Tag: technology

Killer drone ‘hunted down a human target’ without being told to

After a United Nations commission to block killer robots was shut down in 2018, a new report from the international body now says the Terminator-like drones are now here.

Last year “an autonomous weaponized drone hunted down a human target last year” and attacked them without being specifically ordered to, according to a report from the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya, published in March 2021 that was published in the New Scientist magazine and the Star.

The March 2020 attack was in Libya and perpetrated by a Kargu-2 quadcopter drone produced by Turkish military tech company STM “during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction led by Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army,” the Star reports, adding: “The Kargu-2 is fitted with an explosive charge and the drone can be directed at a target in a kamikaze attack, detonating on impact.”

The drones were operating in a “highly effective” autonomous mode that required no human controller and the report notes:

“The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability” – suggesting the drones attacked on their own.

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Are children ‘dying like dogs’ in effort to build better batteries?

“Our children are dying like dogs.”

That is the sorrowful statement of one Congolese mother whose son and cousin died while working the cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

She and other parents like her are part of a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in Washington, D.C., in 2019 seeking to hold Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Dell Technologies, Microsoft and Tesla accountable for what they allege is profiting off the misery of child labor in their quest for cobalt.

“Cobalt is a key component of every rechargeable lithium-ion battery in all of the gadgets made by defendants and all other tech and electric car companies in the world that has brought on the latest wave of cruel exploitation fueled by greed, corruption and indifference to a population of powerless, starving Congolese people,” the suit reads.

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Physicists Have Broken The Speed of Light With Pulses Inside Hot Plasma

Sailing through the smooth waters of vacuum, a photon of light moves at around 300 thousand kilometers (186 thousand miles) a second. This sets a firm limit on how quickly a whisper of information can travel anywhere in the Universe.

While this law isn’t likely to ever be broken, there are features of light which don’t play by the same rules. Manipulating them won’t hasten our ability to travel to the stars, but they could help us clear the way to a whole new class of laser technology.

Physicists have been playing hard and fast with the speed limit of light pulses for a while, speeding them up and even slowing them to a virtual stand-still using various materials like cold atomic gases, refractive crystals, and optical fibers.

This time, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Rochester in New York have managed it inside hot swarms of charged particles, fine-tuning the speed of light waves within plasma to anywhere from around one-tenth of light’s usual vacuum speed to more than 30 percent faster.

This is both more – and less – impressive than it sounds.

To break the hearts of those hoping it’ll fly us to Proxima Centauri and back in time for tea, this superluminal travel is well within the laws of physics. Sorry.

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‘Weapons of the future’: Russia has launched mass production of autonomous high-tech WAR ROBOTS, Defense Minister Shoigu announces

The Russian military will soon be equipped with autonomous war robots capable of acting independently on the battlefield, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has said, adding that Moscow has launched mass production of such machines.

“These are not just some experimental prototypes but robots that can really be shown in sci-fi movies since they can fight on their own,” the minister told the Russian Zvezda broadcaster during the ‘New Knowledge’ forum, on Friday. Held in several Russian cities from May 20 to May 22, the forum is a series of educational events featuring top specialists in a variety of fields.

“A major effort” has been made to develop “the weapons of the future,” Shoigu said, referring to war robots equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). The bots, which are said to be capable of independently accessing a combat situation, are part of the new state-of-the-art arsenal that the Russian military is currently focused on.

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Pentagon Marches Towards AI Taking The Kill Shot

Dozens of autonomous war machines capable of deadly force conducted a field training exercise south of Seattle last August. The exercise involved no human operators but strictly robots powered with artificial intelligence, seeking mock enemy combatants.

The exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon, armed the robots with radio transmitters designed to simulate a weapon firing. The drill expanded the Pentagon’s understanding of how automation in military systems on the modern battlefield can work together to eliminate enemy combatants.

“The demonstrations also reflect a subtle shift in the Pentagon’s thinking about autonomous weapons, as it becomes clearer that machines can outperform humans at parsing complex situations or operating at high speed,” according to WIRED. 

