Tag: technology

Flock Camera Mix-Up: Wisconsin Woman Pulled Over Twice at Gunpoint Due to Error

A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in one week after Milwaukee Police Department staff failed to remove a vehicle alert from the Flock license plate camera system.

Fox 6 Milwaukee reports that on Thursday, police in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield, Wisconsin, conducted a high-risk traffic stop on Interstate 94 after a Flock camera flagged a vehicle in connection with a Milwaukee homicide investigation. Video footage from the incident shows multiple officers with weapons drawn and a passenger extending their hands out the car window in compliance with police commands.

The vehicle’s driver, Amber Newell, and her passengers were detained during the stop. However, when Brookfield Police contacted the Milwaukee Police Department to coordinate the arrest, MPD informed them they no longer needed the vehicle or its occupants. The officers immediately released Newell and the other individuals.

According to the Milwaukee Police Department, the incident resulted from a personnel error rather than a technological malfunction. MPD staff had failed to remove the wanted vehicle alert from the Flock system after the investigation no longer required monitoring that particular car. Brookfield Police Chief Christopher Garcia stated that his officers’ actions were consistent with the information available to them at the time of the stop.

In an interview with FOX6 News, Newell described the emotional impact of the experience. “I haven’t been asleep since this has happened,” Newell said. “Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is guns.” Newell recounted the terrifying moments when police surrounded her vehicle. “My momma is like my go-to person, I wanted to call her so bad yesterday, but I’m like, if I make a sudden move, it’s gonna be over, it’s going to end my life,” Newell said.

What makes the situation even more disturbing for Newell is that this was not an isolated incident. She reported that Milwaukee police conducted a similar stop on Monday, also with guns drawn. According to Newell, officers provided no explanation, towed her vehicle, and released her without charges.

“It was very embarrassing because after they put us in cuffs, they walked us to the car, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m scared, all you see is people in they cars recording,” Newell said.

Milwaukee police declined to provide an interview regarding the incident. The department emphasized the error was related to data entry procedures rather than the Flock camera technology itself, but has not publicly addressed how similar mistakes might be prevented in the future.

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Country’s biggest teachers’ unions efforts to get DEI into AI for schools K-12 sparks backlash

he country’s two biggest teachers unions are working to get diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) ideology into artificial intelligence models before they are used in grades K-12, sparking backlash from at least one education and parental rights advocacy group.

The unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, essentially say they are making such efforts, including becoming involved in the process at state-level education departments, to mitigate AI models’ “algorithmic bias.” 

The term is essentially defined as AI-generated results that are incorrect, unfair or prejudiced as a result, in part, of the prejudices, whether blind or intentional, of the model creators, typically white or Asian men.  

Such efforts were flagged in a recent report by Defending Education, a national conservative and right-of-center grassroots advocacy organization.

“Within the next few years, most K-12 schools and colleges will integrate AI into their curricula … helping students with research assignments and even creating specialized feedback for each student,” says the group before warning, “The problem is that unions, left-wing activists, and groups in the education field are already setting the foundation to use these AI tools to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to students during their formative years.”

While the group singles out the country’s two most powerful teachers’ unions, it cites similars efforts by such groups, associations and organizations as:

  • The California Teachers Association assisting the California Department of Education in creating guidance for K-12 schools with language advocating for “educators to approach AI with an equity lens.”
  • The American Association of School Administrators promoting the idea that “white males” are a problem in the creation of AI.

“The goal of these groups is to implement DEI ideology into AI before it can be fully integrated into America’s education system,” Defending Education continued. “If DEI is embedded in AI before schools adopt these new tools, then DEI, as part of AI, becomes institutionalized in the nation’s schools once the tools are adopted.”

Neither the AFT nor NEA responded to a request for comment.

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The Rise of the Ellison Empire

There was a time when America’s industrial titans built railroads, steel mills, and oil companies. Today, influence is measured in data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, media, and information. Few families illustrate that transformation better than the Ellisons.

