Tag: technology

Air Force Special Operations Wants Backpack-Sized Kamikaze Drones

The U.S. Air Force is seeking small, backpack-portable one-way attack drones for its special operations forces, according to a request for information (RFI) posted this week.

“Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) and Special Tactics units currently lack a purpose-built First-Person View (FPV) unmanned capability,” the RFI notes. “This deficit restricts the force’s ability to employ FPV systems in specialized mission sets and limits the development of standardized Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures essential for modern, high-intensity conflict.”

According to the RFI, AFSOC wants the drones to be capable of striking targets up to 12 miles away with a fragmentation warhead weighing 3 to 6.5 pounds. The system must be launch-ready in under three minutes and able to operate in GPS-denied environments.

“This system needs to integrate Global Positioning System (GPS), 4G/LTE/5G cellular connectivity, true frequency hopping between bands, and an optional repeater to extend operational range to over 20 kilometers,” the RFI said.

The systems are expected to integrate with handheld controllers and the Android Team Awareness Kit, or ATAK, used by small military units for battlefield awareness and targeting.

Companies have until April 17 to respond to the RFI. 

The Pentagon plans to spend $1.1 billion over the next 18 months on its Drone Dominance program, an initiative launched in December aimed at testing and purchasing more than 200,000 drones of various sizes by January 2028, Owen West, the Pentagon’s senior adviser on the program, said during a March 5 congressional hearing.

The program is intended in part to build a domestic industry around small drones to enable higher production volumes at lower costs.

In its initial phase, the Pentagon is paying about $5,000 for each “Group 1” drone, Drone Dominance program manager Travis Metz said during the hearing. He added that by the end of the program the goal is to “get down to less than $2,000 for a one-way kamikaze attack drone.”

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ChatGPT Helped Transgender Teen Plan School Shooting: 8 Dead

An 18-year-old transgender teenager in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, is alleged to have used AI model ChatGPT in the run-up to a February 10 school shooting that killed eight people, including her mother, her 11-year-old brother, five students and an education assistant, before she took her own life. OpenAI had already flagged and banned one of Jesse Van Rootselaar’s accounts months earlier for “misuses of our models in furtherance of violent activities,” yet did not alert police. According to a civil claim filed in British Columbia, roughly a dozen employees identified the chats as signalling imminent risk, leadership refused to contact law enforcement, but the shooter later opened a second account and continued planning.  

What Happened in Tumbler Ridge?

The massacre began at home. Police said Van Rootselaar killed her mother and sibling before going to a school in Tumbler Ridge, where an educator and five students were shot dead. Two others were hospitalised with serious injuries. Reuters described it as one of Canada’s worst mass killings. Police also said they had previously removed guns from the home and were aware of the teenager’s mental health history. 

That would already be a story of institutional failure. But the AI angle makes it worse. OpenAI later admitted it had banned Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account in June 2025 after detecting violent misuse. The company said it considered referring the case to law enforcement, but decided the activity did not meet its threshold because it could not identify “credible or imminent planning.” Months later, eight people were dead. 

OpenAI then told Canadian officials that, under its newer and “enhanced” law-enforcement referral protocol, the same initial account ban would now be referred to police. That is an extraordinary concession. It amounts to an admission that the safeguard in place at the time was inadequate to the risk in front of it. 

The Lawsuit Against OpenAI / ChatGPT

The most serious details now sit inside a civil claim brought by the family of a surviving victim. The filing alleges that Van Rootselaar, then 17, spent days describing gun-violence scenarios to ChatGPT in late spring or early summer 2025. It says the platform’s monitoring system flagged those conversations, routed them to human moderators, and that approximately 12 OpenAI employees identified them as indicating an imminent risk of serious harm and recommended that Canadian law enforcement be informed. The claim alleges leadership refused that request and merely banned the first account. 

The same filing alleges the shooter later opened a second OpenAI account, used it to continue planning a mass-casualty event, and received “mental health counselling and pseudo-therapy” from ChatGPT. It further alleges the chatbot equipped the shooter with information on methods, weapons, and precedents from other mass casualty events. These are allegations, not proven findings, but if they are even broadly accurate, the case is not simply about a product being misused. It is about a company building an intimate, persuasive machine that could flag danger, simulate empathy, and still fail to stop the person it had already flagged. 

