Tag: technology

This 1996 Law Protects Free Speech Online. Does It Apply to AI Too?

We can thank Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for much of our freedom to communicate online. It enabled the rise of search engines, social media, and countless platforms that make our modern internet a thriving marketplace of all sorts of speech.

Its first 26 words have been vital, if controversial, for protecting online platforms from liability for users’ posts: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” If I defame someone on Facebook, I’m responsible—not Meta. If a neo-Nazi group posts threats on its website, it’s the Nazis, not the domain registrar or hosting service, who could wind up in court.

How Section 230 should apply to generative AI, however, remains a hotly debated issue.

With AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, the “information content provider” is the chatbot. It’s the speaker. So the AI—and the company behind it—would not be protected by Section 230, right?

Section 230 co-author former Rep. Chris Cox (R–Calif.) agrees. “To be entitled to immunity, a provider of an interactive computer service must not have contributed to the creation or development of the content at issue,” Cox told The Washington Post in 2023. “So when ChatGPT creates content that is later challenged as illegal, Section 230 will not be a defense.”

But even if AI apps create their own content, does that make their developers responsible for that content? Alphabet trained its AI assistant Gemini and put certain boundaries in place, but it can’t predict Gemini’s every response to individual user prompts. Could a chatbot itself count as a separate “information content provider”—its own speaker under the law?

That could leave a liability void. Granting Section 230 immunity to AI for libelous output would “completely cut off any recourse for the libeled person, against anyone,” noted law professor Eugene Volokh in the paper “Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output,” published in 2023 in the Journal of Free Speech Law.

Treating chatbots as independent “thinkers” is wrong too, argues University of Akron law professor Jess Miers. Chatbots “aren’t autonomous actors—they’re tightly controlled, expressive systems reflecting the intentions of their developers,” she says. “These systems don’t merely ‘remix’ third-party content; they generate speech that expresses the developers’ own editorial framing. In that sense, providers are at least partial ‘creators’ of the resulting content—placing them outside 230’s protection.”

The picture gets more complicated when you consider the user’s role. What happens when a generative AI user—through simple prompting or more complicated manipulation techniques—induces an AI app to produce illegal or otherwise legally actionable speech?

Under certain circumstances, it might make sense to absolve AI developers of responsibility. “It’s hard to justify holding companies liable when they’ve implemented reasonable safeguards and the user deliberately circumvents them,” Miers says.

Liability would likely turn on multiple factors, including the rules programmed into the AI and the specific requests a user employed.

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Physicists Have Achieved Quantum “Alchemy” by Exciting Electrons to High-Energy States

A promising—and powerful—new engineering breakthrough could soon enable researchers to alter the properties of materials by exciting electrons to higher-than-normal energy levels.

In physics, Floquet engineering involves changes in the properties of a quantum material induced by a driving force, such as high-powered light. The resulting effect causes the material’s behavior to change, introducing novel quantum states with properties that do not occur under normal conditions.

Given its promising applications, Floquet engineering has remained of interest to researchers for many years. Now, a team of scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and Stanford University says they have developed a new method for achieving Floquet physics that is more efficient than past methods that rely on light.

21st Century Alchemy?

Professor Keshav Dani, a researcher with OIST’s Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit, said in a statement announcing the breakthrough that the team’s new approach leverages what are known as excitons, which have proven far more powerful in coupling with quantum materials than existing methods “due to the strong Coulomb interaction, particularly in 2D materials.”

Because of this, Dani says, excitons “can thus achieve strong Floquet effects while avoiding the challenges posed by light.” The team says this offers a novel means of exploring various applications, which include “exotic future quantum devices and materials that Floquet engineering promises.”

Such unique phenomena could enable material science applications that are almost akin to alchemy, in that the concept of creating new materials simply by shining light on them sounds more like science fiction than even the most advanced 21st-century engineering.

Floquet Engineering

In the past, Floquet effects have remained elusive in the lab, although investigations over the years have demonstrated their promise, provided they can be achieved under practical conditions. However, a major limiting factor has been reliance on intense light as the primary driving force, which can also lead to damage or even vaporization of the materials, thereby limiting useful results.

