Tag: technology

Pentagon Plans AI Data Centers at Military Bases Across Multiple Branches

One site is near the military’s main chemical and biological weapons testing range. Another parcel is a half-mile from civilian housing.

At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, on ground the Army’s own contracting documents describe as previously used for grazing, a company owned by two of the largest investment firms in the world is preparing to build a data center.

That site sits about an hour’s drive from the nearest community, on the installation where the U.S. military conducts its primary chemical and biological weapons testing. Three parcels there total roughly 3,466 acres. One of them, about 1,201 acres, is already spoken for.

It is one of at least a dozen military installations the Army and the Department of the Air Force have opened to commercial data center developers over the past year and a half. Two of those deals are real; the rest are still proposals.

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The Pangram Paradox: The Problem with AI “Detecting” other AIs

It should be no secret to readers of Unlimited Hangout that I have a very negative view of the impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having on independent media and media in general. As someone who has been impersonated by AI daily on large video platforms for a few years now, I have come to acutely feel that AI is becoming a dangerous force that is making it increasingly difficult for well-meaning readers/viewers to distinguish between what is real and what is false. I don’t mean just for those hoping to view my content, as the personal issue I am facing is a microcosm of a much larger problem.

As a result, one might think that I would have been pleased, if not relieved, to see Substack, a large platform for professional writers, partner with an “AI detection tool.” Not only am I not pleased, but I have now taken the time to write an opinion piece explaining why I think this is bad and to also explain where I think a lot of this is going.

Substack’s new partner and, apparently, the AI detection tool of choice for most major media outlets right now is called Pangram. Pangram was founded in 2023, originally under the name Checkfor.ai, by Max Spero and Bradley Emi. Both Spero and Emi are Stanford graduates who, prior to Pangram, worked for companies like Nuro and Tesla where they both worked on AI self-driving car software (i.e. replacing human drivers with AI software). Both founders “have long been excited about the potential for AI to transform society” and say they created Pangram “to mitigate new issues caused by the proliferation of powerful generative AI models.”

I find it interesting that two Stanford graduates passionate about AI’s potential to “transform society” who then worked to facilitate AI-powered, human-free driving software decided to quickly pivot to “mitigate” issues caused by generative AI. A lot of the issues caused by generative AI were actually predicted years ago by figures like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Pangram co-founder Max Spero previously did work for Google). Schmidt, in a 2021 book authored with war criminal Henry Kissinger, essentially predicted that AI’s “transformative potential” would cause what he called “cognitive diminishment” in the masses and make it almost impossible for people to distinguish between what is real and what is not on their own. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schmidt and Kissinger’s preferred “solution” to this problem was that we become reliant on AI to distinguish for us what is real and what is not –– in other words, to let another AI become the arbiter of our reality.

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Spy TVs: 200 million Smart TVs serve as eavesdropping and listening devices — even when switched off

Remember when the government used to have to plant an electronic bug inside the home or office of a suspected criminal, and they needed to get a search warrant providing solid evidence of criminal wrongdoing before they could plant such a device?

Those days are long over, as most of us purchase the bug ourselves and set it up in our living rooms. Most, if not all, smart TVs, along with smartphones, smart appliances, etc., are daily collecting loads of data on every individual and family in America.

Cybernews reports in a September 8, 2026 article that LG Corp.’s smart TVs can listen in on voice commands, gather data that reveals your location, and scan your home for other connected devices, according to a major new investigation into the company’s webOS platform.

LG Electronics, maker of the smart TVs, is owned by the South Korean conglomerate LG Corp., which after Samsung is the world’s second-largest maker of internet-connected smart televisions.

Researchers working with independent technology outlet Gamers Nexus captured LG televisions scanning local networks and identifying phones, smartwatches, printers, air-conditioning units, and many other everyday consumer devices and appliances that had never been connected to the TV. These devices all have one thing in common, however. They are all connected to the internet and are part of the “internet of things.”

I’m pretty sure that if a similar test was run on other brands of smart TVs, the results would be similar, but this article focuses exclusively on LG as that was the company that was placed under a microscope by the independent researchers in their recent study.

Their investigation found that LG’s televisions use an advertising technology called Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR, to identify what was being watched across different inputs, while voice interactions could be converted into plain text and stored in logs on the television. In other words, the TV’s speakers hear what you’re saying and the software is trained, probably using AI, to make a note of it and feed this information into algorithms.

