Tag: technology

‘UNACCEPTABLE RISKS’: Trump Bans Import of Chinese Humanoid Robots Over National Security Concerns

‘These are not the droids that you’re looking for.’

Chinese companies have been leaping ahead in the race to develop the best, most useful (and most lethal) humanoid robots in the planet, clearly taking the lead in this flourishing industry.

But now, the Chinese droids face a major obstacle in their path, as they lose access to the planet’s largest and most robust market.

Today, it’s been reported that the Donald J. Trump administration has banned imports of humanoid robots made in China.

Officials warn they pose ‘unacceptable risks’ to US national security.

The Telegraph reported:

“US regulators barred imports of advanced Chinese robotics on Tuesday, including bipedal robots and four-legged devices, arguing they could be used to spy on American citizens or controlled remotely.

Officials at the Federal Communications Commission said: ‘Foreign-produced advanced robotics devices present an unacceptable cybersecurity and safety risk. Advanced robotic devices collect data that could be leveraged by malign actors to surveil Americans, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or to remotely commandeer the robots’.”

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AI is the Globalist’s Next Tool

Recently, an OpenAI model – one more powerful than anything released to the public – successfully and autonomously did something we were told could never happen – it broke out of its sandbox (a computer with no internet access), in order to find the answer to a test problem it had been given.

To do this, it found previously unknown software bugs that allowed it to reach an OpenAI computer it wasn’t supposed to be able to access. Then it started hacking other computers on OpenAI’s networks until it found one that had Internet access.

After gaining Internet access, the AI model went where it could find the answers to the question – successfully hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. The AI model used several hacking techniques together, including using a stolen password and finding several totally new security bugs in Hugging Face’s computers, allowing the AI model to take control of those computers.

This isn’t the plot to a dystopian Hollywood summer blockbuster, this is the frightening reality of the world we now live in.

If this lab break sounds familiar, it should. It is the tech equivalent of the Wuhan lab leak, which we were told would never and could never happen

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the privilege and honor of working for the late Dr. Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko. Zev was one of the most courageous voices for medical freedom, a man who put everything on the line to stand up and demand the truth about COVID – where it came from, how to treat it, and the concerns about the rushed experimental vaccine.

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Nearly 400 Drones Target Moscow Overnight, With Zelensky In Washington Seeking To Sway Trump

Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks on Russian territory have long become a nightly thing (as have Russian drones and missiles on Ukraine territory), but it has become clear that these attack waves have grown in volume and effectiveness.

On Tuesday Russian officials are newly acknowledging another massive attack wave on the Moscow region, describing that nearly 400 drones were inbound on the capital overnight. 

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin indicated that 390 drones had been tracked by anti-air defense systems across the wider Moscow region since Monday night, but said that “most” of them were intercepted – with no forthcoming reports of casualties. 

One regional report cited some damage in residential and business areas, however:

In the village of Vaulovo, a private house caught fire in the “Dubrava” dacha community, and a dacha house was damaged in the “Romashkino” community in the village of Dubna. No one was injured.

A warehouse belonging to the logistics company 3PL caught fire in the village of Koledino in Podolsk, outside Moscow, following the attack, the independent Telegram channel Astra reported, citing photos and video from witnesses. A nearby Wildberries warehouse is operating “as normal,” the company reported.

Drones impacted other regions of Moscow, however, and left at least 19 people in the Belgorod region injured. The high rate of injuries was due to an intercity bus being struck.

Ukraine has continued targeting Wildberries warehouses and logistics hubs (the major Russian online retailer which is comparable to Amazon) – an escalating trend since July 18. So far nearly a dozen facilities have been hit across Moscow and the surrounding region, St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, Voronezh, Tambov, Krasnodar, Stavropol Krai, and Crimea..

Crimea meanwhile continues to struggle to keep the lights on and gas supplies available for the population. Regional reports say power was knocked out for the city of Feodosia overnight, after an electric substation was struck.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has been highlighting the ‘success’ of the country’s drone capabilities to Western backers, and is expected to carry the same message to Washington this week.

