Tag: technology

RAND Corporation: “Internet Of Bodies May Lead To Internet Of Brains” By 2050

The Internet of Bodies ecosystem may lead to the Internet of Brains sometime between 2035 and 2050, according to a UK Defence-commissioned RAND report.

Commissioned by the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and conducted by RAND Europe and Frazer Nash Consulting, the study “Cultural and technological change in the future information environment” looks at six technologies and information environments and their implications for British defense.

They include:

  • Automated information systems
  • A virtual metaverse
  • Augmented and mixed reality
  • Advanced connectivity
  • Human augmentation
  • Information security

A major theme running through these information environments is transhumanism — the merger of humans and machines.

According to the report, “Advances in object connectivity may eventually extend to human bodies. Researchers refer to the potential development of an internet-linked network of human-connected devices collecting end users’ biometric data as an ‘internet of bodies […] An ‘internet of bodies’ may also ultimately lead to an ‘internet of brains’, i.e. human brains connected to the internet to facilitate direct brain-to-brain communication and enable access to online data networks.’“

The Internet of Bodies and the coming Internet of Brains fall specifically under the category of “human augmentation technologies,” which “refer to technologies that enhance human capabilities, either physically or cognitively.”

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Is IRS using AI to infringe upon our financial privacy?

The House Judiciary Committee has opened an inquiry to whether the IRS is using artificial intelligence to invade Americans’ financial privacy after an agency employee was captured in an undercover tape suggesting there was a widespread surveillance operation underway that might not be constitutional.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., sent a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding documents, and answers as to how the agency is currently employing artificial intelligence to comb through bank records to look for possible tax cheats.

The inquiry comes after the same panel has been exploring why the FBI was obtaining Americans’ bank records, including those of Jan. 6 suspects, without using search warrants or subpoenas.

Hageman told Just the News that lawmakers are increasingly concerned that federal law-enforcement agencies are no longer abiding by constitutional protections, including prohibitions against search and seizure without a warrant. 

The congressional inquiry was prompted by a September 2023 announcement that the IRS is using AI to “help IRS compliance teams better detect tax cheating, identify emerging compliance threats and improve case selection tools.”

The Treasury Department has since acknowledged it has “implemented an enhanced process using AI to mitigate check fraud in near real-time by strengthening and expediting processes to recover potentially fraudulent payments from financial institutions’ since late 2022.”

Jordan’s and Hageman’s letter said lawmakers have evidence and reason to believe that the IRS and Department of Justice (DOJ) are actively monitoring millions of Americans’ private transactions, bank accounts, and related financial information—without any legal process—using the AI-powered system.

“This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private financial records raises serious doubts about the IRS’s—and the federal government’s—respect for Americans’ fundamental civil liberties,” the letter said.

You can read the letter here: 2024-03-20 JDJ HH to IRS re AI surveillance.pdf

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Unbelievable: New AI Ad Will Make You Question Reality

Social media is going wild over a woman advertising body wipes for men.

The only thing is — everything about the woman, from her voice, to her eyes to her hair, are entirely AI generated.

In a head-spinning example of a new AI advertising platform known as Arcads, which creates ads using “AI actors,” a woman appears as though she’s delivering a social media lecture on male hygiene.

However, it soon becomes clear she’s reading a pre-written script pushing a product, and her eyes don’t exactly match up with the cadence of the words she’s saying.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” wrote one X user.

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Latest Google Gaffe: Search Giant’s AI Points Users Towards Scam and Malware Sites

Google’s recently introduced AI search feature called “Search Generative Experience” (SGE) has been found to recommend malicious websites that redirect users to scams, fake giveaways, and unwanted browser extensions.

BleepingComputer reports that earlier this month, Google began rolling out its new AI-powered search feature, SGE, which provides quick summaries and site recommendations related to users’ search queries. However, the new system appears to have some significant flaws that cybersecurity experts are now bringing to light.

SEO consultant Lily Ray was among the first to notice that Google’s SGE was recommending spammy and malicious sites within its AI-generated responses. Upon further investigation by BleepingComputer, it was found that the suspicious sites shared similarities in their TLD usage (.online), HTML templates, and redirect practices, suggesting they are part of a coordinated SEO poisoning campaign.

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Stop Your Car From Spying on You

Being proved right isn’t always fun. Just weeks after my warning in the March issue that our modern high-tech cars are tracking us and sharing data with manufacturers, cops, and parties unknown, came a report of soaring auto insurance premiums because of snitching vehicles. The consequences get worse from there. Fortunately, there are ways to keep your snoopy ride from contacting the mothership.

“Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry,” Kashmir Hill reported this month for The New York Times. “Sometimes this is happening with a driver’s awareness and consent…. But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened.”

Hill profiled Seattle resident Kenn Dahl, who checked his LexisNexis consumer disclosure report after his car insurance premium jumped by 21 percent. LexisNexis turned over documents containing “the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations.” The data came from General Motors based on his enrollment in OnStar Smart Driver. The records were interpreted as grounds for putting him in a higher insurance risk category.

Dahl joined the program without realizing the potentially expensive and intrusive consequences. But other drivers are sometimes enrolled without their knowledge when they sign paperwork at the dealership. Worse, data may be collected through other means without explicit consent.

“Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely,” added Hill. “Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis.”

This isn’t the first warning about car data-collection. Modern vehicles are equipped with “microphones, cameras, and sensors sending signals through your car’s computers,” the Mozilla Foundation warned in a September 2023 report. Those features can be convenient, the authors noted, but “whenever you interact with your car you create a tiny record of what you just did. Like when you turn the steering wheel or unlock the doors. And usually all that information is collected and stored by the car company.”

Those sensors collect information about activity in the vehicle and surrounding environment. Nissan’s data policy even claims the right to track “your sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information,” though it’s unclear how much they’re doing now, and what they’re giving themselves leeway to monitor in a more dystopian future.

But mysteriously rising insurance premiums aren’t the end of the potential consequences of data-hungry computers with wheels. Some uses of data are not just expensive, but dangerous.

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‘Whole Thing Smacks of a Brave New World’: New AI Tool Predicts Vaccine Hesitancy

A team of researchers has developed a “powerful new tool in artificial intelligence” (AI) that can predict if someone is or isn’t likely to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

According to the University of Cincinnati, the new AI tool “uses a small set of data from demographics and personal judgments such as aversion to risk or loss” to identify “reward and aversion judgment” patterns in humans that may help explain one’s willingness to get vaccinated.

The researchers presented their findings in a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Public Health and Surveillance.

The study’s findings “could have broad applications for predicting mental health and result in more effective public health campaigns,” the university said.

According to the study, “Despite COVID-19 vaccine mandates, many chose to forgo vaccination, raising questions about the psychology underlying how judgment affects these choices.”

The researchers claim their findings “demonstrate the underlying importance of judgment variables for vaccine choice and uptake, suggesting that vaccine education and messaging might target varying judgment profiles to improve uptake.”

But critics like Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, said that the new technology implies that those who question vaccines have mental health problems:

“The whole implication here is that nonconformity to the government propaganda machine’s standard of care makes one some type of mental case or extreme outlier. The whole thing smacks of a Brave New World where potentially non-compliant individuals are targeted with messaging based on fear and irrationality.”

Hooker said the new technology “is a prefabricated substitute to what Big Pharma and government health agencies avoid: rational discussions of science and medicine that might expose the truth about vaccine adverse events.”

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Unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys

A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple’s M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.

The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can’t be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself. Instead, it can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party cryptographic software that could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations, particularly on the earlier M1 and M2 generations. The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.

Beware of hardware optimizations

The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it’s actually needed, the DMP, as the feature is abbreviated, reduces latency between the main memory and the CPU, a common bottleneck in modern computing. DMPs are a relatively new phenomenon found only in M-series chips and Intel’s 13th-generation Raptor Lake microarchitecture, although older forms of prefetchers have been common for years.

Security experts have long known that classical prefetchers open a side channel that malicious processes can probe to obtain secret key material from cryptographic operations. This vulnerability is the result of the prefetchers making predictions based on previous access patterns, which can create changes in state that attackers can exploit to leak information. In response, cryptographic engineers have devised constant-time programming, an approach that ensures that all operations take the same amount of time to complete, regardless of their operands. It does this by keeping code free of secret-dependent memory accesses or structures.

The breakthrough of the new research is that it exposes a previously overlooked behavior of DMPs in Apple silicon: Sometimes they confuse memory content, such as key material, with the pointer value that is used to load other data. As a result, the DMP often reads the data and attempts to treat it as an address to perform memory access. This “dereferencing” of “pointers”—meaning the reading of data and leaking it through a side channel—is a flagrant violation of the constant-time paradigm.

