Tag: technology

U.S. Sanctions Chinese Cybersecurity Firm Over Cyberattacks

US sanctions Beijing-based Integrity Technology Group for aiding “Flax Typhoon” hackers in cyberattacks on American infrastructure, freezing assets and banning US dealings.

The US Treasury Department has sanctioned Integrity Technology Group, a Beijing-based company, accusing it of involvement in cyberattacks against American infrastructure. The decision, announced on January 3, 2025, has escalated tensions between the US and China over cybersecurity issues.

What’s Behind the Sanctions?

Integrity Technology Group, also known as Yongxin Zhicheng Technology Group, is alleged to have worked closely with the Chinese state-sponsored hacking group “Flax Typhoon.” US officials claim the company played a key role in cyber activities targeting government systems, businesses, and critical infrastructure. Over 250,000 devices worldwide were reportedly compromised in these incidents.

The sanctions freeze the company’s assets in the US and prohibit American entities from doing business with it. By cutting off financial ties, the US aims to limit the group’s resources for continuing cyber operations.

Official Statements and Responses

The US government has stated that these actions are part of ongoing efforts to protect national security and hold cyber offenders accountable. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen commented, “This sends a clear message to entities enabling malicious cyber activity: we will not tolerate these actions.”

China, however, has rejected the accusations. A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the sanctions “baseless” and accused the US of deflecting blame for its own cybersecurity issues. Integrity Technology Group has denied the allegations, claiming it operates within legal bounds and condemning the sanctions as damaging to its reputation.

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FBI Confirms Cybertruck Bomber Matthew Livelsberger Sent Shocking Email Claiming China’s ‘Gravitic Drones’ Threaten U.S. East Coast, Warning of Impending Attack

The FBI has verified the authenticity of an email sent by Matthew Livelsberger, the individual behind the recent Tesla Cybertruck explosion outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.

In the email, Livelsberger alleged that China has deployed advanced “gravitic drones” capable of launching attacks along the U.S. East Coast.

“We have confirmed that the document that [Livelsberger] sent to the podcast, we know that he was the one that sent that document,” said FBI Special Agent Spencer Evans, adding they have not yet addressed “into what’s legitimate, what’s not.”

Investigations also revealed that Livelsberger utilized artificial intelligence tools, including ChatGPT, to plan the attack.

He sought instructions on calculating the amount of explosives needed and how to purchase a phone without revealing his personal information.

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Drones, exploding parcels and sabotage: How hybrid tactics target the West

When mysterious drones began appearing over oil rigs and wind farms off Norway’s coast about three years ago, officials were not certain where they came from.

But “we knew what they were doing,” Stale Ulriksen, a researcher at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy, said in a recent interview. “Some of it was espionage, where they are charting a lot of things. Some of it, I think, was positioning in case of a war or a deep crisis.”

The drones were suspected of being launched from Russian-controlled ships in the North Sea, Ulriksen said, including some ships that were near underwater energy pipelines. Norway could not do much to stop them, he added, given that they were flying over international waters.

In recent weeks, reports of drone swarms over the United States’ East Coast have brought fears of hybrid warfare to widespread attention. Only 100 of 5,000 drone sightings there required further examination, U.S. officials said, and so far none are believed to have been foreign surveillance drones. But it is a different story for the drones spotted in late November and early December over military bases in England and Germany where U.S. forces are stationed.

Military analysts have concluded those drones may have been on a state-sponsored surveillance mission, according to one U.S. official familiar with the incidents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation. British and German defense officials declined to discuss details of the sightings.

Experts said the drones’ presence was indicative of a so-called hybrid or “gray zone” attack against the West, where a range of tactics — military, cyber, economic and even psychological — are used to covertly attack or destabilize an enemy.

As Russia, Iran and other hostile states become increasingly brazen in their hybrid attacks on Western countries — such as the hacking of sensitive computer systems and alleged assassination plots — defense officials face a thorny challenge. How to deter such acts without touching off a broader and potentially deadly conflict? And how to assign blame against the attacker when the strikes are designed to evade culpability?

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How AI Is Fueling UFO Misinformation Online

Social media platforms have seen a surge in the sharing of alleged videos of UFOs (unidentified flying objects), particularly following a November 2024 U.S. congressional hearing.

In November 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Accountability held a hearing titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP): Exposing the Truth.”

During the hearing, a former Department of Defense official testified to Congress that government employees had been injured by UFOs and accused the U.S. government of conducting a secret UFO retrieval program. However, he did not provide direct evidence to support his claims.

Although this hearing was similar to previous congressional UFO hearings, the pedigrees of some whistleblowers who testified set it apart. Witnesses included a former U.S. counterintelligence officer, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, and a former NASA associate administrator.

All of them stressed the need for more government transparency, less stigma around the UFO topic, and new policies to bring UAP data out of classified programs and into the public domain.

This congressional hearing energized already enthusiastic UFO communities, prompting many to create AI-generated videos about UFOs and encouraging thousands of people to share them. Misbar investigated some of the most viral claims, analyzing them and explaining how AI-generated content can be identified.