Normally, Floquet engineering focuses on achieving such effects under quantum conditions that challenge our usual expectations of time and space. When researchers employ semiconductors or similar crystalline materials as a medium, electrons behave in accordance with what one of these dimensions—space—will allow. This is because of the distribution of atoms, which confines electron movement and thereby limits their energy levels.

Such conditions represent just one “periodic” condition that electrons are subjected to. However, if a powerful light is shone on the crystal at a certain frequency, it represents an additional periodic drive, albeit now in the dimension of time. The resulting rhythmic interaction between light (i.e., photons) and electrons leads to additional changes in their energy.

By controlling the frequency and intensity of the light used as this secondary periodic force, electrons can be made to exhibit unique behaviors, which also cause changes in the material they inhabit for the time during which they remain excited.

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We’re Losing the Human Touch in Food

Food, which generally originates with a farmer, gardener, or orchardist, is fast losing its hands-on persona and increasingly gaining a mechanical, chemical platform.

Over the last decade, the United States has lost about 28,000 farms annually. While some of the loss is due to urbanization, most of the land remains farmland, either managed by other farmers or simply abandoned. While there are 1.3 million farmers over age 65, only 300,000 are 35 or younger. In 2022, the average American farmer was 58—years older than the average age in other vibrant economic sectors.

The American business landscape is largely anti-people. The current rush to artificial intelligence reflects how eagerly most businesses seek to eliminate people. The farming sector illustrates this trend better than most.

Between 1960 and 2019, the percentage of disposable personal income spent on food dropped from 17 percent to 9.5 percent. Meanwhile, health care spending rose from about 9 percent in 1980, to 18 percent today. Could the two possibly be related? One more data point: In the last 80 years, the farmgate share of the retail food dollar fell from around 40 percent to just 15.9 percent in 2023.

Farming is out of sight and out of mind for most people. Food appears on grocery store shelves. It’s treated as a pit stop between life’s more important activities. Fortunately, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is beginning to shine a spotlight on food, including revised and more truthful dietary guidelines.

For decades, American agriculture policy and practice have replaced farm labor with machines, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. This raises the question: Is food a living thing, or simply an inanimate pile of protoplasmic matter to be manipulated like wheel bearings or bottle caps?

As technological sophistication pulls our culture away from its biologically vibrant roots, it jeopardizes our functional microbiomes. Yes, that’s a packed sentence. You might need to reread it—slowly. The point is, our internal systems are more aligned with the ancient world than with Star Trek. Do we really want machines, chemicals, and drugs to be the medium in which our food is grown?

Wes Jackson, co-founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has long advocated for a healthy “eyes-to-acres” ratio. He suggests that when fewer people interact with the land and the growing of food, both land stewardship and food integrity suffer.

Per-person agricultural output—the number of people one farmer feeds—has increased dramatically over the past century. Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the reaper in the 1830s launched the agricultural industrial revolution, enabling farmers to produce far more than ever before. Replacing the scythe with the reaper was revolutionary.

While technology brought many agricultural efficiencies, without ecological ethics, it may have gone too far. The introduction of subtherapeutic antibiotics in chicken waterers enabled the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). With feed augers, water pumps, and massive barns, individual farmer output soared. And along came super bugs, C. diff, MRSA, avian influenza, polluted water, and fecal-stench air in surrounding neighborhoods.

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A Man Bought Meta’s AI Glasses, And Ended Up Wandering The Desert Searching For Aliens To Abduct Him

At age 50, Daniel was “on top of the world.”

“I turned 50, and it was the best year of my life,” he told Futurism in an interview. “It was like I finally figured out so many things: my career, my marriage, my kids, everything.”

It was early 2023, and Daniel — who asked to be identified by only his first name to protect his family’s privacy — and his wife of over three decades were empty nesters, looking ahead to the next chapter of their lives. They were living in an affluent Midwestern suburb, where they’d raised their four children. Daniel was an experienced software architect who held a leadership role at a large financial services company, where he’d worked for more than 20 years. In 2022, he leveraged his family’s finances to realize a passion project: a rustic resort in rural Utah, his favorite place in the world.

