Tag: technology

CIA Used Top-Secret Tech to Locate Downed US Aviator in Iran, Director Says

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a press briefing on April 6 that the agency used classified capabilities over the weekend to locate and rescue a U.S. weapons system officer who was shot down deep behind enemy lines in Iran.

Although he said he could not discuss these methods in detail, Ratcliffe explained that the CIA has “unique” capabilities, which only President Donald Trump can deploy.

“We deployed both human assets and exquisite technologies—that no other intelligence service in the world possesses—to a daunting challenge, comparable to hunting for a grain of sand in the middle of a desert,” Ratcliffe said.

Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth joined him.

On Saturday morning, the CIA achieved its primary objective in finding and confirming the soldier was still alive, Ratcliffe said.

“[Ratcliffe] did a phenomenal job that night,” Trump said before introducing Ratcliffe to give more details about the mission.

Finding the injured U.S. service member, whose identity has not yet been released, was like finding a needle in a haystack, Trump said, for which the CIA was mostly responsible.

The soldier stuck to his training after being shot down, and while bleeding profusely, Trump said, he scaled cliff faces and embedded himself in treacherous mountain terrain to avoid detection.

It was a race against the clock, Ratcliffe said.

Meanwhile, the CIA was tasked with executing a deception campaign to misdirect Iranian forces trying to track him down.

The CIA director began his comments by touting “flawless” military operations and intelligence under the Trump administration, such as Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 to take out key Iranian nuclear facilities.

Others included the overnight mission to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro earlier this year and strikes against drug cartels in the Pacific and Caribbean to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.

Now, the same methods used in previous military operations are being used every day in Operation Epic Fury against Iran and were used in the rescue mission of the downed airman, Ratcliffe told reporters.

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Gunman fires 13 shots into home of Indiana politician who voted in support of datacenters

Shots were fired at an Indiana politician’s home and the gunman left behind a creepy note after the lawmaker voted for building artificial intelligence datacenters.

Democratic Indianapolis city councilor Rob Gibson said 13 rounds were fired at his home early Monday morning – as bullet holes could be seen in his front door. 

An eerie note reading ‘no datacenters’ was left under his front doormat, which lay amid shattered glass. 

Harrowing photos showed his wooden door riddled with bullet holes with jagged chunks of what had once been his glass screen door.

The councilman backed the project with a six-to-two vote last week, approving the Los Angeles-based company Metrobloks to build a datacenter in Indianapolis.

Gibson fully defended his approval of the project, stating that early estimates show at least $20 million could flow into the neighborhood as a result. 

‘Metrobloks has the potential to bring significant investment, create jobs, and generate long-term tax revenue that supports infrastructure, housing, and essential services,’ Gibson said in a statement. 

But angry locals have been slamming the plan for months, arguing that the datacenter would bring harmful environmental effects and disrupt their neighborhood, 13WTHR reported.

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Mexico Speeds Up Biometric ID Rollout

Mexico’s government wants you to believe that handing over your fingerprints, iris scans, and facial data is voluntary. President Claudia Sheinbaum has said so publicly.

But by July 2026, every one of the country’s roughly 130 million mobile phone lines must be linked to a biometric national ID, and unregistered numbers get suspended on July 1.

Refuse the biometric credential and lose your phone.

The CURP Biométrica upgrades Mexico’s existing population registry code, the Clave Única de Registro de Población, from an 18-character alphanumeric string into something far more personal. The updated system captures face, fingerprint, and iris biometrics, packages them with a QR code and digital signature, and produces what amounts to a mobile-readable identity document tied to your body.

Registration happens at RENAPO and Civil Registry offices, where staff scan all ten fingerprints, both irises, take a facial photograph, and record a digital signature. You’ll need a valid photo ID, a certified CURP, and an original or certified birth certificate just to walk in.

The government has framed this primarily as a tool for addressing Mexico’s crisis of forced disappearances. The biometric data feeds into a Unified Identity Platform connecting the National Population Registry with the National Forensic Data Bank and records held by prosecutors and intelligence agencies, enabling real-time identity searches. That’s the stated purpose.

