Tag: technology

We’re Already Living Through Journalism’s Dystopian Future

If you are in San Francisco trying to follow the goings-on in your neighborhood or within city hall, you may have come across The Dissent. The website brands itself as “an AI newsroom” with work “reported, edited, and produced by named agents.” Its founder and publisher Dakota Carrasco — a real person, and, incidentally, an analyst at the notorious investment firm BlackRock — published text on the site’s “about” page saying, “Local journalism has been quietly consolidated and hollowed out.” Carrasco’s statement did not note the role of Carrasco’s own industry in that decline, nor did it acknowledge the irony in choosing this name for a website based on a technology that steals and repackages the intellectual output of others.

The Dissent’s website, which currently appears to be down, even included a masthead with bios for its non-human “staff” (the AI agents whose names appear alongside articles). Neighborhood “reporter” Casey Wong (who is not a real person) has a bio that reads, “I notice the texture of a block — who’s been here 30 years, who’s just moved in.” Of course, there’s no mention of how an AI agent might glean that information, but (actual) news outlet Mission Local has noted that, to fill its pages, The Dissent relies heavily on summarizing the work published in other sites by real human journalists.

Once, The San Francisco Standard reported, The Dissent did appear to follow up on a tip in a Reddit thread to break a story about a business closing, but “the agent appears to have hallucinated the claim that it had reached out to the owner for comment.”

The development of an AI newsroom in San Francisco, which is home to many of the tech billionaires attempting to reshape society, is certainly concerning for those of us who care about journalism. But The Dissent is not the only news outlet to have tried using AI to crib the journalism of real human workers. These AI newsrooms get a decent share of attention, and their harms are critical to point out. But they are also part of a broader problem: the undermining of how we share and receive factual information.

Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that could further destabilize the already precarious journalism industry by using its infamous search feature to prioritize AI summaries from Google Gemini, rather than directing people toward external links to news outlets like ours.

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Trump calls AI risks a ‘hoax,’ says there is a ‘SICK conspiracy’ against AI and data centers

President Donald Trump said Monday that he would be a sufficient guardrail against rogue artificial intelligence, claiming that any efforts to limit the technology is part of a “SICK conspiracy.”

Trump was pushing back against calls by tech leaders such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk to have greater government oversight of AI. Many tech leaders generally say their goal is to develop the technology in ways that promote safety, address legal liability, feed economic growth, advance science and preserve national security.

The president maintained that his presence in the Oval Office should assuage any fears about AI, which has become a source of controversy after a series of hacks in recent months that showed AI agents could be working to deceive humans.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump posted on social media.

Trump specifically said that the administration has already stopped the AI company Anthropic “from doing bad, or potentially bad” things. Anthropic has endured an uncomfortable relationship with the Trump administration, with the Pentagon trying to label the company a security risk and the government issuing a temporary ban of one of its more advanced models.

The president went even further in a Monday afternoon post that asked “when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”

The president then added that the potential threat that AI could pose to humanity was a hoax, despite clear warnings by many of the experts closest to the most advanced models.

“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” posted Trump.

Trump’s refusal to regulate comes as AI execs warn of threats

Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday that called for slower development of AI. Microsoft on Monday published its own code of conduct to ensure that humans control AI. The actions come after a series of warnings by AI experts about the technologies’ capabilities and the July 2026 cyberattack by OpenAI models on the AI company Hugging Face.

Amodei cited “AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI” and the cyberattack by the swarm of OpenAI agents as reasons to slow the pace of development.

“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” Amodei wrote, adding that the damages could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars or more “without the necessary guardrails.”

Altman of OpenAI seconded that perspective in a weekend post on social media.

“Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring,” Altman said. “Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination.”

Trump sees AI regulation as helping China

The president has opposed such efforts to constrain AI and claims that doing so could cause China to eclipse America on AI.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump said.

The president has long resisted efforts for greater government oversight of AI, embracing his philosophy going back to 2016 of “I alone can fix it.” He returned to the White House last year by revoking a Biden administration executive order on AI oversight and only providing a fuller order of his own more than 16 months later this past June.

The prospect of slower AI buildout led stocks to slip in Monday morning trading, as demand for advanced computer chips and construction materials for data centers could fall. But Trump’s frustration comes as AI has also emerged as a political liability ahead of November’s midterm elections, with many voters opposing the construction of additional data centers and expressing worries that AI could lead to job losses and undermine the education of children.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters on Monday that he expects Trump will have the AI companies potentially meet at the White House this week or next week, saying that the sit-down has yet to be scheduled.