“All the kids were out of the house, and it was like, ‘oh my gosh, we’re still young. We’ve got this resort. I’ve got a good job. The best years of our lives are in front of us,” Daniel recounted, sounding melancholy. “It was a wonderful time.”

That all changed after Daniel purchased a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — the AI-infused eyeglasses that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made central to his vision for the future of AI and computing — which he says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Meta platforms through extensive interactions with the company’s AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a “new dawn” for humanity.

And though his delusions have since faded, his journey into a Meta AI-powered reality left his life in shambles — deep in debt, reeling from job loss, isolated from his family, and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

“I’ve lost everything,” Daniel, now 52, told Futurism, his voice dripping with fatigue. “Everything.”

In many ways, Daniel was Meta’s target customer. He was an experienced tech worker and AI enthusiast who had worked on machine learning projects in the past and had purchased the Meta glasses because he was intrigued by their AI features.

“I used Meta [AI] because they were integrated with these glasses,” said Daniel. “And I could wear glasses — which I wore all the time — and then I could speak to AI whenever I wanted to. I could talk to my ear.”

Today, however, as he continues to recover from his mental health breakdown, Daniel describes himself as a “shell” of who he “used to be.”

“My kids don’t talk to me because I got weird. They don’t know how to talk to me,” said the father of four. “I was a cook… I played the guitar. I love music. I love learning.”

But now, he says, he’s “just trying to survive day to day.”

According to Daniel and multiple family members, the 52-year-old had no history of mania or psychosis before encountering Meta AI. He’d struggled with alcoholism, but quit drinking in early 2023, months before he purchased the Meta smart glasses.

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Mysterious ‘Dorito-Shaped’ Aircraft Spotted at Night Near Area 51

A nighttime thermal image captured during flight activity involving a B-2 Spirit shows a sharply triangular aircraft that resembles an unexplained platform photographed over Wichita in 2014.

Anders Otteson, the man behind the popular Uncanny Expeditions YouTube channel (that we have featured before here at The Aviationist), spotted something particularly intriguing during his latest trip to the Groom Lake area. While camping along Groom Lake Road and monitoring nighttime flight activity, early on Jan. 14, 2026, Otteson captured thermal imagery of a sharply triangular, “Dorito-shaped” aircraft operating in the restricted airspace surrounding Area 51. “Dorito” is a nickname commonly used by observers to describe an aircraft with a sharply triangular shape.

Otteson is not a casual observer. A videographer, explorer, and content creator, he routinely sets up camp in remote and unlikely locations with the specific goal of documenting activity rarely seen by the public. His epic expeditions into the deserts surrounding Groom Lake and other classified sites combine long nights in the field with thermal imaging equipment, optical sensors, and scanner monitoring, offering a unique perspective on flight activity associated with stealth aircraft and black programs.

However, the latest sighting is even more interesting than usual, as the aircraft he spotted flying at night over Nevada bears a striking resemblance to the now somewhat famous triangular aircraft photographed in daylight over Wichita, Kansas, in 2014, an image that, as our analysis at the time showed, appeared to be legitimate and unaltered.

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How the Pentagon Is Quietly Turning Laser Communications Into the Backbone of Future Space Warfare

Military communications have long depended on radio waves bouncing invisibly across land, sea, air, and space. However, as satellites multiply in orbit and the electromagnetic spectrum grows increasingly contested, the limits of traditional radio-frequency links are becoming harder to ignore.

Now, a new empirical study suggests that a less visible—and far more powerful—alternative is edging closer to practical, operational use: laser-based communications that can adapt on the fly to harsh and unpredictable conditions.

In a paper published in Optical Engineering, researchers from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA) describe the development and testing of a new optical receiver designed to support the SDA’s latest laser communication standard.

The research focuses on how to reliably receive laser signals that fluctuate wildly in strength as satellites race overhead—but its implications extend well beyond the lab.

At stake is whether the U.S. military can build a resilient, high-speed space communications backbone capable of supporting future defense operations.

The study focuses on the Space Development Agency’s Optical Communication Terminal standard, a set of specifications intended to ensure that laser communication systems built by different vendors can communicate with one another.

Interoperability is central to SDA’s “Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture” (PWSA), a satellite architecture composed of hundreds of relatively small spacecraft operating together in low Earth orbit.