It’s undeniable artificial intelligence will be the face of warfare for years to come. Military planners are moving ahead with incorporating autonomous weapons systems on the modern battlefield.

General John Murray of the US Army Futures Command told an audience at the US Military Academy in April that swarms of robots will likely force the military to decide if a human needs to intervene before a robot engages the enemy.

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Pentagon collecting Americans’ phone data without warrants and hiding details, senator says

U.S. federal agencies including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been purchasing access to large databases of phone location data and hiding their motives in what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) described as “warrantless surveillance” of Americans.

In a Thursday letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Wyden called on Austin to declassify all answers about the Department of Defense’s data collection practices. Wyden noted that of eight questions he raised with the DoD, he received unclassified answers to three questions, while the answers to the five remaining questions were offered in a classified manner.

“In February 2020, media reports revealed that U.S. government agencies are buying location data obtained from apps on Americans’ phones and are doing so without any kind of legal process, sich as a court order,” Wyden wrote. “I have spent the last year investigating the shady, unregulated data brokers that are selling this data and the government agencies that are buying it. My investigation confirmed the warrantless purchase of American’s location data by the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”

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The Smallest-Ever Injectable Chip Hints at a New Cybernetic Medicine

Electronics are getting imperceptibly small, opening new avenues for medical technology to place advanced monitoring and treatment devices inside our bodies. And Columbia University engineers just demonstrated a new and revolutionary version of this, creating the world’s smallest single-chip system ever developed, according to a recent study published in the journal Science Advances.

And, critically, the tiny new chip can be implanted via a hypodermic needle to measure internal body temperature, and potentially much more.

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New High-Speed Propulsion System Paves Way for Hypersonic Flight up to Mach 16

We humans have a wonderful ability to keep developing, innovating, and engineering bigger, better, and faster contraptions. Close to Earth, we’ve been soaring through the skies in airplanes since 1903 thanks to the Wright brothers, and we’ve been launching spacecraft into space since 1957 when the Soviet Union rocketed the Sputnik satellite above our heads.

So why not try even further, and even faster using less energy and fuel? How does a flight from New York to Los Angeles in a mere 30 minutes instead of six hours spent sitting next to a stranger in cramped conditions sound? This may soon be possible thanks to a team of engineers from the University of Central Florida.

The team discovered a way of stabilizing detonation for hypersonic propulsion by creating a hypersonic reaction chamber for jet propulsions.

This breakthrough allows for a potential way to develop, and integrate ultra-high-speed detonation technology that allows for hypersonic propulsion, and advanced power systems, as the team explained in its study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They’re not the only ones working on such technology. For example, in late 2020 China was testing a hypersonic jet engine that’s able to go 16 times the speed of sound in a one-of-a-kind wind tunnel in Beijing. If this jet engine, called sodramjet, was used, you’d be able to travel anywhere on Earth in just two hours. 

Other agencies, companies, and governments are focusing their energy on the future of hypersonic flight, not only for fast commercial travel across the world but to also improve how spacecraft engines launch up into space.

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Research Finds More Than Half of School Apps Sending Personal Student Data to Third Parties

According to a new research report published by the nonprofit entity Me2B Alliance, around 60 percent of school apps are sending student data to a wide range of high-risk third parties without getting the permission of either the students or their parents.

The study audited 73 apps from 38 different schools spread over 14 American states. It involved almost half a million people, including students, their teachers, and family members. The organization warned that school apps must not include third-party data channels and that an “unacceptable amount” of school data was being shared with third parties through these apps, specifically with analytics and advertising platforms.

“The findings from our research show the pervasiveness of data sharing with high-risk entities and the amount of people whose data could be compromised due to schools’ lack of resources… The study aims to bring these concerns to light to ensure the right funding support and protections are in place to safeguard our most vulnerable citizens – our children,” Lisa LeVasseur, executive director of Me2B Alliance, said in a statement.

The study found that around 18 percent of the apps had links to very high risk third parties, meaning that such parties probably re-shared the data with hundreds of thousands of entities. 67 percent of public school apps were found to be sending data to third parties, which is 10 percent higher than private school apps. 

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