Tag: technology

Chief Advisor of Klaus Schwab and the WEF Boasts: Dreams of Dictators Are Now Possible

“Dictators always dreamt about eliminating privacy, monitoring everyone, knowing everything you do, think, and feel…It is now possible.”

The privacy versus security debate is as old as civilization, historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari said recently at the Athens Democracy Forum, an annual international conference in Greece. “But there is now something new: for the first time in history, it is possible to eliminate privacy completely,” said Harari, chief advisor to the World Economic Forum’s leader, Klaus Schwab. 

“It was not possible before,” said Harari, “It is now possible. A fundamental change has taken place. “Dictators always dreamt about completely eliminating privacy, monitoring everyone all the time, and knowing everything you do, and not just everything you do but everything you think, and everything you feel.”

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Forget extinction: U.S. company plans to bring back wooly mammoths

Wooly mammoths might be making a comeback thanks to Colossal Biosciences of the great state of Texas.

The Dallas-based company says it plans to take on the environmental issues that led to critical endangerment and perform the once seemingly impossible task of reviving long-extinct species.

Colossal announced it will pioneer the use of CRISPR technology along with other genome engineering technologies toward a practical working model of de-extinction initially focused on its long-term goals of successful restoration and rewilding of functional woolly mammoths, large proboscideans from the Ice Age, to the tundra, according to a press release.

It said genetic engineering applications expand beyond animals and have the potential to advance human health, enhance food production, reduce environmental impact, and optimize animal health and welfare.

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AI Used to Tap Massive Amounts of Smart Meter Data

The global market for Smart Electricity Meters estimated at US$10.5 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$15.2 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 6.7% over the analysis period.

For utilities aiming to modernize their grid operations with advanced solutions, smart electricity meters have emerged as an effective tool that can flawlessly address their various energy T&D needs in a simple and flexible manner.

Single-Phase, one of the segments analyzed in the report, is projected to record 6.2% CAGR and reach US$11.9 Billion by the end of the analysis period. After a thorough analysis of the business implications of the pandemic and its induced economic crisis, growth in the Three-Phase segment is readjusted to a revised 7.9% CAGR for the next 7-year period.

In the coming years, the growth of smart electricity meters market will be driven by the increasing need for products and services that enable energy conservation; government initiatives to install smart electric meters in order to address issues of energy requirement; the ability of smart electric meters to prevent energy losses due to theft and fraud, and to reduce the costs involved in manual data collection; increasing investments in smart grid establishments; the growing trend of integration of renewable sources to existing power generation grids; rising T&D upgrade initiatives especially in developed economies; increasing investments into construction of commercial establishments such as educational institutions and banking institutions in both developing and developed economies; and emerging growth opportunities in Europe with the ongoing rollouts of smart electricity meter rollouts in countries such as Germany, the UK, France, and Spain.

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Federal government spent $22M studying invisibility cloaks, anti-gravity, and moon tunnel

The federal government has spent years investing millions into funding research projects straight out of a sci-fi movie.

The projects dating back to 2009 include those focused on invisibility cloaking, traversable wormholes, negative energy, anti-gravity, high-frequency gravitational wave communications, and a proposal to tunnel a hole through the moon. Research into the projects was done to assess the military and defense capabilities of the new technologies.

The Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program, through the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, received $10 million in the 2008 Defense Supplemental Appropriation Act and $12 million from the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act for the research, according to documents obtained by Vice‘s Motherboard.

“None of these technologies ever seem to have gotten remotely close to being a reality, as far as we know,” the outlet claimed Tuesday.

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Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers

Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow’s invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.

The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.

The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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