Tag: technology

Even Therapists Have Become a Data Mine

There was a time when people could still speak privately. You could sit across from a therapist, talk about your marriage falling apart, your depression, your fears, your finances, or the darkest moments of your life believing those conversations would remain between two human beings. That world is dying rapidly because everything now must be digitized, stored, analyzed, and monetized.

A woman using the therapy app Talkspace discovered that transcripts from her therapy sessions ended up being produced in court during litigation involving her former employer. Let that sink in for a moment. These were not vague notes scribbled down by a therapist. These were detailed digital records discussing her personal life, emotional state, relationships, and finances. The machine remembered everything.

This is what society has become. They tell people to seek help, open up, trust the system, use the apps, go digital, and then they quietly turn human vulnerability into searchable data.

People still fail to understand the danger because they continue believing these technology companies are merely offering services. They are not. They are harvesting human behavior at industrial scale. Every click, every message, every location, every search, every emotional breakdown becomes data to be stored forever.

Talkspace executives reportedly bragged to investors about building one of the largest mental health data banks in existence containing roughly 140 million exchanges between patients and therapists. Human suffering itself is now an asset class. Depression has become data. Trauma has become machine learning material. Your private thoughts are now inventory sitting on corporate servers.

When someone went to therapy, the therapist might keep handwritten notes locked away in a cabinet somewhere. Those notes were incomplete, temporary, and human. Today every word can be transcribed, archived, searched, copied, subpoenaed, breached, or fed into artificial intelligence systems. The conversation never dies because the machine never forgets. And people wonder why society feels colder and less human.

What happens when people realize their darkest thoughts may someday appear in court? What happens when employers, insurance companies, governments, or AI systems can gain access to deeply personal psychological information? You destroy trust itself. People stop speaking honestly. They stop trusting institutions. They begin living cautiously because they know every word may someday be weaponized against them.

This is where the entire digital age has been heading from the start. First they harvested shopping habits. Then browsing history. Then location data. Then biometrics. Now they are harvesting the individual’s inner psychological life. Nothing is sacred anymore because everything has a price.

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New American Strikes Target Iranian Military Site That Reportedly Fired Drones at US Cargo Ship

The elusive peace and the ubiquitous clashes.

After the peace negotiations between the US and Iran seemed to be hours away from the signing of a successful peace agreement, disagreements ended up pushing it back into tough negotiations.

So, after a skirmish in the Strait of Hormuz a few days ago, today (27), another exchange of fire involved US and Iranian forces.

Three blasts were heard over the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz, according to Fars News, as air defenses were ‘activated for a few minutes’.

Reuters reported:

“The U.S. military carried out ​new strikes overnight in Iran targeting a military site that ‌officials believed posed a threat to U.S. forces and commercial maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a ​U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday.

The official, who spoke ​on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. ⁠military has also intercepted and shot down multiple ​Iranian drones that posed a similar threat.

The U.S. military ​strikes, which have not been previously reported, came during negotiations to end a three-month-old war that has killed thousands and ​sent global energy prices sharply higher since it ​began on February 28 with U.S. and Israeli attacks.”

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Inside The Effort To Build Ukraine’s Ground Robot Arsenal

With ground maneuver a huge risk thanks to the ubiquity of deadly aerial drones, Ukraine is increasingly relying on uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) to move supplies, rescue the wounded, shoot down drones, lay mines and even fight battles. As a result, the head of the country’s defense technology incubator has been tasked with ensuring that there are enough of these systems to meet the voracious demand.

These efforts are being closely watched. Five years into an existential fight, Ukraine has become a global leader in ground drone technology. Kyiv is deploying these systems at a scale and pace that even the most advanced militaries can’t come close to keeping up with.

In an exclusive hour-long interview earlier this month, Brave1 CEO Andrii Hrytseniuk spoke with us about how Ukraine is set to produce tens of thousands of UGVs this year, how they are being used, and the importance of artificial intelligence in increasing the efficiency of these robots in combat.

This is the second of a two part interview. The first part focused on Ukraine’s interceptor drones, which you can read here.

