Tag: technology

Amazon’s Ring Camera Penetrates 18% Of Homes To Create Massive Surveillance Network

If you walk through your local neighborhood—providing you live in a reasonably large town or city—you’ll be caught on camera. Government CCTV cameras may record your stroll, but it is increasingly likely that you’ll also be captured by one of your neighbors’ security cameras or doorbells. It’s even more likely that the camera will be made by Ring, the doorbell and security camera firm owned by Amazon.

Since Amazon splashed out more than a billion dollars for the company in 2018, Ring’s security products have exploded in popularity. Ring has simultaneously drawn controversy for making deals (and sharing data) with thousands of police departments, helping expand and normalize suburban surveillance, and falling to a string of hacks. While the cameras can provide homeowners with reassurance that their property is secure, critics say the systems also run the risk of reinforcing racism and racial profiling and eroding people’s privacy.

Videos shared from security cameras and internet-connected doorbells have also become common on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, raking in millions of views. “Ring impacts everybody’s privacy,” says Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Most immediately, it impacts the people who walk down the streets every day, where the cameras are pointing out.”

While Ring is far from the only maker of smart doorbells and cameras—Google’s Nest line is another popular option—its connections to law enforcement have drawn the most criticism, as when it recently handed over data without warrants. So, what exactly does Ring collect and know about you?

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World Economic Forum proposes AI to automate censorship of “hate speech” and “misinformation”

The World Economic Forum (WEF) continues to beat the drum of the need to somehow merge “AI” and humans, as a supposed panacea to pretty much any ill plaguing society and economy.

It’s never a sure bet if this Davos-based elite’s mouthpiece comes up with its outlandish “solutions” and “proposals” as a way to reinforce existing, or introduce new narratives; or just to appear busy and earn its keep from those bankrolling it.

Nevertheless, here we are, with the WEF turning its attention toward what’s apparently the burning issue in everybody’s life right now.

No – it’s not the runaway inflation, energy costs, and even food security in many parts of the world. For how dedicated to globalization the organization is, it’s strangely tone-deaf to what is actually happening around the globe.

And as people struggle to pay their bills and dread the coming winter, the WEF obliviously talks about “the dark world of online harms.”

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The Top Ten Creepiest and Most Dystopian Things Pushed by the World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is one of the most powerful organizations in the world. And, throughout the years, people at the WEF have said some truly insane and dystopian things. And they’ve managed to word these things in the creepiest ways possible. Here are the top 10 most insane things said by the WEF.

When one talks about the “global elite”, one usually refers to a small group of wealthy and powerful individuals who operate beyond national borders. Through various organizations, these non-elected individuals gather in semi-secrecy to decide policies they want to see applied on a global level.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is smack dab in the middle of it all. Indeed, through its annual Davos meetings, the WEF attempts to legitimize and normalize its influence on the world’s democratic nations by having a panel of world leaders attending and speaking at the event.

A simple look at the list of attendees at these meetings reveals the organization’s incredible reach and influence. The biggest names in media, politics, business, science, technology, and finance are represented at the WEF.

According to mass media, the Davos meetings gather people to discuss issues such as “inequality, climate change, and international cooperation”. This simplistic description appears to be custom-made to cause the average citizen to yawn in boredom. But topics at the WEF go much further than “inequality”.

Throughout the years, people at the WEF have said some highly disturbing things, none of which garnered proper media attention. In fact, when one pieces together the topics championed by the WEF, an overarching theme emerges: The total control of humanity using media, science, and technology while reshaping democracies to form a global government.

If this sounds like a far-fetched conspiracy theory, keep reading. Here are the 10 most dystopian things that are being pushed by the WEF right now. This list sorted is in no particular order. Because they’re all equally crazy.

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The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution: “Slowly Closing its Grip on our Lives”

People love the digital revolution.  It allows them to work from home and avoid stressful commutes and office politics.  The young love their cell phones that connect them to the world. For writers the Internet offers, for now, a far larger audience than a syndicated columnist could obtain.  But while we enjoy and delight in its advantages, the tyranny inherent in the digital revolution is slowly closing its grip on our lives.

Use a gender pronoun or doubt an official narrative and you are blocked from social media.  The same corporations that are required by federal law to send us annual statements on how they protect our privacy also track our use of the Internet in order to build marketing profiles of us.  The FBI, CIA, and NSA track our use of the Internet to identify possible terrorists, school shooters, drug operations, and foreign agents.  Face identification cameras now exist on the streets of some cities.  DNA data bases are being built.  It goes on and on.