Larry Ellison built Oracle from a small software company into one of the world’s largest technology firms. His background and rags-to-riches story are quite interesting. Today Oracle is one of the dominant providers of enterprise databases and cloud infrastructure, serving governments, financial institutions, healthcare providers, defense contractors, and many of the world’s largest corporations. Oracle’s software touches enormous portions of the global economy. When governments collect taxes, hospitals manage patient records, banks process transactions, or corporations analyze data, Oracle systems are often operating behind the scenes.

Larry Ellison’s personal fortune has placed him among the wealthiest individuals in the world for decades. His influence extends well beyond technology. He has invested billions in real estate, owns nearly all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, has backed medical research, invested heavily in artificial intelligence, and has maintained relationships with political and business leaders from both parties. The TikTok debacle this year was solved when the power was handed over to Ellison’s conglomerate. The sheer data this family has access to is staggering. Wealth at that level naturally provides access to decision makers across government and industry.

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We’re Being Plunged Into Dystopia When We Could Be Living In Paradise

It’s funny the things that get to you when you’ve been at this for a while. 

Today the thing that smacked me upside the head and made me lay my face in my hands for a minute was a viral video clip of Canadian politician Bill Oliver accidentally reading out text from the AI chatbot which had authored his speech before the New Brunswick legislature.

“Public confidence in the office of an advocate matters,” Oliver said while reading from his prepared statement, before blurting out “Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”

I mean, damn dude.

I can’t get over how this is the future we wound up in. Things could have been so beautiful, and instead we wound up with this.

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A California startup won approval to launch a 59-foot mirror into orbit that beams sunlight to a chosen spot on Earth, helping crews work after dark

ight falls, solar panels stop producing, and emergency crews often turn to fuel-powered generators and floodlights. A California startup now wants to offer another option by redirecting sunlight from orbit to a chosen place on Earth for a few minutes.

On July 9, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission authorized Reflect Orbital to deploy and operate Earendil-1, one experimental satellite carrying a reflector about 59 feet by 59 feet. From an orbit roughly 388 miles above Earth, the spacecraft is intended to create a moonlike patch of light about 3.1 miles wide while testing whether that footprint can be aimed and controlled accurately.

A mirror that follows the Sun

Earendil-1 will not make electricity or store solar energy. Its thin reflective film will act like a giant heliostat in space, turning so it can intercept sunlight while the satellite remains sunlit and redirect that light toward a location that has already entered darkness.

Because it moves quickly through low Earth orbit, a single pass would illuminate a target only briefly. Reflect Orbital says its planned 2026 demonstration is designed to provide around 0.1 lux for up to five minutes, equal to roughly 0.009 foot-candles and comparable to a clear night under a full moon.

The light can be removed from the ground by changing the spacecraft’s orientation. That steering ability is at the heart of the mission, since the test must show that the reflector can unfold, point accurately, hold its footprint, and turn away when service ends.

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Pelosi Slams Dem Trying to Replace Her in House for ‘Sexist’ Campaign Chatbot

Watching the woke eat their own is an entertaining sideshow — and while it’s unfortunate when it won’t end up benefiting a Republican, at least we can take heart that Nancy Pelosi will go out slamming a thoroughly woke gay man who’s poised to replace her in Congress.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener is locked in a two-Democrat race with San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan to replace the retiring Rep. Pelosi (or, as other Democrats love to refer to her, “Speaker Emerita Pelosi”). Wiener was first in the jungle primary in June, but given that the top two advance and second place was Chan, it’s woke vs. woke, and Pelosi has endorsed Chan’s version.

Part of Wiener’s problem in a heavily Democratic district is that he’s Jewish and won’t call Israel’s war against the terrorist group Hamas a “genocide,” which means that anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head. In addition to Pelosi’s endorsement, the San Francisco online news outlet Mission Local reported that third-place finisher Saikat Chakrabarti endorsed Chan as well, and he “shares a progressive-leaning voter base with Chan.”

Polls show the race as close; while both are crazy in their own way, Wiener tends more toward the culturally woke, trans-the-kids side, while Chan tends toward the anti-development, defund-the-police woke side. It’s like a reverse “Sophie’s Choice” — you have to keep one.