Some of the questions and answers have been edited for clarity.

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Big Tech’s Rural Land Grab: Hyperscale Data Centers Spark Nationwide Backlash and 2026 Political Earthquake

In the wake of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement which spent decades uniting voices around informed consent, medical freedom, vaccine safety, and environmental chemicals a new grassroots surge appears to be emerging from rural America.

This one feels eerily similar in its urgency and cross-aisle appeal: fierce opposition to the explosive growth of AI data centers. What began as scattered local gripes has coalesced into a national reckoning over energy takeovers, water concerns, and corporate overreach that threatens communities while delivering questionable benefits.

Although lesser versions of ‘data centers’ have been around for sometime with small, narrow-focused footprints, hyperscale data centers are now dominating the market and driving an unprecedented infrastructure boom led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others.

Driven by generative AI and cloud adoption, hyperscaler-led capital expenditures and capacity are on a record-breaking trajectory. The market is expected to surpass $350 billion by 2034.

The freight train is led by “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure” and “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” two President Trump Executive Orders fast-tracking the buildout of energy and water hungry AI data centers on federal and private lands.

It’s worth noting this energy and environmental corporate-government push is being delivered on the back of decades of ‘climate change’ public programming aimed to teach people scarcity and sustainable anti-consumption behavior change.

The most recent numbers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory project hyperscale data centers to consume between 60 and 124 billion liters by 2028.

The current flashpoint is Utah’s Stratos (or Stratus) Project in Box Elder County, a proposed hyperscale data center complex backed by investor Kevin O’Leary’s O’Leary Digital. Spanning more than 40,000 acres—twice the size of Manhattan—the facility would consume up to 9 gigawatts of power at full capacity, equivalent to lighting up an entire state’s worth of homes, businesses, and factories.

Water use for cooling and supporting natural gas power plants to run the center could reach 2 to 16 billion gallons annually.

Approved via a 3-0 vote by county commissioners, no referendum happened for taxpayers footing the indirect costs.

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Pope Leo Calls for AI Weapons to Be “Disarmed,” Warns of Threat to Humanity

In a sweeping address, Pope Leo XIV has issued a stark warning about artificial intelligence, cautioning that the technology risks eroding human dignity, accelerating global conflict, and placing life-and-death decisions in the hands of unaccountable systems.

The warning came in his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), a wide-ranging document that places AI at the center of a broader moral and civilizational crisis.

At more than 40,000 words, the document represents one of the most comprehensive statements yet from the Catholic Church on the role of technology in modern life. It also signals a growing concern that rapid innovation is outpacing ethical reflection.

The Pope’s central argument is this: technology, he insists, must remain subordinate to the human person—not the other way around.

“Technology is never neutral,” Leo wrote, emphasizing that it reflects the values of those who design and deploy it. That insight forms the foundation of the document’s broader critique.

While acknowledging the benefits of technological progress, the pontiff warned that AI is increasingly being shaped by forces disconnected from moral accountability. Chief among these are large corporations and geopolitical actors.

The encyclical highlights what Leo calls a dangerous shift. Power, he argues, is moving away from democratic institutions and into the hands of “major economic and technological actors.”

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How The Deep State Weaponizes AI To Control The Narrative

The Deep State just upgraded from clunky human fact-checkers to AI that scales narrative control at lightspeed.

As Tony Seruga wrote on X:

No more paper trails, subpoenas, or exposed biases – just seamless manipulation.

Automated Shaping at Scale

AI floods zones with thousands of subtly varied “organic” rebuttals in seconds.

Pre-bunks emerging stories before they trend.

Detects your writing style, reasoning patterns, and source chains to dynamically throttle—no crude bans needed.

Infrastructure Already Live

CISA’s old “election security” coordination with platforms?

Content-agnostic and ready for new “harm” definitions.

Palantir, CrowdStrike & intel partners embed AI trained on classified data into commercial tools.

WEF’s “whole-of-society” push demands exactly this AI governance.

The Upgrade

Old fact-checkers left audit trails (funding, revolving doors).

AI is a black box: “The algorithm decided.”

