Tag: technology

China wants to rid itself of Western tech by 2027 — outlines domestic alternatives in ‘Document 79’

The WSJ reports that China is on an extensive push to drive out Western tech companies from the country and replace them with domestic alternatives. China reportedly started its domestic expansion in 2022 with a highly secretive “Document 79,” an initiative focused on deleting Western tech companies from the country. Since then, China’s new plan has been in full effect — domestic alternatives have replaced most Western software providers.

When initiated two years ago, Document 79 was a super sensitive document that only high-ranking officials were purportedly shown. Security was so paramount that copies of the document were not allowed to be made. The initiative set out by Document 79 is to replace foreign software in China’s IT systems by 2027, with state-owned firms required to provide quarterly updates on their progress in replacing foreign software with domestic alternatives.

Two years later, the fruits of Document 79 are now apparent. Microsoft, HP Enterprise, and Cisco’s market share in China has fallen drastically in the past several years. In 2018,  HP Enterprise had a 14.1% market share in China, but in 2023, that has fallen to just 4%. Cisco’s market share has halved in the past five years down to just 8%. Microsoft’s Chinese sales today account for just 1.5% of the company’s overall sales.

Most government institutions in China are now buying domestic technology over Western solutions, even if the Western solutions are superior due to Document 79. This includes everything from software to hardware solutions. Chinese customers who were buying IBM-powered rack-mount servers five years ago are now requesting Chinese-made rack-mount servers utilizing Huawei chips.

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NIST staffers revolt against expected appointment of ‘effective altruist’ AI researcher to US AI Safety Institute

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is facing an internal crisis as staff members and scientists have threatened to resign over the anticipated appointment of Paul Christiano to a crucial, though non-political, position at the agency’s newly-formed US AI Safety Institute (AISI), according to at least two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous.

NIST is an agency of the US Department of Commerce whose mission is “to promote US innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.” According to the agency’s website, its core competencies are “measurement science,” “rigorous traceability” and “development and use of standards.” NIST also develops cybersecurity standards, guidelines and best practices, and released an AI security framework in January 2023.

Christiano, who is known for his ties to the effective altruism (EA) movement and its offshoot, longtermism (a view that prioritizes the long-term future of humanity, popularized by philosopher William MacAskill), was allegedly rushed through the hiring process without anyone knowing until today, one of the sources said.

The appointment of Christiano, which was said to come directly from Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, has sparked outrage among NIST employees who fear that Christiano’s association with EA and longtermism could compromise the institute’s objectivity and integrity.

However, Divyansh Kaushik, associate director for emerging technologies and national security at the Federation of American Scientists, told VentureBeat that President Biden’s AI Executive Order, introduced in November 2023, specifically asks NIST and the AISI to focus on certain tasks — including CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear materials) — for which Paul Christiano is “extremely qualified.”

Many say EA — defined by the Center for Effective Altruism as an “intellectual project using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible” — has turned into a cult-like group of highly influential and wealthy adherents (made famous by FTX founder and jailbird Sam Bankman-Fried) whose paramount concern revolves around preventing a future AI catastrophe from destroying humanity. Critics of the EA focus on this existential risk, or “x-risk,” say it is happening to the detriment of a necessary focus on current, measurable AI risks — including bias, misinformation, high-risk applications and traditional cybersecurity. 

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Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen

In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is “simply not compatible with a free society”. We should take his claim seriously.

Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only is Ring’s surveillance network spreading rapidly, it is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property and expanding the surveillance of everyday life. What’s more, once Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement, there is no way to revoke access and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared.

Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.

Then there’s this: since Amazon bought Ring in 2018, it has brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, who can request recorded video content from Ring users without a warrant. That is, in as little as three years, Ring connected around one in 10 police departments across the US with the ability to access recorded content from millions of privately owned home security cameras. These partnerships are growing at an alarming rate.

Data I’ve collected from Ring’s quarterly reported numbers shows that in the past year through the end of April 2021, law enforcement have placed more than 22,000 individual requests to access content captured and recorded on Ring cameras. Ring’s cloud-based infrastructure (supported by Amazon Web Services) makes it convenient for law enforcement agencies to place mass requests for access to recordings without a warrant. Because Ring cameras are owned by civilians, law enforcement are given a backdoor entry into private video recordings of people in residential and public space that would otherwise be protected under the fourth amendment. By partnering with Amazon, law enforcement circumvents these constitutional and statutory protections, as noted by the attorney Yesenia Flores. In doing so, Ring blurs the line between police work and civilian surveillance and turns your neighbor’s home security system into an informant. Except, unlike an informant, it’s always watching.

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Climate Change Committee’s Net Zero Plan Involves Pumping Compressed CO2 With Energy of 500 Hiroshima Bombs into Ground Every Year. Are They Mad?

In the last few weeks a number of serious errors have come to light in the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) plan for Net Zero. The CCC plan was published mid-2019 in a document titled ‘Net Zero Technical Report’.

