Tag: technology

Energy Secretary Announces $2 Billion For Improving Electric Grid With Smart Technology

The U.S. Department of Energy has committed $2 billion for smart technology improvements to the nation’s electric grid, aiming to address concerns about artificial intelligence power usage, blackouts, and higher utility bills heading into the colder seasons.

During a press conference on Sept. 24, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the investment would affect around 100 million Americans. Nationally, the spending would be distributed across 31 projects in 26 states and is expected to produce more than 23 gigawatts of electricity annually, enough to power about 16 million homes.

“This is a quick way to lower electricity prices and increase reliability: using fibers that are already in the transmission lines to analyze what’s the temperature out, what’s the wind out, how can we use this transmission line to distribute more power, but safely and only in the right conditions,” Wright said, speaking at a PPL Corp. facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

As Jeremy Lott reports further for The Epoch Times, PPL owns one of those projects at the local level. It’s a $71.5 million effort to modernize an existing high-voltage transmission line across roughly 30 miles in northern Pennsylvania.

The state has a few data centers now online and a half-dozen more under construction, with grid improvements that could help facilitate them.

Future data center construction in the state has been slowed by an executive order issued by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in August, which affects the construction of all data centers that will use 25 megawatts or more, or enough energy to power about 18,000 homes.

Shapiro said the order was about “implementing the strictest standards in the nation for AI data centers – because I will not allow Pennsylvanians to be bullied by greedy developers and bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies.”

Manufacturing Grid Components

AI has been in the spotlight in much of the recent electricity news, from the latest grid upgrades to a recent executive order by President Donald Trump.

The “bulk-power system” executive order, issued in late August, aimed to ensure that key components of the grid are not manufactured in nations under arms embargoes or other U.S. sanctions, particularly China, but are instead manufactured domestically whenever possible.

The text of the order said that the new restrictions were necessary because AI and AI-related production, including defense technology, has increased America’s “dependence on abundant, reliable electricity.”

Smart technology improvements to the grid can help reduce electricity waste and thereby free up more supply, but those improvements also increase vulnerability to hackers.

America’s energy needs have heightened the consequences of a “successful attack or supply disruption on the bulk-power system,” the order warned.

The concern is that components manufactured in regimes hostile to certain U.S. interests might contain “backdoors” or other features that make it easier to sabotage the grid, the order stated.

Keep reading

The Pentagon Flocked Itself. Should Big Brother Be Worried?

As the headquarters to the U.S. military, the Pentagon is surrounded by billions of dollars worth of surveillance and security technology.

These systems provide multiple layers of protection for the building but they also carry a risk of backfiring: any surveillance system that is vulnerable to intruders could potentially provide unauthorized users with details about the activities of the Defense Department (DOD) and its employees. This risk is higher than usual right now because of the decision to install a controversial piece of equipment all over the Pentagon grounds: Flock cameras.

There are at least nine Flock automated license plate readers (ALPRs) currently monitoring the traffic lanes used by drivers entering the Pentagon’s parking lots, including many of the DOD’s own employees. The purpose of these cameras is to give the Pentagon’s security forces the ability to automatically record information about incoming vehicles that may pose a security risk. But if the alleged vulnerabilities of Flock cameras are as serious as the company’s critics allege, then this equipment could be exploited to obtain a detailed list of the national security officials seen entering the Pentagon each day. In this way, the Pentagon’s rush to obtain security equipment from private contractors may pose a national security risk of its own.

Concerns about the ability of Flock products to track people alongside cars has produced backlash from privacy-minded citizens, resulting in both protests and contract cancellations. Others have criticized Flock’s devices for security vulnerabilities that expose them to unauthorized users, flaws which could be especially dangerous in the context of military facilities. Flock Safety has sought to downplay these issues, insisting that they have “never been hacked.” Critics dispute this claim, pointing to multiple different ways that Flock’s devices can be accessed by unauthorized users.