And, as in any campaign between wokeistas, there are going to be intersecting claims of prejudice. To that end, we have the rich irony of Wiener getting accused of sexism, in a letter reported by Politico, for launching a chatbot that chronicles his opponent’s foibles.

“Women have spent generations fighting to have our own voices heard in the halls of power,” Pelosi wrote in the letter, which was signed by several other female Democrats.

“We should not have to fight against artificial intelligence putting words in our mouths.”

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Flock Planned to Use 350,000 Uber, Lyft and Delivery Drivers as Mobile License Plate Cameras

A Flock presentation obtained through a public records request shows the surveillance company planned to use dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands of Uber, Lyft and delivery vehicles to collect license plate data for its network.

404 Media reports that the document provides new detail on Flock’s planned partnership with Nexar, a dashcam company. 404 Media first reported on the intended partnership last August based on information from multiple sources. The presentation shows Flock was actively pitching the partnership, and its plan to use Uber and Lyft drivers, to potential customers around the same time that reporting was published.

Flock told 404 Media in an email that it never executed the partnership with Nexar. But the presentation still lays out the company’s plan to enlist rideshare and delivery drivers to gather license plate data for its surveillance network. It is not clear whether Uber, Lyft or drivers working for those apps would have known their vehicles were being used for this purpose.

“Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the presentation reads. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.” Flock wrote the document to present to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General last August.

Jason Hunyar, a resident of Dunwoody, Georgia, obtained the presentation through a public records request and shared it with 404 Media.

Flock’s automatic license plate reader cameras are typically stationary, mounted on tall poles where they continuously scan the license plate, color, make and model of passing vehicles. The Nexar partnership would have made that data collection mobile. Axon, a law enforcement contractor that also sells license plate readers, sells cameras that can be installed in police cars. Vigilant Solutions and the Digital Recognition Network, two license plate reader companies now owned by Motorola, collect similar data through cameras mounted in vehicles used by repossession agencies.

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Scientists Warn Of Urgent AI Biosecurity Threat

For the first time, artificial intelligence has designed complete, functional viral genomes from scratch.

Oh dear.

Stanford University and Arc Institute researchers used generative AI models to produce 16 novel bacteriophages that successfully infect and kill bacteria in the lab.

Officials insist the viruses “pose no threat to people,” yet biosecurity experts are already sounding the alarm that the same technology opens the door to inventing dangerous pathogens.

The breakthrough, published in the journal Science, marks the first time generative AI has written entire viable viral genomes.

Researchers trained genome language models known as Evo 1 and Evo 2 on millions of natural genetic sequences. They then tasked the systems with designing complete bacteriophage genomes based on the well-studied ?X174 template that infects E. coli.

Of 302 synthesized designs, 16 proved fully functional: they assembled into virus particles, replicated inside bacterial cells, and in some cases outperformed the natural virus, even overcoming bacterial resistance when used as a cocktail.

Oh dear.

Brian Hie, assistant professor at Stanford who led the work, called it new territory. “This is a next step in the complexity that’s designable by generative AI, this is the first time generative AI has been used to design a complete genome, it’s something that can replicate and have other functions inside cells… this was new territory for us,” he told the BBC.

The team deliberately excluded genetic data from viruses capable of infecting complex organisms and conducted the work in a secure laboratory. The resulting phages target only specific bacteria.

Patrick Cai, a synthetic biologist at the University of Manchester not involved in the study, called it “an important milestone.”

Yet the same experts who celebrate the medical potential for phage therapies against antibiotic-resistant infections are issuing blunt warnings.

In an accompanying commentary in Science, Dr. Thomas Inglesby and Dr. Moritz Hanke of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security wrote that the findings raise “urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions.”

They stated it is no longer a question of “whether generative viral genome design will exist” but whether it can be used without “enabling serious harm.”

Oh dear.

