false. A fascinating example of why document authenticity and physical-to-digital identity matter so much in supply chains. Great write-up from Dr. Spink: blog.foodfraudpreventionthin…