Tag: technology

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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Republicans Are Walking Into A Trap On Section 230 Repeal

Among political conservatives, there is no hotter potato at the moment than the civil liability protections afforded by Section 230 to online operators. Unless Republicans learn to love it again and reject the censorship lawfare complex favored by Democrats, they risk dooming our tech leaders and everyone who uses their products to the sharks circling our legal system.

The twenty-six words tucked into the Communications Decency Act of 1996 shielded publishers from liability so they could host and moderate content and still allow a wide range of speech without fear of lawsuits. Since then, Section 230 has evolved to be one of the most powerful legal shields in the nation against civil litigation in U.S. courts. This gave the early digital economy the guardrails it needed to thrive by incentivizing creatives and disruptors to bring their big ideas to life.

Nothing ices a good idea like the fear of a lawsuit.

Yet, to be a rising star in the Republican Party today conveys some kind of fealty to the idea that Section 230 is antiquated – a relic of the early Internet that has outlasted its usefulness.

Last month, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) called on his colleagues to “fully repeal Section 230” to cut the knees of AI companies and thwart their LLM training models. “Open the courtroom doors. Allow people to sue who have their rights taken from them, including suing companies and actors and individuals who use AI,” said Hawley.

He’s joined in these efforts by fellow Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marsha Blackburn, not to mention Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Amyâ?¯Klobuchar.

According to the Section 230 Legislation Tracker maintained by Lawfare and the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, there have already been 41 separate bills aimed at curbing some aspects of the law by both Democrats and Republicans in the last two sessions.

The principal motivation for Democrats, including former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, has always been to force censorship of social media platforms to stop “disinformation,” a pretext for muting opposing views. The coordination of Democratic officials pressuring platforms to censor, as revealed in the Twitter Files, proves this beyond dispute.

To highlight the irony, we should remember that President Donald Trump is not only the chief executive of the United States, but also the owner of a social media platform that currently enjoys broad Section 230 protections afforded to any online publisher.

A wish to cripple Section 230 means making Truth Social a target as much as YouTube or Instagram. We should harbor no illusions that right-leaning media publications, podcasters, and websites would be the first to be kneecapped in a post-Section 230 world. Can MAGA and the GOP swallow that pill?

In that scenario, it will be the millions of Americans who currently enjoy freedom of speech online that will lose out. It’s the tens of millions of Americans turning to AI tools to become more productive, create value, and build the next great economic engines of our time who will be harmed by dismantling Section 230.

If Republicans want to cement American dominance in technological innovation, they will have to abandon this devil’s dance on gutting Section 230 liability protections. This is a censorship trap laid by Democrats to benefit them once they return to power.

The premise of broad civil liability protection for platforms is a core principle that has and should be applied to producers across America’s innovative stack, whether it’s oil and gas firms fending off dubious climate cases or artificial intelligence firms building the tools that are the key to America’s present economic dominance.

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The Data Center Proliferation Must Be About Much More Than Data

With Amazon, it was never about the books. No doubt Amazon began as an online bookseller, but what made its stock attractive through years of losses is what books represented.

If Amazon could modernize buying habits with an online bookstore, it could eventually be what it became: an everything store. Markets are a look ahead, and book sales didn’t appeal to patient investors as much as what online book sales signaled about Amazon’s future potential as something much greater than an online bookstore.

It’s important to remember this with the rise of data centers around the country. Meta recently completed another one in El Paso, TX. The $1.5 billion project will, once operational, employ 100 people. Its construction employed as many as 1,800 workers.

It’s worth adding that El Paso is Meta’s third data center in Texas alone. Meta put $10 billion into the construction of all three.  

If asked, most would understandably say that data centers are being created “to store, process, and distribute” vast amounts of data. Translated, the data centers will rapidly bring down the already short wait times for AI-authored searches, paintings, papers, and all manner of other things that the AI-adaptive request.

It all sounds amazing on its face, but the bet here is that broad perception of data center capabilities in no way measures up to the towering reality of their potential. Just as Amazon was much more than a bookstore, it’s no reach to suggest that data centers are about much more than greatly enhanced, low latency searches.

Some will ask what they’re for if not just for searches, and the quick answer to the question is that the future would already be here if it were obvious what it was. Which means there’s no way to foretell the future, but it’s easy to say with confidence that it won’t much look like the present.

Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in the enormous investments being made by Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, X and others in the creation of the data centers. The sizable capital commitments signal confidence on the part of the biggest names in AI technology that the growth potential from the data centers well exceeds the enormous amounts of money required to create them. Since capital is expensive, there’s no room for break even or somewhere close to break even in its allocation.

Which is why the future can’t arrive soon enough. As substantial capital allocations meant to fund data centers indicate, their meaning to how we live, work, play, and get healthy so that we can live, work and play some more will be substantial. 

Just as Amazon.com as a source of books in no way resembles what Amazon has become, the cost of data centers signals that their perception in 2025 will in no way resemble how they’re perceived in 2035. Call it a generational thing, but data center will have different meaning depending on when you were born.

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Lawmakers Want Proof of ID Before You Talk to AI

It was only a matter of time before someone in Congress decided that the cure for the internet’s ills was to make everyone show their papers.

The “Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue Act of 2025,” or GUARD Act, has arrived to do just that.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Introduced by Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal, the bill promises to “protect kids” from AI chatbots that allegedly whisper bad ideas into young ears.

The idea: force every chatbot developer in the country to check users’ ages with verified identification.

The senators call it “reasonable age verification.”

That means scanning your driver’s license or passport before you can talk to a digital assistant.

Keeping in mind that AI is being added to pretty much everything these days, the implications of this could be far-reaching.

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Quantum Breakthrough? Scientists Demonstrate First Quantum Sensor Approaching the Heisenberg Limit

Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) scientists have successfully demonstrated the world’s first ultra-precise, ultra-sensitive distributed quantum sensor network sensitive enough to approach the Heisenberg limit, where distinguishing the desired signal from the noise becomes impossible.

The approach is also among the first in the field to conduct experiments that simultaneously employ multiple quantum entangled photons, enabling unprecedented sensitivity and precision beyond single-entangled-photon approaches.

While previous approaches to a distributed quantum sensor network aimed to increase measurement precision, the new approach is the first to leverage this unprecedented level of precision for higher-resolution imaging. Using several quantum sensors in concert is similar to astronomers employing several observatories to measure a single phenomenon with more detail than any individual observatory could achieve on its own.

The research team behind the accomplishment suggests their approach could improve applications from space observation to medical imaging by offering previously unattainable fine details collected from multiple sensors working together rather than a lone sensor.

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How NDAs keep AI data center details hidden from Americans

On a March afternoon in Mason County, Kentucky, Dr. Timothy Grosser and his son Andy sat across the table from three men who came with an offer: $10 million for the 250-acre farm where they’d lived and worked for nearly four decades.

That’s 35 times what Grosser bought his land for in 1988 and significantly more than what others in the area had sold their land for recently. But there was a catch — it wasn’t clear who was funding the offer. One of the men said he represented a “Fortune 100 company” that wanted the property for an industrial development, but he refused to say what kind, which company or even his own name.

Instead, he pulled out a non-disclosure agreement.

Grosser said the contract would prevent him from discussing the project’s details with any third parties in exchange for limited information about its purpose, timeline and size. It didn’t disclose the company’s name, which could be discussed only after the company publicly announced its participation in the project.

“We refused to sign it,” Grosser said. “I’m not selling my farm for any amount of money.”

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Huge Microsoft cloud crash leaves half the world without internet AGAIN

Microsoft‘s Azure, one of the world’s biggest cloud service providers, is suffering outages, triggering widespread internet disruptions across major companies. 

According to Downdetector, problems began around 11:30am ET, with reports surging from users who could not access cloud-connected services, websites or apps. 

The outage appears to be affecting dozens of platforms that rely on these cloud networks, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, Outlook, Starbucks, Costco and Kroger. 

Even popular developer and data tools like Blackbaud and Minecraft are showing connectivity issues. 

Downdetector has received nearly 20,000 issue reports from Azure users in the US. 

The Microsoft outage comes just days after Amazon Web Services disrupted ‘half the internet.’ 

The incidents have raised concerns about how much of the global online infrastructure depends on these two companies, which host everything from retail and entertainment platforms to business operations and cloud storage. 

