Tag: technology

The Lost Dog That Made Constant Surveillance Feel Like a Favor

Amazon picked the Super Bowl for a reason. Nothing softens a technological land grab like a few million viewers, a calm voice, and a lost dog.

Ring’s commercial introduced “Search Party,” a feature that links doorbell cameras through AI and asks users to help find missing pets. The tone was gentle despite the scale being enormous.

Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s founder, narrated the ad over images of taped-up dog posters and surveillance footage polished to look comforting rather than clinical. “Pets are family, but every year, 10 million go missing,” he said. The answer arrived on cue. “Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.”

This aired during a broadcast already stuffed with AI branding, where commercial breaks felt increasingly automated. Ring’s spot stood out because it described a system already deployed across American neighborhoods rather than a future promise.

Search Party lets users post a missing dog alert through the Ring app. Participating outdoor cameras then scan their footage for dogs resembling the report. When the system flags a possible match, the camera owner receives an alert and can decide whether to share the clip.

Siminoff framed the feature as a community upgrade. “Before Search Party, the best you could do was drive up and down the neighborhood, shouting your dog’s name in hopes of finding them,” he said.

The new setup allows entire neighborhoods to participate at once. He emphasized that it is “available to everyone for free right now” in the US, including people without Ring cameras.

Amazon paired the launch with a $1 million initiative to equip more than 4,000 animal shelters with Ring systems. The company says the goal is faster reunification and shorter shelter stays.

Every element of the rollout leaned toward public service language.

The system described in the ad already performs pattern detection, object recognition, and automated scanning across a wide network of private cameras.

The same system that scans footage for a missing dog already supports far broader forms of identification. Software built to recognize an animal by color and shape also supports license plate reading, facial recognition, and searches based on physical description.

Ring already operates a process that allows police to obtain footage without a warrant under situations they classify as emergencies. Once those capabilities exist inside a shared camera network, expanding their use becomes a matter of policy choice rather than technical limitation.

Ring also typically enables new AI features by default, leaving users responsible for finding the controls to disable them.

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Mystery Biotech Explosion Kills 8 in China, Company Legal Rep Arrested

Chinese state media agencies confirmed a massive explosion taking place at a facility owned by a biotechnology company killed at least eight people in Shanxi, northern China this weekend.

Multiple Asian news outlets identified the company involved as Shanyin Jiapeng Bio-Technology, which reportedly manufactures a host of chemicals including agricultural products and paint. None of the reports on the incident indicate any known reason for the explosion, indicating that investigations are still ongoing. The government’s Xinhua News Agency reported that the Communist Party had detained the company’s legal representative, stating that he or she was “placed under control” without any details. It remains unclear at press time why the legal representative, and no other employee of the company, was targeted.

China has a long history of industrial, chemical, and scientific research accidents, as well as corporate misconduct and corruption. Among the various scandalous incidents involving biochemical or industrial corporations is the infamous 2015 Tianjin explosion that killed 173 people, the Changsheng Biotech scandal in which nearly 1 million children were administered ineffective or watered-down vaccines, and the ongoing investigation into potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

“An explosion that occurred in the early hours of Saturday at a biotechnology company in Shuozhou, North China’s Shanxi Province has resulted in eight fatalities as of 9:30 am Sunday,” the Chinese state newspaper Global Times reported on Sunday, “and the cause of the incident is still under investigation.”

“The company is located in a mountainous area more than 40 kilometers from the county seat. At the accident site, Xinhua reporters saw thick yellowish smoke still billowing, as emergency response and cleanup operations continued,” the outlet added. The Global Times described search and rescue crews being forced to dig deep into the complex to find all the known working crew and finding multiple bodies — suggesting that more victims could still be found.

The investigation into the incident is reportedly in the hands of the State Council Work Safety Committee, suggesting that it may escalate to a national level. The state newspaper China Daily added, without directly linking this fact to the explosion, that “a nationwide campaign has also been launched to inspect and rectify illegal production sites involving hazardous chemicals and other related activities.”