The actual system being built does considerably more than locate missing people. The legislation gives broad access to biometric and personal information to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the National Guard, and the law doesn’t require authorities to notify citizens when their data gets accessed. You won’t know who’s looking at your biometrics, or why, or how often.

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US & EU Negotiate Biometric Data-Sharing Deal

Washington wants to run European fingerprints through American databases, and the EU is considering it. The Department of Homeland Security and the European Union are in formal negotiations over an arrangement that would give DHS direct query access to biometric records held by EU member states, a level of access that Brussels has never granted to a non-EU country for border security purposes.

The deal sits inside DHS’s Enhanced Border Security Partnership program, which effectively tells Visa Waiver Program countries to open their biometric databases or risk losing visa-free travel privileges. Washington has set a December 31, 2026, deadline for EBSP agreements to be operational. After that, DHS reviews each country’s compliance. Countries that fail to meet expectations risk suspension from the VWP, which would reimpose visa requirements on their citizens.

When DHS encounters a traveler, asylum seeker, visa applicant, or anyone flagged during immigration processing, it would query a participating country’s database using that person’s biometrics.

A match returns fingerprints and related identity data to DHS.

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NO-FLY ZONE: China is Dominant in Today’s Drone Industry – But It’s Tightening Penalties for Civilian Operators To Include Prison Time

To fly a drone over a Chinese city may result in a jail sentence.

China now dominates the global drone industry, but it has become one of the toughest places to fly an FPV due to the new regulations.

The New York Times reported:

“New regulations are sharply tightening rules for recreational and civilian operators. Since January, officials have ramped up the penalties for unauthorized flying of drones to include possible jail time. Starting in May, all drones must be registered with the owners’ real names, requiring operators to link their flight equipment to their official identification or cellphone number.

Permits will be required at least a day in advance in restricted zones, which cover most cities. The rules make an exception for small drones flying below 400 feet in some open areas, but those areas are very limited.”

Flight data will be transmitted to the government in real time, and in cities like Beijing, a near-total drone ban is now in force.

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Microsoft says Copilot is for entertainment purposes only, not serious use — firm pushing AI hard to consumers and businesses tells users not to rely on it for important advice

Microsoft used to push its AI services towards its user base, especially with the launch of the Copilot+ PC, but it seems that even the company itself does not trust its creation. According to the Microsoft Copilot Terms of Use, which was updated in October last year, the AI large language model (LLM) is designed for entertainment use only, and users should not use it for important advice. While this may be a boilerplate disclaimer, it’s quite ironic given how hard the company wants people to use Copilot for business uses and has integrated it into Windows 11.

“Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended,” the document said. “Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” This isn’t limited to Copilot, too. Other AI LLMs have similar disclaimers. For example, xAI says “Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving and is probabilistic in nature; therefore, it may sometimes: a) result in Output that contains “hallucinations,” b) be offensive, c) not accurately reflect real people, places or facts, or d) be objectionable, inappropriate, or otherwise not suitable for your intended purpose.”

These may sound common sense for people familiar with how LLMs work, but, unfortunately, some people treat AI output as gospel, even those who are supposed to know better. We’ve seen this with Amazon’s services, after some AWS outages were reportedly caused by an AI coding bot after engineers let it solve an issue without oversight. The Amazon website itself has also been hit with a few “high blast radius” incidents that were linked to “Gen-AI assisted changes,” resulting in senior engineers being called up in a meeting to resolve the matter.

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Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Putting Data Centers in Space?

Data centers present sprawling engineering and political problems, with ravenous appetites for land and resources. Building them on Earth has proven problematic enough — so why is everyone suddenly talking about launching them into space?

Data centers are giant warehouses for computer chips that run continuously, with up to hundreds of thousands of processors packed closely together taking up a mammoth footprint: An Indiana data center complex run by Amazon, for example, takes up more real estate than seven football stadiums. To operate nonstop, they consume immense amounts of electricity, which in turn is converted to intense heat, requiring constant cooling with fans and pumped-in water.

