Tag: technology

Big Tech is paying millions to train teachers on AI, in a push to bring chatbots into classrooms

On a scorching hot Saturday in San Antonio, dozens of teachers traded a day off for a glimpse of the future. The topic of the day’s workshop: enhancing instruction with artificial intelligence.

After marveling as AI graded classwork instantly and turned lesson plans into podcasts or online storybooks, one high school English teacher raised a concern that was on the minds of many: “Are we going to be replaced with AI?”

That remains to be seen. But for the nation’s 4 million teachers to stay relevant and help students use the technology wisely, teachers unions have forged an unlikely partnership with the world’s largest technology companies. The two groups don’t always see eye to eye but say they share a common goal: training the future workforce of America.

Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are providing millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union. In exchange, the tech companies have an opportunity to make inroads into schools and win over students in the race for AI dominance.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said skepticism guided her negotiations, but the tech industry has something schools lack: deep pockets.

“There is no one else who is helping us with this. That’s why we felt we needed to work with the largest corporations in the world,” Weingarten said. “We went to them — they didn’t come to us.”

Weingarten first met with Microsoft CEO Brad Smith in 2023 to discuss a partnership. She later reached out to OpenAI to pursue an “agnostic” approach that means any company’s AI tools could be used in a training session.

Under the arrangement announced in July, Microsoft is contributing $12.5 million to AFT over five years. OpenAI is providing $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources, and Anthropic has offered $500,000.

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Mexican and Colombian Cartels Sending Members to Ukraine To Learn To Operate Attack Drones, Changing Drug War Tactics Forever

It’s a clear and present danger to the US.

The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is generating bad repercussions for Europe and the outside world, such as an energy crisis, military escalations, and other problematic developments.

To the US, there’s a new, dangerous reality that may be about to bring a whole new level of danger, as the Latin American cartels are sending their operatives to Ukraine to be trained in drone warfare.

These criminals are attending the Kill House Academy, a ‘Top Gun school for the drone-warfare era’, according to the British media, a place that trains some of Kiev regime’s best UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) pilots.

It’s actually easy for a cartel member to blend in with the thousands of new Latin American recruits.

The Telegraph reported:

“Among the more promising recent recruits [at the Kill House Academy] was a pilot with the callsign Aguila 7 (Eagle 7) – a former special forces soldier from Mexico, enlisted with Ukraine’s International Legion. But while he excelled at the course, it seemed he had foes other than Russian soldiers in his sights. Eagle 7 was in fact a foot soldier in Mexico’s feared Los Zetas drug cartel and had been sent there to learn drone skills for use in drug wars back home, according to reports.”

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JP Morgan’s Biometric Mandate Signals New Era Of Workplace Surveillance In Finance

When employees begin reporting to JPMorgan Chase’s new Manhattan headquarters later this year, they will be required to submit their biometric data to enter the building.

The policy, a first among major U.S. banks, makes biometric enrollment mandatory for staff assigned to the $3 billion, 60-story tower at 270 Park Avenue.

JPMorgan says the system is part of a modern security program designed to protect workers and streamline access, but it has sparked growing concern over privacy, consent, and the expanding use of surveillance technology in the workplace.

Internal communications reviewed by the Financial Times and The Guardian confirm that JPMorgan employees assigned to the new building have been told they must enroll their fingerprints or undergo an eye scan to access the premises.

Earlier drafts of the plan described the system as voluntary, but reports say that language has quietly disappeared. A company spokesperson declined to clarify how data will be stored or how long it will be retained, citing security concerns. Some staff reportedly may retain the option of using a badge instead, though the criteria for exemption remain undisclosed.

The biometric access requirement is being rolled out alongside a Work at JPMC smartphone app that doubles as a digital ID badge and internal service platform, allowing staff to order meals, navigate the building, or register visitors.

According to its listing in the Google Play Store, the app currently claims “no data collected,” though that self-reported disclosure does not replace a formal employee privacy notice.

