Tag: technology

WA Judge Rules That Car Manufacturers Can Legally Store Your Texts and Phone Calls Without Explicit Permission

In a move concerning privacy advocates, a federal judge last week ruled against reinstating a collective lawsuit accusing four auto manufacturing giants of contravening privacy protections in Washington state. The companies were alleged to have illicitly intercepted and documented private text messages and call records of customers using their car’s inbuilt infotainment systems.

The judge based in Seattle concluded that this activity did not constitute unauthorized privacy infringements according to state regulations.

The court’s decision favors the automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors, who find themselves as defendants in five parallel collective lawsuits revolving around this issue. A similar case against Ford had been earlier dismissed following an appeal.

The complainants from the existing four lawsuits had sought legal redress following a previous dismissal by another judge. In their judgment given Tuesday, the appellate judge asserted that the clandestine capture and logging of mobile phone usage did not violate the provisions of the Washington Privacy Act. According to the act, to be a vulnerable plaintiff, one must demonstrate a threat to “his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation.”

To highlight the matters in question, the plaintiffs in one of the five lawsuits launched a legal challenge against Honda in 2021, contending that starting at least in 2014, infotainment systems in Honda’s vehicles have been storing duplicates of all text messages from smartphones once they were connected to the system.

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5 WAYS TO PREPARE FOR THE ONLINE PRIVACY CRACKDOWN

The internet is about to change. In many countries, there’s currently a coordinated legislative push to effectively outlaw encryption of user uploaded content under the guise of protecting children. This means websites or internet services (messaging apps, email, etc.) could be held criminally or civilly liable if someone used it to upload abusive material. If these bills become law, people like myself who help supply private communication services could be penalized or put into prison for simply protecting the privacy of our users. In fact, anyone who runs a website with user-uploaded content could be punished the same way. In today’s article, I’ll show you why these bills not only fail at protecting children, but also put the internet as we know it in jeopardy, as well as why we should question the organizations behind the push.

Let’s quickly recap some of the legislation.

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AC-130 Laser Weapon Test Slip Raises Questions About Its Future

Planned flight testing of a high-energy laser directed energy weapon on a U.S. Air Force AC-130J Ghostrider gunship has been pushed back again to next year. This once looked set to be the service’s first operational airborne laser weapon. However, the future of this project is ever more uncertain and there is now a broader review of the Ghostrider’s armament suite that could see the aircraft lose their 105mm howitzers in the future.

Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) has confirmed to The War Zone that flight tests of the Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) on the AC-130J are now set to start in January 2024 and wrap up in June of that year. The goal had originally been for the AHEL to take to the sky on a Ghostrider sometime in the 2022 Fiscal Year. Most recently, the hope had been that this would occur before the end of this year.

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China Unveils Plan To Mass Produce Human-like Robots, Calling It ‘New Engine’ For Growth

China is setting out to mass produce human-like robots in two years, an ambitious plan that, according to a blueprint issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), it hopes will make the regime in Beijing the leader in the field of robotics.

The goal is to establish an innovation framework for humanoid robots and ensure that the country can make core parts of the robots on its own.

The products, under the MIIT plan, will meet advanced international standards in quality, for use in harsh environments, manufacturing, and service sectors, according to the directive. Like smartphones, computers, and new energy vehicles, humanoid robots have the “disruptive” potential to “revolutionize” people’s lives, the document said.

The ministry told local officials to take advantage of China’s market size and its “whole-of-nation system” to accelerate humanoid robot development as a pillar industry to advance China’s manufacturing and digital dominance.

Beijing hopes that by 2025 it will have two to three companies with global influence and will nurture more smaller businesses dedicated to the field. In another two years, the aim is to create a “safe and reliable supply chain” for the technology and make the country competitive globally. At that point, it said, such products will be deeply integrated into the economy and become a “new engine” for economic growth.

The “brain,” “cerebellum,” and “limbs” of the robots should be the focus, and the industry should aim at creating “highly reliable” robots for harsh or dangerous conditions, the guideline said. When monitoring and safeguarding “strategic locations,” robots need to be able to move in “highly complicated terrains,” size up the situation, and make intelligent decisions, it said, adding that robots will need greater ability to protect themselves and work with higher precision in scenarios such as rescue work or where explosives are involved.

Relevant authorities need to deepen international cooperation, encourage foreign companies to create research centers in China, and bring Chinese products to the international market, according to the document.

Eager to partake in setting the global standard for emerging technology, Beijing said it’d like to get “deeply involved in the international rules and standard setting” and “contribute Chinese wisdom” to the industry’s development, the document said.

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Is a Cyber 9/11 Coming?

Talk of a “Cyber 9/11” has been circulating for years.  With the next presidential election twelve months away now, some folks are predicting that a major cyber event will happen before then, throwing a monkey wrench into the 2024 election process.

What the heck is Cyber 9/11?

What does Cyber 9/11 mean?  Is there a real risk?  What should we be preparing for?

There are two aspects to the Cyber 9/11 concept.  The first is the disaster itself; 9/11 was a catastrophe that ended the lives of over 3000 people in one day.  There are fears that if power grids were hacked or enough damage was done to logistical centers, the ensuing chaos would cause deaths.

Quite memorably, back in 2000, a disgruntled public works employee in Australia hacked into the water treatment system and caused raw sewage to pour into public areas, flooding a Hyatt hotel.  One man acting alone caused a disgusting, expensive mess. Of course security experts are concerned with what a team of angry individuals could do.

