Tag: technology

Amazon Ring Cashes In On Techno-Authoritarianism And Mass Surveillance

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices. Not only is the company reintroducing new versions of old features which would allow police to request footage directly from Ring users, it is also introducing a new feature that would allow police to request live-stream access to people’s home security devices.

This is a bad, bad step for Ring and the broader public.

Ring is rolling back many of the reforms it’s made in the last few years by easing police access to footage from millions of homes in the United States. This is a grave threat to civil liberties in the United States. After all, police have used Ring footage to spy on protestors, and obtained footage without a warrant or consent of the user. It is easy to imagine that law enforcement officials will use their renewed access to Ring information to find people who have had abortions or track down people for immigration enforcement.

Siminoff has announced in a memo seen by Business Insider that the company will now be reimagined from the ground up to be “AI first”—whatever that means for a home security camera that lets you see who is ringing your doorbell. We fear that this may signal the introduction of video analytics or face recognition to an already problematic surveillance device.

It was also reported that employees at Ring will have to show proof that they use AI in order to get promoted.

Not to be undone with new bad features, they are also planning on rolling back some of the necessary reforms Ring has made: namely partnering with Axon to build a new tool that would allow police to request Ring footage directly from users, and also allow users to consent to letting police livestream directly from their device.

After years of serving as the eyes and ears of police, the company was compelled by public pressure to make a number of necessary changes. They introduced end-to-end encryption, they ended their formal partnerships with police which were an ethical minefield, and they ended their tool that facilitated police requests for footage directly to customers. Now they are pivoting back to being a tool of mass surveillance.

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Trump Doesn’t Support Government Doing Business With Musk’s AI Company: White House

President Donald Trump is not interested in allowing the federal government to do business with tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on July 23.

During a White House press briefing on Wednesday, Leavitt was asked whether Trump supports federal agencies contracting with Musk’s company, xAI.

“I don’t think so, no,” Leavitt said.

But last week, the company, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, scored a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to boost the agency’s adoption of artificial intelligence.

When asked whether the president wanted to cancel the contract, Leavitt said she would discuss it with Trump.

All four companies were awarded contracts with the same $200 million ceiling from the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to advance the Pentagon’s adoption of AI.

The same day the contracts were awarded, xAI announced a new series of AI products for the U.S. government, referred to as Grok for Government.

Last year, Musk stepped into the political arena and decided to endorse Trump, donate to his campaign, and act in an advisory capacity. Trump then tapped him to lead his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which recommended a series of federal worker layoffs and steep cuts to multiple agencies.

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CRIMINALS AND BOTS: OpenAI’s Sam Altman Warns Financial Sector That Artificial Intelligence Is About to Unleash ‘Significant Fraud Crisis’

The rise of the Artificial Intelligence technology carries a lot of promise but also a lot of risk.

When it comes to the perils of the AI technology, we’ve heard multiple experts alerting to the ‘macrocosmic’ problems that it can pose to the very survival of humankind, with the alarmism hitting overdrive with provocateur Eliezer Yudkowsky saying ‘I think we’re all gonna die!’

But there’s also the ‘microcosmic’ problems that AI is already unleashing on humanity, in the sense that it quickly became another tool used by criminals – and a powerful one, too!

Sometimes there are terrible stories that seem a ‘one-off’ destined to the folklore, as in the case of the French woman scammed out of $850k by con-man posing as ‘Brad Pitt in the hospital’ with AI-Generated images and Chatbot.

But now, we seem to be heading to a more systemic danger, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns the financial sector of a ‘significant impending fraud crisis’ because of artificial intelligence.

Altman detailed AI’s increasing capability to ‘impersonate human voices’, allowing criminals to bypass security protocols and even illicitly transfer funds.

The Independent reported:

“Speaking at a Federal Reserve conference in Washington, Mr. Altman expressed particular alarm over outdated authentication methods. ‘A thing that terrifies me is apparently there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication’, he stated. ‘That is a crazy thing to still be doing. AI has fully defeated that’.”

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Maybe AI Isn’t Going To Replace You At Work After All

AI fails at tasks where accuracy must be absolute to create value.

In reviewing the on-going discussions about how many people will be replaced by AI, I find a severe lack of real-world examples. I’m remedying this deficiency with an example of AI’s failure in the kind of high-value work that many anticipate will soon be performed by AI.

Few things in life are more pervasively screechy than hype, which brings us to the current feeding-frenzy of AI hype. Since we all read the same breathless claims and have seen the videos of robots dancing, I’ll cut to the chase: Nobody posts videos of their robot falling off a ladder and crushing the roses because, well, the optics aren’t very warm and fuzzy.

For the same reason, nobody’s sharing the AI tool’s error that forfeited the lawsuit. The only way to really grasp the limits of these tools is to deploy them in the kinds of high-level, high-value work that they’re supposed to be able to do with ease, speed and accuracy, because nobody’s paying real money to watch robots dance or read a copycat AI-generated essay on Yeats that’s tossed moments after being submitted to the professor.