In combination, the app and access system will allow the bank to track who enters the building, when, and potentially how long they stay on each floor, a level of visibility that, while defensible as security modernization, unsettles those wary of the creeping normalization of biometric surveillance in the workplace.

Executives have promoted the new headquarters as the “most technologically advanced” corporate campus in New York, and that it is designed to embody efficiency and safety. Reports suggest that the decision to make biometrics mandatory followed a series of high-profile crimes in Midtown, including the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Within the bank, the justification has been framed as protecting employees in a volatile urban environment.

Yet, the decision thrusts JPMorgan into largely uncharted territory. No other major U.S. bank has been publicly documented as requiring its employees to submit biometric data merely to enter a headquarters building.

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China Escalates Cyberattacks That Are Increasingly Hard To Detect

AChinese hacking group is reportedly behind a significant espionage campaign targeting U.S. technology firms and legal services, highlighting a worrisome escalation in China’s cyber “Cold War” with the United States.

Since March 2025, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group and its cybersecurity subsidiary, Mandiant, have tracked suspicious activities, delivered over a backdoor malware known as “BRICKSTORM.” This sophisticated campaign is targeting a variety of sectors, including law firms, software-as-a-service providers, and other technology companies. Following extensive monitoring and analysis, Google has linked these hacking efforts to UNC5221, a long-suspected Chinese Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, alongside other “threat clusters” associated with China.

The BRICKSTORM campaign is especially disturbing for two primary reasons. Firstly, it was crafted to ensure “long-term stealthy access” by embedding backdoors into targeted systems, enabling hackers to dodge conventional detection and response methods. The stealth campaign has proven so adept that, on average, these intruders remain undetected in targeted systems for nearly 400 days, as revealed by a Google report.

Secondly, the motivations behind these cyberattacks transcend the theft of trade secrets and national security data. Google suspects that these hackers are also probing for “zero-day vulnerabilities targeting network appliances,” as well as “establishing pivot points for broader access” to additional victims. This indicates a strategy to gather intelligence that could be pivotal to the Chinese military should tensions escalate between the U.S. and China.

Xi Jinping, the leader of Communist China, has consistently expressed his ambition for the nation to become a “cyber superpower.” With this goal in mind, the Chinese government has invested significant resources in building a formidable cyber army.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) considers cyber warfare to be a crucial aspect of both its defensive and offensive strategies, alongside traditional military forces. Cyberattacks are viewed as a cost-effective means to undermine an opponent’s will to fight by targeting its economic, political, scientific, and technological systems.

Thus, the PLA reportedly employs as many as 60,000 cyber personnel, ten times larger than the U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber Mission Force. Additionally, a higher proportion of the PLA’s cyber force is dedicated to offensive operations compared to the United States (18.2 percent versus 2.8 percent).

Alongside China’s official cyber force, the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Public Security have adopted a “pseudo-private” contractor model that allows them to hire civilian hackers to conduct cyber espionage abroad while obscuring the Chinese government’s involvement.

Over time, the Communist regime has also significantly advanced its cyber operation capabilities. Today, China’s cyber operations are increasingly sophisticated, utilizing advanced tactics, techniques, and procedures to infiltrate victim networks, according to a U.S. government report.

The BRICKSTORM attack is part of a long series of high-profile cyberattacks originating from China in recent years. Between 2023 and 2024, Salt Typhoon, a Chinese hacking group linked to the Ministry of State Security accessed U.S. wireless networks operated by companies such as AT&T and Verizon, “as well as systems used for court-appointed surveillance.” This breach resulted in the compromise of telecommunication data for over a million American users, including individuals involved in both Trump’s and then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaigns.

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From AI to TikTok to TV, This Pro-Israel Billionaire Is Expanding Power in US

Larry Ellison’s name isn’t always mentioned alongside more public-facing megabillionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg. But as he vaults to the top of the U.S. power elite after a string of high-profile corporate deals, that’s about to change.

Ellison, the founder of the tech giant Oracle, is quickly emerging as the new face of oligarchic power in the U.S. Oracle has become an AI powerhouse at the same time Ellison and his son David have acquired Paramount and its vast media empire. With Donald Trump’s recent executive order, Ellison and Oracle will also now oversee TikTok’s algorithms, shaping a platform that reaches 150 million U.S. users.

