Tag: technology

AI drones used in Gaza now surveilling American cities

AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.

The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.

Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.

According to my research, almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the ‘No Kings’ protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.

In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July.

The AI system behind Skydio drones is powered by Nvidia chips and enables their operation without a human user. The drones have thermal imaging cameras and can operate in places where GPS doesn’t work, so-called ‘GPS-denied environments.’ They also reconstruct buildings and other infrastructure in 3D and can fly at more than 30 miles per hour.

The New York police were early adopters of Skydio drones and are particularly enthusiastic users. A spokesman recently told a drone news website that the NYPD launched more than 20,000 drone flights in less than a year, which would mean drones are being launched around the city 55 times per day. A city report last year said the NYPD at that time was operating 41 Skydio drones. A recent Federal Aviation Authority rule change, however, means that number will undoubtedly have increased and more generally underpins the massive expansion in the use of Skydio drones.

Prior to March this year, FAA rules meant that drones could only be used by US security forces if the operator kept the drone in sight. They also couldn’t be used over crowded city streets. An FAA waiver issued that month opened the floodgates, allowing police and security agencies to operate drones beyond a visual line of sight and over large crowds of people. Skydio called the waiver ground-breaking. It was. The change has ushered in a Skydio drone buying spree by US police and security forces, with many now employing what is called a ‘Drone As First Responder’ program. Without the need to see the drone, and with drones free to cruise over city streets, the police are increasingly sending drones before humans to call outs and for broader investigative purposes. Cincinnati for example says that by the end of this year 90% of all call outs will be serviced first by a Skydio drone.

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Trump Says He Won’t Let Nvidia Sell Advanced Chips to China, Other Countries

President Donald Trump said that he would not let China purchase Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell chips in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday.

“No, we won’t do that,” Trump said during the interview, which was taped on Friday, when asked about whether the chipmaker will be allowed to sell its most advanced chips to China.

“We will not let anybody have them other than the United States.”

The “60 Minutes” interview on Oct. 31 was Trump’s first appearance on the show since suing and reaching a settlement with the network’s parent company, Paramount, in July.

During the interview, Trump said that the United States is currently winning the AI race, but giving China advanced chips will provide it with “an equal advantage” in the competition.

“Right now, we’re winning it because we’re producing electricity like never before,” the president said.

On Oct. 31, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed hope that his company will be able to sell its Blackwell chips, its latest generation of AI chips, in China at some point, though there are no plans to do so at the moment.

“I hope so, but that’s a decision for President Trump to make,” Huang told reporters on the sidelines of the APEC CEO summit in Gyeongju, South Korea.

The United States has imposed export controls on the sale of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to China, aiming to limit its tech progress, particularly in applications that could help its military.

“We’re getting approvals done in two to three weeks. It used to take 20 years. And we are leading the AI race right now by a lot,” Trump added.

On Nov. 2, Trump reiterated this stance when asked about Nvidia’s Blackwell chips aboard Air Force One on his way back to Washington.

“It’s 10 years ahead of every other chip,” Trump said. “No, we don’t give that chip to other people.”

After the Oct. 30 bilateral meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, Trump told reporters that semiconductors had been discussed and China was “going to be talking to Nvidia and others about taking chips,” but added, “We’re not talking about the Blackwell.”

Last week, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle urged caution about selling advanced chips to China.

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Uber CEO Predicts All Cars Will Be Autonomous in 20 Years, Driving Will Be a Hobby Like ‘Horseback Riding’

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi believes that in “20 plus years,” all cars will be autonomous, leading to a decline in private car ownership and a shift in the perception of driving to be a hobby, which he compares to horseback riding.

Business Insider reports that in a recent conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi shared his vision for the future of transportation, predicting that all cars will be autonomous in around 20 years. This shift, according to Khosrowshahi, could lead to a significant reduction in private car ownership and an increased focus on safety metrics for autonomous vehicles.

Khosrowshahi’s comments come at a time when many companies, including Tesla and Waymo, are developing and releasing robotaxis or autonomous software for personal vehicles. While these advancements have been met with both excitement and skepticism, the Uber CEO believes that the transition to fully autonomous vehicles is inevitable.

“Humans are fallible, and I think there’s much less permissiveness for machines to make those kinds of mistakes, especially if those mistakes lead to fatality,” Khosrowshahi said during the MD MEETS podcast. He emphasized that as autonomous driving technology matures, machines will undoubtedly become safer than human drivers.

This shift towards autonomous vehicles raises important questions about the future of driving and car ownership. Khosrowshahi suggested that societies will need to grapple with the idea of allowing humans to drive on open roads, given the potential safety advantages of autonomous vehicles. He sees driving becoming a hobby like horseback riding is today.

As companies continue to develop and deploy autonomous driving technologies, they face increasing scrutiny over safety concerns. Tesla, for example, was recently ordered to pay over $242 million in damages after a Florida jury found its Autopilot technology partially responsible for a fatal crash.