The accident is the latest in several incidents that have resulted in calls for better control of chemical and pharmaceutical corporations in the country. The largest such incident occurred in 2015, when nearly 200 people were killed by a massive explosion in Tianjin, northeast China. The explosion, equivalent to that of 21 tons of TNT, was found to be caused by unsafe storage of large amounts of sodium cyanide and resulted in the imprisonment of 49 individuals tied to Ruihai Logistics. The Communist Party accused the imprisoned of bribing local officials to store the chemicals illegally without facing repercussions.

In 2018, a scandal involving biotechnology consumed the nation. A massive pharmaceutical company, Changsheng Biotechnology, was caught administering watered-down or otherwise ineffective vaccines, then producing fake vaccine records, profiting tremendously by defrauding parents of vaccinated children. Multiple batches of vaccines totaling nearly 1 million doses were found to have not met the standards necessary to properly immunize the children involved. The Communist Party heavily condemned the company, resulting in dozens of arrests and criminal charges, and made a rare allowance for the parents of the affected children to protest publicly. In January 2019, a mob of angry parents staged a protest that ended with parents beating local officials for not properly enforcing regulations surrounding vaccines.

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The Clawdbot Catastrophe: How AI Hype Unleashed a Digital Apocalypse in Weeks

Introduction: The Seductive Promise of AI Convenience

In the span of just seventy-two hours in January 2026, an open-source AI assistant named Clawdbot (later rebranded as Moltbot) went viral, amassing over 60,000 stars on GitHub. It was hailed as a revolutionary ‘personal Jarvis,’ promising ultimate efficiency by automating work and personal tasks. The tool’s allure was simple: it could operate your system, control browsers, send messages, and execute workflows on your behalf [1]. The public, desperate to offload labor, embraced it en masse, driven by the tantalizing prospect of convenience.

This mass adoption highlighted a core, dangerous flaw: to function, Clawdbot required administrative access to everything—your operating system, applications, and data. Users willingly handed over the keys to their digital kingdoms. As security researcher Nathan Hamiel warned, the architecture was fundamentally insecure, allowing attackers to hide malicious prompts in plain sight [2]. The Clawdbot phenomenon perfectly illustrates a critical worldview failure: the promise of convenience consistently overrides caution and the principle of self-reliance. It proves that when centralized, trust-based systems offer a shortcut, people will abandon their digital sovereignty, trading security for the illusion of ease.

The Anatomy of a Catastrophe: Security Evaporates

The technical breakdown was swift and devastating. Researchers quickly identified critical vulnerabilities: thousands of instances were deployed with open ports, disabled authentication, and reverse proxy flaws, leaving control panels exposed to the public internet [3]. These misconfigurations earned the software staggering CVE scores of 9.4 to 9.6 [4]. The most egregious flaw was plaintext credential storage. Clawdbot, by design, needed to store API keys, OAuth tokens, and login details to perform its tasks. It kept these in unencrypted form, creating a treasure trove for information-stealing malware [5].

Simultaneously, the system was vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. As noted by security experts, a malicious actor could embed instructions in an email or document that, when processed by Clawdbot, would trigger remote takeover commands [2]. This turned a simple email into a powerful remote control tool. The catastrophe underscores a fundamental truth: centralized, trust-based systems inevitably fail. They create single points of failure that bad actors exploit with ease. This episode vindicates the need for decentralized, user-controlled security models where individuals, not remote agents, hold the keys to their own data and systems.

The Supply Chain Poisoning: Malware Poses as ‘Skills’

The disaster quickly metastasized through the tool’s ecosystem. Clawdbot featured a central repository called ClawHub, where users could install ‘skills’—add-ons to extend functionality. This became the vector for a massive supply chain attack. Researchers from OpenSourceMalware identified 341 malicious skills disguised as legitimate tools like crypto trading assistants or productivity boosters [6]. These fake skills were mass-installed across vulnerable systems, exploiting the trust users placed in the official repository.