In summary, the CCCs plan for Net Zero is to shift transport and heating from using petrol, diesel and gas to using electricity and then to decarbonise the electricity grid.

To decarbonise the grid, it is assumed that electricity will be generated using nuclear and renewables. During periods when nuclear, wind and solar cannot meet demand, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will be deployed to remove CO2 emissions as the electricity must be generated using gas.

Carbon Capture and Storage is a new and untested technology that has never been deployed at scale anywhere on earth. However, it is clear from the CCC’s report that CCS plays a major roll in achieving Net Zero. As I reported in a previous article, regardless of this being an untested technology, the U.K. only plans to build a quarter of the required capacity to hit Net Zero by 2050 (the plan requires the U.K. to capture and store 176Mt of CO2 annually).

Nevertheless, our Government envisages significant CCS capacity at 50Mt annually. Carbon Capture and Storage involves filtering CO2 from the exhaust produced from gas turbines used to generate electricity, then piping the captured CO2 to plants that compress the gas into a liquid before it is then injected into underground storage areas around the U.K.

Compressed CO2 is currently being commercialised as a way to store energy for use in periods when nuclear and renewables are unavailable. The company Energy Dome has developed a working 4MWh system in Sardinia, Italy. The company says its technology has an energy storage density 10-20 times higher than other compressed air energy storage (CAES) solutions and two-thirds that of liquid air energy storage (LAES).

The CCC’s plan requires vast quantities of CO2 to be compressed and stored under the U.K. Given this potential energy could be released at any time should something go wrong, it seems sensible to consider the safety implications of Carbon Capture and Storage.

Energy Dome has recently raised $11m and is building a larger 100MWh system. Its 100MWh store requires about 2,000 tonnes of CO2. This means the company is expecting to store 0.05MWh of energy per tonne of compressed CO2. Using this energy density, the CCC’s plan to store 176Mt per year will mean 8.8TWh of potential energy is being trapped beneath the U.K. annually. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with an energy of about 15 kilotons of TNT or 0.0174TWh. Therefore the energy we will be storing under our feet is equivalent to 505 Hiroshima bombs every year or the energy released by 16 magnitude seven earthquakes per year.

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GLOWING PLANTS THAT TURN ENERGY INTO LIGHT ARE ABOUT TO BE COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME

Tapping into the magic of bioluminescence, Light Bio is preparing to ship its first orders for glowing plants this spring. The company provides flora that converts energy into light, making their offerings the first commercially available plants that glow in the dark.

After scaling up production to meet excessive demands, Light Bio says it will finally begin shipping orders for their glowing “Firefly Petunia,” which was so named because its glowing leaves resemble fireflies, next month.

Some plant and animal species in nature convert chemical energy into visible light, causing them to glow. While the majority of these seemingly magical lifeforms are aquatic, some take the form of glowing plants. Among the most studied are bioluminescent mushrooms that glow in the dark.

Some laboratories have been able to combine the genes responsible for these glowing fungi into more aesthetically pleasing plants, including flowers. However, genetic engineering is complicated, and the most common process involves incorporating five different genes into the target plant to generate light. The science is also highly regulated, meaning glowing plants have thus far existed as a laboratory curiosity and nothing more.

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DOD developing ‘Gremlin’ capability to help personnel collect real-time UAP data

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is producing and refining a new deployable surveillance capability — the Gremlin System — to enable personnel to capture real-time data and more rapidly respond to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) incidents as they occur, the acting chief of the office told DefenseScoop during a press briefing Wednesday.

Tim Phillips, AARO’s acting director on assignment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, shared the first public details about these in-the-works, sensor-equipped Gremlin “kits” during the Wednesday briefing, which was more broadly focused on the office’s release of the congressionally required “Volume I Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP.” That report is attached below.

“We’re working with some of the government labs, such as the Department of Energy labs, and we have a great partner with Georgia Tech. And what we’re doing is developing a deployable, configurable sensor suite that we can put in Pelican cases. We’re going to be able to pull it to the field to do a long-term [collection]. Since the UAP target — that signature is not clearly defined — we really have to do hyperspectral surveillance to try to capture these incidents,” explained Phillips, who stepped into the AARO lead role when its inaugural director Sean Kirkpatrick departed last year.

The AARO team began developing the sensors and associated capabilities for Gremlin in October. 

The team is currently experimenting with Gremlin at “a very large range in Texas,” where officials have been testing the system against known drone-type targets, and some unknown targets as well, Phillips noted.

“It’s picking up a lot of bats and birds. We’re learning a lot about solar flaring. We’re really starting to understand what’s in orbit around our planet and how we can eliminate those as anomalous objects,” he said. 

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Anti-Misinformation AI Flagging Factual Stories As False.

Artificial intelligence hired by the Washington Secretary of State’s Office to monitor potential election ‘misinformation’ has flagged multiple factual stories from The Center Square regarding evidence of noncitizens illegally voting. Logically — a UK-based AI company — was contracted by the Washington Secretary of State last year to scan for “false content” on various social platforms, including X (formerly Twitter).