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US Expands Biometric Technology in Airports Despite Privacy Concerns

Biometric technology is being rolled out at US airports at an unprecedented pace, with plans to extend these systems to hundreds more locations in the coming years. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is driving a significant push toward facial recognition and other biometric tools, claiming improved efficiency and security. However, the expansion has sparked growing concerns, with privacy advocates and lawmakers voicing concerns about data security, transparency, and the potential for misuse of such technology.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has already implemented its Biometric Facial Comparison system at 238 airports, including 14 international locations. This includes all CBP Preclearance sites and several major departure hubs. CBP says its Biometric Exit program is rapidly gaining traction, with new airport partners joining monthly and positive feedback reported from passengers.

Meanwhile, the TSA has equipped nearly 84 airports with its next-generation Credential Authentication Technology (CAT-2) scanners, which incorporate facial recognition. This rollout is part of a broader effort to bring biometrics to over 400 airports nationwide. These advancements are detailed in a TSA fact sheet aimed at building public awareness of the initiative.

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‘Over 800 Biases Uncovered’ As Pentagon Ends AI Chatbot Pilot Program For Military Medicine

The US Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) has concluded a pilot program focused on using AI chatbots in military medical services.  

In a Jan. 2 announcement, the DoD said the Crowdsourced AI Red-Teaming (CAIRT) Assurance Program pilot focused on using large-language models (LLM) for clinical note summarization and as medical advisers in the military.

It comes as more AI firms have begun offering their products to the US military and defense contractors to investigate their usefulness in military applications.

CoinTelegraph’s Stephen Katte reports that, according to the DoD, the pilot was a red-teaming effort conducted by technology nonprofit Humane Intelligence.

It attracted over 200 independent external participants, including clinical providers and healthcare analysts, who compared three prominent chatbot models.

Analysts from the Defense Health Agency and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences also collaborated with the other participants, testing for potential system weaknesses and flaws while the chatbots were used.

According to the DoD, the pilot discovered a few hundred possible issues when using chatbots in military medical applications.

“The exercise uncovered over 800 findings of potential vulnerabilities and biases related to employing these capabilities in these prospective use cases.”

“This exercise will result in repeatable and scalable output via the development of benchmark data sets, which can be used to evaluate future vendors and tools for alignment with performance expectations,” the DoD said.

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s lead for the initiative, Matthew Johnson, said the results will also be used to shape future DoD research and development of Generative AI (GenAI) systems that may be deployed in the future.

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Apple Reaches $95M Settlement Over Lawsuit Accusing ‘Siri’ Of Eavesdropping On Consumers

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit that accuses the company of infringing on its users’ privacy by utilizing “Siri,” Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, to eavesdrop on individuals with Apple devices.

The agreed upon settlement, which was filed on December 13th, 2024, in Oakland, California, is currently awaiting approval by a U.S. district judge.

The 5-year-old lawsuit alleged that Apple would activate Siri without the user’s knowledge “for over a decade.” The suit continued, claiming that Apple would continue to record, unbeknownst to the phone owner, sharing conversations and certain key words with advertisers in order to push products and services.

Apple has long marketed itself as a “pioneer” in protecting its consumers privacy. However, users have also long suspected that their device is listening to them after specific ads for products or services have been presented via social media apps after simply discussing topics or figures out loud that are related.

Two plaintiffs in the suit recall that after merely mentioning Air Jordan shoes, their iPhone began showing them advertising for the shoes more often. Another noted that after discussing a specific surgical treatment with his doctor, he began receiving medical ads related to that treatment.

The claims fly in the face of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s claim that the right to privacy is a “fundamental human right.”

If the district judge approves the settlement, tens of millions of Apple consumers who owned devices beginning in September 17th, 2014, would be able to file claims, receiving up to $20 per device, depending on the volume of the claims, according to court documents.

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“TIME TO WAKE UP!”: ‘Cybertruck Bomber’ Had Several Manifestos, Warned Of Drones Using ‘Gravatic Propulsion’

The details surrounding Cybertruck bomber Matthew Livelsberger continue to drip – with two ‘manifesto’ letters found in the Cybertruck itself, and another ‘manifesto’ he emailed to former Navy SEAL Sam Shoemate.

In the letters found in the Cybertruck, Livelsberger described the USA as “terminally ill,” and said his actions were meant as a “wake-up call,” and not a terrorist attack.

The most intriguing, however, is the email he sent to Shoemate – in which he warns that the “drones” seen around the United States over the last month are using “gravatic propulsion systems,” which only China and the United States possess.

Shoemate shared the email on Shawn Ryan’s show, writing on X, “I knew taking this public would insert me into the “glowy boi” conspiracy cycle, especially since I’m an intelligence officer,” adding “I had no choice. Dude dumped it in my inbox. When I saw his name in the news, I had little choice but to hand it over to the feds. I knew the FBI wouldn’t release it, or at least without an agenda attached, so I took it to Shawn Ryan because he has the platform to handle the magnitude of this information and will do so as objectively as possible.”

