Tag: technology

Russia May Send Hypersonic Missiles to Venezuela as Defense Against Regime Change: ‘America May Be in For Some Surprises’

Russia has opened the door to supplying hypersonic missiles to Venezuela as a deterrent against a possible U.S. invasion.

Alexei Zhuravlyov, deputy chairman of Russia’s parliamentary defense committee, warned that “America may be in for some surprises” if it attempts to remove the Maduro dictatorship from power.

“I see no obstacles to supplying a friendly country with new developments such as the Oreshnik or, let’s say, the well-proven Kalibr missiles,” Zhuravlyov told the Russian news site Gazeta.Ru.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that the Oreshnik missiles possess such overwhelming power that launching several of them with conventional warheads would unleash destruction comparable to a nuclear strike.

The Oreshnik was first deployed in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro in November 2024, in retaliation for Ukraine’s use of Western-supplied long-range weapons, including British and American Storm Shadow missiles, against targets inside Russia.

The warning comes after Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro pleaded for military assistance from both Moscow and Beijing amid reports that President Trump is planning an operation to remove him from power.

In his letter to the Kremlin, Maduro requested additional Sukhoi Su-30MK2 fighter jets, describing them as “the most important deterrent the Venezuelan national government had when facing the threat of war.”

Over the weekend, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the Kremlin condemns “the use of excessive military force in carrying out anti-drug tasks.”

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The Drone War No One Can Stop: Mystery Aircraft Defy Europe’s Defences

In September 2025, a wave of incursions caused major disruption. 

Copenhagen Airport was temporarily closed. 

Danish military bases were breached. 

Drones were also spotted over a power plant, a hospital, and a ThyssenKrupp naval factory in Germany.

France and Belgium were affected too.

The countries hit seemed powerless to stop the drones.

On Saturday (1 November) and Sunday (2 November), drones were sighted on two separate occasions over Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium.

The base hosts F-16s from the Belgian Air Force’s 10th Tactical Wing.

Alarmingly, under NATO’s nuclear sharing program, the base also stores B61-series nuclear bombs.

Belgian Defence Minister Theo Francken confirmed that drones entered the area near the Base in northeastern Belgium on Saturday and Sunday nights in two separate phases.

Francken said the first phase involved “small drones to test the radio frequencies” of Belgian security services. Later, “big drones” appeared, apparently “to destabilize the area and people,” he told public broadcaster RTBF.

“It resembles a spy operation. By whom, I don’t know,” he said. “I have a few ideas, but I’m going to be careful about speculating.”

As in September, Belgian forces appeared unable to bring down the drones. Francken later explained why jamming efforts failed and why the military chose not to use kinetic force.

Francken said the security services’ jammer failed because the drones had adapted.

“The jammer didn’t work because they tested our radio frequency and changed it,” he explained. “They have their own frequencies. An amateur doesn’t know how to do that.”

When asked why the drones weren’t shot down, Francken said:

“If they’re over a military base, we can shoot them down. But if they’re nearby, we have to be very careful — they could fall on a house, a car, a person. That’s completely different.”

He added that the situation also raised legal questions. “It’s not entirely clear. We have to clarify the legal grounds.”

Francken admitted that Belgium was still playing catch-up.

“We’re chasing after the threat,” he said. “We should have bought air defense systems five or ten years ago.”

Similar failures exposing the limits of counter-drone technology have occurred in recent years, affecting key U.S. military bases.

In December 2023, Langley Air Force Base in Virginia was swarmed by dozens of drones over several weeks, sparking a major security scare.

In 2024, Liberation Times obtained twenty-two witness statements and an incident report through a Freedom of Information Act request, following incursions at the base.

These statements come from members of the 633d Security Forces Squadron, who are responsible for guarding Joint Base Langley-Eustis.

Witnesses from the 633d Security Forces Squadron reported observing the so-called ‘drones’ ‘moving at rapid speeds’ and displaying ‘flashing red, green, and white lights’.

Concerningly, one witness stated that their dronebuster ‘failed to register’ one of the objects, while another was unable to use a dronebuster ‘due to not having a visual’.