What’s more alarming than Ellison’s sheer wealth — in September, he briefly surpassed Musk as the world’s richest person — is that he’s building his concentrated power and control in collaboration with the Trumpian project of attacking so-called “wokeness,” all while supercharging the corporate expansion of artificial intelligence and tech surveillance.

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Scientists Discover a New Form of Ice That Shouldn’t Exist

Researchers at the European XFEL and DESY are investigating unusual forms of ice that can exist at room temperature when subjected to extreme pressure.

Ice comes in many forms, even when made of nothing but water molecules. Scientists have now identified more than 20 unique solid structures, or “phases,” of ice, each with its own molecular arrangement. These variations are labeled with Roman numerals, such as ice I, ice II, and ice III.

In a recent breakthrough, an international team of researchers led by scientists from the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) has discovered a completely new phase known as ice XXI. Using advanced X-ray facilities at the European XFEL and PETRA III, the team captured and analyzed this previously unknown structure. Their findings have been published in Nature Materials.

Ice XXI is unlike any other form of ice observed so far. It develops when liquid water is subjected to rapid compression, creating what scientists call “supercompressed water” at room temperature. This phase is metastable, meaning it can persist for a time even though another type of ice would normally be more stable under the same conditions. The discovery provides valuable new insights into how ice behaves and transforms under extreme pressure.

Water or H2O, despite being composed of just two elements, exhibits remarkable complexity in its solid state. The majority of the phases are observed at high pressures and low temperatures. The team has learned more about how the different ice phases form and change with pressure.

“Rapid compression of water allows it to remain liquid up to higher pressures, where it should have already crystallized to ice VI,” KRISS scientist Geun Woo Lee explains. Ice VI is an especially intriguing phase, thought to be present in the interior of icy moons such as Titan and Ganymede. Its highly distorted structure may allow complex transition pathways that lead to metastable ice phases.

Because most ice variants exist only under extreme conditions, the researchers created high-pressure conditions using diamond anvil cells. The sample – in this case, water – is placed between two diamonds, which can be used to build up very high pressure due to their hardness. Water was examined under pressures of up to two gigapascals, which is about 20,000 times more than normal air pressure. This causes ice to form even at room temperature, but the molecules are much more tightly packed than in normal ice.

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These Are The Five States Leading America’s Data Center Boom

Most of the rapid growth in new data center capacity is happening in established (“incumbent”) markets – places like Virginia, Texas, Oregon, Ohio, and Iowa, while new or smaller states (“emerging markets”) are starting to attract data center development, though on a smaller scale so far.

Goldman analysts, led by Hongcen Wei, cited new current project schedules from Aterio data that showed US data center capacity is projected to reach 46 GW by October 2025, marking a 37% year-over-year increase. He found that most of this increase comes from incumbent markets. 

Here are the key takeaways from the report:

  • Top states (Virginia, Texas, Oregon, Ohio, Iowa) account for 7.6 GW of the 12.4 GW added year-to-date.
  • Virginia remains dominant with 33% yoy growth, while Texas and Georgia lead in acceleration, each up 57% yoy.
  • 31 states have added capacity in 2025 (versus 22 in 2024), highlighting broader national expansion, though most new entrants remain modest in scale.
  • PJM (Mid-Atlantic), ERCOT (Texas), and the Southeast (mainly Georgia) together account for 64% of new US capacity.
  • TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) is the least competitive region due to power constraints.

Looking ahead:

  • Another 4 GW of capacity is expected by year-end 2025, primarily from top markets.
  • Beyond that, 63 GW in new projects are announced for the next few years.
  • Rapid growth in data centers is expected to push major US power markets – CAISO, MISO, and PJM – toward critical tightness in coming years.

Data center buildouts are entering hypergrowth (read “circle jerk“).

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Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt shares dire warning of homicidal AI models

Talk about a killer app.