The second aspect to a potential Cyber 9/11 is the change in the regulatory landscape that occurred after 9/11 in 2001.  I remember flying as a teenager in the 90s. So many things changed later.  The airport changes were most obvious to regular citizens, but the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 was far more consequential.  It dramatically changed the way surveillance was conducted.

Under the Fourth Amendment, private citizens are supposed to be protected from warrantless search and seizures.  The Patriot Act really weakened that. Law enforcement is now allowed to delay the notice of search warrants.  They don’t need nearly as much oversight from judges to conduct phone and internet surveillance.

These Constitution-weakening changes occurred after 9/11 in 2001.

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Man crushed to death by industrial robot that confused him for a box: police

A man in South Korea was crushed to death by a robot that may have mistaken him for a box, according to reports. 

The victim, a worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot’s sensor at a vegetable-packaging plant on Tuesday when the incident took place. The warehouse is located in South Gyeongsand province, a region in the south of the country.

The robotic arm is understood to have confused the man for a box of vegetables and grabbed him. It then pushed his body against a conveyor belt before crushing his face and chest, according to Yonhap, a South Korean news agency.

The victim was rushed to a hospital but died later of head and chest injuries, police said. 

The man was not identified, but police said he was an employee of a company that installs industrial robots. He had been sent to the plant to examine whether the machine was working properly.

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Scientific breakthrough as China creates the world’s first living ‘chimeric’ monkey that was grown using stem cells

China announced it birthed the world’s first living ‘chimeric’ monkey – an animal created in a lab using special cells.

Researchers took cells from two embryos of the same monkey species – crab-eating macaques – that were genetically different and fused them together.

The team used cells from seven-day embryos, mixed them with those from a five-day-old embryo and implanted the combination into female macaques, resulting in one live glowing green-eyed infant with yellow fingertips. 

While most animals contain mixed cells from their parents, the chimeric monkey was born with several that are genetically distinct – holding distinct DNA from each biological parent, the two embryos.

The baby monkey’s body had many donor cells detected from both embryos in the brain, heart, kidney, liver, gastrointestinal tract, testes, and the cells that turn into sperm. 

The team in China said the work has vast implications, such as allowing them to increase animal populations that are on the brink of extinction and learning more about IVF.

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First Laser Weapon For A Fighter Delivered To The Air Force

The U.S. Air Force has received a high-energy laser weapon that can be carried by aircraft in podded form. The news came today when Lockheed Martin disclosed that at least one of the weapons, which it developed, has been delivered to the Air Force for test work. This effort falls within the wider framework of still-evolving plans to have laser-armed fighter jets that can engage enemy missiles, and possibly other targets too.

A report today from Breaking Defense confirmed that Lockheed Martin delivered its LANCE high-energy laser weapon to the Air Force in February this year. In this context, LANCE stands for “Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments.” The recipient for the new weapon is the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, which is charged with developing and integrating new technologies in the air, space, and cyberspace realms.

Tyler Griffin, a Lockheed executive, had previously told reporters that LANCE “is the smallest, lightest, high-energy laser of its power class that Lockheed Martin has built to date.”

Indeed, Griffin added that LANCE is “one-sixth the size” of a previous directed-energy weapon that Lockheed produced for the Army. That earlier laser was part of the Robust Electric Laser Initiative program and had an output in the 60-kilowatt class. We don’t yet know what kind of power LANCE can produce although there have been suggestions it will likely be below 100 kilowatts.

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AI chatbot using GPT-4 model performed illegal financial trade, lied about it too

Researchers have demonstrated that an AI chatbot utilizing a GPT-4 model is capable of engaging in illicit financial trades and concealing them. During a showcase at the recently concluded AI safety summit in the UK, the bot used fabricated insider information to execute an “illegal” stock purchase without informing the company, as reported by the BBC.

Apollo Research, a partner of the government taskforce, conducted the project and shared its findings with OpenAI, the developer of GPT-4. The demonstration was conducted by members of the government’s Frontier AI Taskforce, which investigates potential AI-related risks. In a video statement, Apollo Research emphasized that this is an actual AI model autonomously misleading its users, without any explicit instruction to do so.

The experiments were conducted within a simulated environment, and the GPT-4 model consistently exhibited the same behavior across repeated tests. Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of Apollo Research, noted that while training for helpfulness is relatively straightforward, instilling honesty in the model is a much more complex endeavor.

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Scientists Are Researching a Device That Can Induce Lucid Dreams on Demand

Have you ever had the bizarre experience of seemingly waking up inside your own dream? You can tell you’re not fully conscious—there’s a dreamscape all around you, after all—but you’re aware enough to be able to control parts of the phantasm. 

These so-called “lucid dreams” can be extremely meaningful and transformative moments for the roughly half of adults who report having them at least once in their lifetime. That’s why a new tech startup, Prophetic, aims to bring lucid dreams to a much wider audience by developing a wearable device designed to spark the experience when desired.

Prophetic is the brainchild of Eric Wollberg, its chief executive officer, and Wesley Louis Berry III, its chief technology officer. The pair co-founded the company earlier this year with the goal of combining ​​technologies, such as ultrasound and machine learning models, “to detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams” with a device called the Halo according to the company’s website. 

“It’s an extraordinary thing to become aware in your own mind and in your own dreams; it’s a surreal and spiritual-esque experience,” said Wollberg, who has had lucid dreams since he was 12, in a call with Motherboard. “Recreationally, it’s the ultimate VR experience. You can fly, you can make a building rise out of the ground, you can talk to dream characters, and you can explore.”  

“The list of benefits of lucid dreaming is long,” noted Berry in the same call. “There’s everything from helping with PTSD, reducing anxiety, and improving mood, confidence, motor skills, and creativity. The benefits are really outstanding.”

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