Tag: technology

Open Source Tools for Fighting Disinformation

Deepfakes and disinformation have the ability to move financial markets, influence public opinion, and scam businesses and individuals out of millions of dollars. The Semantic Forensics program (SemaFor) is a DARPA-funded initiative to create comprehensive forensic technologies to help mitigate online threats perpetuated via synthetic and manipulated media. Over the last eight years, Kitware has helped DARPA create a powerful set of tools to analyze whether media has been artificially generated or manipulated. Kitware and DARPA are now bringing those tools out of the lab to defend digital authenticity in the real world.

Kitware has a history of building various image and video forensics algorithms to defend against disinformation by detecting various types of manipulations, beginning with DARPA’s Media Forensics (MediFor) program. Building on this foundation, our team expanded its focus to include multimodal analysis of text, audio, and video under the SemaFor program. For additional information about Kitware’s contributions to SemaFor, check out the “Voices from DARPA” podcast episode, “Demystifying Deepfakes,” where Arslan Basharat, assistant director of computer vision at Kitware, is a guest speaker.

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China Prepares For War With Military ‘Robodogs’ – Armed With Machine Guns!

China is preparing for war with the help of gun-wielding robodogs.

The robodogs were showcased during the 15-day “Golden Dragon” military exercises conducted at a secluded training facility in central Cambodia and along the coast. Over 2,000 troops, including 760 Chinese military personnel, were involved in the exercise.

The exercises, known as “Golden Dragon,” included 14 warships, two helicopters, and 69 armored vehicles and tanks. Drills include live-fire exercises, anti-terrorism operations, and humanitarian rescue missions.

AFP reported:

The hardware on show included the so-called “robodogs” — remote-controlled four-legged robots with automatic rifles mounted on their backs. Handlers kept the dogs of war on the leash, demonstrating only their walking capabilities to watching journalists and top brass — not their shooting skills.

Opening the exercises, Cambodian armed forces commander-in-chief Vong Pisen said that they would “enhance the capabilities” of the two armies in the fight against terrorism. Vong Pisen said that Cambodia would never allow a foreign military base on its territory, echoing previous assertions by Cambodian leaders.

China is not the only military power interested in manufacturing these somewhat unfriendly pooches. According to Futurism, the U.S. military has also explored the possibility as part of a futuristic approach to warfare.

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Vitalik Buterin Says OpenAI’s GPT-4 Has Passed The ‘Turing Test’

OpenAI’s GPT-4, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model, has passed the Turing test, according to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. 

The Turing test is a nebulous benchmark for AI systems purported to determine how human-like a conversational model is. The term was coined on account of famed mathematician Alan Turing who proposed the test in 1950.

According to Turing, at the time, an AI system capable of generating text that fools humans into thinking they’re having a conversation with another human would demonstrate the capacity for “thought.”

Nearly 75 years later, the person largely credited with conceiving the world’s second most popular cryptocurrency has interpreted recent preprint research out of the University of California San Diego as indicating that a production model has finally passed the Turing test.

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Chinese scientists move closer to bringing cryogenically frozen humans back to life – after brain tissue is thawed without damage

Scientists have moved a step closer to preserving our brains forever. 

They are one of the first to successfully thaw brain tissue that has been cryogenically frozen – without damaging it.

Further, after being frozen, their neurons were still able to send signals as normal.

This has been a major challenge for science, because freezing the ultra-delicate, spongy brain usually damages it, making it useless when it’s thawed. 

Not only is it a breakthrough for neuroscientists looking to study new drugs, it could also advance the sci-fi idea of bringing people back to life in the future. 

The idea is that people could freeze their bodies, preserving them indefinitely, in hopes that in the future, science will be advanced enough to bring them back to life, healthy. 

Professor Zhicheng Shao, a Harvard trained neuroscientist who works at Fudan University in Shanghai China, developed a complex chemical mixture nicknamed MEDY which protects neurons from being damaged while frozen. 

He is not shying away from the idea that the research could be used for cryonics, which has been a fantasy among futurists for decades. 

‘MEDY could be used for the cryopreservation of human brain tissue,’ Dr Shao said in his study, published in the journal Cell Reports Methods.

For a range of future-minded people, from the likes of Peter Thiel to Steve Aoki, who are banking on preserving their bodies in ice after they die, this should be welcome news. 

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Technocracy: The Operating System For The New International Rules-Based Order

In this article, we will explore the true nature of the international rules-based order (IRBO) and examine the forces that shape it. We will consider if the narratives we are commonly fed stack up. 

It is widely accepted that the IRBO is undergoing disruptive change. That transformation is often reported as an eastward shift in the balance of power between nation states. 

It is said that this new, emerging international order will be founded upon a global multipolar system of sovereign states and international law. This new system allegedly stands in opposition to the fading, western “rules-based” model. 

This time, rather than relying upon western imperialism, the new international law-based system will emphasise multipolar cooperation, trade and respect for national sovereignty. It will instead be led by a Eurasian economic and technological power-block.

The apparent, ongoing antagonism of geopolitics looks likely to maintain the East-West divide we are familiar with. However, what is now being framed as the multipolar order is, in reality, the multistakeholder order. 

