A jet-based drone rocket called Palyanytsia was fired onto RF territory overnight.
This is a new rocket drone type developed in Ukraine, or given to Zelenskyiy, and will seriously escalate the situation.
It contains aluminum fog that when blown up creates a vacuum effect — thermobaric rocket drone, 1500 km range.
The drone rocket was launched during the night of Aug 24.
Anduril says it has received active interest in integrating more than a dozen new military and commercial payloads onto its Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle (XL-AUV). Payload testing and otherwise demonstrating the Ghost Shark’s highly modular design are core focuses of new work on the underwater drone that is now set to occur in the United States.
The War Zone learned these and other new details about Ghost Shark in an interview earlier this week with Dr. Shane Arnott, Senior Vice President for Engineering at Anduril and the company’s maritime lead.
The Ghost Shark’s U.S. debut, which Anduril announced this week, came at the biennial U.S. Navy-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise in Hawaii, where the uncrewed undersea vehicle (UUV) was displayed to attendees. RIMPAC 2024 wrapped up on August 1. Development of Ghost Shark began in Australia in 2022 for that country’s navy, which is looking to acquire at least three of the UUVs by 2025. The Ghost Shark now in the United States is an additional example that Anduril built using its own funds.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an important research topic in the last decade, where things refer to interconnected machines and objects with embedded computing capabilities employed to extend the Internet to many application domains. While research and development continue for general IoT devices, there are many application domains where very tiny, concealable, and non-intrusive Things are needed.
The properties of recently studied nanomaterials, such as graphene, have inspired the concept of Internet of NanoThings (IoNT), based on the interconnection of nanoscale devices. Despite being an enabler for many applications, the artificial nature of IoNT devices can be detrimental where the deployment of NanoThings could result in unwanted effects on health or pollution. The novel paradigm of the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) is introduced in this paper by stemming from synthetic biology and nanotechnology tools that allow the engineering of biological embedded computing devices.
Based on biological cells, and their functionalities in the biochemical domain, Bio-NanoThings promise to enable applications such as intra-body sensing and actuation networks, and environmental control of toxic agents and pollution. The IoBNT stands as a paradigm-shifting concept for communication and network engineering, where novel challenges are faced to develop efficient and safe techniques for the exchange of information, interaction, and networking within the biochemical domain, while enabling an interface to the electrical domain of the Internet.
More than three years ago, in May 2021, I wrote a piece here detailing the importance of a relatively obscure mineral, antimony, to the ultimate success of alternative energy sources like wind and solar and electric vehicles, and thus to the progress of the energy transition itself.
Even more pressing is the fact that antimony is critical to the needs of major weapon systems used by the U.S. military. The piece also discussed the urgent need for policymakers to find ways to speed up the permitting processes for mining of this and an array of other critical energy minerals if the United States were to avoid becoming almost wholly dependent on China for its future energy needs.
The story was focused on the struggles of Perpetua Resources, a mining company that had at the time struggled for over a decade to obtain the needed local, state, and federal permits to mine a long-known major resource of antimony at the Stibnite mine in Idaho. Stibnite is a long-ago abandoned gold mining operation that Perpetua says it could quickly place into antimony production once all the needed permits are secured.
Since that time, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and fellow sponsors have tried to move federal permitting reform bills in both 2022, and again this year. The 2022 bill failed in the face of bipartisan opposition, and this year’s effort currently seems doomed to the same fate. It must seem to Sen. Manchin that no one in Washington, D.C., other than himself and a handful of fellow members of congress, is serious about getting anything real done on this pressing issue that is essential to the entire energy transition effort.
The push to develop digital ID and expand its use in the US is receiving a boost as the country’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is launching a new project.
NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has teamed up with 15 large financial and state institutions, as well as tech companies, to research and develop a way of integrating Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) into financial services. But according to NIST, this is just the start and the initial focus of the program.
The agreement represents an effort to tie in yet more areas of people’s lives in their digital ID (“customer identification program requirements” is how NIST’s announcement describes the focus of this particular initiative). These schemes are often criticized by rights advocates for their potential to be used as mass surveillance tools.
On 27 March 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a Yugoslav Army unit (3rd Battalion of the 250th Air Defense Missile Brigade, which was under the leadership of Colonel Zoltán Dani) shot down an F-117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft of the United States Air Force by firing a S-125 Neva/Pechora surface-to-air missile. It was the first ever shootdown of a stealth technology airplane. The F-117, which entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 1983 was the first operational aircraft to be designed using stealth technology; by comparison, the Yugoslav air defenses were considered relatively obsolete. The F-117 fleet was officially retired on April 22, 2008.