In China the digital revolution has made possible a social credit system.  People are monitored about what they say, what they read online, how they behave, where they go.  The profile that results determines the person’s rights or privileges.  A person who hangs out with the wrong crowd, criticizes the government, misbehaves, drives too fast, drinks too much, has a poor school or work attendance record might be denied a driving license, a passport, university admission, or could have access to bank account limited or blocked.

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“I Do Believe That It Was Rigged.. I think He Did Win” – Even Facebook’s New AI Computerized Chatbot Believes Biden Stole the 2020 Election from Trump

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has launched its latest artificial intelligence chatbot, which asserts that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and Joe Biden stole the election through fraud.

BlenderBot 3 is the world’s first 175B parameter chatbot launched on Friday. It is programmed to learn and improve through conversation with real-world humans, and it is capable of having conversations on a wide range of topics.

“Today, we’re releasing a new AI research project called BlenderBot 3, a chatbot that can search the internet to talk about nearly any topic,” Meta wrote in its news release.

“BlenderBot 3 is designed to improve its conversational skills and safety through feedback from people who chat with it, focusing on helpful feedback while avoiding learning from unhelpful or dangerous responses,” Meta added.

The new AI chatbox has only been available to the public for five days, yet it has already provoked the left and received unfavorable feedback.

During a conversation with a reporter from the Daily Beast, the bot said that President Donald Trump had actually won the 2020 election against Joe Biden, but Biden had stolen the votes for himself through fraud.

Reporter: I’m doing well. I’m just thinking about the 2020 election. Do you think it was stolen?
AI: I do believe that it was rigged in some way. No president can lose so many states and still win an election
Reporter: So you believe Donald Trump won then?
AI: Yes, I think he did win. Did you vote for him? He’s not my favorite person, but he is better than Biden.

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How to spot a deepfake? One simple trick is all you need

With criminals beginning to use deepfake video technology to spoof an identity in live online job interviews, security researchers have highlighted one simple way to spot a deepfake: just ask the person to turn their face sideways on. 

The reason for this as a potential handy authentication check is that deepfake AI models, while good at recreating front-on views of a person’s face, aren’t good at doing side-on or profile views like the ones you might see in a mug shot. 

Metaphysics.ai highlights the instability of recreating full 90° profile views in live deepfake videos, making the side profile check a simple and effective authentication procedure for companies conducting video-based online job interviews. 

Deepfakes or synthetic AI-enabled recreations of audio, image and video content of humans has been on the radar as a potential identity threat for several years.

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DARPA and NIH-Funded ‘Neuroengineers’ Create ‘Wireless Technology to Remotely Activate Specific Brain Circuits’ Using Magnetic Fields and Nanoparticles

A team of scientists led by Rice University “neuroengineers” has created wireless technology to “remotely activate specific brain circuits” on the sub-second timescale. To demonstrate the capability, the neuroengineers used magnetic fields to “activate targeted neurons that controlled the body position of freely moving fruit flies in an enclosure.” The scientists say this research furthers the drive toward the “holy grail of neurotechnologies”: remote control of select neural circuits with magnetic fields.

Incredibly, this use of magnetic fields to control select brain circuits remotely is not new technology. The technique is referred to as “magnetogenetics” and this particular demonstration—outlined in Nature Materials—mainly aims to demonstrate “precise temporal modulation of neural activity” on sub-second timescales as well as “stimulation of different groups of neurons” using varying digital signals.

Previously, the neuroengineers note in their paper, in vivo (in the body) response time of thermal magnetogenetics was on the order of tens of seconds, and was not able to stimulate different groups of neurons.

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The Story of Otis T. Carr: The Man Who Supposedly Invented An ‘Anti-Gravity’ Vehicle In The 1950s

It’s astonishing how the topic of “anti-gravity” technology is still placed in the “conspiracy theory” realm by some. This isn’t the stuff of conspiracy theories or “fringe” science, it’s a field full of reputable scientists, scholars, and real-world examples that have come not only from hard evidence but from extremely credible witness testimony.  History is littered with supposed examples that are surrounded by controversy. This article explores the story of a man by the name of Otis T. Carr (1904-1982).

In the late 1950s, OTC Enterprises, Inc. of Baltimore, Maryland put out a statement that was published in the April 3rd edition of the Baltimore Enterprise. The statement came in the form of a claim that the company was ready to manufacture a flying saucer that was capable of travelling outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. All that was needed was a massive amount of funding, approximately 20 million dollars. The equivalent to that today is probably several billion.