Artificial intelligence models are vulnerable to hackers and could even be trained to off humans if they fall into the wrong hands, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned.

The dire warning came Wednesday at a London conference in response to a question about whether AI could become more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

“There’s evidence that you can take models, closed or open, and you can hack them to remove their guardrails. So, in the course of their training, they learn a lot of things. A bad example would be they learn how to kill someone,” Schmidt said at the Sifted Summit tech conference, according to CNBC.

“All of the major companies make it impossible for those models to answer that question,” he continued, appearing to air the possibility of a user asking an AI to kill.

“Good decision. Everyone does this. They do it well, and they do it for the right reasons,” Schmidt added. “There’s evidence that they can be reverse-engineered, and there are many other examples of that nature.”

The predictions might not be so far-fetched.

In 2023, an altered version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT called DAN – an acronym for “Do Anything Now” – surfaced online, CNBC noted.

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The Sun Is Setting on Solar Scamming As A Real End to 47 Years of Taxpayer Subsidies Is Finally on the Horizon

“Solar construction firm Blue Ridge Power issues mass worker layoff in North Carolina,” read the article in pv magazine. “The utility-scale solar engineering, procurement and construction firm filed a WARN act with the state, cutting over 500 jobs.”

Much of the rooftop solar industry is in liquidation mode, and now the central station “utility scale” solar industry is in trouble. Expect more of the same in the next months as solar subsidies and local opposition (the environmental grassroots) grows. The delayed end of the Investment Tax Credit (30 percent credit) and the Production Tax Credit (2.8 cents/kWh) will cause a rush to the exits before the credits expire at the end of 2027 (with credits at risk for projects not started by July 4, 2026).

Blue Ridge is a primary industrial solar installer in South and North Carolina, with 8,000 MW installed and 1,200 MW under construction in 14 states. Some quotations from Ryan Kennedy‘s September 23, 2025, recap:

“Blue Ridge Power has experienced market headwinds similar to those impacting the entire renewable energy industry, requiring Pine Gate Renewables to dedicate significant resources to support the organization. After reviewing numerous options to find a path forward, Pine Gate made the difficult decision to conduct an orderly wind-down of Blue Ridge Power,” said Pine Gate Renewables in a statement.

And on the macro situation:

E2 research shows that since January 2025, businesses cancelled more than $22 billion of planned clean energy factories and projects that were expected to create 16,500 jobs. Analysis by Energy Innovation suggests that more than 830,000 jobs could be lost due to policy rollbacks created by the Trump Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The U.S. clean energy workforce now stands at 3.56 million. In 2024, 7% of all new jobs in the United States were in clean energy, and clean energy represented 82% of all new energy sector jobs. However, approximately 50,000 fewer jobs were created in 2024 as compared to 2023.

“What these numbers show is that this was one of the hottest and most promising job sectors in the country at the end of 2024,” said Bob Keefe, E2’s executive director. “Now, clean energy job growth is at serious risk – and with it, our overall economy.”

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NSW Flood Relief Data Breach: Contractor Uploads Personal Details of Thousands to ChatGPT

Thousands of flood survivors in New South Wales, Australia, have had their personal details exposed after a former contractor to the NSW Reconstruction Authority uploaded sensitive data to ChatGPT.

The breach involves the Northern Rivers Resilient Homes Program, which was created to support residents impacted by the 2022 floods.

Through the program, the government offered options such as voluntary home buybacks, financial help to rebuild, or property upgrades aimed at improving resilience.

Now, applicants who sought relief through this initiative may be dealing with the consequences of a serious privacy failure.

Central to the incident is an Excel spreadsheet containing more than 12,000 rows of data.

The document, which was uploaded to ChatGPT between March 12 and 15, is believed to include information on as many as 3,000 people.

The compromised data includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and some health-related information. According to the government, the upload was carried out without authorization.

Despite taking place over six months ago, the breach was not made public until this week, during a public holiday in NSW.

The delay in disclosure is a reminder of ongoing concerns around the speed and transparency of mandatory breach notifications.

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