Innovative tactics and leaders who know what they are about can take ancient weapons to destroy “state of the art” weapons systems and platforms such as the use of ancient pike tactics at Stirling Bridge to slaughter the English King’s modern heavy horse on 11 September 1297 in Scotland or the English victory against the French at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin’s Day). During WWII, the Russian-Finnish War in 1939-40 set a David versus Goliath fight that saw a very lop-sided body-count for the Russians fighting the tiny Finnish forces.
Stealth is very expensive and puts tremendous constraints on the utility of the the platform employing it. In the calculus of war, its use diminishes over time. Yet another exemplar of the adage that complexity and sophistication doesn’t always yield martial advantage. The stealth capability has been oversold on shaky science in the art of war.
In a fight with peer and near-peer adversaries, the stealth advantage is negligible.
It is overpriced and the enemy always gets a vote.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrating into everyday life – as chatbots, digital assistants, and internet search guides, for example. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems – which consume large amounts of text data to learn associations – can create all sorts of written material when prompted and can ably converse with users. LLMs’ growing power and omnipresence mean that they exert increasing influence on society and culture.
So it’s of great import that these artificial intelligence systems remain neutral when it comes to complicated political issues. Unfortunately, according to a new analysis recently published to PLoS ONE, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
AI researcher David Rozado of Otago Polytechnic and Heterodox Academy administered 11 different political orientation tests to 24 of the leading LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Twitter’s Grok. He found that they invariably lean slightly left politically.
“The homogeneity of test results across LLMs developed by a wide variety of organizations is noteworthy,” Rozado commented.
This raises a key question: why are LLMs so universally biased in favor of leftward political viewpoints? Could the models’ creators be fine-tuning their AIs in that direction, or are the massive datasets upon which they are trained inherently biased? Rozado could not conclusively answer this query.
“The results of this study should not be interpreted as evidence that organizations that create LLMs deliberately use the fine-tuning or reinforcement learning phases of conversational LLM training to inject political preferences into LLMs. If political biases are being introduced in LLMs post-pretraining, the consistent political leanings observed in our analysis for conversational LLMs may be an unintentional byproduct of annotators’ instructions or dominant cultural norms and behaviors.”
San Francisco’s City Attorney has filed a lawsuit against the owners of 16 websites that have allowed users to “nudify” women and young girls using AI.
The office of San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu on Aug. 15 said he was suing the owners of 16 of the “most-visited websites” that allow users to “undress” people in a photo to make “nonconsensual nude images of women and girls.”
A redacted version of the suit filed in the city’s Superior Court alleges the site owners include individuals and companies from Los Angeles, New Mexico, the United Kingdom and Estonia who have violated California and United States laws on deepfake porn, revenge porn and child sexual abuse material.
The websites are far from unknown, either. The complaint claims that they have racked up 200 million visits in just the first half of the year.
One website boasted that it allows its users to “see anyone naked.” Another says, “Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates when you can just use [the website] to get her nudes,” according to the complaint.
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday called for increased immigration, insisting “we need more people, especially with AI coming.”
“We’re going to let a lot of people come in, because we need more people, especially with AI coming and all the different things,” Trump said. “And the farmers need, everybody needs but we’re going to make sure they’re not murderers and drug dealers.”
Trump’s position on AI puts him to the left of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
Fink, who has spent years pushing open borders and mass immigration onto America, told the World Economic Forum earlier this year that “xenophobic” countries with “declining populations” may actually be the “big winners” in a future dominated by AI and robotics.
Review bombing has become a way of life, as shows like Star Wars: The Acolyte have been inundated with fake reviews bashing the series. Now, the Federal Trade Commission is taking action against fake reviews and A.I.-generated reviews. But this doesn’t mean that the federal government is going to show up at your door if you leave a negative review.
As laid out on the FTC’s official site, the new rule isn’t targeting individuals who write bad reviews out of spite. Instead, it’s going after reviews–either written by people or artificial intelligence–that accept compensation in return for favorable coverage and false testimonials. These practices artificially suppress real reviews, and often misrepresent their products.
“Fake reviews not only waste people’s time and money, but also pollute the marketplace and divert business away from honest competitors,” said FTC Chair Lina Khan in a statement. “By strengthening the FTC’s toolkit to fight deceptive advertising, the final rule will protect Americans from getting cheated, put businesses that unlawfully game the system on notice, and promote markets that are fair, honest, and competitive.”
Essentially, companies will no longer be allowed to buy reviews without also stating that they were written by A.I. or by someone who never actually used the product. Businesses are also prohibited from offering real consumers any kind of incentive to leave a review, either positive or negative.
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