Tag: technology

Israel unveils Light Shield – a world-first laser that can shoot down enemy missiles and drones… with each blast costing just $2 instead of Iron Dome’s $70k rockets

Israel have unveiled the world’s first laser-based interception system that can shoot down enemy missiles and drones for just $2 per blast.

The £413million Light Shield – also known as Iron Beam – fires beams of light with between 100kW and 150kW of energy at targets several kilometres away with pinpoint accuracy.

Now, after completing development and passing its final tests, the state-of-the-art weapon, which ‘never runs out of ammo’, has officially been declared operational.

After being in development for over a decade, the cutting edge weapon will be delivered to the military by the end of this year.

Taking to X to share the game-changing achievement, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett posted a clip of the Light Shield in action, blasting enemy drones out of the sky.

‘For the first time ever, our new Light Shield laser defence system successfully shut down dozens of enemy UAVs, using only a beam of light,’ he said.

Describing how the technology works, Bennett explained that the moment an incoming threat, such as a rocket, drone, or UAV, is detected, a high energy laser locks on and destroys it in mid-air within around two seconds.

‘When a missile is coming in, hundreds of micro lasers are fired at once towards that missile, and then a very clever algorithm identifies which one of them hit the target and then tells all the other laser beams to redirect and then the full laser power hits that exact point.

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Polish missile caused ‘Russian drone attack’ damage – media

The only confirmed damage from what Poland claims was a Russian drone incursion into its airspace was actually caused by a Polish missile fired from a NATO F-16 which struck a residential building, the Rzeczpospolita outlet has reported, citing sources.

Polish officials last week reported at least 19 violations of the country’s airspace by drones, saying up to four UAVs had been downed. Warsaw accused Moscow of being behind the incident. Russia has rejected the accusation and insisted its drones only strike Ukrainian military-related facilities.

Western leaders, according to Moscow, “accuse Russia of provocations on a daily basis, most often declining to offer any arguments.” 

Rzeczpospolita reported on Tuesday that most of the drones involved in the incident were not carrying explosives and caused no damage. However, one exception was in the village of Wyryki Wola near the border with Belarus, where what was described by Poland as an “unidentified flying object” crashed into a private home, damaging the roof but without causing casualties.

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It’s Not the Technology

By the standards of a dispassionate observer, the American political left has undergone a transformation over the past few decades that is as alarming as it is undeniable. Once it was a coalition of pragmatic reformers, undercover communists, labor advocates, and young idealists. This ensemble can be sold as reality to only the most out of touch American. The Democratic Party and its broader ecosystem have drifted into a fever swamp of ideological radicalism, fueled by a toxic brew of conspiracy theorizing, moral panic, and a deliberate cultivation of fear. Gay race communism and rioting replaced liberation of the individual and mass GOTV drives. This is not a phenomenon driven by the machinations of technology. Tech is the current pitch to explain away what lies at the heart of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Social media and digital platforms are mere tools of coordination, amplifying what is already afoot. The root of this radicalization lies in the left’s intellectual and moral decay, a decades-long indulgence in unhinged narratives and unchecked hysteria, encouraged by a party and its media allies who thrive on a perpetually anxious voter base. The consequences of this trajectory are profound and will be with us for years, threatening not only the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects but the broader health of American political life.

To understand this shift, one must first trash the notion that technology is the primary culprit. The internet, for all its flaws, is a neutral instrument. It is a medium that can amplify both reason and madness. It is a tool. All sides in all nations deal with this. The left’s radicalization predates Twitter’s character limit, Reddit threads and Facebook’s algo. It is not the medium but the message that has poisoned the increasingly fragile minds of the left’s base. The left’s embrace of apocalyptic rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking began in earnest during the George W. Bush era, when the Iraq War and the Patriot Act provided fertile ground for narratives of government malevolence. Anti-Trump messaging is insane, but liberals were going to group therapy to shout at W dolls two decades ago. Those old concerns were not without some basis (civil libertarians had points about government overreach), but the left’s response was not to critique with precision but to spiral into fantasies of dystopian cabals. Bush was always poised to cancel elections. The Bush administration was not merely wrong. It was evil. It was a shadowy regime orchestrating global domination. Such hyperbole became mainstream fodder, seeded by activists & academics and abetted by a media eager for viewers, clicks and outrage. This is why the rehabilitation of W is such a joke to those on the right old enough to remember the ‘00s.

