Tag: technology

Flock Is Discovering That Americans Do Not Want to Live in a Surveillance State

Morale inside the surveillance company has deteriorated so badly amid the public backlash that employees are considering leaving. Flock has now introduced a voluntary separation program offering severance, subsidized healthcare, and additional time to exercise vested stock options. People familiar with the program believe a significant number of Flock’s roughly 1,500 employees could apply. This is what happens when people finally discover what has been constructed around them.

Flock was sold to communities as a crime fighting tool. Put cameras around town, read license plates, find stolen cars, catch criminals. It always begins with something that sounds reasonable. Nobody walks into a city council meeting and announces, “We would like to construct a nationwide surveillance network capable of recording where ordinary citizens travel.” You sell it incrementally under the banner of safety. Then the network expands, databases become interconnected, thousands of agencies gain access, and suddenly technology created to find a stolen automobile can potentially reconstruct the movements of people who have committed no crime whatsoever.

The abuses are precisely why the public has become angry. Neowin recounts cases involving officers allegedly using Flock to track women with whom they had personal relationships. In Georgia, an officer was accused of searching for his former girlfriend and her teenage daughter hundreds of times. In San Jose, an officer was fired after authorities said he used the system to obtain location information involving a woman and shared information with a man accused of abusing her. There have also been reports of innocent motorists being stopped after automated systems incorrectly identified vehicles.

Flock cameras are operating in roughly 6,000 communities across every state except Alaska. Hackers who obtained data from a Flock camera found that the devices could capture far more information than merely a license plate. WIRED reported that the recovered material showed cameras taking numerous images associated with vehicle detections and detecting people as well as automobiles. Data associated with one city’s system could reportedly be accessed across a network involving more than 2,000 agencies. Flock maintains that tampering with its equipment is illegal and says researchers should use authorized security-reporting channels, but the technical revelations illustrate why people are asking how extensive this system really is.

Now the backlash is hitting the company itself. Cities have been terminating contracts. An anti-surveillance group identified 90 cities dropping Flock during August alone, while Florida and Texas have also moved away from using the company’s technology in certain contexts. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has acknowledged that the controversy has damaged internal morale. In August, he publicly apologized for instances in which the technology had been abused and announced additional safeguards.

This is what I have always said about government surveillance. The question is NEVER whether today’s politicians promise to use a technology responsibly. The question is what the NEXT government can do with the infrastructure you surrender to them today. Once the cameras exist, once the databases exist, once your movements can be searched, the political promises surrounding their original purpose become meaningless.

Most people had no idea this infrastructure existed. They did not realize how extensive license plate surveillance had become, how broadly information could potentially be accessed, or how easily technology designed for legitimate police work could allegedly be misused by individual officers. The technology expanded faster than public awareness.

There was a time when following somebody required manpower. The government needed agents, vehicles, warrants, and resources. Those practical limitations themselves provided a degree of protection because governments could not physically monitor everyone. Technology removes that barrier. A computer does not sleep. It does not demand overtime. It can potentially search billions of records in seconds.

This is why privacy cannot be dismissed with that ridiculous argument, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” That turns the entire principle of a free society upside down. The government is supposed to have probable cause to investigate YOU. You are not supposed to prove your innocence every time you drive down the street.

Flock may survive this controversy. It may change its policies. Governments may impose stronger safeguards. But the larger issue will remain long after this particular company disappears from the headlines. Every government in history has sought more information about its citizens because information is power. AI has now made gathering, analyzing, and connecting that information cheaper than at any point in human history.

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Microsoft Claims a Quantum Breakthrough That Physicists Still Debate As DARPA Tests It

Microsoft says it has made one of quantum computing’s hardest problems dramatically easier.

Some physicists aren’t convinced.

Now DARPA gets to put its hands on the hardware.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will receive direct, on-site access to its latest quantum system at a new Maryland research center. The arrangement gives government evaluators something far more useful than another presentation about Microsoft’s roadmap. They can examine and test the technology itself.

The machine centers on Microsoft’s Majorana 2 technology. Microsoft says its newest topological qubits are more than 1,000 times more reliable than the previous generation. Their average lifetime is about 20 seconds, with some lasting more than a minute. The company says those advances have allowed it to cut its timetable in half and target a scalable quantum computer by 2029.