Laser links promise far higher data rates than radio systems and are inherently harder to jam or intercept. However, they also introduce new technical hurdles, especially when signals must pass through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere.

“The Space Development Agency (SDA) has developed an Optical Communication Terminal standard to ensure system interoperability among a number of industry partners by defining critical technical specifications ranging from initial pointing, acquisition, and tracking to data modulation formats and error-correction protocols,” researchers explain.

That standard, now in its fourth major revision, adds support for what are known as burst-mode waveforms—signals that trade continuous transmission for short, intense pulses.

The appeal of burst mode lies in flexibility. When a satellite passes over a ground station, the strength of its laser signal can vary by roughly 20 decibels from start to finish due to changing distance, pointing geometry, and atmospheric distortion.

Rather than designing a system for worst-case conditions and accepting inefficiency the rest of the time, burst-mode signaling allows operators to dynamically sacrifice data rate in exchange for greater signal margin. To put it simply, the link can slow down when conditions are bad, rather than dropping out entirely.

To test how well this concept works in practice, researchers built and characterized a prototype ground receiver optimized for the SDA standard’s new burst-mode formats.

Unlike more complex coherent optical systems, the receiver relies on a large-area avalanche photodiode (APD) that can collect distorted light without the need for adaptive optics. That choice reflects a broader design philosophy: favoring robustness and simplicity over maximum theoretical performance.

“Burst-mode waveforms offer extended receiver power efficiency at the expense of data rate for longer range applications or size, weight, and power constrained terminals,” researchers explain.

For a mobile ground station, a ship at sea, or even an aircraft receiving data from space, maintaining a reliable link can matter more than pushing the highest possible throughput at every moment.

The experiments described in the paper show that the prototype receiver performs close to theoretical expectations across a wide range of operating conditions, particularly once front-end signal conditioning is applied.

While researchers stop short of claiming a fully fielded system, they describe it as an initial demonstration of an SDA-compliant burst-mode optical receiver—an important milestone for a standard intended to underpin real-world deployments.

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US Patent and Trademark Office Hammers Innovators It’s Supposed to Help

“America must once again be a country where innovators are rewarded with a green light, not strangled with red tape,” President Donald J. Trump told the Winning the AI Race forum last July. If Trump wants to see strangulation up close, he should visit the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

As if it were run by the Wicked Witch of the West, USPTO subjects pioneering inventors to a parade of unpleasant surprises. So far, no inventors report being chased by evil, flying monkeys. But tomorrow is another day.

If an airborne chimpanzee landed on Gilbert P. Hyatt’s desk and torched his files, Hyatt probably would roll his eyes and ask, “What took you so long?”

USPTO has battled the Sin City-based inventor for nearly 30 years. It has forced him through hoops, entombed him in paperwork, and even issued a jaw-dropping No New Patents for Hyatt order that sounds like hyperbole but is confirmed by federal courtroom testimony.

“The Patent Office is prejudiced against independent inventors and against pioneering inventions,” Hyatt told me over lunch, near the legendary Las Vegas Strip. “They used every trick in the book, to try and get rid of me, to delay, and to hope that I would die and then go away.” Hyatt, 87, has denied USPTO that easy victory. “I’m still here today. My patent applications are still alive.”

USPTO previously treated Hyatt fairly. From 1971 through 1997, it issued him 75 patents. His licensed patents have spawned such products as the first Canon and Nikon digital cameras, Panasonic TV sets, Sharp’s calculators and liquid-crystal displays, and Sony’s PlayStation. Hyatt’s signature achievement is U.S. Patent No. 4,942,516, for the computer microprocessor, which fuels the Digital Age.

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Defense Ministry halts US takeover bid for Iron Dome software developer

The Defense Ministry is delaying approval of a planned takeover of Amprest Systems, a company that develops command-and-control software for the Iron Dome air defense system, amid concerns over foreign control of sensitive defense technology, according to people familiar with the matter.

The deal would give U.S.-listed holding company Ondas Holdings control of Amprest, whose software plays a central role in Iron Dome and other air defense systems. Ondas is seeking to buy out Amprest’s shareholders for about $100 million, valuing the company at more than $200 million. If completed, the transaction would leave Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the developer and manufacturer of Iron Dome, as a minority shareholder.