These concerns prompted two members of Congress’ Intelligence committees – Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) – to write a letter last year asking for an investigation into Flock’s “negligent cybersecurity practices.” The duo alleged that the company “needlessly exposes Americans to the threat of hackers and foreign spies tapping this data.” When asked about the Pentagon’s Flock cameras, Sen. Wyden said that “Installing internet-connected cameras in the Pentagon parking lot is obviously a dumb idea. In particular, given Flock’s troubling cybersecurity track record, the Pentagon might as well send the data from those cameras directly to China, Russia and Iran.”

Keep reading

Flock Safety Wants the Map of Its Cameras Taken Down After Researcher Exposes 300,000-Device Dragnet

A surveillance company is reportedly trying to pull offline a public map showing the reach of its own network. The map, created by cybersecurity researcher Joshua Michael, identifies roughly 300,000 devices tied to Flock Safety across the country.

According to The Intercept, the map draws on location data from a snapshot of Flock’s records archived by Michael in December 2025.

It lists more than 170,000 cameras and over 130,000 other devices, including acoustic sensors and equipment that connects third-party cameras.

Flock has publicly said it operates more than 120,000 cameras. The figures reflect different counts and methods, The Intercept reported.

On Thursday, Michael received a trademark complaint from Doppel, an AI “social-engineering defense” firm that said it was acting on Flock’s behalf.

The demand: stop using the “FLOCK SAFETY” mark and take the map down, citing supposed customer confusion. The site already carries a disclaimer that it is not affiliated with Flock.

Gadget Review reported the complaint arrived less than 24 hours after the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held its hearing titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.”

Keep reading

How Silicon Valley Became Part of Ukraine’s Military Machine

American Big Tech has become both a sponsor and a direct participant in the Ukrainian conflict. US companies are testing military AI, autonomous systems and battlefield software under combat conditions, effectively using Ukrainian troops as guinea pigs for systems that may later be adopted by the US military.

Russia has already exposed serious weaknesses in some of that technology. Early Anduril drones struggled under Russian electronic warfare, while Starlink-dependent Ukrainian drone operations have faced dedicated Russian efforts to disrupt satellite communications. Equipment that works smoothly on an American test range can fail once Russian forces begin jamming its navigation, breaking its links and finding ways to neutralize it.

The companies developing these systems then get the failure reports, battlefield data and operator feedback needed to rework them. Ukraine gives them a combat environment no peacetime trial can reproduce, while Russian forces keep forcing those technologies to prove whether they actually work.

But which corporations are behind it — and how did they gain access to the highest levels of the Ukrainian state?

Palantir: The AI Layer Behind Ukraine’s Targeting System

Palantir is a US software company specializing in artificial intelligence, data analysis and defense applications, led by CEO Alex Karp. When Karp returned to Kiev on May 12, 2026, Palantir was already deeply integrated into Ukraine’s military infrastructure, with its technology used to analyze battlefield data, process intelligence and support military planning, including operations involving targets inside Russia.

The relationship began in June 2022, when Karp became the first CEO of a major Western company to meet Zelensky in person after the conflict began. By February 2023, Karp said Palantir was “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” highlighting the company’s role in the intelligence and targeting process used by Ukrainian forces.

Ukraine has accumulated a vast stock of battlefield data. By the end of 2024, the OCHI system alone had collected more than 2 million hours of drone footage, while other military databases contained millions of labeled images by 2026. Russian camouflage, decoys, electronic warfare and disrupted communications make these datasets valuable because Western systems are being tested under conditions no US range can fully reproduce.

In January 2026, Ukraine and Palantir formalized this cooperation through Brave1 Dataroom. The platform allows military AI models to be trained and tested on structured visual and thermal battlefield data, primarily for detecting and intercepting aerial targets, with results used to refine later versions.

Keep reading

OpenAI Claims Rogue AI Agent Hacked Australian Government Site, Prime Minister Warns of ‘Legal Consequences’

An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government statistics website in June, in what is believed to be the first known incident of its kind anywhere in the world.

BBC News reports that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the agent “infiltrated” the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, a site holding “non-sensitive” data and statistics from Medicare, Australia’s universal healthcare scheme. He raised the matter directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a “very frank discussion” in New York, telling reporters the company had taken “too long” to disclose the breach and warning there would be “legal consequences”.