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Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost

Last month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

History of the Internet Archive

Kahle has been striving since 1996 to transform the Internet Archive into a digital Library of Alexandria—but “with a better fire protection plan,” joked Kyle Courtney, a copyright lawyer and librarian who leads the nonprofit eBook Study Group, which helps states update laws to protect libraries.

When the Wayback Machine was born in 2001 as a way to take snapshots of the web, Kahle told The New York Times that building free archives was “worth it.” He was also excited that the Wayback Machine had drawn renewed media attention to libraries.

At the time, law professor Lawrence Lessig predicted that the Internet Archive would face copyright battles, but he also believed that the Wayback Machine would change the way the public understood copyright fights.

”We finally have a clear and tangible example of what’s at stake,” Lessig told the Times. He insisted that Kahle was “defining the public domain” online, which would allow Internet users to see ”how easy and important” the Wayback Machine “would be in keeping us sane and honest about where we’ve been and where we’re going.”

Kahle suggested that IA’s legal battles weren’t with creators or publishers so much as with large media companies that he thinks aren’t “satisfied with the restriction you get from copyright.”

“They want that and more,” Kahle said, pointing to e-book licenses that expire as proof that libraries increasingly aren’t allowed to own their collections. He also suspects that such companies wanted the Wayback Machine dead—but the Wayback Machine has survived and proved itself to be a unique and useful resource.

The Internet Archive also began archiving—and then lending—e-books. For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project to create a “National Emergency Library” as libraries across the world shut down during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project eventually grew to 1.4 million titles.

But lifting the lending restrictions also brought more scrutiny from copyright holders, who eventually sued the Archive. Litigation went on for years. In 2024, IA lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over the Archive’s Open Library project, which used a novel e-book lending model to bypass publishers’ licensing fees and checkout limitations. Damages could have topped $400 million, but publishers ultimately announced a “confidential agreement on a monetary payment” that did not bankrupt the Archive.

Litigation has continued, though. More recently, the Archive settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. A settlement in that case, reached last month, was similarly confidential. In both cases, IA’s experts challenged publishers’ estimates of their losses as massively inflated.

For Internet Archive fans, a group that includes longtime Internet users, researchers, students, historians, lawyers, and the US government, the end of the lawsuits brought a sigh of relief. The Archive can continue—but it can’t run one of its major programs in the same way.

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Elon Musk predicts phones and apps will be obsolete in five years, says AI will curate everything

Elon Musk appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience this week, where he predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will be so transformative that it will replace traditional phones and apps.

Musk told Rogan that within a few years, AI will be so integrated into daily life that people will no longer open individual apps or platforms. Instead, he said, AI will anticipate what users want and curate everything directly for them through their devices.

“Well, I can tell you where I think things are gonna go, which is that it’s, we’re not gonna have a phone in the traditional sense,” Musk said. “What we call a phone will really be an edge node for AI inference, for AI video inference with, you know, with some radios to obviously connect to. But, essentially, you’ll have AI on the server side, communicating to an AI on your device, you know, formerly known as a phone, and generating real-time video of anything that you could possibly want.” 

Musk explained that this shift would eliminate the need for operating systems or apps. “There won’t be operating systems or apps. It’ll just be, you’ve got a device that is there for the screen and audio, and to put as much AI on the device as possible,” he said.

Rogan asked Musk whether platforms like X or email services would still exist if apps disappeared. Musk replied, “You’ll get everything through AI.”

He explained that AI will learn to anticipate users’ preferences and deliver content automatically.

“Whatever you can think of. Or really, whatever the AI can anticipate you might want, it’ll show you.” Musk explained. “That’s my prediction for where things end up.”

When asked how soon this could happen, Musk estimated, “I don’t know. It’s probably, well it’s probably five or six years, something like that.”

“So five or six years, apps are like Blockbuster Video,” Rogan said, to which Musk responded, “Pretty much.”

“Most of what people consume in five or six years, maybe sooner than that, will be just AI-generated content,” Musk added.

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AI drones used in Gaza now surveilling American cities

AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.

The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.

Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.