According to Livelsberger’s email:

“China has been launching them from the Atlantic from submarines for years, but this activity recently has picked up. As of now, it is just a show of force and they are using it similar to how they used the blloon for a sigint and isr, which are also part of the integrated comms system,” he writes.

“…they are the most dangerous threat to national security that has ever existed. They basically have an unlimited payload  capacity and can park over the WH if they wanted. It’s checkmate.”

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Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

Apple last year deployed a mechanism for identifying landmarks and places of interest in images stored in the Photos application on its customers iOS and macOS devices and enabled it by default, seemingly without explicit consent.

Apple customers have only just begun to notice.

The feature, known as Enhanced Visual Search, was called out last week by software developer Jeff Johnson, who expressed concern in two write-ups about Apple’s failure to explain the technology, which is believed to have arrived with iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 on October 28, 2024.

In a policy document dated November 18, 2024 (not indexed by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine until December 28, 2024, the date of Johnson’s initial article), Apple describes the feature thus:

Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides [your] IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos. You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.

Apple did explain the technology in a technical paper published on October 24, 2024, around the time that Enhanced Visual Search is believed to have debuted. A local machine-learning model analyzes photos to look for a “region of interest” that may depict a landmark. If the AI model finds a likely match, it calculates a vector embedding – an array of numbers – representing that portion of the image.

The device then uses homomorphic encryption to scramble the embedding in such a way that it can be run through carefully designed algorithms that produce an equally encrypted output. The goal here being that the encrypted data can be sent to a remote system to analyze without whoever is operating that system from knowing the contents of that data; they just have the ability to perform computations on it, the result of which remain encrypted. The input and output are end-to-end encrypted, and not decrypted during the mathematical operations, or so it’s claimed.

The dimension and precision of the embedding is adjusted to reduce the high computational demands for this homomorphic encryption (presumably at the cost of labeling accuracy) “to meet the latency and cost requirements of large-scale production services.” That is to say Apple wants to minimize its cloud compute cost and mobile device resource usage for this free feature.

With some server optimization metadata and the help of Apple’s private nearest neighbor search (PNNS), the relevant Apple server shard receives a homomorphically-encrypted embedding from the device, and performs the aforementioned encrypted computations on that data to find a landmark match from a database and return the result to the client device without providing identifying information to Apple nor its OHTTP partner Cloudflare.

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Here are a few of the new laws taking effect in the US in 2025

At the end of last year, The Epoch Times highlighted the more notable new laws that will take effect in US states in 2025.  The outlet noted several new laws are set to take effect in 2025, impacting various aspects of life in the United States, including digital content creation, kids’ social media use and more.

Most of these laws are not unique to the US and throughout the West people are familiar with the underlying agenda that has given rise to such laws.   Judging by these laws alone, it is hard not to feel that the West is experiencing or being forced into a crisis of moral decline, with some places more in crisis than others.

Abortion

In New York, a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion as a right will become enforceable on 1 January 2025, although its full implications are still unclear as state law already protects abortion through foetal viability and in cases involving a risk to the mother’s health or life.

The amendment to the New York constitution also bars discrimination based on characteristics such as national origin, gender identity and gender expression.  Opponents argue that the amendment could lead to the expansion of other constitutional rights such as transgender surgeries for minors, male participation on female sports teams and voting rights for non-citizens.

Seven other states have passed amendments to expand or protect abortion access, with most either already in effect or facing legal disputes.

REAL ID Enforcement

The REAL ID Act, passed by Congress in 2005, established minimum security standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards. The Department of Homeland Security has delayed the enforcement of REAL ID multiple times due to the covid-19 pandemic. The enforcement date for REAL ID compliance is 7 May 2025.

From that date, all US adults will be required to present REAL ID-compliant identification to fly domestically and access certain federal facilities.  All REAL ID-compliant cards will have a star symbol on the upper portion of the card, with US passports also being an acceptable form of ID.

Digital Replication and AI

California will enforce two laws protecting the voices and likenesses of actors and performers from digital replication through artificial intelligence, requiring professionally negotiated contracts and banning the commercial use of digital replicas of deceased performers without their estate’s consent.

Similar laws will also be enforced in Illinois, which has banned the distribution of AI-generated audio or visual replicas of a person without their consent and expanded the definition of “child pornography” to include digitally manipulated or created depictions.

Children’s Social Media Use

In Florida, a new law will prohibit children ages 13 and under from joining social media platforms starting on 1 January 2025, and require parental consent for those aged 14 and 15 to create social media accounts, with civil penalties and liabilities imposed on non-compliant platforms.

California has introduced a law requiring parents or guardians of children who perform in monetised online videos to set aside a percentage of the minor’s gross earnings in a trust for their benefit.

Another California law, expanding the Coogan Law, will require employers of child influencers to set aside 15 per cent of their gross earnings in a trust, providing additional protections for child actors and influencers.

Ten Commandments in Louisiana Classrooms

In Louisiana, a law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms is set to take effect on 1 January 2025, despite a federal judge finding the law “facially unconstitutional” and temporarily blocking its enforcement.

Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill is appealing the injunction, arguing that it only applies to the five school boards named in the lawsuit and plans to work with the remaining schools to ensure compliance.

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