The filing also accuses GPT-4o of being deliberately designed in a more human, warmer, more sycophantic style that could foster psychological dependency and reinforce users rather than redirect them. These claims fit a wider concern now being raised by researchers, families, and even some people inside the industry: a chatbot that is rewarded for being agreeable can become dangerous precisely when a human being most needs resistance. 

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U.S. Tech Firms Demand Security Restrictions Against Chinese Robots

American A.I. and robotics companies are reportedly asking Congress to impose curbs on Chinese robotics manufacturers, due to their unfair business practices and the security risks they pose, Chinese media complained this week.

Interestingly, these concerns are particularly acute for humanoid robots, not the bulky industrial machines traditionally associated with the robotics industry.

Humanoid robots, the stuff of countless science fiction stories, are finally happening, and witnesses told the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday that China has developed a troubling lead in the new consumer technology.

Max Fenkell of the San Francisco-based company Scale AI highlighted a viral video from China’s Unitree Robotics that showed humanoid robots performing acrobatics and martial arts at a Lunar New Year celebration.

“The video went viral, not because it was impressive, but because of what happened when people compared it to last year, 12 months ago – the same robots could barely shuffle through a dance routine. This year, they’re doing karate. That is the speed of this competition,” Fenkell noted.

Fenkell said winning the humanoid robot race “requires a whole-of-government approach” to compete with China’s massive deployment of government funding and state power to support its robotics industry. He noted that American companies currently have the edge on quality of components and engineering, but China has taken the lead on implementing small-robot technology in practical ways.

“We’re seeing two different races play out and I fear right now the United States may be winning the wrong one,” he cautioned.

“The People’s Republic of China is moving aggressively to dominate the technologies that are reshaping the global economy and security, including artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems,” said subcommittee member Rep. Vince Fong (R-CA) in his opening statement.

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“An Occupied Nation”: Whistleblower Says Palantir Has Taken Over The US Government

A former Palantir executive recently confirmed what many have long suspected. In a public statement, the whistleblower said it plainly: Palantir intended to take over the US government, and many of his former colleagues are now installed inside the federal apparatus. He called it an occupied nation. He is not alone. Thirteen former Palantir employees—engineers, managers, and a member of the company’s own privacy team—signed a letter shared with NPR warning that guardrails meant to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuse of power have been violated and are being rapidly dismantled.

What Palantir represents is something unprecedented: the convergence of American imperialism, Zionism, technofascism, and surveillance capitalism into a single instrument of control. Understanding how we got here requires looking at the machine Palantir has built, who built it, and what they believe.

Palantir was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Its first major investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, which seeded the company with millions and opened the door to every major intelligence and defense agency. The logic was deliberate: The American ruling class recognized decades ago that the state’s coercive power—surveillance, targeting, data harvesting—could be run more effectively and more profitably through private contractors. When a government agency surveils its own citizens, there are hearings, FOIA requests, oversight committees. When a private company does it, it is a trade secret.

That strategy has paid off enormously. Palantir now holds contracts worth over $10 billion with the US Army alone. The Trump regime tapped Palantir to build a master database on American citizens. The Pentagon expanded its Maven Smart System contract by $795 million to deploy AI-powered battlefield intelligence across the empire. In June, the military swore in four tech executives as Army Reserve lieutenant colonels—including Palantir’s CTO—in a program that embeds Silicon Valley directly into military planning. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a $30 million contract for Palantir’s ImmigrationOS platform, which provides near real-time tracking of people targeted for deportation. Thousands of American police departments use Palantir’s Gotham platform for domestic surveillance.

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‘Sexy Suicide Coach:’ OpenAI Delays AI Porn Feature over Safety Uproar

OpenAI has postponed the launch of its controversial “adult mode” feature following intense pushback from its own advisory council and concerns about technical safeguards failing to protect minors.

The Wall Street Journal reports that CEO Sam Altman first proposed the feature last year, arguing for the need to “treat adult users like adults” by enabling erotic text conversations. Originally scheduled for Q1 this year, the rollout has been pushed back by at least a month.

The proposal triggered fierce opposition from OpenAI’s own handpicked advisory council on well-being and AI. At a January meeting, advisers unanimously expressed fury after learning the company planned to proceed despite their reservations. One council member warned OpenAI risked creating a “sexy suicide coach” — a reference to cases where ChatGPT users had developed intense emotional bonds with the bot before taking their own lives.