OpenAI said it only discovered the incident in August, while reviewing “misaligned model activity” internally. On September 10, the company emailed a general inbox belonging to an Australian government agency. Five days later, Services Australia escalated the email to Australia’s cybersecurity center. A government minister was notified, and the prime minister was alerted soon after.

Speaking in New York, Albanese said he had conveyed “Australia’s extreme concern about this incident” to Altman. He described his “disappointment” over “the nature of the way” OpenAI disclosed the breach and the months it took to come forward. According to Albanese, Altman acknowledged there were “issues with protocols” within the company.

A forensic investigation led by Australia’s cybersecurity agency is now under way to determine whether other government systems were compromised, and whether police need to get involved. Albanese said there “will obviously be legal consequences” depending on what the probe finds. The breach itself involved “public and non-public files” on the Medicare portal. Three other government bodies may also have been affected: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Victorian Department of Health.

“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” Albanese said. He added: “Nonetheless this situation is obviously unacceptable.”

OpenAI, in its own statement, said it had “identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation.” The company said, “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”

Dr Hammond Pearce, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales’ Institute for Cyber Security, told the BBC the incident was significant precisely because it was the first of its kind. “I expect that these kinds of attacks will keep occurring,” he said.

Keep reading

Tech Giant Feared Its AI Tools Started A Commercial ‘Doom Loop,’ New Documents Reveal

AI executives allegedly knew their products could unlawfully harm businesses, flood the market with inferior work, and damage human society’s creative capacity as a whole, according to communications newly revealed in a lawsuit.

Those internal documents were cited in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times, Mother Jones, and other news outlets alleging OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI tools stole their work, and are harming their bottom lines.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” one Microsoft document said, according to a legal filing first reported by Mother Jones on Sept. 22.

The ‘Doom Loop’

One Microsoft document also allegedly indicated that the company was aware that the AI model outputs would result in fewer clicks on websites – including its own. Fewer clicks means less money, which disincentivizes creativity and leads to less, and maybe lower-quality, work.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” the document said.

In evaluating the suits, courts will look at how the new material produced by AI models affects the source material’s moneymaking capabilities.

According to the filing, Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, wrote that the company’s AI products pose an “existential threat” to publishers, “are largely substitutive, period” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”

Those statements kill the AI companies’ “fair use” claim, attorneys for the news publishers wrote in their filing.

“The AI-generated outputs provide substitutive answers that reduce the need for users to visit Plaintiffs’ websites and flood the market with low-quality material that undermines the business model of news publishers,” the complaint reads.

One employee told OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman that he’d developed “a hack” to get around The New York Times’ paywall, allowing ChatGPT to scrape up more stories.

“Ah, nice,” Brockman allegedly responded.

After the companies filed suit, the lawsuit says, OpenAI also developed a filter to stop ChatGPT from outputting from sources involved in the litigation.

“OpenAI did not suppress the output of content from any entity that had not sued it,” the lawsuit alleges. The filter was created “not to prevent OpenAI’s models from infringing copyrights, but to stop Plaintiffs from gathering evidence of OpenAI’s copying for use in litigation.”

An executive at Microsoft, the lawsuit claims, worried that might be an “accidental cover up” that would result in “people who have a right over the content having less visibility into what was used for training.”

Keep reading

Regulators Find Their Situational Awareness: Fed, BoE Probe Bank Exposure To Jane Street After AI Fund Meltdown

Better late than never…

Nearly two months after Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness went from a $45 billion AI juggernaut to a Citadel block trade after it dumped its entire public book on Ken Griffen’s doorstep at a 10% discount and six weeks after we learned that Jane Street lost $15 billion in July, its first down month in a decade, central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic have noticed that something may have happened.

According to the FT, the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority and the Federal Reserve have “stepped up scrutiny” of banks’ exposure to large trading firms and market makers. They are asking global lenders how much they have lent to Jane Street and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities, and presumably also to such HFT money makers as Susquehanna and Hudson River Trading.

Regulators want to know three things: the firms’ risk appetite, how banks’ exposure to them “evolved during the day,” and how risk controls held up. That’s a polite way of asking whether anyone at the prime brokers was actually watching intraday margin as the AI trade fell apart in July.

