Tag: technology

Atlas of Surveillance…

Law enforcement surveillance isn’t always secret. These technologies can be discovered in news articles and government meeting agendas, in company press releases and social media posts. It just hasn’t been aggregated before.

That’s the starting point for the Atlas of Surveillance, a collaborative effort between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism. Through a combination of crowdsourcing and data journalism, we are creating the largest-ever repository of information on which law enforcement agencies are using what surveillance technologies. The aim is to generate a resource for journalists, academics, and, most importantly, members of the public to check what’s been purchased locally and how technologies are spreading across the country.

We specifically focused on the most pervasive technologies, including drones, body-worn cameras, face recognition, cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, predictive policing, camera registries, and gunshot detection. Although we have amassed more than 12,100 datapoints in 5,500-plus jurisdictions, our research only reveals the tip of the iceberg and underlines the need for journalists and members of the public to continue demanding transparency from criminal justice agencies.

Visit it HERE

NASA WILL DEBUT ITS MYSTERIOUS X-59 ‘QUIET’ SUPERSONIC AIRCRAFT AT FAMOUS LOCKHEED MARTIN SKUNK WORKS FACILITY NEXT WEEK

NASA has announced plans to unveil its X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft next week, the American space agency said in a statement on Friday.

“NASA will provide live coverage as it reveals its X-59 aircraft at 4 p.m. EST on Friday, Jan. 12, as part of the agency’s Quesst mission to make commercial supersonic flight possible,” read a portion of the NASA statement.

The aircraft, which recently received a patriotic paint job, will see its public reveal during a ceremony at the famous Lockheed Martin Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California.

As part of NASA’s Quesst mission, the X-59 will be flown above populated regions of the United States, after which the space agency will collect information from the public about responses to sound the aircraft produces, which will then be supplied to international regulators for assessment.

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Artificial ‘womb’ for premature babies could be available this year after 300 tests with lamb prove successful – bringing hope to 15 million preterm infants born each year

Scientists have announced human trials for an artificial uterus could be approved this year, bringing hope to the 15 million infants born prematurely each year in the US. 

A team at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia successfully tested the womb with preterm lambs, finding the animals ‘opened their eyes, became more active, had apparently normal breathing and swallowing movements’ while in the sac.

The main reason half of preterm babies don’t survive is their lungs aren’t fully developed due to premature birth, and they have a hard time transitioning from breathing in the amniotic fluid to breathing air. 

The team conducted 300 successful tests, finding the animals had normal brain development and stable nutrition as if they were feeding off their mother.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has met with experts to discuss the following steps to bring the artificial uterus, called EXTEND, into human trials – and is set to announce a decision later this year.

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The end of gambling addiction? Scientists develop brain chip that lower risk-taking in monkeys

Monkeys are natural risk-takers, but when scientists implanted chips into their brains, they became much more careful, according to a new study.

A team of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan used flashes of light from implanted chips to activate two different sections of the macaque monkeys’ brains. 

Switching one on encouraged them to take bigger risks with the hope of a bigger payoff, while switching the other section on led the animals to settle for a smaller but more certain reward.

This research offers insight into the neural roots of gambling addiction, said the researchers behind the study. 

But before digging into the brain, scientists began by figuring out whether their six monkeys liked to gamble.

They trained the macaques to look at different colored spots on a screen to receive a water reward.

Some spots would give the monkey a small reward 90 percent of the time – low risk, low reward. 

Others gave a reward that was 10 times larger, but it only paid out 10 percent of the time – high risk, high reward. 

Overwhelmingly, the monkeys went for the high-risk, high-reward spots. Like a gambler at a slot machine, even though they may lose more often than they win, they gambled with their eye on a big payout.

Next the team tried to figure out which brain areas were in control of this risk-reward calculation. 

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PRISONS ACROSS THE U.S. ARE QUIETLY BUILDING DATABASES OF INCARCERATED PEOPLE’S VOICE PRINTS

Roughly six months ago at New York’s Sing Sing prison, John Dukes says he was brought out with cellmates to meet a corrections counselor. He recalls her giving him a paper with some phrases, and offering him a strange choice: He could go up to the phone and utter the phrases that an automated voice would ask him to read, or he could choose not to and lose his phone access altogether.

Dukes did not know why he was being asked to make this decision, but he felt troubled as he heard other men ahead of him speaking into the phone and repeating certain phrases from the sheets the counselors had given them.

“I was contemplating, ‘Should I do it? I don’t want my voice to be on this machine,’” he recalls. “But I still had to contact my family, even though I only had a few months left.”