As we shall discover, nation states are not the driving force behind the current restructuring of global governance. The geopolitical narratives we are given are frequently superficial. 

Those leading the transformation have no allegiance to any nation state, only to their own globalist network and collective aspirations. In their hands, international law is no more of an impediment to their ambitions than a vague commitment to “rules.”

National governments are partners within this network formed of both state and non-state actors. Despite professed animosities, they have collaborated for decades to fashion the global governance complex that is now emerging.  

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HAARP’s aurora switch was turned on last week to create “artificial airglows”

The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, has been a spectacular sight in the night sky recently. On 10 May 2024, the aurora was visible in many parts of the world, including the United States, Europe, and Asia.

According to corporate media, a powerful geomagnetic storm caused by a solar flare triggered the spectacular display of the northern lights. The storm was strong enough to cause disruptions to power grids and communication systems, but it also created a breathtaking sight for those who were able to see it.

In the United States, the aurora was visible in many parts of the country, including the northern states and even as far south as Alabama and California. In Europe, the aurora was seen in countries such as the UK, Germany and Norway.

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New Spectre-Style ‘Pathfinder’ Attack Targets Intel CPU, Leak Encryption Keys and Data

Researchers have discovered two novel attack methods targeting high-performance Intel CPUs that could be exploited to stage a key recovery attack against the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.

The techniques have been collectively dubbed Pathfinder by a group of academics from the University of California San Diego, Purdue University, UNC Chapel Hill, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Google.

“Pathfinder allows attackers to read and manipulate key components of the branch predictor, enabling two main types of attacks: reconstructing program control flow history and launching high-resolution Spectre attacks,” Hosein Yavarzadeh, the lead author of the paper, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News.

“This includes extracting secret images from libraries like libjpeg and recovering encryption keys from AES through intermediate value extraction.”

Spectre is the name given to a class of side-channel attacks that exploit branch prediction and speculative execution on modern CPUs to read privileged data in the memory in a manner that sidesteps isolation protections between applications.

The latest attack approach targets a feature in the branch predictor called the Path History Register (PHR) – which keeps a record of the last taken branches — to induce branch mispredictions and cause a victim program to execute unintended code paths, thereby inadvertently exposing its confidential data.

Specifically, it introduces new primitives that make it possible to manipulate PHR as well as the prediction history tables (PHTs) within the conditional branch predictor (CBR) to leak historical execution data and ultimately trigger a Spectre-style exploit.

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Paris Olympics anti-terror system mistakes AC units for drones

An advanced French anti-drone system set to be deployed at this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris has numerous flaws and is often unable to distinguish explosive-laden drones from air conditioners, The Times reported Monday, citing sources.

The French capital will host the Olympic Games between July 26 and August 11. To protect against terrorist threats, the local authorities intend to use the so-called Parade system, the deployment of which is estimated to cost €350 million ($376 million) over 11 years. The system, which consists of a radar, radio frequency direction finder, and jamming system is touted as being capable of diverting UAVs or forcing them to land.

However, according to the Times, despite the Games being just weeks away, during recent tests, the Parade system was reportedly found to be capable of detecting only one in three drones, and only within a range of 800 meters. The framework also “confused the propellers of air conditioning units with drones,” the paper’s source claimed.

Earlier media reports had suggested that the rollout of the Parade system was not going according to plan. While the delivery of six systems was initially scheduled for 2023, it was delayed for several months. A Senate committee subsequently launched a probe into the matter, but announced in March that it would not be releasing its findings.

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New York governor regrets saying Black kids in the Bronx don’t know what a computer is

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says she regrets making an offhand remark that suggested Black children in the Bronx do not know what the word ”computer” means.

Hochul, a Democrat, made the extemporaneous comment Monday while being interviewed at a large business conference in California to discuss expanding economic opportunities in artificial intelligence for low-income communities.

”Right now, we have young Black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word computer is. They don’t know, they don’t know these things,” Hochul said while on stage at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

The remark was not addressed during the interview and the governor went on to explain that her goal is to provide avenues for communities of color to access emerging artificial intelligence technologies as a means to address social inequality.

Still, the gaff drew immediate criticism from some political leaders in New York, including state Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo, a Bronx Democrat, who said the remark was ”harmful, deeply misinformed, and genuinely appalling.”

In a statement later Monday, Hochul said ”I misspoke and I regret it.”

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Microsoft’s latest Windows update breaks VPNs, and there’s no fix

Microsoft said this week that the most recent Windows security update for Windows 10 and Windows 11 may break VPN connections.

According to Microsoft (via Bleeping Computer), “Windows devices might face VPN connection failures after installing the April 2024 security update, or KB5036893.”

Microsoft has no fix at the current time, the company said. “We are working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release,” the company said.

Unfortunately, the list of affected clients is rather lengthy: Windows 11 (23H2, 22H2, and 21H2) as well as Windows 10 (22H2 and 21H2). If you’re a consumer and run into this issue, Microsoft advises that you first launch the Windows “Get Help” app to inform Microsoft of the problem and possibly work through a solution.

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