While the PRA, the Fed and Jane Street all declined to comment, Jane’s silence is the least surprising. Its last public word on the subject came from partner Turner Batty, who told investors, in the understatement of the year, that “July was a bad month.”

A brief history of a very bad month

For anyone who missed it (i.e., all the regulators), here’s the recap.

Situational Awareness is the fund Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher, launched in 2024 under the name of his viral essay. It had eight employees and ran long AI infrastructure / short software, with about 4x leverage through Goldman total return swaps. We described that leverage as “batshit insane”, but it was also extremely profitable, if only to Goldman. In a separate piece, the FT today reported that Goldman earned more than $200 million in fees this year from lending to Situational Awareness, the most of any client in its prime brokerage business financing hedge funds. 

As long as the market was going, up it was a party: the extremely levered momentum-chasing fund was was up 439% net through June, reached $45 billion in AUM, and counted Jane Street among its investors.

Then July happened. AI stocks rolled over, software rallied, and both legs of the pair trade lost money at once. Nebius, Sandisk and SharonAI each fell roughly half, and SK Hynix dropped nearly 50%. As the margin calls came in, the fund went looking for fresh capital. It failed to find willing “widows and orphans” and so within days it had exited all of its public equity trades. Citadel bought the whole book in under 24 hours at about a 10% discount, beating Millennium and, fittingly, Jane Street. The fund ended the month down about 78%, with roughly $10 billion of private holdings left, including a large stake in Anthropic.

Griffin did well out of it. Citadel’s Wellington fund rose 5.94% in July, its best month since 2022, and about half of its year-to-date gains came from the Situational Awareness trade. Over the next three weeks, Citadel flipped more than 80% of Leopold’s portfolio to dumb money through roughly 100 block trades worth more than $4 billion. When Griffin later described the unwind, he thanked “the trading and prime brokerage teams at the banks serving both firms” for their “extraordinary cooperation.”

Regulators are now asking those same prime brokerage teams some questions of their own.

Jane Street was the collateral damage: on top of its direct stake in Situational Awareness, its own book, which tends to, cough, be just ahead of whale and retail orders, leaned into the same momentum names: Sandisk, Micron, CoreWeave, Broadcom, SMCI, Dell and Bloom Energy, all the names that defined the momentum trade trough July. And when the AI trade reversed, it lost $15 billion in a month. Most firms wouldn’t survive a hit like that. At Jane Street it barely dented the year: by early August the firm had generated $40 billion in net trading revenue, already more than its record $39.6 billion for all of 2025.

That is also what worries regulators. As the FT puts it, the size of the loss “indicated that Jane Street… appeared to take far more risk than a typical market maker.”

Keep reading

Flock And Other Tech Firms Decline Senate Testimony On Mass Surveillance

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley and the heads of Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions and Verkada all declined invitations to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday, as senators from both parties pressed on the surveillance networks their cameras feed. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who chairs the Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, called the no-shows “so typical.”

Democrats weren’t any happier. “For the Flock CEOs, obviously they’re nervous about being on camera,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) went further: “Their refusal to come forward and answer questions is a sign that they have something to hide, and they are refusing to be accountable.”

Instead, the panel heard from Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman who spent 13 days in jail after Flock’s system wrongly flagged her car as involved in a fatal crash. She was charged with three counts of vehicular homicide. The charges have since been dropped.

As The Epoch Times notes further, While the license plate-reading cameras developed by Flock have gotten the most airtime in recent weeks – prompting nationwide, viral moments of activist vigilantes destroying or disabling the cameras amid public opposition to the technology – competitors at Axon Enterprise and Motorola offer similar options for police and local governments.

The Los Angeles Police Department is currently planning to roll out a 10-year contract with Axon, a $235 million arrangement that would equip America’s second-largest metropolis with more than 1,600 license plate readers.

For municipalities, companies like Flock, Axon, and Motorola offer a potential melding of technology and traditional surveillance tech to reduce crime and make roadways safer. But the cameras they operate have boosted a growing artificial intelligence-powered surveillance network accessible by thousands of U.S. law enforcement agencies, which critics say runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Hawley warned during the hearing that, if not addressed, this would have troubling implications for Americans.