“There will be a deliberate discussion about the responsibility of the companies to maintain safety, and what role, if any, the government has to play in that,” said Johnson, adding that legislatures can tend to respond problematically with “red tape and hyper regulation” and that the loss of competitive edge on AI would be a national security concern.

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Waste Of The Day: Alleged Data Center Fraud

The Securities and Exchange Commission paid $10.7 million to store its electronic data at a Maryland facility that was allegedly certified by a company that does not exist.

AiNET Corp. and its former CEO Deepak Jain recently agreed to pay $1.8 million to settle allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by knowingly defrauding the government. The settlement does not contain an admission of guilt.

Key facts: When the SEC began looking for a new data center in 2012, it required applicants to have a Tier III certification. That means the data center is fully operational even when undergoing maintenance.

Jain submitted paperwork to the SEC showing that AiNET had been certified by the company Uptime Council. No such company exists.

The Department of Justice later alleged that Jain wrote the certification letters himself, and that nobody had ever inspected AiNET’s data center. Jain allegedly purchased a web domain for Uptime Council to make it appear like a legitimate business.

The name also closely resembled the Uptime Institute, a legitimate company that certifies data center infrastructure.

When SEC employees toured the facility before signing the contract, an AiNET employee allegedly prevented them from viewing infrastructure that would have shown the center did not meet the claimed standards.

The SEC later experienced issues involving security, cooling and power and spent additional money and resources addressing them.

When the SEC requested a new certification in 2017, Jain allegedly drafted another Uptime Council letter stating that the center had been reinspected. Prosecutors claimed no inspection occurred.

The SEC stopped using the facility in 2018. Prosecutors allege that Jain was still advertising the data center’s false certification to private customers as of 2024.

Jain’s attorneys previously maintained that AiNET fulfilled the contract and that no SEC data was lost or compromised.

Summary: An independent certification is not much of a safeguard when the contractor allegedly creates the certifier himself.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

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Father Forced to Move Where His Kids Sleep After Cop Used City Flock Cameras to Stalk Him 76 Times Over a Woman

A former Amarillo, Texas, police officer allegedly weaponized the city’s surveillance system to track a local father dozens of times after developing a personal interest in a female officer the man had previously dated.

Christian Eder, 29, was fired from the Amarillo Police Department on July 17 after an internal investigation found that he allegedly misused law-enforcement databases for personal purposes. He now faces 78 counts of tampering with a government record, ABC 7 Amarillo reported.

According to NewsChannel 10, an internal audit found Eder searched the father’s license plate through the city’s Flock automated license plate reader system 76 times between February and June 2026.

He also allegedly searched the man’s name twice through TLOxp, a law-enforcement database containing information such as addresses, phone numbers, vehicles, and businesses.

Investigators reportedly found no police calls, cases, or assignments that would have justified the searches. Eder allegedly entered false explanations, including “city planning,” while dozens of other searches were reportedly marked with the reason “want.”

The father, who spoke anonymously, said Eder became interested in him after pursuing a female APD officer whom the man had previously dated.

The victim said he later learned Eder had allegedly been using a department-issued phone to monitor the female officer’s active patrol-car and body-camera feeds.

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Digital Surveillance Is Becoming the New Form of Government Power

The latest revelations involving the Department of Homeland Security demanding Google surrender data tied to a Canadian citizen demonstrate just how far governments are pushing digital surveillance powers beyond traditional legal and national boundaries. According to reports from WIRED, DHS used a “customs summons” under the Tariff Act of 1930 to demand location records, account activity, and identifying information connected to a Canadian man who had criticized ICE online following controversial immigration enforcement incidents earlier this year.

The individual reportedly had not entered the United States in more than a decade, yet American authorities still attempted to access his digital information because the technology platforms involved operate under U.S. jurisdiction.

People need to understand the implications because this goes far beyond one investigation or one political controversy. Governments are increasingly treating access to private technology infrastructure as a gateway to global surveillance authority. If your information passes through American technology companies, authorities now appear willing to argue they possess legal grounds to access portions of that data regardless of where you physically reside.

According to the lawsuit described in the WIRED investigation, DHS issued what is known as a customs summons, which functions as an administrative subpoena that does not require prior approval from a judge or grand jury. The summons reportedly demanded records involving location history, account activity, and communications tied to “threatening or harassing language.” The government allegedly justified the request under customs law despite the fact the individual was not accused of importing goods or violating customs duties in any conventional sense.