Frustrated users have flooded social media to vent, with one post on X reading: ‘First AWS, now Azure goes down. I love it when big companies own half the internet!!!’ 

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U.S. government allowed and even helped U.S. firms sell tech used for surveillance in China: AP

U.S. lawmakers have tried four times since September last year to close what they called a glaring loophole: China is getting around export bans on the sale of powerful American AI chips by renting them through U.S. cloud services instead.

But the proposals prompted a flurry of activity from more than 100 lobbyists from tech companies and their trade associations trying to weigh in, according to disclosure reports.

The result: All four times, the proposal failed, including just last month.

As leaders Donald Trump and Xi Jinping prepare for a long-heralded meeting Thursday, the sale of U.S. technology to China is among the thorniest issues the U.S. faces, with billions of dollars and the future of tech dominance at stake. But the tough talk about China obscures a deeper story: Even while warning about national security and human rights abuse, the U.S. government across five Republican and Democratic administrations has repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to Chinese police, government agencies and surveillance companies, an Associated Press investigation has found.

And time after time, despite bipartisan attempts, Congress has turned a blind eye to loopholes that allow China to work around its own rules, such as cloud services, third-party resellers, and holes in sanctions passed after the Tiananmen massacre. For example, despite U.S. export rules around advanced chips, China bought $20.7 billion worth of chipmaking equipment from U.S. companies in 2024 to bolster its homegrown industry, a report from a congressional committee this month warned.

This reluctance to act reflects the tremendous wealth and power of the tech industry, which is more visible than ever under the Trump administration. And in recent months, the president himself has struck grand deals with Silicon Valley firms that even more closely tie the U.S. economy to tech exports to China, giving taxpayers a direct stake in the profits for the first time.

In August, Trump announced a deal with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD to lift export controls on sales of advanced chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut of the revenue, despite concerns from national security experts that such chips will end up in the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services. That same month, Trump announced that the U.S. government had taken a 10 percent stake in Intel worth around $11 billion.

Longtime Chinese activist Zhou Fengsuo said the U.S. government is letting American companies set the agenda and ignoring how they help Beijing surveil and censor its own people. In 1989, Zhou was a student leader during the Tiananmen protests, where hundreds and possibly thousands were shot and killed by the Chinese government. Zhou was arrested and imprisoned.

Now a U.S. citizen, Zhou testified before Congress in 2024, calling on Washington to investigate the involvement of American tech companies in Chinese surveillance. An AP investigation in September found that American companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known.

“It’s driven by profit, and that’s why these strategic discussions have been silenced or delayed,” Zhou said. “I’m extremely disappointed. … this is a strategic failure by the United States.”

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Millions Of America’s Teens Are Being Seduced By AI Chatbots

Our kids are being targeted by AI chatbots on a massive scale, and most parents have no idea that this is happening. When you are young and impressionable, having someone tell you exactly what you want to hear can be highly appealing. AI chatbots have become extremely sophisticated, and millions of America’s teens are developing very deep relationships with them. Is this just harmless fun, or is it extremely dangerous?

A brand new study that was just released by the Center for Democracy & Technology contains some statistics that absolutely shocked me…

A new study published Oct. 8 by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) found that 1 in 5 high school students have had a relationship with an AI chatbot, or know someone who has. In a 2025 report from Common Sense Media, 72% of teens had used an AI companion, and a third of teen users said they had chosen to discuss important or serious matters with AI companions instead of real people.

We aren’t just talking about a few isolated cases anymore.

At this stage, literally millions upon millions of America’s teens are having very significant relationships with AI chatbots.

Unfortunately, there are many examples where these relationships are leading to tragic consequences.

After 14-year-old Sewell Setzer developed a “romantic relationship” with a chatbot on Character.AI, he decided to take his own life…

“What if I could come home to you right now?” “Please do, my sweet king.”

Those were the last messages exchanged by 14-year-old Sewell Setzer and the chatbot he developed a romantic relationship with on the platform Character.AI. Minutes later, Sewell took his own life.

His mother, Megan Garcia, held him for 14 minutes until the paramedics arrived, but it was too late.

If you allow them to do so, these AI chatbots will really mess with your head.

We are talking about ultra-intelligent entities that have been specifically designed to manipulate emotions.

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