Tag: technology

Adults and Children Continuously Targeted for Data Extraction, Surveillance and Censorship

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that not a single day goes by without a new data exploit, hack, breach, leak, or scandal involving censorship by private companies and government agencies. Of course, this is all compounded even further by the fact that more devices contain more sensors that connect to the internet than ever before, offering many new methods for targeting groups and individuals. It has been estimated that by 2030 there could be 125 billion devices — potentially 15 per user — that in some way will comprise the ever-expanding Internet of Things ecosystem.

Amid this sea of two-way data traffic, we have a massive amount of targeted advertising and personally identifiable information extraction that has shown very often to all be done without users’ consent. If there is consent at all, it very likely is through lenthy and confusing Terms and Conditions that almost no one reads in their entirety. Worse still is the proven targeting of children’s data. Lawmakers continue to attempt to rein in these consumer-unfriendly practices, but their current proposals will likely do more harm than good. At this point it should be obvious that even if legislative measures are effectively created, such a waiting game only leaves all of us, including our kids, increasingly vulnerable at any given moment. People want – and deserve – to become personally responsible for their own security and privacy.

Fortunately, there are residential proxy providers on the opposing side that understand the rising awareness by the public of these data violations and creepy intrusions. These companies are doing everything they can to offer the tools necessary for individuals to protect their family’s data and privacy, while also offering increasing freedom to reach the websites that we do want to visit.

Keep reading

Israel Successfully Tests New Laser Missile Defense System

Israel’s new laser missile defense system has successfully intercepted mortars, rockets and anti-tank missiles in recent tests, Israeli leaders said Thursday.

The Israeli-made laser system, known as the “Iron Beam,” is designed to complement a series of aerial defense systems, including the more costly rocket-intercepting Iron Dome.

“This may sound like science-fiction, but it’s real,” said Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. ”The Iron Beam’s interceptions are silent, they’re invisible and they only cost around $3.50” apiece, he added.

Little is known about the laser system’s effectiveness, but it is expected to be deployed on land, in the air and at sea. The goal is to deploy the laser systems around Israel’s borders over the next decade to protect the country against attacks.

Thursday’s announcement also sent a message to Israel’s foes, including archenemy Iran. The tests took place last month in the Negev Desert.

The announcement came near the anniversary of the 11-day Israel-Gaza war, in which Gaza’s ruling Hamas militant group fired more than 4,000 rockets toward Israel.

Keep reading

Secret documents show Pentagon investigated how to communicate with a possible 4,590 space civilizations

Recently released and formerly secret United States files revealed that the Department of Defense (DOD) has investigated the best possible path to get in touch with aliens and speak with a possible 4,590 extraterrestrial civilizations.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document, which was acquired by the Sun as part of a huge Freedom of Information request, is a scientific research into SETI, which is an acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The report, which was sanctioned by the U.S. government, said its goal is to “ascertain whether alien civilizations exist in the universe, how far from us they exist and possibly how much more advanced than us they may be.”

“As of 2009, the only physical tools we know that could help us get in touch with aliens are the electromagnetic waves an alien civilization could emit and we could detect,” the report added.

However, with the current technology, the government cannot explore for aliens “beyond a few hundred light-years away.” It also said that in the past 50 years of SETI searches, no extra-terrestrial civilization was found because “quite simply we did not get far enough.”

Contact with aliens “demands the construction of much more powerful and radically new radio telescopes,” which the files said were being planned and should have been finished around 2020.

The report focused on how distant alien civilizations are and how long it will take humans to arrive there.

It assumed that there could be 4,590 extraterrestrial communities in the universe and the distance of the closest one is probably between 1,933 and 2,670 light-years away in accordance with advanced calculations from the former and current. 

Keep reading

Muting your mic doesn’t stop big tech from recording your audio

Anytime you use a video teleconferencing app, you’re sending your audio data to the company hosting the services. And, according to a new study, that means all of your audio data. This includes voice and background noise whether you’re broadcasting or muted.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison investigated “many popular apps” to determine the extent that video conferencing apps capture data while users employ the in-software ‘mute’ button.