So, when it was his turn, he walked up to the phone, picked up the receiver, and followed a series of automated instructions. “It said, ‘Say this phrase, blah, blah, blah,’ and if you didn’t say it clearly, they would say, ‘Say this phrase again,’ like ‘Cat’ or ‘I’m a citizen of the United States of America.’” Dukes said he repeated such phrases for a minute or two. The voice then told him the process was complete.

“Here’s another part of myself that I had to give away again in this prison system,” he remembers thinking as he walked back to the cell.

Dukes, who was released in October, says he was never told about what that procedure was meant to do. But contracting documents for New York’s new prison phone system, obtained by The Appeal in partnership with The Intercept, and follow-up interviews with prison authorities, indicate that Dukes was right to be suspicious: His audio sample was being “enrolled” into a new voice surveillance system.

In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call, and to search for other calls where the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.

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We Absolutely Do Not Need an FDA for AI

I don’t know whether artificial intelligence (AI) will give us a 4-hour workweek, write all of our code and emails, and drive our cars—or whether it will destroy our economy and our grasp on reality, fire our nukes, and then turn us all into gray goo. Possibly all of the above. But I’m supremely confident about one thing: No one else knows either.

November saw the public airing of some very dirty laundry at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization that brought us ChatGPT, when the board abruptly announced the dismissal of CEO Sam Altman. What followed was a nerd game of thrones (assuming robots are nerdier than dragons, a debatable proposition) that consisted of a quick parade of three CEOs and ended with Altman back in charge. The shenanigans highlighted the many axes on which even the best-informed, most plugged-in AI experts disagree. Is AI a big deal, or the biggest deal? Do we owe it to future generations to pump the brakes or to smash the accelerator? Can the general public be trusted with this tech? And—the question that seems to have powered more of the recent upheaval than anything else—who the hell is in charge here?

OpenAI had a somewhat novel corporate structure, in which a nonprofit board tasked with keeping the best interests of humanity in mind sat on top of a for-profit entity with Microsoft as a significant investor. This is what happens when effective altruism and ESG do shrooms together while rolling around in a few billion dollars.

After the events of November, this particular setup doesn’t seem to have been the right approach. Altman and his new board say they’re working on the next iteration of governance alongside the next iteration of their AI chatbot. Meanwhile, OpenAI has numerous competitors—including Google’s Bard, Meta’s Llama, Anthropic’s Claude, and something Elon Musk built in his basement called Grok—several of which differentiate themselves by emphasizing different combinations of safety, profitability, and speed.

Labels for the factions proliferate. The e/acc crowd wants to “build the machine god.” Techno-optimist Marc Andreessen declared in a manifesto that “we believe intelligence is in an upward spiral—first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.” Meanwhile Snoop Dogg is channeling AI pioneer-turned-doomer Geoffrey Hinton when he said on a recent podcast: “Then I heard the old dude that created AI saying, ‘This is not safe ’cause the AIs got their own mind and these motherfuckers gonna start doing their own shit.’ And I’m like, ‘Is we in a fucking movie right now or what?'” (Hinton told Wired, “Snoop gets it.”) And the safetyists just keep shouting the word guardrails. (Emmett Shear, who was briefly tapped for the OpenAI CEO spot, helpfully tweeted this faction compass for the uninitiated.)

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US Military Launches Highly Classified Unmanned Space Plane

The US Space Force launched a secretive plane on Thursday which has been equipped with heavier boosters that could feasibly send it further into orbit than ever before.

The launch marks the 9th flight of the three-core SpaceX Falcon Heavy booster, and the 7th flight of the US Air Force’s (not so) secret unmanned spaceplane, the X-37B (USSF-52).

The launch was previously scheduled for Dec. 10, however it was scrapped due to issues with ground equipment just 30 minutes before liftoff – pushing the event back 18 days.

Officially, the X-37B will enter into various orbits around Earth and serve as a testing ground for NASA’s study of the effects of long-duration exposure to space on organic materials, the Epoch Times reports, adding that the mission will also include experiments having to do with “space domain awareness,” which the US Space Force defines as the ability to “rapidly detect, warn, characterize, attribute, and predict threats to national, allied, and commercial space systems.”

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ON THE EVE OF AN A.I. ‘EXTINCTION RISK’? IN 2023, ADVANCEMENTS IN A.I. SIGNALED PROMISE, AND PROMPTED WARNINGS FROM GLOBAL LEADERS

In the field of artificial intelligence, OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, along with the company’s ChatGTP chatbot and its mysterious Q* AI model, have emerged as leading forces within Silicon Valley.

While advancements in AI may hold the potential for positive future developments, OpenAI’s Q* and other AI platforms have also led to concerns among government officials worldwide, who increasingly warn about possible threats to humanity that could arise from such technologies.