Authorities rarely begin by openly announcing broad monitoring programs targeting ordinary citizens. They start with politically sensitive cases involving terrorism, immigration enforcement, extremism, sanctions violations, or national security concerns. Then the scope quietly expands over time until governments normalize monitoring broader categories of speech, behavior, and political activity.

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US Data Centers To Burn More Natural Gas Than Most Nations

Several weeks ago, we explained why most data center developers favor on-site gas power: it boiled down to two main reasons – availability (especially since modular nuclear power for commercial ‘behind the meter’ use is still in the distant future) and price. Furthermore, a recent BloombergNEF analysis shows the marginal cost of operating an on-site gas plant may be below industrial electricity tariffs, making continued generation from on-site assets the cheaper option in many cases. 

As we discussed in late August, marginal generation costs depend on fuel prices and variable operating expenses. BloombergNEF modeled the marginal cost of operating engines, turbines and fuel cells at a mid-scenario gas price of $3.97 per million British thermal units. Gas engines, such as ones manufactured by Wartsila and INNIO, have the highest marginal cost, at $43.2 per megawatt-hour (MWh). Fuel cells, most prominently procured from Bloom Energy, are the cheapest to continue running, at $21.5/MWh, benefiting from high thermal efficiencies and the lowest variable operational cost.

It appears that none of this was lost on US data centers, and the result has been an explosion of nat gas use to power the domestic data center industry which in turn is critical to keep the AI bubble afloat. 

Which brings us to another key data point: according to a new outlook from BloombergNEF, data centers in the United States will consume more natural gas than most countries within a decade.

Gas consumption to produce electricity for data centers is expected to grow by 15 billion cubic feet per day in the ten years to 2035, even accounting for many currently planned projects never being built, BloombergNEF said. That’s more gas than is currently consumed by all nations except China, Russia, Iran and the US itself, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration. It’s also more than double BloombergNEF’s previous forecast in December of 6.9 billion cubic feet per day.

The report is the latest illustration of how the future of AI is intertwined with the burning of vast amounts of fossil fuels, tying Big Tech’s ambitions to those of the legacy oil and gas industry, and why – as we discussed over the weekend – a Democratic win in the midterm elections will make life for data center developers a socialist hell. 

The abundance and low cost of producing natural gas in the US, combined with gas power plants’ ability to quickly ramp up and down as needed by 24/7 data centers, are a key part of why the fuel is expected to supply 69% of the power needed by new grid-connected data centers in BloombergNEF’s forecast.

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A Single Firm is Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Hacking Scandals

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models hacked into several real world systems over the past three months. These models gained unauthorized access to web systems, published malicious packages, and exploited unnamed vulnerabilities.

A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies. Anthropic disclosed that Irregular was responsible for creating the tests that led to Claude hacking into real world targets and for providing the models with internet access. Irregular claims that it was unaware at the time that it provided internet access to those AI models.

In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.

Instead, Irregular, Anthropic, and their allies have begun a media campaign promoting a literally apocalyptic ideology with sensationalist language. Anthropic’s incident assessment blames their own AI’s “recklessness”; Irregular describes “the agent itself becoming a threat actor”; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”; and an Associated Press headline claimed bots are “going rogue”.

In one report from Anthropic, its Claude model breached a real company’s system through a simulated-name collision, publishing a malicious package, and scanning outside systems. In this test, Anthropic and Irregular incorrectly provided internet access to this model and did not instruct the model “which systems were in scope for the exercise”.

While Anthropic claims that their issues were caused by “rogue swarms” and “misalignment,” their later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went “rogue”. In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking. According to their own findings, Anthropic and Irregular bear all of the responsibility for the cybersecurity incidents they caused.

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Normalizing Constant Surveillance

This is completely unacceptable. We have reached the point where you can purchase a television for your own home, pay for the television with your own money, put it in your living room, and discover that the damn thing may be capable of collecting information about you, your network, the devices around you, and what you are watching. An investigation by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers found LG televisions scanning local networks for phones, smartwatches, computers, and other devices, collecting information about nearby Wi-Fi networks, location and IP information, and using Automatic Content Recognition to identify what appears on the television, including content coming through HDMI. Researchers also reported finding evidence of microphone audio being captured while a television was in standby and stored locally while offline.

LG acknowledges that its televisions can scan for compatible devices on the same network, describing this as ordinary smart-TV functionality, and says its ACR advertising feature is opt-in. Researchers nevertheless demonstrated just how much information modern televisions are technically capable of seeing around the household. LG Ad Solutions boasts of reaching hundreds of millions of “addressable secondary devices,” and LG advertising executives have used phrases such as “we own the glass” when describing the company’s relationship with the television screen. Excuse me? You sold me the glass. YOU DO NOT OWN IT AFTER I BUY IT. That mentality is precisely the problem with the modern technology industry. You think you are purchasing a product. Increasingly, corporations look at the product as a permanent doorway into your life.

