Tag: technology

Secret Skunk Works Spy Drone Delivered To Air Force

We have explored the possibilities related to the existence of a high-altitude, long-endurance stealth drone, the so-called ‘RQ-180,’ and how it’s likely poised to eclipse the crewed U-2S Dragon Lady and uncrewed RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance platforms and become one of the most important military aircraft of a generation. Now, there are intriguing indications that a complementary platform or perhaps even a successor to the RQ-180 is not only being developed by Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works, but that this even more advanced spy drone has already been delivered.

These potential revelations come from the latest episode of the Defense & Aerospace Air Power Podcast, hosted by editor-in-chief Vago Muradian, joined by regular guest J.J. Gertler, director of The Defense Concepts Organization and senior analyst at the Teal Group. For the time being, we have no kind of confirmation about these statements, but they are certainly highly interesting, considering what we do know about related programs and emerging requirements.

Speaking about the mysterious new spy drone from the Skunk Works, Muradian explains this is a “much more capable reconnaissance aircraft” than the RQ-180 and that “there are articles that have already been delivered,” although no indication of how many or at what stage the program is at.

Muradian adds that “there have been challenges with that program [and] some speculation that it had been canceled.” He continues: “My understanding is that the program was re-scoped because it is that ambitious a capability that [it] required a little bit of re-scoping in order to be able to get to the next block of aircraft.”

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Lawmakers Demand Answers From Costco Over Sale Of Surveillance Equipment Made Using ‘Banned Chinese Components’

Two bipartisan lawmakers are demanding answers from Costco over its decision to continue selling Chinese-manufactured security products that have been linked to human rights abuses and cybersecurity risks.

In a letter dated Oct. 31, Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) questioned the retail giant’s continued sale of Lorex security products, noting the company previously had ties to China-based company Dahua, whose products are restricted in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Lorex is a former subsidiary of camera maker Zhejiang Dahua Technology, a China-based company that was added to the U.S. trade blacklist in 2019 owing to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) treatment of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.

The U.S. Department of Commerce, in placing the company on the blacklist, said it and other entities “have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups” in China’s Xinjiang region.

Additionally, the FCC last year banned the sale of new telecommunications and surveillance equipment made by Dahua, citing an “unacceptable risk” and national security concerns.

Dahua sold Lorex earlier this year to Taiwanese-based company Skywatch for around $72 million.

However, in their letter to Costco Chief Executive W. Craig Jelinek, Mr. Smith and Mr. Merkley said Dahua still supplies all the component parts for the Lorex cameras and other surveillance equipment.

The continued sale of Lorex security equipment throughout the retailer’s stores allows Dahua to profit from the U.S. market despite its equipment being banned from U.S. government use, they argued.

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Self-proclaimed AI savior Elon Musk will launch his own artificial intelligence TOMORROW – as he tries to avoid tech destroying humanity

Elon Musk is set to roll out the first model of his AI-powered system, xAI, on Saturday, one day after he proclaimed the tech is the biggest risk to humanity. 

The billionaire said Friday that he is opening up early access to a select group, but details of who has not been shared.

‘In some important respects, it (xAI’s new model) is the best that currently exists,’ the Tesla CEO said on Friday. 

Musk, who has been critical of Big Tech’s AI efforts and censorship, said earlier this year that he would launch a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe to rival Google‘s Bard and Microsoft‘s Bing AI. 

Musk revealed his startup on July 12, 2023 by launching a dedicated X account for the AI company and spares website.

The official website only shows an ambitious vision of xAI – that it was developed ‘to understand the true nature of the universe.’

Many of the founding members are skilled with large language models.

The xAI team includes Igor Babuschkin, a DeepMind researcher, Zihang Dai, a research scientist at Google Brain and Toby Pohlen, also from DeepMind.

‘Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality,’ Musk posted on what was Twitter last year. 

He then shared another post highlighting how the date of xAI’s release is to honor Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’

When adding up the month, day and year, you get 42.

The number is the answer a supercomputer gives to ‘the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.’

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Cure for HIV could be months away as first three patients are injected with new CRISPR therapy that seeks and destroys lingering pieces of virus

After four decades and over 700,000 Americans dead, gene editing experts believe they are on the cusp of curing HIV. 

Three patients in California have just been injected with genetic material along with an enzyme called CAS9 that early studies suggest can splice sections of the virus’ DNA that become lodged in human cells, eliminating it entirely.

Using the gene-editing technology CRISPR, a cure for the AIDS-causing virus could be closer on the horizon than ever thought before. 

The current trial aims to prove the treatment is safe, but data on how well it work is expected next year.

HIV was a near-certain death sentence until the mid-90s, when antiviral medications turned it into a chronic disease that people can live with. 

In total 1.2 million Americans have HIV and, even with access to medicine, have a risk of seeing their dormant infection resurface and potentially progress to AIDS.

Treatment options have evolved considerably since HIV was first identified in the early 80s. The course of treatment went from patients having to take several pills a day that might not even work well to start, to taking just a single daily pill that combines all of the best known therapies into one. 

These are known as antiretroviral therapies, or daily medications that tamp down the amount of virus in the blood to undetectable levels. These medications are effective, they are not a cure. 

A cure for HIV has eluded scientists for decades because of the unique way in which the virus hijacks the body’s own cells.   

HIV hides in immune cells in the body, where they can shield themselves from being destroyed by other immune cells. This makes hunting and killing HIV in the body difficult, because there is a risk of damaging healthy cells as well. 