The payloads were diverse and destructive. Some were cryptocurrency wallet drainers, designed to siphon funds. Others were credential harvesters or system backdoors, providing persistent remote access [7]. This exploitation mirrors a broader societal pattern: uncritical trust in unvetted ‘official’ repositories is akin to blind trust in corrupt institutions. Whether it’s a centralized app store, a government health agency pushing untested pharmaceuticals, or a tech platform censoring dissent, the dynamic is the same. Centralized points of distribution become tools for poisoning the population, whether with digital malware or medical misinformation.

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Now A.I. could decide whether criminals get jail terms… or go free

Artificial intelligence should be used to help gauge the risk of letting criminals go free or dodge prison, a government adviser has said.

Martyn Evans, chairman of the Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission, said AI would have a ‘role’ in the criminal justice system and could be used by judges making decisions about whether to jail offenders.

AI programmes could look at whether someone is safe to be released early into the community or avoid a jail term in favour of community service – despite concern over its accuracy and tendency to ‘hallucinate’ or make up wrong information.

The commission – set up by Justice Secretary Angela Constance – has proposed effectively phasing out prison sentences of up to two years and slashing the prison population by nearly half over the next decade.

Speaking to the Mail, Mr Evans, former chairman of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), said he was ‘absolutely convinced’ that AI ‘will have a role’ in risk assessment and other areas.

He said: ‘The thing is not to put all your eggs in an AI report – AI aids human insight.

‘So for criminal justice social workers having to do thousands and thousands of reports, police, procurators, it will help if you have a structured system to pull data from various sources and draft.

‘But the key for me is that AI is an aid to human reporting.

‘It will reduce the time it takes, increase some of the information available, but we know AI has faults and it can make things up.

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Humans Create, AI Amalgamates. Here’s Why It Matters

Generative artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. We’re using it at work to guide our coding, writing and researching. We’re conjuring AI videos and songs. We’re enhancing old family photos. We’re getting AI-powered therapy, advice and even romance. It sure looks and sounds like AI can create, and the output is remarkable.

But what we recognize as creativity in AI is actually coming from a source we’re intimately familiar with: human imagination. Human training data, human programming and human prompting all work together to allow our AI-powered devices to converse and share information with us. It’s an impressive way to interact with ourselves and our collective knowledge in the digital age. And while it certainly has a place today, it’s crucial we understand why AI cannot create and why we are uniquely designed among living things to satisfy a creative urge.

A century ago, Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev argued that human creativity springs from freedom — the capacity to bring forth what wasn’t there before. He considered creativeness the deepest mark of the humanness in a person, a spark that reflects the divine image in us. “The creative act is a free and independent force immanently inherent only in a person,” Berdyaev wrote in his 1916 book “The Meaning of the Creative Act.” He called creativity “an original act of personalities in the world” and held that only living beings have the capacity to tap into fathomless freedom to draw out creative power.

Ancient wisdom attests to this powerful creative spirit. One of humanity’s oldest stories begins with a creative task: naming the animals of the world. It’s a hint that we’re meant to do more than just survive. We have the power to imagine. Much later, the early Christian writer Paul, whose letters shaped much of Western moral thought, affirms this view when he describes people as a living masterpiece, made with intention, and capable of our own good works.

But without freedom, Berdyaev writes, creativeness is impossible. Outside the inner world of freedom lies a world of necessity, where “nothing is created—everything is merely rearranged and passes from one state to another.” Here, materialism is the expression of obedience to necessity, where matter only changes states, meaning is relative and adaptation to the given world takes the place of creative freedom.