According to my research, almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the ‘No Kings’ protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.

In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July.

The AI system behind Skydio drones is powered by Nvidia chips and enables their operation without a human user. The drones have thermal imaging cameras and can operate in places where GPS doesn’t work, so-called ‘GPS-denied environments.’ They also reconstruct buildings and other infrastructure in 3D and can fly at more than 30 miles per hour.

The New York police were early adopters of Skydio drones and are particularly enthusiastic users. A spokesman recently told a drone news website that the NYPD launched more than 20,000 drone flights in less than a year, which would mean drones are being launched around the city 55 times per day. A city report last year said the NYPD at that time was operating 41 Skydio drones. A recent Federal Aviation Authority rule change, however, means that number will undoubtedly have increased and more generally underpins the massive expansion in the use of Skydio drones.

Prior to March this year, FAA rules meant that drones could only be used by US security forces if the operator kept the drone in sight. They also couldn’t be used over crowded city streets. An FAA waiver issued that month opened the floodgates, allowing police and security agencies to operate drones beyond a visual line of sight and over large crowds of people. Skydio called the waiver ground-breaking. It was. The change has ushered in a Skydio drone buying spree by US police and security forces, with many now employing what is called a ‘Drone As First Responder’ program. Without the need to see the drone, and with drones free to cruise over city streets, the police are increasingly sending drones before humans to call outs and for broader investigative purposes. Cincinnati for example says that by the end of this year 90% of all call outs will be serviced first by a Skydio drone.

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Trump Says He Won’t Let Nvidia Sell Advanced Chips to China, Other Countries

President Donald Trump said that he would not let China purchase Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell chips in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday.

“No, we won’t do that,” Trump said during the interview, which was taped on Friday, when asked about whether the chipmaker will be allowed to sell its most advanced chips to China.

“We will not let anybody have them other than the United States.”

The “60 Minutes” interview on Oct. 31 was Trump’s first appearance on the show since suing and reaching a settlement with the network’s parent company, Paramount, in July.

During the interview, Trump said that the United States is currently winning the AI race, but giving China advanced chips will provide it with “an equal advantage” in the competition.

“Right now, we’re winning it because we’re producing electricity like never before,” the president said.

On Oct. 31, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed hope that his company will be able to sell its Blackwell chips, its latest generation of AI chips, in China at some point, though there are no plans to do so at the moment.

“I hope so, but that’s a decision for President Trump to make,” Huang told reporters on the sidelines of the APEC CEO summit in Gyeongju, South Korea.

The United States has imposed export controls on the sale of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to China, aiming to limit its tech progress, particularly in applications that could help its military.

“We’re getting approvals done in two to three weeks. It used to take 20 years. And we are leading the AI race right now by a lot,” Trump added.

On Nov. 2, Trump reiterated this stance when asked about Nvidia’s Blackwell chips aboard Air Force One on his way back to Washington.

“It’s 10 years ahead of every other chip,” Trump said. “No, we don’t give that chip to other people.”

After the Oct. 30 bilateral meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, Trump told reporters that semiconductors had been discussed and China was “going to be talking to Nvidia and others about taking chips,” but added, “We’re not talking about the Blackwell.”

Last week, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle urged caution about selling advanced chips to China.

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Uber CEO Predicts All Cars Will Be Autonomous in 20 Years, Driving Will Be a Hobby Like ‘Horseback Riding’

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi believes that in “20 plus years,” all cars will be autonomous, leading to a decline in private car ownership and a shift in the perception of driving to be a hobby, which he compares to horseback riding.

Business Insider reports that in a recent conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi shared his vision for the future of transportation, predicting that all cars will be autonomous in around 20 years. This shift, according to Khosrowshahi, could lead to a significant reduction in private car ownership and an increased focus on safety metrics for autonomous vehicles.

Khosrowshahi’s comments come at a time when many companies, including Tesla and Waymo, are developing and releasing robotaxis or autonomous software for personal vehicles. While these advancements have been met with both excitement and skepticism, the Uber CEO believes that the transition to fully autonomous vehicles is inevitable.