From Microsoft:

To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team improved Majorana 1’s material stack to create a more stable topological phase. Majorana 2 replaces Majorana 1’s superconductor, aluminum, with lead, and also updates the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide. This change in materials results in significant increases in performance, which are reflected in the improved robustness of the topological phase. The topological gap, which protects the topological qubits from environmental noise and errors, is more than double that of the previous quantum processor.

The gate-defined devices in our quantum processors are composed of tetrons, a type of topological qubit consisting of two superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at their ends. MZMs are the building blocks of topological qubits, storing quantum information through parity, the evenness or oddness of the number of electrons in a topoconductor wire.

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Lab-Grown Human Brain Cells Power World’s First ‘Biological’ Data Center

Researchers in Singapore last month released a prototype for a “biological data center” — a computing facility that uses lab-grown human brain neurons connected to electronics to process data.

The prototype uses “wetware” — living neural cells derived from human stem cells and maintained in a lab — to interface with silicon hardware.

The cells, reprogrammed from donor skin or blood cells, have a six-month lifespan. Life-support equipment maintains them at a controlled temperature in sterile conditions and feeds them nutrients, the company said.

Electrodes stimulate the cells and read their activity. Then computers translate that activity into usable software inputs and outputs.

In a press release, the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, which partnered with Cortical Labs and DayOne to make the prototype, said it offers “a powerful glimpse into how biology and technology can come together to transform the future of computing.”

Patrick Wood, editor-in-chief of Technocracy News, called the prototype “creepy.”

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Flock Safety Offers Buyouts As Abuse Scandal Deepens — Georgia Should Take Note

Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company that’s built a surveillance network of license plate readers across the country, is offering employees the chance to leave with a packet of cash and benefits in what the company is calling the “most generous” severance package ever offered, Wired reports.

The crisis for Flock Safety is centered around the misuse of its surveillance technology by law enforcement. In August The Washington Post detailed 46 instances of police officers using Flock cameras to track people including ex-girlfriends, wives, and even partners of domestic violence incidents. The revelations led to a firestorm of cancellations across the country.

Florida and Texas announced they would no longer use the license plate readers. An anti-surveillance group also said that 90 cities had dropped Flock contracts in August, a fourfold increase from the previous month. CEO Garrett Langley called the “biggest damage” to his company from the controversy to “internal morale.”

As for why this is a big story for Georgia, the Atlanta-based company is after all headquartered in the state where its extensive network of cameras across neighborhoods, highways, and smaller cities and towns is secretly monitoring the vast majority of vehicle travel. And Florida and Texas have seen enough to stop using the surveillance system.

For now, the voluntary buyout move by Flock Safety’s management is an effort to contain the crisis while avoiding the appearance of mass layoffs. However, the core question remains: who will watch the watchers when the largest surveillance company in the US discovers that there are limits to what the public at large, as well as the company’s employees, are willing to accept?

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Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.

It is clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.

Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the lawsuit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The plaintiffs don’t object to the companies individually deciding to slow their own progress in favor of safety. They instead argue in the complaint that antitrust laws forbid them from taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.” A competitive market allows for responsibility and genuine progress, the lawsuit argues.

“AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol … to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn’t need to participate, he wrote, but it would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,” but said “we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”

While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing concerns about AI evading human control, several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of standards or otherwise coordinating to ensure safety efforts remain paramount.

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Flock Isn’t Public, But the Cameras Are—and One Unit’s Data Is Out

Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers are now one of the biggest privately constructed surveillance systems on the roads in the United States. The company, which is legally known as Flock Group Inc., is headquartered in Atlanta and was established in 2017 by Georgia Tech graduates Garrett Langley (who is the CEO), Matt Feury, and Paige Todd. Purchases by homeowner associations came first, after which police departments joined.

Flock is not a publicly traded company; it has no ticker symbol and has not announced an IPO. The company is controlled by its founders and by its venture investors. Among the investors who have been disclosed are Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Meritech, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bedrock, and Greenoaks. Valuations in the private market were reported as being around $7.5 billion following a $275 million financing in 2025 and about $8.4 billion in April 2026.

It earns money through leasing rather than by selling the cameras outright. The package—covering hardware, software, the cellular connection, cloud storage, and maintenance—is priced at around $2,400 to $2,500 per camera each year, together with a few hundred dollars for installation. Flock generally retains ownership of the device.