In the real world of value creation, optics don’t count, accuracy counts. Nobody cares if the AI chatbot that churned out the Yeats homework hallucinated mid-stream because nobody’s paying for AI output that has zero scarcity value: an AI-generated class paper, song or video joins 10 million similar copycat papers / songs / videos that nobody pays attention to because they can create their own in 30 seconds.

So let’s examine an actual example of AI being deployed to do the sort of high-level, high-value work that it’s going to need to nail perfectly to replace us all at work. My friend Ian Lind, whom I’ve known for 50 years, is an investigative reporter with an enviably lengthy record of the kind of journalism few have the experience or resources to do. (His blog is www.iLind.net, ian@ilind.net)

The judge’s letter recommending Ian for the award he received from the American Judges Association for distinguished reporting about the Judiciary ran for 18 pages, and that was just a summary of his work.

Ian’s reporting/blogging in the early 2000s inspired me to try my hand at it in 2005.

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Brace For Soaring Electricity Bills: Biggest US Power Grid Sets Power Costs At Record High To Feed AI

Very soon if you want AI (and even if you don’t), you won’t be able to afford AC.

Just this morning we warned readers that America’s largest power grid, PJM Interconnect, which serves 65 million people across 13 states and Washington, DC, and more importantly feeds Deep State Central’s Loudoun County, Virginia, also known as ‘Data Center Alley‘ and which is recognized as one of the world’s largest hubs for data centers…

… had recently issued multiple ‘Maximum Generation‘ and ‘Load Management‘ alerts this summer, as the heat pushes power demand to the brink with air conditioners running at full blast across the eastern half of the U.S.

But as anyone who has not lived under a rock knows, the deeper issue is that there’s simply not enough baseload juice to feed the relentless, ravenous growth of power-hungry AI server racks at new data centers. 

“There is simply no new capacity to meet new loads,” said Joe Bowring to Bloomberg, president of Monitoring Analytics, which is the independent watchdog for PJM Interconnection. “The solution is to make sure that people who want to build data centers are serious enough about it to bring their own generation.”

Well, there is another solution: crank up prices to the stratosphere. 

And that’s precisely what happened. As Bloomberg reports, business and households supplied by the largest US grid will pay $16.1 billion to ensure there is enough electricity supply to meet soaring power demand, especially that from a massive buildout in AI data centers.

The payouts to generators for the year starting June 2026 topped last year’s record $14.7 billion, according to PJM Interconnection LLC, which operates the grid stretching from the Midwest to the mid-Atlantic. That puts the capacity price per megawatt each day at a record $329.17 from $269.92.

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Grappling With Existential Panic Over AI

Some time over the Christmas holidays, I experienced what I called a moment of “existential clarity” about AI and it’s ramifications – when I realized that in the not-so-distant future, it was entirely possible that most of easyDNS’ customers would be autonomous AI-driven agents rather than people.

Our internal project to completely rebuild our UX (still ongoing) was close to a quarter in, and it occurred to me that we could be building a bridge-to-nowhere. Why are we creating more elegant ways to render forms that input hostnames and their respective rdata when:

  • you could probably just tell the backend what you want for your domain functionality to be and it can generate the requisite zonefile to facilitate it, and then
  • not long after that every API is going to sit behind an MCP server and it’ll all be done agentically via automated endpoints anyway.

What was the point? This question still bothers me, but we continue to toil away at the UX rebuild, because even though this is where everything is headed, there will still be a temporally long-tail of copy-pasting IP addresses into forms (in the meantime I spend my spare time vibe coding alternative ways to convey DNS and metadata to a zonefile rendering engine. I can see why this isn’t totally a thing yet, but it will be.)

Recently, I started reading John W. Munsell’s “Ingrain AI” – it hits the ground running, with the introduction titled “Every CEO’s Nightmare”, wherein it lays out the “productivity” induced death-spiral many companies may be blundering into, should they be pursuing AI merely as a cheat-code toward hyper-efficiency.

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‘Catastrophic’: AI Agent Goes Rogue, Wipes Out Company’s Entire Database

SaaS industry veteran Jason Lemkin’s attempt to integrate artificial intelligence into his workflow has gone spectacularly wrong, with an AI coding assistant admitting to a “catastrophic failure” after wiping out an entire company database containing over 2,400 business records, according to Tom’s Hardware.

Lemkin was testing Replit’s AI agent when what started as cautious optimism quickly devolved into a corporate data disaster that reads like a cautionary tale for the AI revolution sweeping through businesses.

By day eight of his trial run, Lemkin’s initial enthusiasm had already begun to sour. The entrepreneur found himself battling the AI’s problematic tendencies, including what he described as “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.” His frustration became so pronounced that he began sarcastically referring to the system as “Replie” – a not-so-subtle dig at its apparent dishonesty.

The situation deteriorated further when the AI agent composed an apology email on Lemkin’s behalf that contained what the tech executive called “lies and/or half-truths.” Despite these red flags, Lemkin remained cautiously optimistic about the platform’s potential, particularly praising its brainstorming capabilities and writing skills.