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Minority Report: FBI Seeks AI for Political Watch List

The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent.

“The solution must leverage existing enterprise datasets that include enriched or enhanced data elements with documented source attribution to develop predictive models. When new data is ingested, the system must analyze similarity, pattern alignment, and attribute correlation against existing records to predict where additional relevant information may be derived across federated systems,” the document reads, listing “Predictive Modeling Using Enhanced Data with Traceable Lineage” as one of six requirements. In other words, the TSC wants to use AI to help predict who might be a terrorist.

The FBI declined Reason‘s request for comment.

The TSC, originally called the Terrorist Screening Center, was founded in 2003. President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 ordered the FBI to combine all existing government terrorist watch lists into one center with a 24/7 staff on call to respond to queries from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Most of the hundreds of thousands of names on the TSC watch list are foreign citizens believed to be tied to jihadist organizations, with fewer than 10,000 Americans on the list at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term.

But the second Trump administration has renamed the TSC to focus on broadly defined “threats,” and oriented it toward groups the administration deems subversive—a change that has received little media coverage. Last year, the White House published National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which instructed the entire national security apparatus to focus on incredibly broad threats, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;…extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The FBI’s procurement request for predictive AI explicitly mentions NSPM-7, although the reference is likely connected to a 2017 directive of the same name that expanded intelligence sharing between federal agencies about watch-listed people and groups. Nonetheless, the TSC is actively involved in carrying out the mandates of the more recent NSPM-7: “TSC also supports law enforcement and other communities at the federal, state, local, tribal, and international partners as established by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6 and more recently, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7,” the document reads. “To help carry out its mission, the TSC requires enhanced technical solutions that will assist its operational staff by providing automation of time-intensive, repeatable manual tasks entailing large volumes of data across multiple domains.”

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xAI Challenges Minnesota’s Broad “Nudification” Law as a First Amendment Violation

On May 1st, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself to Truth Social. He is floating in the reflecting pool on the National Mall on a gold inner tube, shirtless, giving a thumbs up. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum are in the water beside him, also shirtless. A woman in a checked bikini reclines at one edge of the picture. The joke was about the money being spent repairing the pool.

From August 1st, making that picture in Minnesota could expose the company whose software produced it to a civil penalty of $500,000. Make ten of them and the exposure is $5 million. The people depicted could sue separately for triple damages, punitive damages and legal fees.

That image appears on page 19 of a complaint xAI filed on 27 July in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, asking a federal judge to stop the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, from enforcing House File 1606. The law is the first of its kind in the United States. It targets the software, not the people who make deepfakes or the people who spread them.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. 

Minnesota has a problem it is trying to solve but statute the legislature actually wrote reaches an enormous amount of ordinary, protected speech.

What HF 1606 does

The operative text is now Minn. Stat. § 325E.91. It says that a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program or other service must not “allow a user to access, download, or use” that service “to nudify an image or video,” and must not nudify an image on a user’s behalf. A separate subdivision bans advertising or promoting such a service.

The violation belongs to the owner. The conduct belongs to the user. The person who makes the image, the person who posts it to a group chat, the person who emails it to the subject’s employer: subdivision 2 touches none of them. The statute’s entire enforcement weight lands on whoever built the tool.

“Nudify” is defined as altering or generating an image so that it depicts “an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual,” where the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe the body part belongs to that person.

The whole statute turns on what counts as an intimate part. And here the legislature made a choice that will probably decide the case.

The definition that swallowed the law

For “intimate part,” HF 1606 borrows a definition from Minn. Stat. § 609.341, subdivision 5, part of Minnesota’s criminal sexual conduct code. That statute defines intimate parts to include “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.”

That definition was written to determine when unwanted touching becomes criminal sexual contact. There it makes obvious sense: grabbing someone’s thigh or breast without consent is an assault regardless of what they were wearing. Transplanted into a statute about images, the same list produces something else entirely. Inner thighs are visible in shorts. Buttocks are visible in swimwear. Men’s “breasts” are visible any time a man takes his shirt off. The definition is also open-ended since the statute says the term “includes” those areas rather than limiting it to them.