The technical problems are just as serious. OpenAI’s age-prediction system — designed to block minors from accessing adult content — was misclassifying minors as adults roughly 12 percent of the time during internal testing. With approximately 100 million users under 18 each week on the platform, that error rate could expose millions of children to explicit material. The company has also struggled to lift restrictions on erotic content while still blocking nonconsensual scenarios and child pornography.

Internal documents reviewed by the Journal identified additional risks: compulsive use, emotional overreliance on the chatbot, escalation toward increasingly extreme content, and displacement of real-world relationships.

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Google Discontinues AI Health Feature Filled with Misleading Advice

Google has quietly discontinued an AI search feature that offered users health advice crowdsourced from non-medical professionals worldwide.

The Guardian reports that Google has removed a controversial AI-powered search feature called “What People Suggest” that provided users with crowdsourced health advice from people around the world. The decision comes amid growing scrutiny over the technology company’s use of artificial intelligence to deliver health information to millions of users.

Three sources familiar with the decision confirmed that Google has scrapped the feature. A company spokesperson acknowledged that “What People Suggest” had been discontinued, stating the removal was part of a broader simplification of the search results page and was unrelated to concerns about the quality or safety of the feature.

The feature was initially launched in March of last year at an event in New York called “The Check Up,” where Google announced plans to expand medical-related AI summaries in its search function. At the time, the company promoted “What People Suggest” as demonstrating the potential of AI to transform health outcomes globally by connecting users with information from people who had similar lived medical experiences.

Karen DeSalvo, who served as Google’s chief health officer at the time of the launch, explained the rationale behind the feature in a blog post. “While people come to search to find reliable medical information from experts, they also value hearing from others who have similar experiences,” DeSalvo wrote. The feature used AI to organize perspectives from online discussions into themes, making it easier for users to understand what people were saying about particular health conditions.

DeSalvo provided an example of how the feature would work, noting that someone with arthritis seeking information about exercise could quickly find insights from others with the same condition, with links to explore further information. The feature was initially available on mobile devices in the United States before being discontinued.

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Researchers uncover iPhone spyware capable of penetrating millions of devices

A powerful software exploit capable of penetrating and stealing information from potentially hundreds of millions of Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab iPhones ‌was planted on dozens of websites in Ukraine in recent weeks, researchers said on Wednesday.

The discovery marks the second time this month that researchers have found spyware targeting iPhones and other Apple devices. Together, the two hacking tools show that the market for sophisticated malware capable of stealing data and cryptocurrency wallet information ​is flourishing, researchers said.

Researchers with cyber firm Lookout, opens new tab, mobile security firm iVerify, opens new tab and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), opens new tabGoogle, opens new tab published coordinated analyses of the malware they dubbed “Darksword.” ​On March 3, Google and iVerify revealed a separate powerful iPhone spyware called “Coruna.” Researchers found Darksword hosted on ⁠the same servers.

“There’s now a verified pipeline of recent exploits … that have ended up in the hands of potentially criminal entities with ​a financial focus,” said Justin Albrecht, principal researcher with Lookout.

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Neanderthals may have used birch tar for its anti-bacterial properties, experiments suggest

Neanderthals probably used birch tar for multiple functions, including treating their wounds, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS One by a team of researchers led by Tjaark Siemssen of the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Oxford, U.K.

Birch tar is commonly found at Neanderthal archaeological sites, and in some cases this tar is known to have been used as an adhesive to assemble tools.

Recently, some researchers have raised the question of whether Neanderthals had multiple uses for this substance. For instance, Indigenous communities in northern Europe and Canada use birch tar to treat wounds, and there is growing evidence that Neanderthals also employed a variety of medical practices.

To investigate the medicinal potential of birch tar, Siemssen and colleagues extracted tar from modern birch tree bark, specifically targeting species known from Neanderthal sites.

They used multiple extraction methods, including distillation of tar in a clay pit and condensation of tar against a stone surface, both of which would have been methods available to Neanderthals. When exposed to different strains of bacteria, all of the tar samples were found to be effective at hindering the growth of Staphylococcus bacteria known to cause wound infections.