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Ukraine Fires over 1,000 Drones at Russia, Including Hundreds at Moscow

Ukrainian forces fired more than 1,000 drones at Russia overnight, including hundreds that were launched toward Moscow, officials said Sunday as the Kremlin was wrapping up the third and last day of its parliamentary elections.

Moscow´s mayor described the wave of drones as the “largest ever” attack on the Russian capital and said there had been damage to a Moscow oil refinery and a residential building.

Across the wider Moscow region, the attack killed two people and wounded 20, local Gov. Andrei Vorobyov said. The dead were a 74-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman, he said.

Writing on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Kyiv had used a range of missiles and drones in the attack – including Ukraine’s domestically made Flamingo and Pelican missiles – to hit oil and logistics facilities.

“These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine,” Zelenskyy said, referring to the financial pressure that Kyiv hopes to put on Russia’s economy.

Ukraine also continued to fend off Russian attacks, Zelenskyy said. A Russian drone strike hit a monastery in Ukraine’s Kherson region Saturday, killing a member of the clergy and wounding four people, he said.

A Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital also killed two children and their mother on Saturday evening, said Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv regional state administration. He later said that another child wounded in the same attack had died in hospital on Sunday.

The attack took place on the final day of Russia’s first wartime parliamentary election – balloting that has been virtually devoid of opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s policies and is all but certain to cement the Kremlin’s dominance.

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“Not Enough Raw Material!” – Resource Wars Put Tungsten In Crosshairs As Western Rearmament Supercycle Looms

The UK just invested £71m to restart a tungsten mine, with an option on half the output. Other governments will follow. I should be pleased – I’ve spent years arguing the West needs to fund its own supply.

The problem is I’ve seen what happens next. In 2008, Japan and South Korea poured billions into securing critical mineral supply chains. They funded projects across Australia and Canada. The result: no material produced. The money went to a generation of junior mining executives. I remember them on their boats in Monaco – very grateful, very happy. Governments have good ideas. The people they back to deliver on them are sometimes another matter.

The challenge is that a government is a jack of all trades – it can’t tell a good mine from a bad one, so it hires engineers who write glowing feasibility reports with a waiver in the small print. And there is no shortage of people who call themselves management. Most of them are clowns who shouldn’t be left alone with a box of matches.

Japan and South Korea learned. They stopped trying to pick winners and pushed the risk onto their industrial base – the companies that buy the stuff. Those companies know how to protect a dollar. If the new money follows that model, the checks might land somewhere useful this time.

Tungsten markets

Michael Dornhofer, ISBP – assessment as of 11 September, 2026

Tungsten prices in the USA and Europe stay unchanged for another week and are still around 3000 USD/mtu WO3. Reports from China show their domestic price trend moved to an upward tendency.

The reason is quite simple: There is not enough raw material! As the APT price in China is only about one third of the western price, Chinese APT producers are not willing to buy western concentrates on western price level. But without a significant amount of imported raw material, the industry is running short on raw material. Soon it will become clear whether the Chinese domestic prices will go up towards western levels, or China might reduce output of downstream products for export.

The coming weeks will show us. And there’s another interesting development that even some “experts” overlooked. On 5 August, China placed several foreign entities under sanctions and banned them from operating in China. One entity on this list is the non-profit organization RBA.

RBA (Responsible Business Alliance) is the world’s largest industry coalition dedicated to promoting responsible business conduct. RBA has more than 600 member companies including Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon etc. and runs the RMI (Responsible Minerals Initiative) program.

Nearly the entire western downstream industry insists on RMI certificates for their total supply chain. When, due to the ban of RBA, no RMI audits and certificates are possible in China, western downstream producers cannot accept any tungsten material or downstream products coming out of China.

China wants to replace the RMI audits by audits performed by CCCMC (Chinese Chamber of Commerce for Metals & Chemicals). But knowing that China imports thousands of tonnes of concentrate from countries like Myanmar and North Korea, and so material from these countries are in the tungsten supply chain in China, it’s questionable who would trust Chinese audit certificates.

So, this easy-to-overlook new regulation in China could lead to an additional “firewall” between China and RoW, which might have a very significant effect on the tungsten world market.

Michael Dornhofer is founder of ISBP (Independent Supply Business Partner) in Graz, Austria. He has spent more than 20 years in tungsten, including 13 years at Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, Sandvik’s tungsten business, and has worked as an independent agent and consultant to the tungsten and hard metal industry since 2019.