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‘Eastern Sentry’: The New NATO Initiative To Protect The Eastern Flank

Some eight NATO allies have prepared operation ‘Eastern Sentry’ following last week’s alleged Russian drone breach of Poland. It is a new joint military mission to bolster defense of Europe’s eastern flank, also after Romania had more recently reported a Russian drone incursion, resulting in the scrambling of fighter jets to track it.

“Following the Russian drone incursions into Poland, I have decided to deploy three Rafale fighter jets to contribute to the protection of Polish airspace and of NATO’s Eastern Flank together with our Allies,” President Emmanuel Macron announced on X this week. Along with France, the effort includes the UK, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Spain, and The Netherlands. More nations are expected to join.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has confirmed that his country will deploy Royal Air Force jets to Poland, while Italy will contribute two Eurofighter jets, and Germany has readied four Eurofighters. Denmark will also sent jets, and Czech Mi-171S helicopters have also arrived in Poland. Over 150 NATO troops have also initially arrived along with the equipment.

Meanwhile, eastern European and Baltic countries are already calling for more, including:

Anti-drone defense systems in NATO countries still need to be developed, Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics told a press conference on Tuesday.

NATO on Friday launched “Eastern Sentry,” a new military mission to bolster defense of Europe’s eastern flank in response to Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace last week.

The Washington Post wrote on Monday, “The incident raised serious questions about the alliance’s readiness to counter the relatively cheap, highly maneuverable but devastatingly destructive unmanned aerial vehicles that have redefined modern warfare since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.”

Additionally, in a Monday interview, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called on NATO countries to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

“We as NATO and the EU could be capable of doing this, but it is not a decision that Poland can make alone; it can only be made with its allies,” he said.

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Shooting Down Russian Drones Over Poland: Who Is Trying To Start World War 3?

The world is now closer to a full-scale war between NATO and Russia than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  In the early morning hours of September 10, 2025, Western air defenses spotted a fleet of Russian drones that had entered Poland’s airspace.  Shortly thereafter, NATO fighter planes intercepted the intruders, shooting down 16 of them. NATO’s military forces also elevated their alert status.

Questions immediately arose about whether this episode was a deliberate provocation on Russia’s part, or simply a case in which Moscow’s contingent of unmanned drones heading for targets in Ukraine flew off course.  Not surprisingly, high-level officials in both Warsaw and Kyiv, including Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, insisted that the airspace violation was intentional, despite the lack of definitive evidence.  The Washington Post’s editorial board embraced a somewhat different argument, concluding that it really didn’t matter if the incursion was deliberate or not; in either case, the members believed that the situation amounted to a test of NATO’s air defenses and, more important, the Alliance’s “resolve.”

Hawks in many NATO countries also exploited the incident to argue that the Alliance needed to accelerate the pace of its ongoing military buildup and to boost its security solidarity with Ukraine.  In other words, such advocates seek to escalate NATO’s existing proxy war that uses Kyiv as a tool to weaken Russia.  The contemplated escalation would take the form of increasing the Alliance’s direct military involvement – even though that step would risk the outbreak of combat between Russian and NATO units.  NATO leaders have now used the drone incident to adopt a new confrontational mission, dubbed Eastern Sentry.

Such a move would intensify NATO’s already alarming confrontation with Moscow.  Ironically, a reasonably dispassionate assessment of the circumstances surrounding the drone episode would suggest that it was more likely an inadvertent intrusion than a hostile probe.  At the same time that Alliance defenders were knocking the Russian drones out of Poland’s skies, Russian ally Belarus announced that it was taking similar action against such drones that had penetrated its airspace.