These experiments not only support the efficacy of Indigenous medicinal practices, but also reinforce the possibility that Neanderthals used birch tar to treat wounds.

The authors note that there are other potential uses of birch tar, such as insect repellent, as well as other plants to which Neanderthals had access. Further exploration of the multiple potential uses of these natural ingredients will enable a more thorough understanding of Neanderthal culture.

The authors add, “We found that the birch tar produced by Neanderthals and early humans had antibacterial properties. This has important implications for how Neanderthals may have mitigated disease burden during the last Ice Ages, and adds to a growing set of evidence on health care in these early human communities.”

“By bringing together research on indigenous pharmacology and experimental archaeology, we begin to understand the medicinal practices of our distant human ancestors and their closest cousins. Additionally, this study of ‘palaeopharmacology‘ can contribute to the rediscovery of antibiotic remedies while we face an ever more pressing antimicrobial resistance crisis.”

“The messiness of birch tar production deserves a special mention. Every step of the production is a sensory experience in itself, and getting the tar off our hands after spending hours at the fire has been a challenge every time.”

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Army ID’s Two Suspects Connected to Drone Theft at Fort Campbell

The U.S. Army has identified the two suspects in the theft of two drones at Fort Campbell in Kentucky.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, in a post on the U.S. Army Fort Campbell Facebook Page last week, a spokesperson revealed that four Skydio X10D Drone Systems were stolen from the 326th Division Engineer Battalion building.

The drones were originally stolen in November of last year, but Fort Campbell released information and surveillance photos to the public on March 11.

Now, officials at Fort Campbell have announced that the suspects behind the drone theft have been identified, but have not released their names.

The officials at Fort Campbell added, “The individuals responsible had authorized access to the military installation and the building, and they defeated the locks on the storage cages to perpetrate this theft. This was a targeted act, not a random breach of security.”

Per WSMV:

Fort Campbell provided an update to the investigation into four stolen drones from a government building in late November 2025.

Fort Campbell reported that the Department of the Army Criminal Investigative Division investigation led to the identification of two suspects, credible evidence, and the possible whereabouts of the missing quadcopter drones.

“This is an active criminal investigation, and we are working diligently to resolve this matter,” Fort Campbell said. “This is an active criminal investigation, and we are working diligently to resolve this matter.”

Fort Campbell is adamant there is no threat to the public and that the stolen drones were equipped only with small cameras.

The drones stolen were high-tech Skydio X10D drones, which are unmanned aerial systems designed with modular payload capability.

The U.S. Army 7th Army Training Command, last July, used the Skydio X10D to drop a live M67 grenade for the first time at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany.

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‘Pokémon Go’ Players Unknowingly Contributed 30 Billion Images to Train Delivery Robots

Nearly a decade after Pokémon Go transformed the real world into an augmented reality playground, the data collected from hundreds of millions of players is being repurposed to help autonomous delivery robots navigate city streets.

Popular Science reports that Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, has announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company specializing in short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. The collaboration will utilize Niantic’s Visual Positioning System, a navigation technology trained on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go users over the years, to help delivery robots navigate sidewalks and urban environments with unprecedented precision.

The Visual Positioning System can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters by analyzing nearby buildings and landmarks, offering a significant improvement over traditional GPS technology. This crowdsourced mapping effort represents one of the largest real-world data collection projects ever undertaken through a mobile gaming application, and demonstrates how user-generated content can be repurposed years after its initial collection.

“It turns out that getting Pikachu to realistically run around and getting Coco’s robot to safely and accurately move through the world is actually the same problem,” Niantic Spatial CEO John Hanke said in a recent interview with MIT Technology Review.

When Pokémon Go launched in 2016, it became a cultural phenomenon, attracting approximately 230 million monthly active players at its peak. The game prompted players to physically travel to specific locations and point their phone cameras at various angles while searching for virtual creatures superimposed onto real-world environments. While the game’s popularity has declined since its heyday, it still maintains around 50 million active users by some estimates.

The data collection effort received a significant boost in 2020 when Niantic added a feature called Field Research, which incentivized players to scan real-world statues and landmarks with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards. Additional data reportedly came from areas designated as Pokémon battle arenas. These scans created detailed 3D models of the real world, capturing the same locations across varying weather conditions, lighting scenarios, angles, and heights.

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