2023’S BIGGEST AI UPSET

Among the year’s most significant controversies involving AI, in November Altman was released from his duties as CEO of OpenAI, only to be reinstated 12 days later amidst a drama that left several questions that, to date, remain unresolved.

On November 22, just days after Altman’s temporary ousting as the CEO of OpenAI, two people with knowledge of the situation told Reuters that “several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors,” which had reportedly warned about “a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity,” the report stated.

In the letter addressed to the board, the researchers highlighted the capabilities and potential risks associated with artificial intelligence. Although the sources did not outline specific safety concerns, some of the researchers who authored the letter to OpenAI’s board had reportedly raised concerns involving an AI scientist team comprised of two earlier “Code Gen” and “Math Gen” teams, warning that the new developments that aroused concern among company employees involved aims to upgrade the AI’s reasoning abilities and ability to engage in scientific tasks.

In a surprising turn of events that occurred two days earlier on November 20, Microsoft announced its decision to onboard Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI and one of its co-founders, who had resigned in solidarity with Sam Altman. Microsoft said at the time that the duo was set to run an advanced research lab for the company.

Four days later Sam Altman was reinstated as the CEO of OpenAI after 700 of the company’s employees threatened to quit and join Microsoft. In a recent interview with Altman, he disclosed his initial response to his invitation to return following his dismissal, saying it “took me a few minutes to snap out of it and get over the ego and emotions to then be like, ‘Yeah, of course I want to do that’,” Altman told The Verge.

“Obviously, I really loved the company and had poured my life force into this for the last four and a half years full-time, but really longer than that with most of my time. And we’re making such great progress on the mission that I care so much about, the mission of safe and beneficial AGI,” Altman said.

But the AI soap opera doesn’t stop there. On November 30, Altman announced that Microsoft would join OpenAI’s board. The tech giant, holding a 49 percent ownership stake in the company after a $13 billion investment, will assume a non-voting observer position on the board. Amidst all this turmoil, questions remained about what, precisely, the new Q* model is, and why it had so many OpenAI researchers concerned.

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Google’s New Patent: Using Machine Learning to Identify “Misinformation” on Social Media

Google has filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a tool that would use machine learning (ML, a subset of AI) to detect what Google decides to consider as “misinformation” on social media.

Google already uses elements of AI in its algorithms, programmed to automate censorship on its massive platforms, and this document indicates one specific path the company intends to take going forward.

The patent’s general purpose is to identify information operations (IO) and then the system is supposed to “predict” if there is “misinformation” in there.

Judging by the explanation Google attached to the filing, it at first looks like blames its own existence for proliferation of “misinformation” – the text states that information operations campaigns are cheap and widely used because it is easy to make their messaging viral thanks to “amplification incentivized by social media platforms.”

But it seems that Google is developing the tool with other platforms in mind.

The tech giant specifically states that others (mentioning X, Facebook, and LinkedIn by name in the filing) could make the system train their own “different prediction models.”

Machine learning itself depends on algorithms being fed a large amount of data, and there are two types of it – “supervised” and “unsupervised,” where the latter works by providing an algorithm with huge datasets (such as images, or in this case, language), and asking it to “learn” to identify what it is it’s “looking” at.

(Reinforcement learning is a part of the process – in essence, the algorithm gets trained to become increasingly efficient in detecting whatever those who create the system are looking for.)

The ultimate goal here would highly likely be for Google to make its “misinformation detection,” i.e., censorship more efficient while targeting a specific type of data.

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China developing ‘brain warfare’ tech with devices that make you sleep and thought-controlled weapons

Two studies from China’s People’s Liberation Army indicate a focus on enhancing military capabilities, using advanced technology to achieve victory without traditional weapons.

These biological weapons aim to induce sleep, impair cognitive functions, reduce alertness, and affect decision-making, the report stated.

The report, “Warfare in the Cognitive Age: NeuroStrike and the PLA’s Advanced Psychological Weapons and Tactics,” was published earlier this month by The CCP Biothreats Initiative, a research group.

“The PLA is at the forefront of incorporating advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces and novel biological weapons into its military strategies,” the researchers stated.

‘In summary, the PLA’s integration of cutting-edge technologies such as AI, [brain-computer interfaces], and biological weapons into its military arsenal brings significant psychological dimensions to warfare, extending beyond their physical effects,’ according to the report.

Devices for cognitive warfare include anti-sleep glasses, designed to boost alertness. The report also reveals other weapons such as ‘soft-kill radio waves,’ utilizing electromagnetic energy to induce drowsiness in enemies.

There are also reports that China is working on weapons directly controlled by a soldier’s thoughts, enabling them to manipulate enemies.

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