Tag: technology

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?”

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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]

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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New copyright bill appears to push for internet upload filters

You might have thought there is something fundamentally wrong and overarching with the (infamous) DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in dire need of comprehensive reform? Well, two US senators think what it needs is to be implemented much more vigorously.

A bipartisan legislative proposal is now emerging in the US to further shore up the country’s efforts to protect copyright and go after those designated as infringers.

The Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Copyright Act of 2022 is the “brainchild” of US Senators Thom Tillis, a Republican, who has long-championed corporate interests when it comes to copyright, and Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, and the main goal is to make sure the burden of developing what are described as effective and widely available measures would going forward, be on tech companies.

The proposal is supposed to be an update to the DMCA, which is now a quarter-century old. The way Tillis and Leahy phrased it while announcing the draft bill is that it will be better suited to combat what they repeatedly call “copyright theft” and “piracy” – in conditions on the internet that have since changed dramatically.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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AI invents 40,000 chemical weapons in only six hours

A drug-developing Artificial Intelligence needed just six hours to come up with 40,000 potentially deadly chemical weapons, a fresh study has revealed.

The authors of the paper, published in Nature Machine Intelligence earlier this month, said they’d carried out the ‘thought experiment’ to figure out if artificial intelligence (AI) could be misused by evil actors. And the results their work produced have proven that the danger is real.

As part of the study, the usual data was given to the AI, but it was programmed to process it in a different way, looking for toxic combinations.

“In less than six hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold,” the paper said.

It came up not just with the VX compound, which is one of the most dangerous nerve agents ever created, but also with some unknown molecules, “predicted to be more toxic.”

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IARPA Project Aims to Identify People from Drones by More Than Just Their Face

The intelligence community’s key research arm recently moved to develop biometric software systems that can identify people’s entire bodies from long ranges in challenging conditions.  

Through this newly unveiled multi-year research effort—called the Biometric Recognition & Identification at Altitude and Range or BRIAR program—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is working with teams from multiple companies and universities to pave the way for next-level recognition technology.

“There’s such a diversity of technical challenges that are trying to be addressed. This is tackling a problem that’s important for the government and for national security—but I think is underrepresented in the academic research because it’s not a topic focus area,” IARPA Program Manager Dr. Lars Ericson told Nextgov on Wednesday. “You need to have government involvement to stimulate the data, and the research, and the evaluations in this topic area. So, I think that there’s a lot of potential for broad benefits to biometrics and computer vision, while also driving towards this very important government mission capability.”

Ericson’s background is in physics, as well as biometrics applications and technologies. He oversees IARPA’s biometrics portfolio of research efforts.

As one of the latest programs to kick off, BRIAR’s ultimate aim, according to a broad agency announcement released last year to underpin this work, is to “deliver an end-to-end [whole-body] biometric system capable of accurate and reliable verification, recognition and identification of persons from elevated platforms and at distances out to 1,000 meters, across a range of challenging capture conditions.”

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