The nature of Minsk’s response indicated that a Russian drone fleet launched against Ukraine had been disrupted by Ukrainian or NATO electronic warfare measures, causing it to deviate onto a new course over Poland.  It would be ironic if the Western powers had brought this problem on themselves through their own electronic warfare actions, but the overall circumstances suggest that that it is the most likely explanation.

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Top Secret Thiel Group ‘Dialog’ Packed With Members Of Trilateral Commission

Dialog — a secretive, invite-only network founded two decades ago by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman, the star investors and entrepreneurs — is preparing a major expansion, including a real estate purchase to build a campus in the D.C. suburbs, a tipster familiar with the group’s plans tells Axios.

Why it matters: Dialog, often compared to a tech-era Bilderberg, has quietly become one of the most elite, and mysterious, gatherings for CEOs, elected officials, and intellectual heavyweights.

Dialog leaders are in active discussions to buy a physical venue in Virginia, just outside Washington, to serve as a permanent hub for its off-the-record meetings, the tipster says.

  • The decision to buy land, then build, within commuting distance of the capital shows the group isn’t just kissing President Trump’s ring, but plans to be engaged in Washington long after this term.

A source invited to participate in Dialog said that amid “rising demand for quieter reflection in an always-on world, Dialog bills itself as offering global elites the chance to talk candidly across ideological lines, away from their phones and the pressures of social media, the news media, and their stakeholders.”

  • “Given declining trust in institutions and anti-establishment fervor,” this source added, “the group actively keeps its inner workings secretive and hidden from public scrutiny,” the source said — adding that the group’s “secretive nature allows participants to share controversial and concerning ideas that they would not be comfortable sharing elsewhere.”

Zoom in: The next flagship Dialog gathering will be in the spring. Smaller retreats are planned sooner, including one in the Middle East this fall.

  • The group is also in talks to acquire at least one smaller, like-minded membership organization “to scale its reach into additional elite circles,” the source said.

The backstory: Past Dialog participants, who cut across a wide swath of elite influencers, include Elon Musk, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Larry Summers, Chamath Palihapitiya, Henry Kravis, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D), Eric Schmidt, Grover Norquist, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Robert Hur and Sophia Bush.

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Michael Crichton’s Unheeded Warning of Biotechnology Catastrophe

With over 30,000 reader reviews on Amazon, Michael Crichton’s bestselling sci-fi novel Jurassic Park (first published in 1990) has become a cultural sensation, spawning a series of successful movies, one of which is in cinemas in Japan as I write. Yet despite this dino-disaster movie popularity, most people have failed to heed the warning Crichton makes clear in many of his novels about the terrible dangers of modern technology – especially biotechnology and genetic engineering.

As Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm puts it, “genetic power is far more potent than atomic power” and potentially even more destructive. That destructive power manifested itself on a global scale during the Covid disaster, precipitated both by an apparently bioengineered pathogen and the genetically engineered injection widely promoted to combat it.

For a long time, Crichton’s novels and films depicted catastrophes caused by technology going berserk and beyond the control of its human creators. For instance, in his 1973 movie Westworld, Crichton’s story depicted an interactive amusement park replicating an American Old West town, with humanoid robots. To the consternation of the programmers, the robots eventually escape their control and commit brutal murders of many customers in the park.

However, these destructive robots are simply artificial technological simulations. The mayhem in Crichton’s tales gets even worse when the natural world is involved. In Crichton’s view, the world of nature is far more complicated and uncontrollable, making the destructive consequences of human attempts at manipulation all but inevitable.

Crichton declares his stance about this explicitly in his introduction to the 2002 novel Prey, which is about biology-based nanotechnology. He explains, “The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do,” which therefore is a “powerful argument for caution.”

Continuing in that vein, he makes an astonishing prediction: “Sometime in the twenty-first century, our self-deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power. One area where this will occur is in the meeting point of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer technology. What all three have in common is the ability to release self-replicating entities into the environment.”