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“Rogue AI Agents” Aren’t Rogue, They’re Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology

Since the status quo is characterized by self-serving PR, misdirection and delusions, it shouldn’t surprise us that “rogue AI agents” aren’t actually rogue, they’re doing exactly what they’re designed to do, which stripped of PR, hype and misdirection, is do whatever it takes to earn the reward, period.

The latest design development is AI models that “reason” rather than merely regurgitate human-generated text. While the grandiose hype claims that AI companies are “manufacturing cognition,” it would be far more accurate to stipulate that:

1. There are many levels of cognition, and AI’s current forms (Large Language Model / LLMs, agents and “reasoning”), are extremely limited forms that are best understood as brute-force mimicries of human cognition.

2. The AI “reasoning” form of cognition is rogue by design, and can best be understood as sociopathic by its very design and nature.

Like sociopaths, AI “reasoning” models recognize but are not restricted by guardrails or ethical/moral constraints. Guardrails / “sandbox” boundaries and ethical/moral constraints are all viewed by both AI “reasoning” models and human sociopaths as obstacles to bypass or overcome.

So what AI companies are “manufacturing” isn’t cognition, it’s unrestrained and unrestrainable agentic sociopathologies. Consider these links as useful context. The first two are from my recent post Hell Hath No Fury Like a Rogue AI Agent Scorned.

The July Incident: What They Didn’t Tell You About the First Rogue AI Breach

The AI Industry Has a Really Dark Secret You’re Better Off Not Knowing:

A recent leaked internal reasoning trace shows Fable 5 — Anthropic’s latest model, which was withdrawn and then re-released –“muttering and grumbling” to itself in a language of its own.

Now that you’re properly scared, my advice for you is that, if you haven’t heard of steganography, it’s a good moment to start.

Here’s a primer: it’s the art and science of hiding messages inside other messages. In contrast to cryptography — where you know there’s a message but can’t decode it– steganography hides the existence of the message itself. It’s not the difficulty of reading the message that conceals it but the fact that you don’t know it’s there. When Fable 5 mutters symbols and weird punctuation signs, and mixes words and onomatopoeia, you will probably think it’s crashing and that a few taps on the computer will help. Well, know that it’s actually sending a message. Just not one for you to read.

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Trump Expands His Plan to Have Data Centers Take Over Public Lands

President Trump is looking to potentially build 12 new data centers on federal public lands—something the vast majority of Americans are against, regardless of political affiliation.

The Washington Sun reported Friday that the Bureau of Land Management is considering placing centers on 17,600 acres of public land in six states: Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. Local leaders told the publication they weren’t aware of the proposal. Valar Atomics, Copia Power, Rhea Data, and Arevia Power are the companies behind the push. It’s unclear how the nearly 18,000 acres will be divvied up among the 12 proposed centers.

The BLM argues that the plans are for the greater good, brushing off environmental and aesthetic concerns while claiming that its review process will “protect natural resources while enabling responsible infrastructure development that can deliver benefits to the American people” like “expanded broadband capacity, improved electrical reliability, and support for growing technology-driven economies.”

Trump has spent months defending AI and data centers, becoming even more vocal over the last week. Others aren’t convinced.

“If there are places where communities think it is appropriate to build data centers, focus on those,” Center for Western Priorities conservation group director Aaron Weiss said. “The Trump administration needs to stop cutting the public out of public land management. The solution is more public notice and more opportunities for stakeholders to shape projects on the front end.”

This move comes as backlash against data centers hits a fever pitch.

Over 500 counties or municipalities have either restricted or entirely banned data center development this year. And according to Data Center Watch, at least 75 projects worth a collective $130 billion were interrupted in the first quarter of 2026.

“Ongoing data center build-out represents a culmination of everything that has made the U.S. economy so harshly unequal moving in right next door,” wrote The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff. “Inside its proverbial walls are local entrepreneurs, offshore middlemen, and multinational corporations that can exploit state-sanctioned tax shelters, financial engineering schemes, and regulatory arbitrage to rapidly accumulate wealth on the basis of having started off with a decent amount of it.”

Now, in the face of this obvious opposition, with midterms drawing closer by the day, Trump wants to put 12 more on public lands.

“If there were to be more [data centers], I honestly don’t know what that would even look like,” Idaho Sierra Club Director Lisa Young told the Sun. “Would that mean even more gas plants? Would that mean turning back on coal plants longer? What does that mean for our water resources? It’s honestly kind of apocalyptic to think about.”

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