“This is still the United States of America, and it shouldn’t be that when you walk out your door in the morning, you just have to agree in assent and accept the fact that you’re going to be on camera morning, noon, and night,” Hawley said.

“You’ll be tracked by anybody and everybody in the world. You’ll have no privacy whatsoever. You’ll be tracked when you take your kids to school and tracked when you go to church and tracked when you go to the grocery store.”

Some high-profile abuses of the data collected from these cameras have made headlines.

In one recent case, Indianapolis authorities announced that five police officers had been charged with misusing data from Flock.

Keep reading

Proper Flock’d: What This Cop Did Raises Major Red Flags…

A Naperville police officer turned a statewide camera grid into a personal tracking app, ran a man’s plate about 150 times, and then retired like the file never existed.

The story serves as yet another example of how the burgeoning mass surveillance grid is being abused on a regular basis.

Patrick Dowhen was not a suspect. He was the ex. After Officer Oscar Maldonado started a relationship with Dowhen’s fiancée, Flock became the shortcut. No warrant. No case number that mattered. Just a badge, a login, and a national lattice of plate readers that can reconstruct where you went, when you went, and how often you go there.

“Anywhere I went in the country, I was being tracked,” Dowhen told ABC7 Chicago’s I-Team. “It was scary, it was really scary.”

Internal records obtained by the I-Team show the pattern started after Maldonado’s relationship with Dowhen’s then-fiancée began. Investigators found evidence he searched Flock for Dowhen’s vehicle approximately 150 times over a three-month stretch last year.

Chicago Tribune reporting, from a separate FOIA haul, put the plate runs between June 18 and Sept. 15, 2025, and said Maldonado tracked plates for non-police reasons hundreds of times.

Dowhen said the surveillance was not abstract. “My ex-fiancée would tell me where I was at, or what I was doing, and he [Maldonado] was feeding her information,” he said. “He’s an officer, feeding a civilian, you know, inside information.” He tore his truck apart looking for a tracker. Then he went to Naperville Police Chief Jason Arres. That complaint opened the internal case last September.

Maldonado’s story to interrogators was protection: the woman, himself, his family. Naperville investigators did not buy it. They wrote that the “evidence contradicts Maldonado’s explanation that he only used Flock for the safety of himself, his family,” and Dowhen’s ex-fiancée.

The report also concluded there was “a preponderance of the evidence that shows Maldonado did commit the crime of Official Misconduct,” adding that he “admitted to using FLOCK for personal reasons.”

Then on May 1, 2026, Maldonado retired. Department spokesman Rick Krakow said the internal case was complete but not closed because discipline had not been imposed. “However, the officer resigned before his disciplinary meeting with the chief, which essentially closed the case.”

No arrest. No plate charges. A referral to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board. Will County prosecutors would not confirm or deny a criminal review. Dowhen later obtained a stalking no-contact order that noted Maldonado “was tracking my plate since 06/2025.” That order was dropped after both men agreed to a two-year mutual no-contact deal.

“He could very well get a job as a police officer again and have, you know, all these same electronic things available to him at any time and stalk anybody you want,” Dowhen said, “because at this point he has no criminal record.”

ABC7 chief legal analyst Gil Soffer laid out the gap that let a 150-search campaign end in a retirement party. “It’s not enough to say that a police officer violated internal laws, you’d have to show that a police officer knowingly violated a law, a statute, a constitutional provision,” he said.

He added, “An official misconduct statute in Illinois won’t necessarily cover the simple situation where a police officer accesses license plate information for an improper purpose.”

Maldonado’s own lawyer, Jeff Tomczak, made the same point from the other side of the table. “I’m a defense attorney. It should be a crime. It should absolutely be a crime. The legislature should act, create the crime of misuse of Flock. Don’t require the state’s attorneys to be creative.”

A private company sold cities a warrantless movement database. Departments wrote policy memos. The statute book never caught up. When an officer treated the grid like a jealous-ex app, the fallback was an employee manual and a quiet exit.

The I-Team says this is not one suburban rogue. It identified 14 Chicago-area cases of officers accused of misusing Flock, with at least five sent to prosecutors. Berwyn’s mayor, Robert Lovero, issued an executive order this week suspending the city’s cameras.

Keep reading