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Feds Can Film Your Front Porch for 68 Days Without a Warrant, Says Court

Law enforcement in Kansas recorded the front of a man’s home for 68 days straight, 15 hours a day, and obtained evidence to prove him guilty on 16 charges. The officers did not have a search warrant, using a camera on a pole positioned across the street to capture Bruce Hay’s home. A federal court ruled on Tuesday that it was fine for law enforcement to do so, in what’s potentially a major reduction in privacy law.

“Mr. Hay had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a view of the front of his house,” said the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its decision on U.S. vs Hay. “As video cameras proliferate throughout society, regrettably, the reasonable expectation of privacy from filming is diminished.”

Hay, an Army veteran, was found guilty of lying about his disability status to collect benefits from the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). However, the concerning part of this case stems from how VA officers collected evidence against Hay. The veteran appealed his case, arguing that the months-long surveillance of his home crossed a line. However, the federal court ruled that law enforcement can videotape the outside of your home, partially because of how prominent video cameras have become in society.

The federal court’s decision says that video cameras have become “ubiquitous,” and have therefore diminished our expectations of privacy. Police officers wear body cameras now, cellphones have cameras, and many doorbells record your porch. The court isn’t wrong that cameras are everywhere.

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EXCAVATIONS OF 7,000-YEAR-OLD UNDERWATER VILLAGE REVEAL USE OF ADVANCED NAUTICAL TECHNOLOGY

Archaeological excavations off the coast of Rome in the Mediterranean Sea reveal that Stone Age people living over 7,000 years ago utilized sophisticated manufacturing techniques and advanced nautical technology in the construction and operation of their seafaring vessels.

According to an analysis published in the journal PLOS ONE, the ancient seafaring vessels discovered at the site are the oldest ever found in the Mediterranean, which may offer “invaluable insights” into the technological sophistication employed by Neolithic navigators.

“Direct dating of Neolithic canoes from La Marmotta reveals them to be the oldest in the Mediterranean, offering invaluable insights into Neolithic navigation,” the researchers explain. “This study reveals the amazing technological sophistication of early agricultural and pastoral communities, highlighting their woodworking skills and the construction of complex vessels.”

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UNCANNY “ADAPTIVE DURABILITY” MAKES THIS STRANGE NEW MATERIAL STRONGER EVERY TIME YOU HIT IT

A team of engineers has invented a remarkable new material that gets stronger after an impact. The material’s creators also say it is electrically conductive, making it an ideal candidate for wearables or other electronics that are subject to repeated stresses and impacts.

Rather surprisingly, the inventors of their new material say the unique properties of corn starch, a common food additive, inspired their efforts.

“When I stir cornstarch and water slowly, the spoon moves easily,” explains Yue (Jessica) Wang, a materials scientist and the project’s principal investigator. “But if I lift the spoon out and then stab the mixture, the spoon doesn’t go back in. It’s like stabbing a hard surface.”

Scientists call this variable state adaptive durability, meaning the strength of the material shifts from a generally malleable state to a more durable one after a type of force is applied. Since many electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablet PCs, and electronic-based wearables could benefit from this type of durability, the researchers behind this latest invention wanted to see if they could imbue a relatively stretchable, malleable with this property. If successful, the resulting material could form the basis for electronic devices that don’t break like a dropped phone but instead actually become stronger through repeated use.

Unfortunately, most metals and other materials with high electronic conductivity are hard and brittle, presenting the developers of this seemingly ‘magical’ material with a formidable barrier. However, recent advances in material sciences have resulted in a class of materials called conjugated polymers that are both stretchy and conduct electricity. Still, these types of polymers, which ae composed of tiny, spaghetti-like molecules, tend to break apart under repeated stresses.

These circumstances motivated Professor Wang and her University of California, Merced engineering team to see if they could find a combination of conjugated polymers that were not only durable but became more sturdy with repeated uses.

First, the researchers combined a solution of four polymers. According to the release announcing the new material, this “poly (2-acrylamido-2-methylpropanesulfonic acid), shorter polyaniline molecules and a highly conductive combination known as poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS). After mixing them, Wang’s team spread the mixture out into a thin film and let it dry.

As expected, the resulting material was stretchy and electrically conductive. However, the real question was how the material would react to hitting it with a hammer. If it reacted like other conjugated polymers, it would weaken and break apart, leaving the researchers back where they started. However, when they tested their material, they found something else altogether.

“Rather than breaking apart from very rapid impacts, it deformed or stretched out,” they explain. “The faster the impact, the more stretchy and tough the film became.” Just like the cornstarch solution, the added force of the impacts resulted in adaptive durability, making a stronger, more durable material than the team started with.

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