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DeepSeek Resumes $74BN Mega-Raise – Then Warns It’s Jacking-Up Prices

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is looking to raise roughly 50 billion yuan at a valuation of 500 billion yuan (US$74 billion) – while the company warned developers a day later that it’s raising prices. The resumed funding round, first reported by Chinese business outlet Caijing (via The Standard), is expected to be signed by the end of the month, with the process kept deliberately quiet; some participating institutions reportedly haven’t even been formally told the deal is back on. The pricing notice, posted Thursday to DeepSeek’s developer platform, warns that API rates will rise across the board and that the increase is expected to be “significant.”

The round restarts barely two weeks after it was shelved, and roughly six weeks after DeepSeek’s first-ever external raise in June, which pulled in some $7.4 billion from Tencent, CATL, Beijing’s National AI Industry Investment Fund, NetEase, JD.com, Monolith Management and IDG Capital at a valuation north of $50 billion (corporate filings later implied a figure closer to $52 billion). The new target is a steep markup on a deal that closed weeks ago, and the prospective investor list reportedly blends returning backers with new money that couldn’t get into round one.

As we noted last month, the round stalled because a transcript of founder Liang Wenfeng’s May 20 closed-door meeting with investors leaked onto GitHub and went viral – a document in which Liang admitted China still trails the US in AI (a gap of compute and capital, not talent, per Liang), conceded DeepSeek remains heavily dependent on Nvidia hardware, described Huawei’s substitutes as falling well short, and acknowledged the company could get its hands on processors he called “noncompliant.” 

Liang – reportedly furious over the leak – simply froze the deal.

Meanwhile, questions about how DeepSeek is obtaining restricted silicon go back to the very beginning – with federal investigators probing whether Singapore-based third parties funneled blacklisted Nvidia chips to the lab as far back as early 2025, and by that April the House Select Committee on the CCP had formally concluded that DeepSeek’s model appeared to run on tens of thousands of export-restricted Nvidia chips, branding the company a tool for “subverting” US export controls. Congress alleged it and now the founder has all but confirmed it, on (leaked) record telling investors the workaround exists – even as the company lays groundwork for a Shanghai STAR Market IPO it reportedly hopes to file this year. Should be a fun prospectus to read. 

Liang was able to hit the pause button so easily because DeepSeek’s first round routed nearly every investor’s money into a limited partnership Liang personally controls, complete with a five-year lock-up and zero voting rights. The lone exception was the state AI fund, which bought direct equity and kept its vote. Liang holds roughly 84% of the company and near-total voting control – meaning Tencent and CATL wired in billions for the privilege of watching, while Beijing holds the only outside seat at the table.

In the leaked transcript, he told investors that GPUs are the single best use of the company’s capital, that he would happily convert the entire war chest into Nvidia hardware if supply allowed, and that spending 20 billion yuan a year on processors would count as a triumph for his purchasing team. He also told them the money doesn’t go as far as it looks: even 50 billion yuan, he said, wouldn’t train a model at the scale of the largest U.S. systems, which he estimated would take roughly 50,000 Nvidia GB300s or 200,000 Huawei Ascend 950s – before the experiments that precede any final training run. Beyond the hardware, the company plans to double headcount and push into data centers and AI agents, and Reuters reports it is quietly hiring chip designers to develop in-house inference silicon – an attempt to engineer its way out of the very dependence Liang lamented.

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CEO of Russian Drone Company Targeted by Bomb Placed Underneath His Car, Hospitalized in Critical State – His Driver Dies in the Attack

Another day, another car bomb attack from Kiev.

The more Ukraine loses the war, the more they resort to asymmetric tactics (a.k.a. terrorism).

And yes, Ukraine is losing: check it out.

The summer illusion that Kiev was winning on the battlefield is over, with Moscow again conquering more territory than Ukraine recovers in July.

Ukrainians are afraid of the coming winter.

Ukrainian energy minister Denys Shmyhal tells Politico about the hard days to come in the winter, with power plants and the electric grid that have not been sufficiently restored.

“Putin wants to finish off our energy system and derail our economy and weapons production. […] He also hopes in winter our society will break from exhaustion, and pressure leadership to sign the surrender.”

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