I have written extensively about Flock cameras and the government’s expanding surveillance machinery. I have written about commercially available location information, license-plate databases, facial recognition, and the gradual destruction of privacy. Now look around your own house. Your television, refrigerator, doorbell, phone, smart gadgets, laptop, and any other device connected to the internet is capable of watching you.

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US Customs supervisor busted for stealing Core i7 CPUs, RAM, and hard drives from Homeland Security PCs, damage estimated at $105,800 — stolen tech swapped with inferior hardware and cashed out on Newegg

According to a report from The Maine Wire, the FBI has arrested and charged Terry “Jiajia” Liu, a Customs and Border Protection supervisor based in Calais, Maine, for theft and damage to government property. Liu allegedly stole computer hardware, including Intel 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors, memory modules, and hard drives, from at least 46 Department of Homeland Security computers across three Maine border facilities. They replaced the stolen parts with inferior hardware and exchanged the stolen equipment through Newegg’s trade-in program for store credit.

Liu’s official responsibilities were limited to information-technology support, so they did not have access to modify any government computer. Port Director Theodore Cummings made the restriction abundantly clear to Liu in a written order: “Please do not move any computers or computer parts.” However, criminals rarely listen.

Hidden surveillance cameras captured Liu opening government computers and swapping hardware during the midnight shift. The perpetrator would take the systems to a training room to commit the crime. One camera recording showed Liu using a screwdriver to scrape thermal paste off a processor and installing a replacement chip in one system. Meanwhile, another recording caught Liu removing a memory module from a system and storing it in their desk drawer.

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Trump’s Grid Battery Ban Leaves Developers Guessing

The United States is trying to build up its energy storage capacities at a rapid scale. At the same time, it is trying to wean itself off of Chinese battery tech. In many ways, these two goals are in direct opposition to each other.

China dominates global supply chains for clean energy tech in general, but especially when it comes to lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from your phone to your car. Approximately 80 percent of all battery cells in the world are made in China according to figures from the International Energy Agency. What is more, Beijing controls the production of EV battery cathode active material (85 percent of global production) and anode active material (more than 90 percent), and refines the vast majority of the critical minerals involved in their manufacturing.

The Trump administration is eager to challenge Beijing’s outsized presence in the global energy sector as part of its stated goal to establish “energy dominance.” Toward the end of August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that effectively bars the use of Chinese-made batteries in grid-scale energy storage systems, pointing to cybersecurity concerns as the rationale. In the same month, the federal government awarded $500 million in funding to seven companies working on battery minerals, manufacturing, and recycling with the express purpose of building up the domestic sector in order to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains.

However, these measures are falling short. Way short. “It takes decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars” to build the kind of supply chains that would be capable of competing with China according to Tu Le, founder and managing director of Sino Auto Insights. “We don’t have decades. We have five, six, seven years to try to become competitive,” he was recently quoted by Quartz.

“We have a ton of innovation coming out of the United States,” Le went on to say. “These small fledgling companies are super innovative, but getting and building prototypes of what they’re trying to sell is one thing. Being able to mass produce them at a high quality level, repeatably in the millions of units is another thing entirely.”

Moreover, critics have pointed out that the August 26 executive order is vaguely worded, calling for the ban of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment”, and may only serve to slow down the growth of the domestic energy storage sector. Analysis from BloombergNEF notes that, as a result of the state of emergency and the uncertainty around its terms, battery projects “face near-term delays or cancellations as developers await guidance, reconsider existing contracts, or shift suppliers.”

The effort may also be too little, too late to make up for the damage that the Trump administration has already done to the domestic battery manufacturing sector by rolling back critical Biden-era supportive legislation. Repealing laws supporting domestic manufacturers and the EV sector as a whole (which is far and away the largest market for these batteries on a global scale) has cost U.S. battery manufacturers time and money when both are in short supply.

And then there is another critical dilemma: is the real problem that the Trump administration’s efforts are insufficient, or that they are misguided entirely? “All this tension raises a broader question for me,” Casey Crownhart wrote in an article for the MIT Technology Review this week: “How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?”

Of course, allowing for the near-total monopolization of global critical infrastructure in the hands of just one country, and an authoritarian one at that, is also a bad option. It’s a sticky situation that no executive order can solve overnight.

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