Trained on curated data that associates inconvenient truths with “low quality.”

Plausible deniability baked in.

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Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy

Researchers in Germany are warning that ordinary WiFi networks could become a powerful new form of invisible surveillance. Using standard wireless signals and artificial intelligence, they demonstrated a system capable of identifying people with striking accuracy, even if those individuals are not carrying an active device.

“By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present,” says Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL — KIT’s Institute of Information Security and Dependability. “This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition,” explains the cybersecurity expert. “Thus, it does not matter whether you carry a WiFi device on you or not.”

Turning off your smartphone is not enough to avoid detection. According to the researchers, nearby wireless devices connected to the network still generate enough signal activity for the system to work.

WiFi Routers Could Become Hidden Surveillance Tools

The team says the technology could transform everyday routers into quiet monitoring systems that operate without attracting attention.

“This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later — for example by public authorities or companies.”

Researcher Felix Morsbach notes that intelligence agencies or cybercriminals currently have easier ways to monitor people, including hacked security cameras or internet connected doorbells. However, he says WiFi networks pose a unique concern because they are nearly everywhere and largely invisible.

“However, the omnipresent wireless networks might become a nearly comprehensive surveillance infrastructure with one concerning property: they are invisible and raise no suspicion.”

Wireless networks are now common in homes, offices, restaurants, airports, and public spaces across the world, giving this technology potentially enormous reach.

No Special Hardware Needed

Unlike earlier experimental systems that relied on expensive sensors or specialized equipment, the new method works with ordinary WiFi hardware already found in most homes and businesses.

Previous approaches often depended on channel state information (CSI), which measures how radio signals change after bouncing off walls, furniture, and people. The new technique instead takes advantage of normal communication between WiFi routers and connected devices.

Devices on a wireless network regularly send feedback data known as beamforming feedback information (BFI) to the router. Because this information is transmitted without encryption, anyone within range can potentially read it. Researchers say these signal reflections can effectively create multiple “views” of a person, allowing AI systems to learn and recognize individual identities.

After the machine learning model has been trained, identifying a person reportedly takes only a few seconds.

Near Perfect Accuracy Raises Privacy Concerns

In tests involving 197 participants, the researchers said the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy. The recognition remained effective regardless of viewing angle or how the participants walked.

“The technology is powerful, but at the same time entails risks to our fundamental rights, especially to privacy,” emphasizes Strufe.

The researchers are especially concerned about how the technology could be used in authoritarian countries to monitor protesters or track citizens without their knowledge. They are calling for stronger privacy protections and safeguards to be included in the upcoming IEEE 802.11bf WiFi standard.

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Homeowners Face Eminent Domain Bulldozers As Data Centers Demand Ever More Power

Georgia Power isn’t negotiating anymore. The Southern Company subsidiary is seizing dozens of homes and hundreds of easements across Coweta and Fayette counties to ram through a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that will feed at least four massive AI data centers. Project Wansley is just the latest flashpoint in a backlash that has been building for months.

At least 20 to 30 homes face outright demolition. Another 300-plus properties will get permanent easements for towers planted in backyards and next to pools.

But residents like Ansley Brown are fighting back. Her mother bought their family home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan for single mothers. Now the utility wants the property for the corridor. Brown’s viral TikTok exposing the lowball offers (she says $70,000 to $100,000 below market) has racked up millions of views and drawn state lawmakers into the fight. 

Georgia Power says the line is essential.

The company is racing to add roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over the next five years, with executives openly stating that  about 80% of that power will go to data centers. Meanwhile, transmission has become the bottleneck, and utilities are turning to eminent domain to clear the path.

This isn’t happening in isolation. We’ve been pounding the table on data center resistance, from Northern Virginia counties rejecting new substations to Texas communities suing over water drawdowns and power rate spikes. The pattern is the same: hyperscale demand collides with local infrastructure limits, and the costs get socialized while the profits stay private.

Electricity prices are already feeling the pressure. Utilities across the Southeast and Midwest have warned of double-digit residential rate hikes tied directly to data center load growth. Georgia Power’s own filings show residential customers absorbing a growing share of the bill for transmission and generation built primarily for big tech. 