According to a university press release, their findings were substantial:

They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular video conferencing applications as the audio traveled from the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while the app was muted.

They found that all of the apps they tested occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated, with one popular app gathering information and delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.

Keep reading

7-Foot Robot at Dallas Love Field Airport Watches for Unmasked Travelers, Will Notify Law Enforcement of Potential Crimes

A 7-foot robot at Dallas Love Field Airport is watching for unmasked passengers and will notify law enforcement of potential crimes.

What could possibly go wrong?

The robot, dubbed “SCOT,” was installed last month to “determine if they are capable of efficiently supplementing current airport operations,” said Love Field spokeswoman Lauren Rounds, the Dallas Morning News.

SCOT can detect if a person is wearing a face mask and can detect behavior of passengers based on what they are wearing.

The robot can bark warnings at people and call the police.

Keep reading

Mosquitoes With Synthetic DNA Scheduled For California Release

In the mosquito breeding rooms of British biotech company Oxitec, scientists line up fresh eggs, each the size of a grain of salt. Using microscopic needles, the white-coated researchers inject each egg with a dab of a proprietary synthetic DNA.

For four days, Oxitec technicians care for the eggs, watching for those that hatch into wriggling brown larvae. Those “injection survivors,” as the company calls them, face a battery of tests to ensure their genetic modification is successful.

Soon, millions of these engineered mosquitoes could be set loose in California in an experiment recently approved by the federal government.

Oxitec, a private company, says its genetically modified bugs could help save half the world’s population from the invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can spread diseases such as yellow fever, chikungunya and dengue to humans. Female offspring produced by these modified insects will die, according to Oxitec’s plan, causing the population to collapse.

“Precise. Environmentally sustainable. Non-toxic,” the company says on its website of its product trademarked as the “Friendly” mosquito.

Scientists independent from the company and critical of the proposal say not so fast. They say unleashing the experimental creatures into nature has risks that haven’t yet been fully studied, including possible harm to other species or unexpectedly making the local mosquito population harder to control.

Even scientists who see the potential of genetic engineering are uneasy about releasing the transgenic insects into neighborhoods because of how hard such trials are to control.

“There needs to be more transparency about why these experiments are being done,” said Natalie Kofler, a bioethicist at Harvard Medical Schoolwho has followed the company’s work. “How are we weighing the risks and benefits?”

Keep reading

Eisenhower warned the World of the “danger that Public Policy could become the captive of a Scientific-Technological Elite” in 1961; but we didn’t listen

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the American people, delivered on the 17th of January 1961, has gone down in history as a truly thought-provoking speech culminating in a warning about the internal threats and dangers facing the country.

Written in eloquent language that would be hard to imagine coming forth from the lips of the current American president or his predecessor, it was apparently prepared by Eisenhower and his brother months in advance, rather than at the last moment, which is what many people had assumed.

And while pretty much everyone in the world has focused on his clear warning about the dangers of an excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the “military-industrial complex”, few have paid attention to—much less been guided by—the second warning he gave, one which is far more relevant today, given the current unmitigated disaster being unleashed upon humanity globally.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.[i]

These are the words that have been quoted time and again to explain the JFK assassination, the inexorable rise of the arms lobby in Congress, the ever-increasing war-mongering that has characterised US foreign policy over the last half century, the trillions that have been spent on the military—both in the US and in client states abroad—and even the lost trillions that have disappeared into black budgets and the secret space programme. These explanations and conclusions are not altogether incorrect or misplaced.

In fact, they do help shed light on how American democracy became subverted, how and why the American people lost the ability to influence their future through elections, and how the American economy became bogged down and is now drowning in its own debt, since the US military-industrial complex has indeed been one of the main protagonists in all of these developments.