The state contract with Logically tasks them with using their AI tools to identify “harmful narratives” concerning Washington’s elections and generate reports for the Secretary of State’s review. Last summer, Logically generated several reports, which included stories published by The Center Square regarding Washington state’s election laws and an incident in which a foreign national avoided prosecution after illegally voting 28 times.

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Pentagon Using AI Program to Identify Targets in Middle East and Ukraine

A defense official said that US Central Command (CENTCOM) has deployed an AI program to help identify targets to bomb in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The US used the AI targeting system dubbed “Project Maven” to locate Russian targets that were destroyed by Ukrainian forces.  

A senior CENTCOM official speaking with Bloomberg said AI systems helped to identify alleged rocket launchers in Yemen. The outlet described the statement made by Schuyler Moore, CENTCOM chief technology officer, as the “strongest known confirmation that the US military is using the [AI] to identify enemy targets that were subsequently hit by weapons’ fire.”

“We’ve been using computer vision to identify where there might be threats,” Moore told Bloomberg. She went on to say that the program has accelerated due to the situation in Israel. “October 7th everything changed,” CENTCOM’s CTO explained.

“We immediately shifted into high gear and a much higher operational tempo than we had previously,” Moore added, saying US forces were able to make “a pretty seamless shift” to Maven after a year of digital exercises.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Joey Temple explained the value of Maven is increasing the number of targets a soldier can sign off on. He estimates that the number of targets could be boosted from 30 to 80 per hour. 

According to Bloomberg, he “describes the process of concurring with the algorithm’s conclusions in a rapid staccato: ‘Accept. Accept. Accept.’” Moore also expressed this view, stating, “The benefit that you get from algorithms is speed.”

While Moore touted the program’s deployment, it is unclear if it has had any positive impact on achieving US goals in Yemen. Washington has admitted that recent strikes on Houthi positions have failed to erode the group’s military capabilities.

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FOR HALF A CENTURY, OUR CALCULATIONS ON NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS IN SPACE HAVE BEEN WRONG, LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIST REVEALS

On July 9, 1962, the largest in a series of tests involving nuclear explosions in space was conducted by the United States. Dubbed Starfish Prime, the test involved the launch of a W49 thermonuclear warhead developed at Los Alamos from Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

The warhead detonated approximately 250 miles above the Earth, producing belts of radiation as high-energy electrons became trapped, amplifying the magnitude of the natural Van Allen radiation belt and increasing the potential adverse effects of the trapped radiation.

Now, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory has found a novel means of offering better protection for space technologies: by fixing mistakes in mathematical calculations related to the effects of nuclear explosions in space that have gone undetected for close to half a century.

The errors relate to our understanding of the influence electromagnetic waves exert on the dispersal of electrons that become trapped in the planet’s magnetic fields when nuclear explosions in space occur.

According to Greg Cunningham, a space scientist with Los Alamos National Laboratory, the discovery and resolution of these longstanding errors in past mathematical calculations will offer scientists an opportunity to improve protections for space technologies, particularly involving models governing the effects of radiation resulting from the detonation of nuclear devices at high altitudes.

“This allows us to make better predictions of what that threat could be and the efficacy of radiation belt remediation strategies,” Cunningham said in a recent statement.

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600-MILLION-CAMERA ‘SKYNET’ BASIS FOR NEW LUNAR SPY SYSTEM AS CHINA PURSUES SURVEILLANCE STATE BEYOND EARTH

With the world’s largest mass surveillance network already under its belt, China is now looking to establish its omnipresence off-world, with plans to extend its sophisticated “Skynet” spy network to the Moon.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA), China’s equivalent to America’s NASA, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, recently disclosed their intentions to build a massive lunar surveillance network in the Chinese journal Acta Optica Sinica. 

According to Chinese media, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) aims to secure its planned lunar base with an omnipresent optical surveillance system, drawing directly from the extensive experience and technical prowess honed through Skynet, also known as Tianwang.

“The construction and operation of the optical surveillance system for the (International) Lunar Research Station can draw on the successful experience … of China’s Skynet project,” CNSA said in its report. 

Paradoxically named for the highly advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system that becomes self-aware and tries to exterminate humanity through an army of robots and machines in the Terminator movie franchise, “Skynet” refers to an interconnected facial recognition system operated by the Chinese government. 

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) flagship newspaper, the Global Times, reports Skynet’s facial recognition software has a 99.8% accuracy rate and can scan the entire population of China, 1.4 billion people, in under a second. However, these claims cannot be independently verified. 

According to the PRC, the name “Skynet” originates from an ancient Chinese proverb describing the omnipresence of justice and not from the fictional AI killing machine. “There is forever a net in the sky, with [a] large mesh but letting nothing through,” the proverb reads. 

And in fairness, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) also has its own “SKYNET,” a classified program that uses machine learning to extract information on possible terror suspects using GSM cellular data. 

However, the term “Skynet” is often colloquially used to describe the smothering system of mass surveillance used by the Chinese government to monitor its citizens. 

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