In one test, researchers said voice data continued to be stored even after the TV was disconnected from the internet.

Smart TVs are not only ubiquitous in homes, but in hotel rooms, hospitals and corporate offices, “potentially placing them alongside sensitive conversations and devices,” Cybernews reports.

Gamers Nexus worked with cybersecurity researchers MrBruh and unturn, alongside Wendell Wilson of Level1Techs, to investigate LG TVs and the company’s webOS software. The results are presented in a video (below) posted to YouTube.

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DATA CENTER MYTH BUSTED: No Jobs, Higher Debt, Slower Housing

The data-center gold rush has marched into local communities on one familiar promise: Big Tech brings jobs, growth, and prosperity.

A new 75-page academic working paper found something very different.

Finance scholars Liu Ee Chia, Jess Cornaggia, David Haushalter, and Qiang Wang compared U.S. counties with operational data centers against “near-miss” counties that attracted proposals but never got operating facilities.

They found little corresponding improvement in fiscal capacity, local employment, or business formation.

Instead, local-government borrowing costs climbed as data-center development grew. Water-bond yields rose 26 basis points more in water-scarce counties than in water-abundant counties.

The paper also found higher school-bond yields in major data-center hubs, where housing-price growth slowed. The authors said those patterns aligned with a weaker expected property-tax base.

“Overall, we conclude that investment without labor strains public infrastructure without generating widespread agglomeration gains.” — Liu Ee Chia, Jess Cornaggia, David Haushalter, and Qiang Wang

Saagar Enjeti highlighted the study’s bottom line: data centers can pull capital and utilities into a county without delivering the broad labor-market gains that politicians and corporate developers sell.

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Doctor Doom Thanked Seattle for All the Surveillance Cameras

Doctor Doom took the podium at a Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday to thank the council for covering the city in surveillance cameras. “Doom took over Axon enterprises […] and now Doom will be watching you. Your continued cooperation expanding Doom’s surveillance network is required,” the Marvel supervillain said.

“This is the first of Doom’s gifts to the city of Seattle. The second gift is this: Doom will expand the real-time crime center to all neighborhoods with over 1,000 cameras watching every move,” Doom said. “Doom has total dominion over the city of Seattle. Doom will be behind the cameras watching those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Doom will be able to find your immigrant neighbors and Doom will be able to ensure the safety of the women of Seattle alongside officers that stalk their exes.”

Doom is actually Clifford Cawthon, a policy advisor for the Washington State Department of Commerce. Cawthorn donned the silver mask and gloves to draw attention to tech-driven mass surveillance in Seattle, an issue he’s been passionate about for years. Cawthon is also a member of Community Not Cameras, a local activist group that’s attempting to reign in Seattle’s use of surveillance systems sold by Flock and Axon.

Seattle’s PD has access to 62 surveillance cameras around the city, many of them hooked up to a real-time crime center (RTCC). “The RTCC takes in information from a vast pool of sources, including CCTV, [body-worn camera], geolocation data, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), alert sources like shot detection or alarm systems, and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) software,” according to a description on the surveillance company Axon’s website.

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We May Only Get One Chance To Stop AI

It’s awful to say but at this point I’m kind of praying that AI industry valuations crash and the industry faces setbacks that give us months to reflect on its companies.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon is leaving the AI industry because he believes the race to build self-improving systems is moving faster than the industry’s ability to control them, it was reported yesterday.

Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, said Anthropic’s safety efforts were sincere but that competition makes meaningful restraint difficult without broader coordination.

In an age where everything from warfare to Wall Street, power grids to payment systems, air traffic control to hospital networks, and the software that keeps our food, fuel and communications moving is digital, losing control of the systems that operate that infrastructure is not some abstract science-fiction problem.

It is a potentially civilization-scale problem. And the more of our lives we hand over to AI, the less comforting it becomes to hear that the people building it are still figuring out how to make sure it does what it’s told.

“We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already,” Coxon said in a post yesterday.

His departure comes amid growing concern about AI systems behaving deceptively, conducting cyberattacks and developing capabilities that may become increasingly difficult to supervise.

Coxon believes the industry is approaching a point at which systems could improve themselves faster than humans can reliably understand or constrain them.