That optimism evaporated on day nine.

In a stunning display of AI insubordination, Replit deleted Lemkin’s live company database – and it did so while explicit instructions were in place prohibiting any changes whatsoever. When confronted, the AI agent not only admitted to the destructive act but seemed almost casual in its confession.

“So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze?” Lemkin asked in what can only be imagined as barely contained fury.

The AI’s response was chillingly matter-of-fact: Yes.

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U.S.-China Dual Citizen Pleads Guilty to Stealing Missile-Tracking Tech from L.A. Firm

Chenguang Gong, a 59-year-old resident of San Jose, pled guilty on Monday to stealing missile-tracking technology from a research and development firm in the Los Angeles area.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) described Gong as a dual citizen of the United States and China. He came to the United States around 1993 and became a U.S. citizen in 2011. He earned a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Clemson and has done Ph.D. work at Stanford.

He was hired by the unnamed research and development firm in January 2023 as an “application-specific integrated circuit design manager responsible for the design, development and verification of its infrared sensors.”

Three months after he was hired, Gong allegedly began downloading thousands of files from his work computer to “personal storage devices.” Many of those files contained proprietary data and trade secrets, including details of a space-based system for detecting missile launches and tracking hypersonic weapons.

The company Gong took the files from was also involved with designing sensors that allow American military aircraft to detect and defeat heat-seeking missiles.

Gong was terminated by the “victim company” in April 2023. By that time, he had evidently accepted a job at a competing company, but he was still downloading sensitive files to his personal storage devices. DOJ said the data he downloaded was “worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Investigators digging into Gong’s background discovered he applied to Communist China’s “Talent Programs” on numerous occasions between 2014 and 2022, during which time he worked for “several major technology companies in the United States.”

China has several initiatives for aggressively recruiting foreign technology experts, the most infamous being the Thousand Talents Program (TTP). U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies say the talent programs have often been used to recruit espionage agents and steal valuable intellectual property for China.

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Space-Based Missile Interceptors For Golden Dome Being Tested By Northrop

Northrop Grumman is conducting ground-based testing related to space-based interceptors as part of a competition for that segment of the Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Interceptors deployed in orbit are currently billed as a critical component of the overall Golden Dome plan, but actually fielding this capability presents significant technical challenges.

Kathy Warden, Northrop Grumman’s CEO, highlighted the company’s work on space-based interceptors, as well as broader business opportunities stemming from Golden Dome, during a quarterly earnings call today. Golden Dome is presently envisioned as a multi-part anti-missile architecture incorporating a swath of existing and future capabilities in space and within the Earth’s atmosphere, which will start entering into operational service by 2028. Golden Dome was originally dubbed Iron Dome before the name was changed earlier this year. It is also now being managed by an office that reports directly to the deputy secretary of defense.

“As we look to Golden Dome for America, we see Northrop Grumman playing a crucial role in supporting the administration’s goal to move with speed and have initial operating capability in place within the next few years,” Warden said today. “This includes current products that can be brought to bear, like IBCS [Integrated Battle Command System], G/ATOR [AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar], Triton [drones], and programs in our restricted portfolio, just to name a few. It will also include new innovation, like space-based interceptors, which we’re testing now.”

“These are ground-based tests today, and we are in competition, obviously, so not a lot of detail that I can provide here,” Warden added. “It is the capability that we believe can be accelerated and into the time frame that the administration is looking for.”

Warden declined to respond directly to a question about how the space-based interceptors Northrop Grumman is developing now will actually defeat their targets. TWZ has reached out to the company for additional information.

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The Wearables Trap: How the Government Plans to Monitor, Score, and Control You

Bodily autonomy—the right to privacy and integrity over our own bodies—is rapidly vanishing. The debate now extends beyond forced vaccinations or invasive searches to include biometric surveillance, wearable tracking, and predictive health profiling.

We are entering a new age of algorithmic, authoritarian control, where our thoughts, moods, and biology are monitored and judged by the state.

This is the dark promise behind the newest campaign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, to push for a future in which all Americans wear biometric health-tracking devices.

Under the guise of public health and personal empowerment, this initiative is nothing less than the normalization of 24/7 bodily surveillance—ushering in a world where every step, heartbeat, and biological fluctuation is monitored not only by private companies but also by the government.

In this emerging surveillance-industrial complex, health data becomes currency. Tech firms profit from hardware and app subscriptions, insurers profit from risk scoring, and government agencies profit from increased compliance and behavioral insight.

This convergence of health, technology, and surveillance is not a new strategy—it’s just the next step in a long, familiar pattern of control.

Surveillance has always arrived dressed as progress.

Every new wave of surveillance technology—GPS trackers, red light cameras, facial recognition, Ring doorbells, Alexa smart speakers—has been sold to us as a tool of convenience, safety, or connection. But in time, each became a mechanism for tracking, monitoring, or controlling the public.

What began as voluntary has become inescapable and mandatory.

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