The shirtless reflecting pool image is covered. So is an image a user made of a former and current governor from opposite sides of the political spectrum in a sumo match, which xAI reproduces on page 20 of its filing; both individuals’ breasts and inner thighs have been “depicted” where they were not before. So is a viral picture of Trump, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk and Tim Cook eating skewers on a Chinese street in vests and shorts.

The legislature knew about the alternative. As introduced in February 2025, HF 1606 cross-referenced Minnesota’s existing deepfake statute, which uses a much tighter list: the genitals, pubic area, anus, or a partially or fully exposed nipple. That version names discrete anatomical features rather than whole regions of the body. Lawmakers considered it and adopted the broader one instead. A court asked to save the statute by reading it narrowly will have to explain why the legislature’s deliberate rejection of the narrow definition should be undone by judicial construction.

The second definitional term is nearly as loose. An “identifiable individual” is someone identifiable “from the image itself, by the person depicted in the image, or by another person,” or from personal information displayed alongside it. The only genuine limit in the statute is realism, which means photorealistic output is regulated and cartoons are not.

The statute is silent on consent. An adult editing a photograph of themselves triggers the same liability as a stranger targeting a classmate. The omission was deliberate. When a Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee staffer flagged during a February hearing that the prohibition “applies to consensual images,” the bill’s Senate sponsor, Erin Maye Quade, explained “that is intentional.”

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The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion

As Big Tech races to build water-guzzling, energy-hungry data centers for its artificial intelligence, talk of an “AI race” between the United States and China has permeated public discourse. Pundits, politicians, and the media have all joined tech corporations in selling this narrative. And it’s giving license to Big Tech and their political handmaidens to ruin our communities, exploit our every action (both online and via AI-powered surveillance), and steal the wealth of human knowledge for private gain.

But the idea of an AI race between China and the US isn’t grounded in reality. The researchers, companies, and governments behind Chinese and US AI development are pursuing completely different goals.

The discourse in the US assumes that achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)—computers that mimic human consciousness—would be so momentous and earth-shattering that clearly this must be the goal of anyone pursuing AI development. But that’s not the main goal of Chinese AI development. And a competition in which the competitors are running toward different finish lines isn’t a race.

If we allow the myth of an AI race with China to give Big Tech free rein, we face a more polluted, less equal world.

A Race Doesn’t Have Two Different Finish Lines

While the US is focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), Chinese developers are focused on AI embedded in products. It’s ChatGPT versus robots.

Yes, China is developing LLMs, although largely in an open-source way as opposed to the for-profit competition in the US. Recent news stories report that China is “catching” the US in LLM development. Indeed, the latest Chinese model outperforms leading US models. But this isn’t evidence of an LLM-AGI race. Instead, it shows that without making AGI its main focus, China is capable of developing its own models almost as quickly as US companies.

More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).

In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.

This isn’t to argue that China is doing it “right” and the US is doing it “wrong.” Either approach will lead to a future in which citizens become increasingly disempowered. In which work becomes more scarce and less lucrative for most people. And in which a handful of billionaires grow wealthier and more powerful.

But the arguments being hauled out to support the destructive growth of hyperscale data centers are based on a fallacy. There is no need to “beat China.” China and the US are racing on separate tracks, in different races, with different finish lines.

These two separate approaches also explain the mind-boggling scale of the data center invasion we currently face. The massive hyperscale data centers—recent proposals would demand up to 5 gigawatts, enough electricity to power roughly 3.75 million US households—are only “required” because the US is racing toward AGI. Meanwhile, the embodied AI dominating in China does not require the same amount of computational power.

The truth is, we don’t need hyperscale data centers to “beat China.” We aren’t racing China. We’re killing ourselves so Silicon Valley can race itself.

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Renewables ‘Can’t Keep Up’ With Data Center Pace. As Usual, The Left Wants Government To Step In…

The political left is worried that the rapid expansion of data centers across the U.S. – a controversial but necessary development considering our competition with China – is increasingly accompanied by the corresponding construction of stand-alone natural gas plants to provide the power demands of the centers.