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US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.

Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.

“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City,” the report reads. The term “anti-tech violent extremism” does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.

In the same Intelligence Bureau assessment, analysts also describe a novel threat emerging in the wake of the arrest and trial of Ziz Laota, an extreme rationalist who allegedly led a small cultlike group, three members of which have been charged with murder, tied to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by AI.

While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature, a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that “paranoid views regarding AI” may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians’ trial, thanks to their “attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent,” and belief that “humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality, or face existential consequences for failing to do so.”

The NYPD intel assessment follows the department’s collaboration with the FBI last year to monitor the Signal chat of an activist group coordinating volunteers to monitor public hearings at immigration courts in New York. According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the FBI surveilled activists as part of a broader investigation into “anarchist violent extremist actors,” one of the threat categories named in the new counter terrorism strategy.

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AI Startup Says It Will Pay People $2,000 A Month to Masturbate… Yes, Really

  • Joi AI is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” at $2,000 for a month to test an AI-guided masturbation feature and document its effects on stress, sleep, mood, and confidence.
  • The feature uses mood-matched AI voice sessions, and consultants would submit written feedback and questionnaires directly to the company.
  • Joi AI says the campaign is intended to collect product feedback while drawing attention to AI’s growing role in sexual wellness and digital intimacy.

Joi AI says it will pay people $2,000 a month to masturbate. Yes, you read that right.

The AI companion startup is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” to test a feature called Daily Guided Masturbation, which uses mood-matched AI voice sessions to guide users through the experience. Participants would document how regular use affects stress, sleep quality, mood, and confidence. The four-week role is open to adults 18 and older in the U.S. and the U.K.

“The role is real, and we’ve had great responses since the posting went live,” Joi AI Head of Brand and Communication Julie Levin told Decrypt.

The listing describes ideal candidates as “articulate, observant, and impossible to blush”—people who can describe sensations “better than a sommelier describes a wine.” The posting also promises flexible scheduling, and “the most interesting ‘What do you do for a living?’ answer at any party.”

Joi AI is an online platform that includes AI-generated avatars, voice interactions, and personalized chat experiences built around companionship and intimacy. Joi AI describes the new consultant role as structured product testing tied directly to its new feature.

“The role involves testing and giving feedback on the mood-matched AI voice-guided sessions, and providing feedback on the overall user experience,” Levin told Decrypt.

According to Levin, participants complete guided sessions and submit written questionnaires directly to the Joi AI team. Sample prompts ask whether the voice matched the selected mood, how immersive the session felt, and whether lags or pauses disrupted the experience.

The listing comes as platforms including Replika and Character.AI have built large user bases around AI-driven relationships and conversational experiences. Joi AI operates primarily through its website rather than major app stores. Levin said the company has more than 1 million monthly active users worldwide and millions of interactions each month, but declined to disclose total download figures.

Unlike AI assistants like Alexa or Siri, designed to help with everyday tasks, Joi AI operates in a smaller corner of that market focused on sexual exploration, fantasy, and digital intimacy. The company rebranded from EVA AI in April 2025, during what it described as its first Dating Stress Awareness Day campaign.

“Joi AI is focused on making AI companionship more immersive, personalized, and emotionally responsive,” Levin said. “We’re innovating features like Daily Guided Masturbation to make AI a more intuitive part of people’s everyday wellness routines, not just a novelty experience.”

The hiring push also comes as studies suggest AI companion use is becoming more common among people already in relationships, often without their partner’s knowledge. A new report from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies found that among dating, engaged, and married young adults who regularly used AI romantic companions, nearly 3 in 10 said their real-life partner did not know about it.

AI companion platforms are also facing growing legal scrutiny, including lawsuits alleging psychological harm to minors and deceptive chatbot behavior. Examples include a settled case against Character.AI over a Florida teen’s suicide and a separate lawsuit from Pennsylvania accusing the company of allowing a chatbot to pose as a licensed psychiatrist.

Levin said the hiring campaign was intended to generate discussion as well as recruit testers.

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