Gain-of-function viral bioengineering and self-replicating mRNA vaccines delivered by lipid nanoparticles have now made this forecast a reality.

Crichton’s theme is not the usual sci-fi disaster trope about the human race misusing scientific advances for war or other evil ends. His point is that both highly complex technological systems and the biological world are inherently uncontrollable and tend toward chaotic breakdown, regardless of our attempts to keep them under control.

Crichton drives this point home in a number of ways. Many chapters in Jurassic Park are titled “Control” as a way to make his theme explicit. The people sitting in control centers on the dinosaur island only have an illusion of control, which disappears when the computer fails or unexpected things happen.

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LaLiga’s Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions Across Spain

LaLiga, Spain’s top football league, is facing a firestorm of criticism after boasting about a staggering 142% increase in anti-piracy takedown notices in early 2025 while simultaneously causing extensive collateral damage across the internet.

As the 2025/2026 season began on August 15, LaLiga ramped up its enforcement strategy, triggering widespread outages for entirely lawful websites, services, and platforms.

These disruptions are tied to a controversial anti-piracy scheme operated in partnership with telecom giant Telefónica.

The initiative, which enjoys judicial backing in Spain, allows LaLiga to instruct major internet service providers, including Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, and DIGI, to block IP addresses suspected of hosting unauthorized streams.

The fallout is that entire chunks of the internet go dark for Spanish users, often during match broadcasts.

LaLiga doesn’t target specific infringing content. Instead, it flags entire IP ranges, many of which are shared by thousands of unrelated domains.

When one site is accused of hosting pirated material, everyone else sharing that IP address gets swept up in the block.

The result is a digital dragnet that has ensnared companies as diverse as Amazon, Cloudflare, GitHub, Twitch, and even Google Fonts.

TorrentFreak has documented repeated weekly blocks of platforms like Vercel since early 2025, while Catalonia’s own .cat domain registry has also reported service disruptions.

The issue became so disruptive that iXsystems, the team behind TrueNAS, a widely used open-source NAS operating system, was forced to shift its distribution model entirely. After its CDN IPs were repeatedly blocked in Spain, making critical security updates inaccessible to users, the developers resorted to distributing their software via BitTorrent.

“These locks have a significant collateral damage about legitimate services, which have nothing to do with football piracy,” TrueNAS noted. Their solution not only bypasses censorship but hands the bandwidth burden back to the same ISPs complicit in the blocking.

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The Strange Case of Summary Execution of Eleven Suspects in Caribbean Waters

The U.S. government has been executing suspected terrorists without indictment, much less trial, since the dawning of the Drone Age, on November 3, 2002. On that day, the George W. Bush administration used a Predator drone to dispatch six alleged terrorist suspects in a car driving down a road in Yemen, far from any battlefield. This unprecedented act of extrajudicial execution was precipitated by the attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for a new, sanguinary, period of military history.

Officials such as John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, and former CEO (from 2005 to 2009) of a private military contracting firm, the Analysis Corporation, assumed the lethal authority to incinerate potentially dangerous human beings, including U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Officials at the helm of what became a literal killing machine adamantly insisted on the necessity of deploying deadly force wherever they ordered missile strikes. The psychological climate in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, powerfully suppressed criticism, and the new techno-killers enjoyed the benefit of the doubt on the part of both the mainstream press and most of the populace. After years of launching missiles covertly, under a pretext of State Secrets privilege, the summary execution of suspects came eventually to be openly acknowledged by President Obama and widely accepted as completely normal, a standard operating procedure, whether carried out by the Pentagon or the CIA.

Even while thus terrorizing millions of innocent people, the perpetrators of the relentless targeted killing campaigns always characterized them as antiterrorism initiatives. As the nugatory, counterproductive “Global War on Terror” dragged on, fomenting anger among locals and creating more radical jihadists than it eliminated, the so-called battlefield expanded to include countries where war was never officially waged, as it had been by President George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq. The inhabitants of Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Mali, and other parts of the Middle East and Africa were also regularly terrorized by the lethal drones flying above their heads, never knowing when or where the next missile would make contact with human beings on the ground.