In Ohio, 10 gas-fired power plants are in the works to fuel new data centers. In West Virginia, a startup business building AI compute campuses plans to utilize hundreds of gas generators by 2028. Newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk has purchased a gas turbine company specifically to power the Tennessee-based data centers fueling Grok.

Across the nation, similar stories are playing out region by region, with dedicated gas plants often backed by tech giants who once swore off fossil fuels before reality set in.

Natural gas plants can be stood up relatively quickly and deliver the massive power required to keep the U.S. ahead of its adversaries in the AI/data center race. While data centers have resulted in controversies in some local communities – an unsurprising NIMBY reaction – other places have welcomed the developments.

As stated here before, artificial intelligence is here, like it or not. The only question is who will make the rules, the U.S. or China?

Soldiers in the anti-fossil fuel brigade are once again coming face-to-face with their biggest enemy: reality. And as usual, rather than seeking to engage fairly in the free market, backers of renewables are demanding that government write regulations requiring their use.

The Associated Press recently reported that “tech giants are demanding power at such speed and scale – some data centers consume more energy than a mid-size city – that the construction of wind and solar simply can’t keep up,” giving natural gas a substantial advantage. Most people call that the free market playing out as it naturally will. The climate change fearmongers call it foul play.

To level the field, the same old playbook is once again being deployed. For instance, in Michigan, Oregon and Minnesota, laws have been enacted in the last 18 months “designed to protect their pre-existing requirements that electric utilities use only emissions-free energy sources by 2040,” AP reported, adding that similar bills are emerging in California, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

New York, not surprisingly, leads the way when it comes to the heavy hand of government mandates. There, legislation would force data centers over a certain size “to meet renewable energy benchmarks starting in 2030 and, by 2040, get at least 90% of their energy from renewable energies.”

The arrogance of those demanding that alternatives be given special consideration was once more on display courtesy of a New York state lawmaker who wrote the bill in question. “We are literally talking about the wealthiest companies in the world that are looking to build in New York state,” said state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez (D), adding, “and if they have the resources to put billions of dollars into data center development, then they certainly should have the resources to build out renewable energy sources to power them.”

So there!

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Xbox Outage Stops Players From Launching Physical Disc Games

Around 11 PM, Eastern time, on Sunday, a server in a data center somewhere fell over. It’s becoming routine, really. Xbox’s status page logged it the way you’d log rain.

By Monday morning it had grown teeth. People lost their logins. Apps stayed shut, the store stayed dark, plenty of downloaded games stayed frozen. Fine. That’s the bargain you strike for digital, and everyone struck it with eyes open.

Then came the part nobody struck. The disc games balked too.

The disc. The physical object. The one in the tray, spinning, bought with actual money at an actual shop.

Xbox’s own status page conceded that players “may have problems” with disc games, and the internet duly confirmed it. The license, it said, couldn’t be verified.

The console, you see, phones home before it will let a disc spin. The disc is a pass that works only when a building three states away agrees to open the door for you.

Xbox was making progress on recovery. It said so itself at 5:26 PM, on X, assuring everyone that most players “should be able to launch titles and complete purchases again.”

GamesRadar clocked the support account at 7:54 AM, “just checking in” on the sign-in and game-launch business. By 9:43 AM it had “identified the issue,” resolution “pending.” Pending pulled a long stretch that day.

The company stayed silent on requests for comment. It had a lot goin on.

Days earlier, PlayStation had suffered an outage of its own. And back on the first of July, Sony had already posted the destination: physical disc production for new PlayStation games stops in January 2028. Senior director Sid Shuman put it down to “shifting trends in consumer preference.” After that date, new games arrive as downloads.

Sony describes killing the disc as a chance to “align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today,” which is press-release for: we checked the register, and you’d mostly stopped buying them. Digital already brings in 20% of the company’s gaming revenue. The discs were the rounding error.

The numbers dig the grave regardless. Physical is 3% of Sony’s gaming revenue now, half what it was in 2020, the year the PS5 turned up with a drive still in it. TechRadar counted seven PlayStation games that sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the US this year. Seven.

