Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Mystery solved: DOJ secretly thwarted release of Russia documents declassified by Trump

In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.

The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021.

Meadows’ memo confirmed prior reporting by Just the News that Trump on Jan. 19, 2021 declassified a binder of hundreds of pages of sensitive FBI documents that show how the bureau used informants and FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and misled both a federal court and Congress about flaws in the evidence they offered to get approval for the investigation.

The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

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Engineers Have Created ‘Small-Scale’ Soft Robots That Can Crawl Around a Stomach and Deliver Drug ‘Cargo’

In a new study published in Science Advances a team of engineers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong outlines how it has created small-scale soft robots capable of multimodal locomotion, drug cargo delivery, and the ability to tolerate exposure to acid. A prime use case for the small-scale robots—which are tens of millimeters across depending on their shape—is, according to the engineers, “for biomedical applications that involve operation in the stomach such as gastric ulcer treatment.” As a proof-of-concept for the study, the researchers even had one of the small, soft robots roll around in an ex vivo pig’s stomach and apply a “therapy patch.”

In their study the engineers describe how their small-scale robots utilize a “modular soft magnetic architecture” with individual parts of the robots containing magnetic microparticles that each have their own prescribed magnetization profiles—that is, they each respond to their own type of magnetic field depending on the directionality of the field.

These “modular magnetization units” are embedded into a “network of adhesive sticker layers” in order to form the soft robots, which are capable of taking on either 2D or 3D shapes. “Functional” modules consisting of different materials, and having different shapes—e.g., particles, papers, films, foams, and electronic components—can then be “seamlessly integrated” into the small-scale robots.

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Over 1,600 of the Brightest Scientific Minds in Technology Have Signed a Letter Calling Both Crypto and Blockchain a Sham

The letter is a punch in the gut to the Wall Street underwriters who have brought billions of dollars of crypto related companies to the public markets, most of which have now collapsed in price. It makes the billionaire venture capitalists who have invested billions in crypto startups look like fools. And it renders the big-name celebrities who have promoted this garbage in TV commercials look like the shills that they are.

The letter was sent to key members of Congress and to the Chairs of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees. It is signed by more than 1,600 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists from around the world. There are 45 signatories who currently work at Google; 19 who work at Microsoft; 11 employed at Apple. (Those three companies currently have a collective market capitalization of more than $5.75 trillion; they can afford to hire the best and the brightest.) There are signatories that are Ph.Ds from the most prestigious universities in the world, including the University of Oxford and MIT. And all 1,600 have signed a letter that says this about crypto and blockchain:

“We strongly disagree with the narrative—peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry—that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans…

“As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.”

The letter links to an article from Bruce Schneier, a Security Technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. The article appeared at Wired on February 6, 2019 under the headline: “There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology.” The article makes the following salient points:

“What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

“When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?”

Losing your money is mostly what has been going on this year in crypto. In addition to crypto itself being a dubious “investment,” the Federal Trade Commission reported in June that “since the start of 2021, more than 46,000 people have reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to scams. That’s about one out of every four dollars reportedly lost to fraud during that period.” (For more on the perils of crypto investing, see our report on how customers on the Coinbase crypto exchange are being victimized.)

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Solar Panels Subsidized By Gov’t Are Winding Up In Landfills, Contaminating Groundwater With Toxic Metals

Oh, the irony…California’s massive push for adaptation of solar over the last several decades in order to ascertain more “clean” energy is now becoming a problem for landfills.

After 1.3 million solar installs later, the first push of panels are reaching the end of their “typical 25-to-30-year life cycle”, according to Yahoo.

And now for the coda to the “clean energy” story: many of the panels are “winding up in landfills, where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium” the report says.

One expert told yahoo that only 1 in 10 panels are actually recycled – the rest are contributing to “truckloads of waste”, some of which is contaminated, according to the report.

Sam Vanderhoof, a solar industry expert and chief executive of Recycle PV Solar told Yahoo: “The industry is supposed to be green. But in reality, it’s all about the money.”

California has been pushing for solar since 2006, when the state approved $3.3 billion in subsidies. Now, about 15% of the state’s power comes from solar – but that belies the environmental disaster disposing of the panels has become.