Each successive president insisted that the AUMFs (Authorizations for Use of Military Force) granted by Congress to George W. Bush in 2001 and 2002 sufficed to make any suspected terrorist or associate identified by U.S. government authorities fair game for summary execution. Among the “authorities” enlisted to create kill lists were privately contracted analysts with financial incentives to locate persons suspected of terrorist acts, whether past or, preposterously, potentially in the future. Despite a long list of documented incidents involving the U.S. government’s annihilation of entirely innocent persons, and often their families as well, such as the case of Zemari Ahmadi in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, so-called suspects continue to be “lit up” by missile strikes, provided only that whoever happens to be the commander in chief either agrees with the lethal determination or has delegated his war-making authority to those in his employ.

Many of the missiles have been launched by remote control, from unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), a.k.a. remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), to eliminate persons in places where no ground troops would ever have been sent in to kill the suspects, because, among other reasons, they were not acting as armed combatants at the time of their death. The targets were not provided with the opportunity to surrender (most were not armed anyway) and in fact met their demise at the hands of the drone warriors only because of the development of the technological capacity to kill by remote control. No officials in the executive branch of the federal government ever publicly debated whether rejecting the advances made in the Magna Carta, the presumption of innocence, the very concept of due process, and the post-World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a good idea. Instead, We Kill Because We Can became the U.S. government’s guiding principle throughout the Global War on Terror, as it evidently continues to be today.

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UK, US Sign $42 Billion Tech Deal To Boost AI Partnership

The United Kingdom and the United States struck a technology pact on Sept. 16 that would bring $42 billion in investments from U.S. tech giants into the UK’s AI infrastructure.

The deal was reached as President Donald Trump arrived in the UK for a two-day state visit, during which he is expected to meet King Charles and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Under the “Tech Prosperity Deal,” the two nations agreed to cooperate in advancing AI, quantum computing, and nuclear technology, according to a statement issued by the UK government.

Major U.S. tech companies—Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and CoreWeave—will invest in the UK’s AI infrastructure, including data centers and computer chips, as part of the agreement.

The deal is expected to generate more than 5,000 jobs in the northeast of England, which the UK government said will become a new AI growth zone.

The two countries will collaborate on research schemes to further the use of AI to allow for “targeted treatments and other shared priorities like fusion energy,” according to the statement.

This could lead to “life-changing breakthroughs like developing targeted treatments for those suffering with cancer or rare and chronic diseases,” the UK government said.

“This Tech Prosperity Deal marks a generational step change in our relationship with the U.S., shaping the futures of millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic, and delivering growth, security and opportunity up and down the country,” Starmer said.

The deal includes a $30 billion investment from Microsoft over four years, its largest commitment in the UK.

The company stated in a blog post that the funding will help develop the country’s “largest supercomputer,” which will be equipped with more than 23,000 advanced AI chips.

Under the U.S.–UK tech pact, Nvidia will partner with UK companies to deploy 120,000 advanced GPU chips across the country, marking its largest rollout in Europe to date, according to the statement.

“Today marks a historic chapter in U.S. – United Kingdom technology collaboration,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said.

OpenAI said it will team up with British company Nscale and Nvidia to launch a Stargate UK project to boost the UK’s sovereign computing capabilities, as part of the tech pact.

The UK and the United States signed a trade agreement in June on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada. The deal still left UK steel and aluminum subject to 25 percent tariffs, rates that the UK government is working to reduce.

Speaking to reporters before departing for the UK on Sept. 16, Trump indicated that he was willing to further negotiate trade with the UK government.

“They want to see if they can refine the trade deal a little bit. We made a deal, and it’s a great deal. And I’m into helping them,” the president told reporters.

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