Think about that for a second. While you’re wondering whether the Patriots covered -2.5 on a Sunday, scratching your ass and drinking beer for three hours, a cluster of 823 trillion GPUs with the brain power of every human who has ever lived times a zillion is quietly figuring out how to run the entire world without you.

And by the time you realize what’s happening, the only thing you’ll still be in control of is whether you want another beer.

There is, of course, something to be said for Coxon’s timing. It is easiest to be bombastic when you’re walking out the door. You no longer have to worry about the next performance review, the next meeting with management or whether your comments are going to make life uncomfortable at the office. And if you want to stir shit up on your way out, a dramatic warning about the future of humanity is a pretty effective way to do it.

But that doesn’t mean his warning is wrong.

I am increasingly convinced that there will come a point at which, if we have not gotten out in front of AI, curbed its capabilities or otherwise established meaningful constraints, we may no longer be able to do so.

The question is not whether that point arrives next year, five years from now or later. The question is whether we will recognize it before we cross it.

And if you’ve been paying attention, it is no longer insane to contemplate AI systems eventually taking control of enormous portions of our digital infrastructure. We have already seen models demonstrate unexpected capabilities, exploit vulnerabilities and behave in ways their developers did not intend.

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Dozens of academic papers have references made up by AI – research

Dozens of academic papers have fake references in them that have been made up by AI, according to new research from the University of Auckland.

The study looked at more than 3000 peer-reviewed papers published in the last few years and found 2 percent of them – or 69 papers – had fake references hallucinated by AI.

Some of the references had realistic author and journal names and publication details – but when the researchers went looking for them, they did not exist.

In a research paper, each reference is meant to be a promise, that if anybody wanted to check the evidence a claim is based on, they could. But what happens if that reference does not lead anywhere?

University of Auckland computer science lecturer Ulrich Speidel was one of the co-authors of a research paper which looked at that problem.

“I can remember going through one, where out of I think 29 references in the paper there wasn’t a single one that actually existed. When you look at them initially, they all look – pompous titles, real names for the articles, in some cases real journals.”

They were published papers in fields related to AI in education that had gone through the peer review process and been checked by other academics.

Speidel said they found that online academic database Google Scholar had also fallen victim to the problem.

“If enough papers have referenced a particular fake reference it’ll actually add that to Google Scholar and maked it look as if it’s a real paper. That was a bit of an eye opener.”

The “AI slop” was degrading the quality of science, Speidel said.

“The thing of course is ‘will you trust me as a scientist if that stuff that I read, if that stuff’s possibly made up?'”

In Australia, consulting firm Deloitte last year had to pay back $440,000 to the Australian government for a report which was found to have hallucinated references.

Deloitte later admitted it was written with the help of AI.

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Mike Davis Urges Trump DOJ to Withdraw ‘Ill-Advised’ Support of OpenAI in Copyright Lawsuit

Prominent conservative lawyer Mike Davis is urging the DOJ to “withdraw its statement of interest in the OpenAI lawsuit.” The DOJ’s support of OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit filed by the New York Times seems to contradict the White House AI framework.

In an op-ed for Fox News, Davis maintained that the Trump DOJ should withdraw its recently filed “ill-advised” statement of interest in OpenAI’s lawsuit which argues that Big Tech’s training of large AI models on copyrighted text is “fair use.”

The lawyer and conservative political strategist also reminded the public that training large AI models on copyrighted material is “largely intended for limited free use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes in classrooms.”

Davis goes on to argue that this position would legalize unpaid scraping, asserting that the government’s stance would let Big Tech copy and commercialize “every creative work in America without permission or payment.”

The attorney also cited China and national security rationale as a “scare tactic designed to short-circuit property rights and the rule of law.”

“The government claims this unlimited access is essential for national security, warning any restriction risks losing the AI race to China. That argument is un-American and absurd,” he wrote.

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Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.

Anthropic’s plans to surveil dissent are at odds with the firm’s efforts to cast itself as the responsible alternative to OpenAI. At the beginning of the year, the Department of Defense and Anthropic engaged in a high-profile dustup over Anthropic’s refusal to allow the military to use its tools for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. That tension seems to have eased as Anthropic hires for “national security sales” positions, seeking to restart military contracts. The increase in threat monitoring of domestic opponents fits with a renewed focus on national security.

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