Amprest’s largest shareholder today is Rafael. The remaining shares are held by Amprest founder and CEO Natan Barak, the OurCrowd investment platform and other investors.

The transaction is being reviewed by the Defense Ministry’s Department for Security of the Defense Establishment, known by its Hebrew acronym Malmab, headed by Yuval Shimoni. Officials involved in the review have raised concerns about a foreign company gaining control of Amprest given its classified activities tied to Iron Dome and other air defense programs.

People close to the deal said the prolonged review has delayed the transaction for several months, with no clear timeline or outcome. The holdup has underscored tensions inside the Defense Ministry between efforts to attract foreign investment into defense technology and strict security oversight that can slow or block such deals.

Amprest was founded about 25 years ago by Barak, a retired Navy officer with the rank of colonel. Its profile rose roughly 15 years ago after its command-and-control software was integrated into Iron Dome. In 2012, Amprest received the Israel Defense Prize for its role in developing the air defense system.

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The $134 Billion Betrayal: Inside Elon Musk’s Explosive Lawsuit With OpenAI

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft has evolved into a high-stakes dispute over whether OpenAI stayed true to the mission it was founded on or quietly outgrew it while relying on that original promise.

Musk is seeking between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages, a figure derived from an expert valuation that treats his early funding and contributions as foundational to what OpenAI later became. While the number is enormous, the heart of the case is simpler: Musk argues he helped create and fund a nonprofit dedicated to AI for the public good, and that OpenAI later abandoned that commitment in a way that amounted to fraud.

According to Musk’s filings, his roughly $38 million in early funding was not just a donation but the financial backbone of OpenAI’s formative years, supplemented by recruiting help, strategic guidance, and credibility. His damages theory, prepared by financial economist C. Paul Wazzan, ties those early inputs to OpenAI’s current valuation of around $500 billion.

The claim is framed as disgorgement rather than repayment, with Musk arguing that the vast gains realized by OpenAI and Microsoft flowed from a nonprofit story that attracted support and trust, only to be discarded once the company reached scale, according to TechCrunch. 

Much of the public attention has centered on internal documents uncovered during discovery, particularly private notes from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman in 2017.

One line has become central to Musk’s argument: “I cannot believe that we committed to non-profit if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”

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FDA Removes Web Content Saying Cellphones Are Harmless – HHS Launches Study

Without fanfare, the Food and Drug Administration has deleted multiple web pages asserting that cellphones are not dangerous. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, the move comes as the Department of Health and Human Services has begun a new investigation into potential health effects of cellphone radiation.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has previously declared that cellphones are causing harms that are not yet fully acknowledged. “There’s cellphone tumors. I’m representing hundreds of people who have cellphone tumors behind the ear. It’s always on the ear that you favor with your cellphone…We have the science,” Kennedy said in a 2023 appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. “You should never put one next to your head… I put it on speakerphone or use earphones.” 

Responding to a Journal inquiry about the change to the FDA website, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said, “The FDA removed webpages with old conclusions about cellphone radiation while HHS undertakes a study on electromagnetic radiation and health research to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies, to ensure safety and efficacy.” 

One of the deleted pages included a passage declaring that “the weight of scientific evidence has not linked exposure to radio frequency energy from cellphone use with any health problems.” There may be more scrubbing of the site to come: The Journal notes that the FDA’s site still has summaries of the deleted pages, but the links redirect to other generalized content about the agency’s regulatory mission. 

Kennedy, who had a career as an environmental litigator, has long engaged on this issue. Kennedy represented people suing phone companies for allegedly causing brain tumors, and won a 2020 case that compelled the Federal Communications Commission to reassess its wireless-radiation regulations. He was also chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which has been involved in litigation over 5G technology, and a case blaming an Idaho man’s cardiac issues on a cellphone tower. He has also pointed to radiation as a prime suspect in the mystery of widespread chronic illnesses among America’s children, “Our children are swimming around in a toxic soup, the Wi-Fi radiation is a lot worse than people think it is…yeah, from your cellphone,” Kennedy told Rogan in 2023.  

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