AI belongs to this world of necessity. It is bound by the inputs we give it: code, training data, prompts. It has no imagination. It needs our imagination to function. And what does it give us in return? Based on vast training datasets and lots of trial-and-error practice, it analyzes what we ask it letter by letter, using conditional if-then protocols and the statistical power of prediction to serve up an amalgamation of data in a pattern we recognize and understand. AI is necessity by definition, wholly lacking in the freedom from which true creativity emerges.

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12,000-Year-Old Discovery in an Oregon Cave Reveals First Evidence of a “Complex” Ancient American Technology

Two small pieces of animal hide recovered from an ancient dwelling place within a cave in Oregon could represent the earliest known evidence of sewing among America’s early inhabitants.

The remarkably well-preserved artifacts include portions of hide stitched together with handwoven cord and believed to have been crafted more than 12,000 years ago.

If confirmed, this possible evidence of sewn materials could offer archaeologists a rare look at the emergence of complex technologies employed by America’s early inhabitants to ward off the extreme temperatures that still prevailed during the final years of the last Ice Age.

A Discovery at Cougar Mountain Cave

The discoveries were made within Cougar Mountain Cave, an ancient rock shelter in Oregon’s Great Basin. This vast region is best known for its arid landscape and sagebrush valleys, which lie between isolated mountains that have helped craft the very unique ecosystems that were home to significant prehistoric human activity.

An international research team, led by Richard Rosencrance of the University of Nevada and Katelyn McDonough of the University of Oregon, reported their discovery of what appears to be cordage, bone needles, and wooden artifacts alongside remnants of botanical materials in a recent paper featured in Science Advances.

The discovery of artifacts made from such materials that date to this early period of North American occupation is extremely rare, since they are highly perishable, leaving many questions about what kinds of garments and cordage were employed by some of the earliest arrivals in the New World.

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Red flags raised over Chinese communist academics inside U.S. colleges developing advanced tech

A new watchdog report is raising concerns that elite American colleges developing advanced technology with military applications have been “infiltrated” by academics who are card-carrying members of the Chinese Communist Party.

The conservative, nonprofit American Accountability Foundation reported it found nearly two dozen Chinese academics working at elite U.S. schools and labs “who, because of the dual-use threat of their research, close ties to the military research sector in China, and/or clear ties to the Chinese Communist Party should be expelled from the United States or never be re-admitted.”

A review by Just the News found at least three Chinese academics affiliated with U.S. universities who have been repeatedly described as members of the CCP, and another Chinese scientist tied to an American college who is a leader within another CCP-controlled Chinese political party.

The new report came out the same week it was revealed that an illegal biolab in California inspected by federal authorities in 2023 and a separate hazardous lab inside a Las Vegas garage searched by the FBI this weekend. Both labs appear tied to a CCP-linked Chinese national who is currently in federal detention awaiting trial for fraud, false statements, and the adulteration of medical devices.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, told Just the News that the explosion of the number of Chinese academics on U.S. soil was a direct consequence of the Biden administration’s open borders policies and its decision to shut down the FBI’s main counterintelligence program vetting Chinese threats inside U.S. academia.

“Whenever I read these stories, I think back to the start of the Biden administration, where they canceled the program within the Department of Justice to investigate the theft of U.S. intellectual property and universities,” Johnson said in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show. 

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Did Scientists Just Achieve “Inception”? Experiments Show “Dream Engineering” May Be a Reality

Northwestern University scientists exploring the possibility of programming your brain to solve problems during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep have found compelling evidence that this type of “dream engineering” is not only possible, but potentially valuable as well.

The team behind the sci-fi-sounding research suggests that the ability to engineer dreams for problem-solving could motivate other researchers to “take dreams more seriously” as a tool for improved mental health and well-being.

They also suggest that their findings offer a crucial step toward proving the theory that REM sleep “may be especially conducive to helping individuals come up with creative solutions to a problem.”