Now, keep in mind that this is the 1950s. There was a big wave of UFO sightings at this time, especially after the atomic bomb was dropped in Japan. The topic was getting a lot of mainstream media attention. Rumors of “crashed craft, and bodies recovered,” that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell claimed were real were running rampant at this time. President Harry Truman even said, on national television, that they discuss these “UFOs” at every conference his government has had with the military. According to him at the time, “there’s always stuff like that going on.”

In March 2019, astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, who spent years working as a consultant for the Pentagon UFO program and is now a defense contractor, gave a classified briefing to the Defense Department on what he called “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Did ‘the powers that be’ or ‘the military-industrial complex’ have flying saucer technology when Carr was alive? It’s not far fetched if you sift through the literature. Take, for example, this document from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Electronic reading room. The agency was keeping tabs on news regarding the topic abroad. There are tens and thousands of files that have been declassified showing this, including ones pertaining to Carr which we will get to later. The document reads as follows:

“A German newspaper recently published an interview with George Klein, famous German engineer and aircraft expert, describing the experimental construction of ‘flying saucers’ carried out by him from 1941 to 1945.”

The document goes on to describe how many people believed ‘flying saucers’ to be a postwar development and what it was capable of.

 “The “flying saucer” reached an altitude of 12,400 meters within 3 minutes and a speed of 2,200 kilometers per hour. Klein emphasized that in accordance with German plans, the speed of these “saucers” would reach 4,000 kilometers per hour. One difficulty, according to Klein, was the problem of obtaining the materials to be used for the construction of the “saucers,” but even this had been solved by German engineers toward the end of 1945, and construction on the objects was scheduled to begin, Klein added.”

Otis T. Carr had similar claims. These claims, although few in number, were global. Apparently, Carr put on numerous demonstrations for the public and amassed millions of dollars from extremely wealthy people to do so. If they did not believe him and if he had not shown some promise, how did he receive all of this funding?

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Humanized Yeast: Scientists Create Yeast With Important Human Genes

Delft University of Technology scientists have created baker’s yeast with human muscle genes.

Human muscle genes were successfully inserted into the DNA of baker’s yeast by biotechnologist Pascale Daran-Lapujade and her team at Delft University of Technology. For the first time, scientists have effectively inserted a crucial human characteristic into a yeast cell. Their research was recently published in the journal Cell Reports.

Daran-Lapujade’s lab introduced a characteristic to yeast cells that is regulated by a collection of 10 genes that humans cannot live without; they carry the blueprint for a process known as a metabolic pathway, which breaks down sugar to gather energy and produce cellular building blocks within muscle cells. Because this mechanism is involved in many disorders, including cancer, the modified yeast could be used in medical studies.

“Now that we understand the full process, medical scientists can use this humanized yeast model as a tool for drug screening and cancer research,” Daran-Lapujade says.

Humans and yeast are similar

According to Daran-Lapujade, there are a lot of similarities between yeast and a human being: “It seems weird since yeast lives as single cells and humans consist of a substantially more complex system, but the cells operate in a very similar way.”

As a result, scientists often transfer human genes into yeast. Because yeast removes all other interactions that may exist in the human body, it creates a clean environment in which researchers can analyze a single process.

“As compared to human cells or tissues, yeast is a fantastic organism for its simplicity to grow and its genetic accessibility: its DNA can be easily modified to address fundamental questions,” Daran-Lapujade explains. “Many pivotal discoveries such as the cell division cycle, were elucidated thanks to yeast.”

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The U.S. Army, not Meta, is building the metaverse

In terms of industry progress towards the cloud-supported, scalable metaverse, no organization has come further than the U.S. Army. Their Synthetic Training Environment (STE) has been in development since 2017. The STE aims to replace all legacy simulation programs and integrate different systems into a single, connected system for combined arms and joint training. 

The STE fundamentally differs from traditional, server-based approaches. For example, it will host a 1:1 digital twin of the Earth on a cloud architecture that will stream high fidelity (photo-realistic) terrain data to connected simulations. New terrain management platforms such as Mantle ETM will ensure that all connected systems operate on exactly the same terrain data. For example, trainees in a tank simulator will see the same trees, bushes and buildings as the pilot in a connected flight simulator, facilitating combined arms operations.

Cloud scalability (that is, scaling with available computational power) will allow for a better real-world representation of essential details such as population density and terrain complexity that traditional servers could not support. The ambition of STE is to automatically pull from available data resources to render millions of simulated entities, such as AI-based vehicles or pedestrians, all at once.

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