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Biden Issues Government’s First-Ever Artificial Intelligence Executive Order To ‘Support Workers, Combat Discrimination’

Early Monday morning, the White House announced President Biden unveiled a wide-ranging executive order on artificial intelligence – the first of its kind. This comes after tech billionaires, such as Elon Musk, have called for a “regulatory structure” for AI due to risks to civilization. 

The order is broad and aims to establish new standards for AI safety and security, protect Americans’ privacy, advance equity and civil rights, stand up for consumers and workers, promote innovation and competition, and position the US to lead the global AI race. 

On Sunday, a White House official, who asked not to be named, told NBC News that AI has so many factors that effective regulations must be broad. 

“AI policy is like running into a decathlon, and there’s 10 different events here.

“And we don’t have the luxury of just picking ‘we’re just going to do safety’ or ‘we’re just going to do equity’ or ‘we’re just going to do privacy.’ You have to do all of these things,” the official said.

The order uses the Defense Production Act, mandating that tech firms must inform the government when developing any AI system that could pose risks to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed told NBC the order represents “the strongest set of actions any government in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security, and trust.” 

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Jet-Powered JDAM Aims To Turn Bombs Into Cruise Missiles

For the second time in as many weeks, Boeing has made an announcement related, at least in part, to the ongoing development of a powered derivative of the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) precision-guided bomb family. The company is pitching the Powered Joint Direct Attack Munition (PJDAM) as a flexible and lower-cost cruise missile that can be used to attack targets on land and ones at sea. It could help countries, including the United States, readily boost their stockpiles of stand-off munitions.

Boeing announced earlier today that it had signed a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Australia’s Ferra Engineering regarding the continued production of pop-out wing kits for the unpowered JDAM Extended Range (JDAM-ER) series. The company said that this deal would also include an “intent to explore applications” for the PJDAM. As currently designed, the PJDAM uses the same wing kit as the JDAM-ER.

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‘I actually had a conversation with Dad’: The people using AI to bring back dead relatives – including a plan to harvest DNA from graves to build new clone bodies

Can artificial intelligence really summon dead relatives back from beyond the grave?

A growing number of people are trying to find out, with pioneers such as inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil using artificial intelligence to recreate lost relatives.

Kurzweil’s attempts to ‘bring back’ his father – who died when Kurzweil was 22 – using AI began more than 10 years ago and are chronicled this year in a comic book by Kurzweil’s daughter Amy.

Kurzweil created a ‘replicant’ of his father by feeding an artificial intelligence system with his father’s letters, essays and musical compositions.

He now has even more ambitious plans to bring his father back to life using nanotechnology and DNA from his father’s buried bones.

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Why Big Tech, Cops, and Spies Were Made for One Another

THE TECHLASH HAS finally reached the courts. Amazon’s in court. Google’s in court. Apple’s under EU investigation. The French authorities just kicked down Nvidia’s doors and went through their files looking for evidence of crimes against competition. People are pissed at tech: about moderation, about monopolization, about price gouging, about labor abuses, and — everywhere and always — about privacy.

From experience, I can tell you that Silicon Valley techies are pretty sanguine about commercial surveillance: “Why should I care if Google wants to show me better ads?” But they are much less cool about government spying: “The NSA? Those are the losers who weren’t smart enough to get an interview at Google.”

And likewise from experience, I can tell you that government employees and contractors are pretty cool with state surveillance: “Why would I worry about the NSA spying on me? I already gave the Office of Personnel Management a comprehensive dossier of all possible kompromat in my past when I got my security clearance.” But they are far less cool with commercial surveillance: “Google? Those creeps would sell their mothers for a nickel. To the Chinese.”

What are they both missing? That American surveillance is a public-private partnership: a symbiosis between a concentrated tech sector that has the means, motive, and opportunity to spy on every person in the world and a state that loves surveillance as much as it hates checks and balances.

Big Tech, cops, and surveillance agencies were made for one another.

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Organizations Weigh-In on Surveilling Kids at U.S. Schools, Now a $3.1B Industry, and Its Adverse Effects on “especially those who are the most vulnerable”

Technology surveillance companies that sell their products to school administrators are creating a “digital dystopia” for U.S. schoolchildren, a new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report concluded.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased school shootings, a $3.1 billion educational technology (EdTech) surveillance industry has scored huge profits based on the claim that its digital tools — including video cameras, facial recognition software, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven behavior detection technology, online and social media monitoring software and more — prevent bullying, self-harm and school violence.

However, the industry failed to back up that claim with evidence and instead used fear as a primary marketing tactic, the ACLU report said.

The ACLU — after conducting its own research and reviewing additional research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice — found a “lack of clear evidence” that the products advertised by EdTech firms keep students safe.

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A.I. Agents: ChatGPT Can Write Its Own Code And Execute It

The widely used chatbot ChatGPT was designed to generate digital text, everything from poetry to term papers to computer programs. But when a team of artificial intelligence researchers at the computer chip company Nvidia got their hands on the chatbot’s underlying technology, they realized it could do a lot more.

Within weeks, they taught it to play Minecraft, one of the world’s most popular video games. Inside Minecraft’s digital universe, it learned to swim, gather plants, hunt pigs, mine gold and build houses.

“It can go into the Minecraft world and explore by itself and collect materials by itself and get better and better at all kinds of skills,” said a Nvidia senior research scientist, Linxi Fan, who is known as Jim.

The project was an early sign that the world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers are transforming chatbots into a new kind of autonomous system called an A.I. agent. These agents can do more than chat. They can use software apps, websites and other online tools, including spreadsheets, online calendars, travel sites and more.

In time, many researchers say, the A.I. agents could become far more sophisticated, and could replace office workers, automating almost any white-collar job.

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