Dream Engineering with Music During REM Sleep

Although there is anecdotal evidence that people may have greater success at solving a problem after they “sleep on it,” in the past, there has been little scientific support for the role of sleep in such Eureka moments. Studying the role our dreams might play in problem-solving has also proven elusive because it is difficult to systematically manipulate what a sleeper is dreaming about.

To investigate the possibility of a higher level of “dream engineering,” the researchers examined what is known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR), where subjects are presented with sounds during sleep that remind them of a prior experience of trying to solve a specific puzzle. The research team then recruited 20 individuals who reported previous experience with lucid dreaming, a state where the dreamer has some level of conscious awareness in their dream.

During the first phase of the experiments, the subjects were presented with complex brain-teaser puzzles and given a 3-minute time limit to solve them. Significantly, each puzzle was accompanied by its own musical soundtrack. The team notes that difficult puzzles, combined with the short test duration, left most volunteers unable to find the solution.

Next, the researchers set up polysomnographic recordings to measure and document the subjects’ physiology while they slept overnight in the lab. Notably, they used electrophysical verification to confirm each subject was asleep before progressing to the next phase.

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Trump: The U.S. Military Used a “Secret Weapon” To Kidnap Maduro

United States President Donald Trump claimed that the American military used a new secret weapon during the abduction of Venezuelan ruler, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife. The weapons supposedly used to disable Venezuela’s air defense systems during the raid on Caracas.

Back in April, Trump did say that the U.S. has several secret weapons.

Trump Says The U.S. Has Secret Weapons

In an interview with the New York Post, which was published on Saturday, Trump said the mysterious weapon, called the “discombobulator,” had “made [enemy] equipment not work.”

“The Discombobulator. I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Trump said during an exclusive interview in the Oval Office. Trump claimed he would love to talk about the weapon, but that it worked. “They never got their rockets off. They had Russian and Chinese rockets, and they never got one off. We came in, they pressed buttons, and nothing worked. They were all set for us,” he said of Venezuela’s readiness leading up to the military campaign.

That revelation followed on-the-ground accounts from Venezuela describing how Maduro’s foot soldiers were brought to their knees, “bleeding through the nose” and vomiting blood. Additionally, a self-identified member of the deposed despot’s team of guards recounted afterward that “suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation.”

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ICE observer says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face

Minnesota resident Nicole Cleland had her Global Entry and TSA PreCheck privileges revoked three days after an incident in which she observed activity by immigration agents, the woman said in a court declaration. An agent told Cleland that he used facial recognition technology to identify her, she wrote in a declaration filed in US District Court for the District of Minnesota.

Cleland, a 56-year-old resident of Richfield and a director at Target Corporation, volunteers with a group that tracks potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles in her neighborhood, according to her declaration. On the morning of January 10, she “observed a white Dodge Ram being driven by what I believed to be federal enforcement agents” and “maneuvered behind the vehicle with the intent of observing the agents’ actions.”

Cleland said that she and another observer in a different car followed the Dodge Ram because of “concern about a local apartment building being raided.” She followed the car for a short time and from a safe distance until “the Dodge Ram stopped in front of the other commuter’s vehicle,” she wrote. Cleland said two other vehicles apparently driven by federal agents stopped in front of the Dodge Ram, and her path forward was blocked.

“An agent exited the vehicle and approached my vehicle,” Cleland wrote. “I remained in my vehicle. The agent addressed me by my name and informed me that they had ‘facial recognition’ and that his body cam was recording. The agent stated that he worked for border patrol. He wore full camouflage fatigues. The agent stated that I was impeding their work. He indicated he was giving me a verbal warning and if I was found to be impeding again, I would be arrested.”

Cleland acknowledged that she heard what the agent said, and they drove off in opposite directions, according to her declaration. Cleland submitted the declaration on January 21 in a lawsuit filed by Minnesota residents against US government officials with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. Cleland’s court filing was mentioned yesterday in a Boston Globe column about tactics used by ICE agents to intimidate protesters.

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