“Humans are fallible, and I think there’s much less permissiveness for machines to make those kinds of mistakes, especially if those mistakes lead to fatality,” Khosrowshahi said during the MD MEETS podcast. He emphasized that as autonomous driving technology matures, machines will undoubtedly become safer than human drivers.

This shift towards autonomous vehicles raises important questions about the future of driving and car ownership. Khosrowshahi suggested that societies will need to grapple with the idea of allowing humans to drive on open roads, given the potential safety advantages of autonomous vehicles. He sees driving becoming a hobby like horseback riding is today.

As companies continue to develop and deploy autonomous driving technologies, they face increasing scrutiny over safety concerns. Tesla, for example, was recently ordered to pay over $242 million in damages after a Florida jury found its Autopilot technology partially responsible for a fatal crash.

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Tests Find Chinese Manufacturer Can Manipulate Electric Buses in Norway

Safety tests by a public transport operator in Oslo, Norway, conducted have raised grave concerns over Chinese electric buses.

The operator known as Ruter conducted secret trials a few months ago on an electric bus from a European manufacturer and one from China’s Yutong to determine if there were cybersecurity threats, MENAFN reported Wednesday.

The European bus remained secure but the Chinese-made one had the ability to be manipulated by its manufacturer.

The manufacturer has access to buses’ software, diagnostics, and battery control systems, therefore the manufacturer could stop or render the vehicle unusable, Ruter explained.

The article continued:

Arild Tjomsland, a special advisor at the University of South-Eastern Norway who assisted with the tests, emphasized the risks: “The Chinese bus can be stopped, turned off, or receive updates that can destroy the technology that the bus needs to operate normally.”

He noted that while hackers and suppliers cannot steer the buses, the ability to stop them could disrupt operations or serve as leverage during a crisis.

During former President Joe Biden’s (D) push for green energy, Chinese automakers were looking to flood the United States market with cheap electric vehicles (EVs), Breitbart News reported in 2023. The following year, Chinese companies were testing their autonomous vehicles on American roads, raising concerns about the data they were collecting as they mapped the nation.

In addition, Breitbart News reported in September 2024, “The British government’s open-doors approach to electric vehicles from Communist China threatens to undercut domestic manufacturing and expose the country to national security risks, with a think tank warning that EVs could be ‘weaponized’ by Beijing.”

In regard to the issue in Oslo, Ruter Director Bernt Reitan Jenssen said, “We’ve found that everything that is connected poses a risk — and that includes buses. There is a risk that for example suppliers could take control, but also that other players could break into this value chain and influence the buses,” the Economic Times reported Tuesday.

The MENAFN article said the test results were forwarded to officials at the Ministry of Transport and Communications in Norway.

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Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline

An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again. After several rounds of back-and-forth, the service center probably got tired and just stopped accepting it, saying it was out of warranty. Because of this, he decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again.

Since the A11 was a smart device, it had an AllWinner A33 SoC with a TinaLinux operating system, plus a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware.

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Is This The Secret SpaceX-Backed Flying Car Musk Just Hinted At? 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Friday for a three-hour conversation covering a wide range of topics, including the upcoming unveiling of the second-generation Tesla Roadster, which he said “will have crazy tech.”

“Look, I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. This is some crazy, crazy technology we got in this car. Crazy technology. Crazy crazy. Let’s just put it this way. It’s crazier than anything James Bond. If you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that,” Musk told Rogan. 

Musk said that this product unveiling will be “unforgettable” and even hinted at a flying car.

He continued, “My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars. If Peter wants a flying car we should should be able to buy one.” 

Recall that shortly after Musk unveiled the Roadster in 2017, he discussed adding a “SpaceX package” with cold-air thrusters for boosting downforce and acceleration. 

However, a “SpaceX package” for the next-generation Roadster seems far-fetched. We suspect Musk will instead unveil a two-seater eVTOL vehicle called the Model A, developed by the SpaceX-backed company Alef Aeronautics.

At the start of 2025, Alef released the “first-ever video in history of a car driving and vertically taking off,” according to a press release earlier this year.  

Here’s the SpaceX-backed flying car in action. 

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