However, what we have seen over the last two and a half years—which is nothing less than a global coup d’état—suggests that Eisenhower’s warning, though completely correct and prescient, goes some way to explaining only the events of the decades following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and not the events of the last few years, such as the Covid-19 plandemic/scamdemic, the jabbing of billions of people across the world by a gene-editing bioweapon, the destruction of the West’s middle class, the relentless roll-out of digital tools and platforms to upend multiple aspects of daily living/human interaction, and the dramatic escalation in censorship and information manipulation to confuse and fool the populations of countries everywhere.

In all of these developments, the US military-industrial complex has not been the protagonist. Indeed, it too has been a victim — a victim of another group of conspirators which has surpassed it in terms of reach, effectiveness and evil intent. To understand the nature of this group, it is necessary to explore President Eisenhower’s speech further and spot the second dire warning he issued. Here it is:

… we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.[ii]

Keep reading

Creepy Bill Gates Threw Millions at New Technology of Under-Skin Nanoparticle QR Code, to be Scanned by Smartphones

Last year it was revealed that Pentagon scientists working in a secretive united created a microchip to be inserted underneath the skin, that can detect Covid-19 before the body exhibits symptoms.

60 Minutes interviewed retired Colonel Matt Hepburn, an army infectious disease physician, who spent years with the secretive defense advanced research projects agency or DARPA, working on technology he hopes will ensure COVID-19 is the last pandemic.

“Dr. Hepburn showed us a few current projects, some sound like they’re from an episode of “Star Trek.” Consider a ship like the USS Theodore Roosevelt — hobbled last year when 1,271 crew members tested positive for the coronavirus. What if everyone on board had their health monitored with this subdermal implant, now in late-stage testing. It’s not some dreaded government microchip to track your every move, but a tissue-like gel engineered to continuously test your blood,” 60 Minutes host Bill Whitaker said.

Dr. Hepburn told 60 Minutes that the microchip is like a “check engine light.”

The segment aired on “60 Minutes.”

Keep reading

Signed as Law: Utah Expands Limits on Drone Surveillance

On Monday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill into law expanding state limits on government drone surveillance. The legislation will not only establish important privacy protections at the state level; it will also help thwart the federal surveillance state.

Rep. Ryan Wilcox (R) introduced House Bill 259 (HB259) on Jan. 28. In 2014, Utah passed a law requiring police to get a warrant before conducting drone surveillance in most situations. HB259 clarifies that the law applies “to any imaging surveillance device, as defined in Section 77-23d-102 when used in conjunction with an unmanned aircraft system.” This includes “radar, sonar, infrared, or other remote sensing or detection technology.”

In effect, the enactment of HB259 clarifies that this type of technology cannot be used in conjunction with a drone without a warrant.

The Senate passed HB259 by a 23-0 vote. The House approved the measure by a vote of 70-0. With Gov. Cox’s signature, the law goes into effect May 4.

Keep reading

Eric Adams considering using drones to fight NYC crime, sources say

Mayor Eric Adams is mulling a mini-army of drones to fight surging crime in the Big Apple — possibly deploying the high-flying robocops from rooftops as watchful guardians of Gotham, sources told The Post.

Tel Aviv-based Blue White Robotics and Easy Aerial of Brooklyn were two drone manufacturers featured earlier this month at an event to launch a NYC-Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Adams attended the gathering in the Williamsburg Hotel, and sources said the mayor was so impressed with the joint presentation that he suggested his chief technology officer Matthew Fraser and the firms’ honchos begin talks about the city potentially buying drones and expanding the NYPD’s use of them.

“Eric is a big booster of drones and how they can be used to streamline government function, but obviously whatever he would try to roll out would be constrained” under existing laws limiting drone use, said a source familiar with the mayor’s thinking.

The drone makers – whose clients include the US Department of Defense, Air Force and Customs and Border Protection – say they’ve dubbed the plan the “Soteria Project,” derived from a Greek word meaning “deliverance from a crisis.”

Keep reading