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‘Mind-Reading’ Cap Keeps Men from Watching Porn in China Where the Content Is Illegal

Although porn is beyond normalized in the U.S.—whether for good or bad—it is, apparently, utterly illegal in China. To help aid in combating the spread of porn in the country, a team of scientists at Beijing Jiaotong University has developed a “mind-reading” cap that can read men’s minds and sound an alarm when they’re watching illicit content. Particularly “porn appraisers”—a.k.a. jian huang shi—whose job it is to rid the Chinese internet of the material.

The South China Morning Post reports that the device could “speed up the work” of these porn appraisers (which the outlet refers to literally as “censors”) by alerting them—with an alarm—as to when they’re seeing pornographic material. These appraisers—much like Facebook content reviewers, it seems—scan thousands upon thousands of images and videos every day on the look out for porn. The problem is sometimes they miss images: this cap is supposed to solve that problem.

According to the scientists, who published their research the Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation, the cap is able to pick up on a spike in brainwaves triggered by a wearer seeing explicit content. The researchers tested the cap on 15 male university students between the ages of 20 and 25 as they watched images flit one after another on a computer screen; sounding an “alarm” any time one of the wearer’s saw (somewhat) pornographic images amidst normal, acceptable ones.

“The prototype device proved that human-machine collaboration was feasible ‘for bad information detection,’” Xu Jianjun, director of the electrical engineering experiment center at Beijing Jiaotong University told the Post. As the news outlet notes, human eyes and brains still outperform machines—which utilize machine-learning algorithms—when detecting porn; at least some of the time, particularly when the images contain complex backgrounds.

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Fake News Board (Commonly Known As Pulitzer Prize) Defends Award To 2018 Russia Hoaxers

The Pulitzer Prize Board last weekend defended its 2018 award to a team of New York Times reporters who devoted story after story to a Democrat-concocted conspiracy framing President Donald Trump as a foreign agent.

On Sunday, the board released a statement saying the organization stood by its 2018 presentations after years of criticism provoked an “independent” review.

“The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed,” the committee wrote, highlighting multiple submissions received over its joint reward to The New York Times and The Washington Post over the Russia hoax four years ago. The board explained that the entries, including from Trump, led the center to commission two reviews probing the credibility of the outlets’ work.

“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions,” the board wrote, “that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

Except the central premise of each paper’s reporting, which sought to undermine the democratically elected president, proved entirely fabricated in the publication of the Mueller report, the product of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

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FDA-Approved Brain Computer Interface Company “Synchron” Implants First Brain Device in US Patient

New York-based Synchron, the startup behind an FDA ‘breakthrough neuroprosthesis device,’ successfully implanted its first brain device in a patient in the US earlier this month, Bloomberg first reported.

According to the news outlet, a doctor at Mount Sinai West Medical Center in New York inserted a “1.5-inch-long implant consisting of wires and electrodes into a blood vessel in the brain of an ALS patient” on July 6.

In August 2020, Synchron becomes the first brain-computer interface (BCI) company to receive the FDA’s approval to conduct an investigational device exemption (IDE) clinical trial of a permanently implanted device.

NIH awarded Synchron $10 million to begin a US trial of a brain implant that allows users to manage digital apps using only their thoughts, as reported by Fierce Biotech.

“Our neuroprosthetics are designed to help people get their lives back by restoring lost functions,” Synchron wrote on its website.

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Gender activists push to bar anthropologists from identifying human remains as ‘male’ or ‘female’

As soon as ancient human remains are excavated, archaeologists begin the work of determining a number of traits about the individual, including age, race and gender.

But a new school of thought within archaeology is pushing scientists to think twice about assigning gender to ancient human remains.

It is possible to determine whether a skeleton is from a biological male or female using objective observations based on the size and shape of the bones. Criminal forensic detectives, for example, do it frequently in their line of work.

But gender activists argue scientists cannot know how an ancient individual identified themselves.

“You might know the argument that the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex,” tweeted Canadian Master’s degree candidate Emma Palladino last week.

Palladino, who is seeking an advanced degree in archaeology, called assigning gender to an ancient human “bullshit.”

“Labelling remains ‘male’ or ‘female’ is rarely the end goal of any excavation, anyway,” wrote Palladino. “The ‘bioarchaeology of the individual’ is what we aim for, factoring in absolutely everything we discover about a person into a nuanced and open-ended biography of their life.”

She is not alone. Gender activists have formed a group called the Trans Doe Task Force to “explore ways in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.”

“We propose a gender-expansive approach to human identification by combing missing and unidentified databases looking for contextual clues such as decedents wearing clothing culturally coded to a gender other than their assigned sex,” the group’s mission statement reads.

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