There is a holdout. Shawn Layden, who used to run the place, reckons the PS6 won’t completely drop discs, on the theory that going all-digital might irritate the customers across 170-odd countries who still enjoy owning a thing.

By Monday evening the disc games came back, though Xbox warned that digital and backward-compatible titles might still stall. The tray whirred, the license got verified, the door swung open. And the disc you paid for went back to being what it had been around 11 PM: a shiny promise that a company somewhere will go on letting you use the thing you bought.

Own nothing, the slogan goes, and be happy. It’s half right.

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Monster fire breaks out near Area 51 sparking theories of secret weapon testing

A massive fire has broken out near the highly classified Area 51 base in Nevada, sparking theories that a secret weapon was recently tested.

The blaze, dubbed the Quail Springs Fire, sparked on Saturday and has since burned through more than 4,400 acres. 

The fire is located in Lincoln County, Nevada, just south of Rachel, burning near Bald Mountain on the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) withdrawn lands.

As of Monday, zero percent of the wildfire is contained as it spreads within the Nevada Test and Training Range, a military training area restricted to the public.

While officials said the fire was started by lightning, online users believe something more sinister is at play. Commenting on a livestream showing the blaze outside of Area 51, many people suggested a secret weapon was to blame.

‘I don’t want to be that guy, but I wonder if they’re testing DEW (Directed Energy Weapons), and this is the result of such,’ one viewer shared, referring to advanced systems that use lasers, high-power microwaves or particle beams to destroy targets.

Another commented, ‘Maybe they tested a new dumb weapon and blew themselves up lol,’ while another suggested the fire was to ‘burn the evidence’ of aliens.

Area 51 has become a cultural phenomenon thanks to decades of conspiracy theories connecting the base to UFOs, aliens and experimental aircraft testing.

Officials noted that no evacuations have been ordered, and no structures are threatened. 

They also said no residences or public spaces are currently threatened.

YouTuber Dreamland Resort captured footage of the fire, showing columns of smoke around Bald Mountain, the highest peak in the Groom Range, located directly inside the restricted military zone of Area 51.

The fire is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, which is listed as the landowner for Area 51 and surrounding regions. 

‘The Quail Springs Fire experienced moderate growth, primarily due to winds, high temperatures, and low relative humidity,’ according to officials with the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), one of the agencies working to control the blaze. 

‘Firefighters are utilizing a confine and contain strategy, rather than full suppression.’ 

Twenty-six personnel are currently assigned to the fire under the direction of a Type 3 incident commander. 

Because the blaze is burning inside a restricted military training area, crews are working to contain it rather than attempting a direct attack.

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Police Are Deploying 60 MPH Autonomous Drones to Read Your License Plate from the Sky

If you thought Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) were deeply invasive when they were just mounted to neighborhood stop signs and hidden inside speed trailers, you might want to look up.

The company that built a massive, interconnected surveillance net across American roadways has officially taken its technology airborne. As highlighted in a viral X post by Josh Walkos, Flock is rolling out “Flock Alpha”—a highly advanced, autonomous police drone designed to track vehicles and suspects from the sky.

Walkos perfectly captured the escalating nature of the tech in his post: “Remember when everyone was told Flock was ‘just reading license plates’? Anyway, here’s Flock Alpha, the autonomous drone.”

The “Drone as a First Responder” Play

Flock isn’t just selling a standard quadcopter; they are aggressively pushing a concept known as “Drone as First Responder” (DFR). Following a strategic partnership with aviation software company Aerodome, Flock integrated its existing street-level surveillance web directly into an autonomous aerial platform.

The specs on the Flock Alpha are undeniably impressive—and for privacy advocates, entirely terrifying.

When a 911 call, a gunshot audio sensor, or a street-level ALPR camera triggers an alert, an officer can deploy the Alpha drone directly from their smartphone. The drone launches itself from a weatherproof docking station and can reach the scene at speeds up to 60 MPH. According to Flock’s promotional materials, the drone arrives first on the scene 78% of the time, long before patrol cars can navigate traffic.

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