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Tests Find Chinese Manufacturer Can Manipulate Electric Buses in Norway

Safety tests by a public transport operator in Oslo, Norway, conducted have raised grave concerns over Chinese electric buses.

The operator known as Ruter conducted secret trials a few months ago on an electric bus from a European manufacturer and one from China’s Yutong to determine if there were cybersecurity threats, MENAFN reported Wednesday.

The European bus remained secure but the Chinese-made one had the ability to be manipulated by its manufacturer.

The manufacturer has access to buses’ software, diagnostics, and battery control systems, therefore the manufacturer could stop or render the vehicle unusable, Ruter explained.

The article continued:

Arild Tjomsland, a special advisor at the University of South-Eastern Norway who assisted with the tests, emphasized the risks: “The Chinese bus can be stopped, turned off, or receive updates that can destroy the technology that the bus needs to operate normally.”

He noted that while hackers and suppliers cannot steer the buses, the ability to stop them could disrupt operations or serve as leverage during a crisis.

During former President Joe Biden’s (D) push for green energy, Chinese automakers were looking to flood the United States market with cheap electric vehicles (EVs), Breitbart News reported in 2023. The following year, Chinese companies were testing their autonomous vehicles on American roads, raising concerns about the data they were collecting as they mapped the nation.

In addition, Breitbart News reported in September 2024, “The British government’s open-doors approach to electric vehicles from Communist China threatens to undercut domestic manufacturing and expose the country to national security risks, with a think tank warning that EVs could be ‘weaponized’ by Beijing.”

In regard to the issue in Oslo, Ruter Director Bernt Reitan Jenssen said, “We’ve found that everything that is connected poses a risk — and that includes buses. There is a risk that for example suppliers could take control, but also that other players could break into this value chain and influence the buses,” the Economic Times reported Tuesday.

The MENAFN article said the test results were forwarded to officials at the Ministry of Transport and Communications in Norway.

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Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline

An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again. After several rounds of back-and-forth, the service center probably got tired and just stopped accepting it, saying it was out of warranty. Because of this, he decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again.

Since the A11 was a smart device, it had an AllWinner A33 SoC with a TinaLinux operating system, plus a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware.

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Is This The Secret SpaceX-Backed Flying Car Musk Just Hinted At? 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Friday for a three-hour conversation covering a wide range of topics, including the upcoming unveiling of the second-generation Tesla Roadster, which he said “will have crazy tech.”

“Look, I think it has a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever. This is some crazy, crazy technology we got in this car. Crazy technology. Crazy crazy. Let’s just put it this way. It’s crazier than anything James Bond. If you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that,” Musk told Rogan. 

Musk said that this product unveiling will be “unforgettable” and even hinted at a flying car.

He continued, “My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars. If Peter wants a flying car we should should be able to buy one.” 

Recall that shortly after Musk unveiled the Roadster in 2017, he discussed adding a “SpaceX package” with cold-air thrusters for boosting downforce and acceleration. 

However, a “SpaceX package” for the next-generation Roadster seems far-fetched. We suspect Musk will instead unveil a two-seater eVTOL vehicle called the Model A, developed by the SpaceX-backed company Alef Aeronautics.

At the start of 2025, Alef released the “first-ever video in history of a car driving and vertically taking off,” according to a press release earlier this year.  

Here’s the SpaceX-backed flying car in action. 

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Republicans Are Walking Into A Trap On Section 230 Repeal

Among political conservatives, there is no hotter potato at the moment than the civil liability protections afforded by Section 230 to online operators. Unless Republicans learn to love it again and reject the censorship lawfare complex favored by Democrats, they risk dooming our tech leaders and everyone who uses their products to the sharks circling our legal system.

The twenty-six words tucked into the Communications Decency Act of 1996 shielded publishers from liability so they could host and moderate content and still allow a wide range of speech without fear of lawsuits. Since then, Section 230 has evolved to be one of the most powerful legal shields in the nation against civil litigation in U.S. courts. This gave the early digital economy the guardrails it needed to thrive by incentivizing creatives and disruptors to bring their big ideas to life.

Nothing ices a good idea like the fear of a lawsuit.

Yet, to be a rising star in the Republican Party today conveys some kind of fealty to the idea that Section 230 is antiquated – a relic of the early Internet that has outlasted its usefulness.

Last month, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) called on his colleagues to “fully repeal Section 230” to cut the knees of AI companies and thwart their LLM training models. “Open the courtroom doors. Allow people to sue who have their rights taken from them, including suing companies and actors and individuals who use AI,” said Hawley.

He’s joined in these efforts by fellow Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marsha Blackburn, not to mention Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Amyâ?¯Klobuchar.

According to the Section 230 Legislation Tracker maintained by Lawfare and the Center on Technology Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, there have already been 41 separate bills aimed at curbing some aspects of the law by both Democrats and Republicans in the last two sessions.

The principal motivation for Democrats, including former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, has always been to force censorship of social media platforms to stop “disinformation,” a pretext for muting opposing views. The coordination of Democratic officials pressuring platforms to censor, as revealed in the Twitter Files, proves this beyond dispute.