Fueled by the ongoing boom in artificial intelligence, Big Tech is so desperate to power its data centers that Microsoft successfully convinced the Trump administration to restart operations at the benighted Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

The data center surge has spawned a backlash, as communities grow skeptical about their environmental toll and ultimate utility of the machine learning systems they serve.

It’s in this climate that technologists, investors, and the world’s richest humans are now talking about bypassing Earth and its logistical hurdles by putting data centers in space. And if you take at face value the words of tech barons whose wealth in no small part relies on overstating what their companies may someday achieve, they’re not just novel but inevitable. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Jeff Bezos’s space launch firm Blue Origin has been working on an orbital data center project for over a year. Elon Musk, not known for accurate predictions, has publicly committed SpaceX to putting AI data centers in orbit. “There’s no doubt to me that a decade or so away we’ll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently told Fox News.

The prospect of taking a trillion-dollar industry that is already experiencing a historic boom and literally shooting it toward the moon has understandably created a frenzy within a frenzy.

But large questions remain: Is it even possible? And if it is, why bother?

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AI Influencing Elections: Anthropic Forms PAC Leading into Midterms as It Fights Trump Administration

AI company Anthropic, currently locked in a legal war with the Trump Administration, has filed paperwork to create a new corporate political action committee, claiming that “AnthroPAC” will make bipartisan donations to candidates. This was met with skepticism from conservatives who point out that 99 percent of the company’s past donations have gone to leftists.

The Hill reports that Anthropic submitted a statement of organization on Friday to form AnthroPAC, marking the AI company’s first employee-funded political action committee. The PAC will be financed exclusively through voluntary contributions from Anthropic employees, following a model commonly used by technology companies to participate in electoral politics.

According to information obtained by the Hill, the PAC is designed to operate on a bipartisan basis, with plans to distribute contributions to candidates across both major political parties. The committee will be managed by a supposedly bipartisan board of directors to oversee its activities and donation decisions.

Despite the stated bipartisan intent, several figures aligned with President Trump expressed doubt on Friday about whether the PAC would genuinely support candidates from both parties. Their skepticism stems from Anthropic’s contentious relationship with the Trump administration and the company’s previous political donations, which have been essentially all to Democratic candidates.

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Downed U.S. Drone Appears On TikTok Live As Iraqi Children Try To Sell It

As the U.S.-Iran conflict enters its second month, America’s Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or LUCAS, is becoming increasingly visible across the Middle East theater, a sign that the Department of War has learned one critical lesson from both the Iranian drone playbook and the Ukraine-Russia war: cheap drones are the future of warfare.

The latest news on LUCAS comes from an unverifiable TikTok video, amplified on X, which appears to show a downed drone seized by Iraqi children who are reportedly trying to sell it.

If authentic, the footage is another reminder that low-cost drones are proliferating so widely across the region that they will likely spread to other parts of the world.

In a separate video reposted on X, Iranian forces appear to have recovered a LUCAS drone in the Persian Gulf area.

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US federal judges increasingly turn to AI – study

Over half of US federal judges (60%) are using at least one AI tool in their judicial work, a recent Northwestern University study suggests. The research is based on responses from 112 federal judges, drawn from a random sample of 502 federal bankruptcy, magistrate, district court, and appellate court officials.

The use of AI in courtrooms has recently drawn attention for fabricated citations and other errors that have undermined confidence in some filings. The survey published earlier this week shows that these tools are now being adopted not just by lawyers, but also by federal judges.

The survey found that 60% of judges use AI at least occasionally for tasks such as reviewing documents, conducting legal research, and drafting or editing documents. Around 22% use it daily or weekly. Legal research was the most common (30%), followed by reviewing documents (16%).

Around one in three judges said they permit or encourage AI in their chambers, while 20% formally prohibit it. More than 45% reported that they have not received AI training from the court administration.

While judges acknowledge the risks of AI, experts warn that its unreliability could undermine judicial authority.

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