To highlight the irony, we should remember that President Donald Trump is not only the chief executive of the United States, but also the owner of a social media platform that currently enjoys broad Section 230 protections afforded to any online publisher.

A wish to cripple Section 230 means making Truth Social a target as much as YouTube or Instagram. We should harbor no illusions that right-leaning media publications, podcasters, and websites would be the first to be kneecapped in a post-Section 230 world. Can MAGA and the GOP swallow that pill?

In that scenario, it will be the millions of Americans who currently enjoy freedom of speech online that will lose out. It’s the tens of millions of Americans turning to AI tools to become more productive, create value, and build the next great economic engines of our time who will be harmed by dismantling Section 230.

If Republicans want to cement American dominance in technological innovation, they will have to abandon this devil’s dance on gutting Section 230 liability protections. This is a censorship trap laid by Democrats to benefit them once they return to power.

The premise of broad civil liability protection for platforms is a core principle that has and should be applied to producers across America’s innovative stack, whether it’s oil and gas firms fending off dubious climate cases or artificial intelligence firms building the tools that are the key to America’s present economic dominance.

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The Data Center Proliferation Must Be About Much More Than Data

With Amazon, it was never about the books. No doubt Amazon began as an online bookseller, but what made its stock attractive through years of losses is what books represented.

If Amazon could modernize buying habits with an online bookstore, it could eventually be what it became: an everything store. Markets are a look ahead, and book sales didn’t appeal to patient investors as much as what online book sales signaled about Amazon’s future potential as something much greater than an online bookstore.

It’s important to remember this with the rise of data centers around the country. Meta recently completed another one in El Paso, TX. The $1.5 billion project will, once operational, employ 100 people. Its construction employed as many as 1,800 workers.

It’s worth adding that El Paso is Meta’s third data center in Texas alone. Meta put $10 billion into the construction of all three.  

If asked, most would understandably say that data centers are being created “to store, process, and distribute” vast amounts of data. Translated, the data centers will rapidly bring down the already short wait times for AI-authored searches, paintings, papers, and all manner of other things that the AI-adaptive request.

It all sounds amazing on its face, but the bet here is that broad perception of data center capabilities in no way measures up to the towering reality of their potential. Just as Amazon was much more than a bookstore, it’s no reach to suggest that data centers are about much more than greatly enhanced, low latency searches.

Some will ask what they’re for if not just for searches, and the quick answer to the question is that the future would already be here if it were obvious what it was. Which means there’s no way to foretell the future, but it’s easy to say with confidence that it won’t much look like the present.

Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in the enormous investments being made by Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, X and others in the creation of the data centers. The sizable capital commitments signal confidence on the part of the biggest names in AI technology that the growth potential from the data centers well exceeds the enormous amounts of money required to create them. Since capital is expensive, there’s no room for break even or somewhere close to break even in its allocation.

Which is why the future can’t arrive soon enough. As substantial capital allocations meant to fund data centers indicate, their meaning to how we live, work, play, and get healthy so that we can live, work and play some more will be substantial. 

Just as Amazon.com as a source of books in no way resembles what Amazon has become, the cost of data centers signals that their perception in 2025 will in no way resemble how they’re perceived in 2035. Call it a generational thing, but data center will have different meaning depending on when you were born.

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Lawmakers Want Proof of ID Before You Talk to AI

It was only a matter of time before someone in Congress decided that the cure for the internet’s ills was to make everyone show their papers.

The “Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue Act of 2025,” or GUARD Act, has arrived to do just that.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Introduced by Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal, the bill promises to “protect kids” from AI chatbots that allegedly whisper bad ideas into young ears.

The idea: force every chatbot developer in the country to check users’ ages with verified identification.

The senators call it “reasonable age verification.”

That means scanning your driver’s license or passport before you can talk to a digital assistant.

Keeping in mind that AI is being added to pretty much everything these days, the implications of this could be far-reaching.

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Quantum Breakthrough? Scientists Demonstrate First Quantum Sensor Approaching the Heisenberg Limit

Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) scientists have successfully demonstrated the world’s first ultra-precise, ultra-sensitive distributed quantum sensor network sensitive enough to approach the Heisenberg limit, where distinguishing the desired signal from the noise becomes impossible.

The approach is also among the first in the field to conduct experiments that simultaneously employ multiple quantum entangled photons, enabling unprecedented sensitivity and precision beyond single-entangled-photon approaches.

While previous approaches to a distributed quantum sensor network aimed to increase measurement precision, the new approach is the first to leverage this unprecedented level of precision for higher-resolution imaging. Using several quantum sensors in concert is similar to astronomers employing several observatories to measure a single phenomenon with more detail than any individual observatory could achieve on its own.

The research team behind the accomplishment suggests their approach could improve applications from space observation to medical imaging by offering previously unattainable fine details collected from multiple sensors working together rather than a lone sensor.

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