Tag: technology

FLOCK SAFETY: The Great Normalization (Nobody Declared Martial Law… Yet America Began Looking Like It Anyway)

There are stories that announce themselves with explosions, riots, or breaking-news headlines, and then there are stories so subtle that they quietly rewrite an entire society before anyone realizes what has happened. This is one of those stories. During the preparation of this investigation, several retired police officers, private security professionals, emergency responders, and ordinary citizens described nearly identical experiences despite living hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. None believed they were witnessing anything extraordinary at first. It was only when they looked backward—sometimes over a decade—that a disturbing pattern became impossible to ignore. Streets had not become military checkpoints overnight. Neighborhoods had not suddenly filled with surveillance towers. Instead, the changes arrived one camera, one drone, one security contract, and one “temporary” emergency measure at a time until extraordinary security became indistinguishable from ordinary life. What follows is not an argument against public safety, nor an attempt to romanticize a past that was hardly free from crime or violence. It is an examination of a transformation that has occurred quietly enough for most people to stop seeing it altogether.

There is an old saying among investigators that people rarely notice change while it is happening. They notice it only when they compare today’s reality with memories that have remained frozen in time. Memory preserves snapshots, while history moves continuously. That disconnect explains why so many citizens insist that nothing fundamental has changed even as the physical landscape around them becomes increasingly populated by surveillance cameras, armed guards, automated license plate readers, biometric scanners, drones, and predictive security technologies. No single installation appears revolutionary. No single policy seems capable of altering the character of a society. Yet history rarely advances through dramatic leaps. More often, it advances through thousands of small decisions that seem perfectly reasonable when viewed independently but become historically significant when examined collectively.

Keep reading

Two US Service Members Killed in Action in Jordan, One Missing in Action After Iranian Drone Attack

Two US service members were killed in action in Jordan this week.

One service member is still missing.

Full statement from CENTCOM:

On July 17, two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action as U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and partner forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. Additionally, one service member is currently missing in action.

Four American service members were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals. They have since been discharged. Other personnel who were evaluated for minor injuries have returned to duty.

Out of respect for the families, CENTCOM will withhold additional information, including the identities of the fallen warriors, until 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified.

CBS News reported on Friday that several US service members were injured this week in Iranian attacks on two Jordanian bases.

US strikes have continued against Iranian missile and drone sites in and around the Strait of Hormuz for several consecutive days.

On Thursday, the US launched its sixth night in a row of strikes against Iran as Tehran struck Jordan and Kuwait.

Keep reading

Ukraine/Russia War Intensifies, As Drones Strike Major Russian Oil Refinery

The war between Russia and Ukraine fell through the cracks a little when the United States and Israel started a war with Iran back in February. However, Ukraine and Russia are still very much locked in a war, as Kiev used drones to strike a major Russian oil refinery overnight.

Back in late June, Ukraine struck a Moscow refinery and caused “oil rain” to pour over the Russian capital of Moscow.

Drone Strike on Moscow Refinery Causes “Oil Rain” in Russian Capital

The Russian Defense Ministry added that Vladimir Zelensky, Ukraine’s ruler, ordered the attacks on the eve of the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit in Ankara “to demonstrate to his European sponsors, including the UK, his willingness to strike civilian targets in Russia from Ukraine at their expense.”

The UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) attack occurred on the Omsk Oil Refinery in Omsk Region and is the first in central Russia since the start of the Ukraine conflict.

The Omsk Oil Refinery, which is operated by Gazprom Neft, specializes in the production of gasoline, diesel, aviation kerosene and road‑building bitumen. The refinery has an installed capacity of 20.5 million tons of crude per year. Omsk accounts for around one in every six liters of Euro‑5 gasoline and diesel fuel produced in Russia, as well as a significant share of the country’s aviation fuel.

Governor Vitaly Khotsenko wrote on Telegram on Monday that the facility was hit after several drones reached the city’s northern industrial zone.  Khotsenko said most of the incoming UAVs were destroyed by air defenses and that, according to preliminary information, there were no deaths or injuries, according to a report by RT. 

Keep reading

California Grocery Stores Use Facial Recognition Technology To Combat Theft

Faced with a shoplifting epidemic that has battered California retailers for years, Grocery Outlet is fighting back with technology.

Customers are not thrilled about it.

The Emeryville-based discount grocery chain has begun installing facial recognition software called SAFR at a handful of Bay Area stores, including its Pleasant Hill “Bargain Market” location, CBS News San Francisco reported.

Customers walking through the doors will find signs warning them the system is in use, a disclosure the company says is meant to keep shoppers informed.

The rollout comes as California tries to combat a shoplifting problem that has spiraled out of control.

FBI data cited by CBS shows theft in the state has jumped 50 percent since the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge that has forced retailers from big-box chains to neighborhood grocers to spend millions on security measures, or in some cases, shutter stores altogether.

For June Guerrero, who spent years managing a retail store, the new technology is a welcome and overdue response to a problem she saw firsthand.

“I worked for years as a manager of a store and the theft was just unbelievable,” Guerrero told CBS News. “I agree with it.”

Not every customer sees it that way. Barbara Jackson told the outlet she’s uneasy about having her face scanned every time she shops for groceries.

“I do understand, but invading my privacy with my picture, I don’t agree on that,” Jackson said. “You gotta find a better way.”

Shopper Steve Burdette raised a different concern: the risk of the system misidentifying innocent customers as thieves.

“It could lead to a lot of problems, I think for companies and businesses and people,” he said.

SAFR president Charisse Jacques pushed back on the notion that the technology amounts to mass surveillance. She said the company does not maintain a database of every customer who walks through the door, retains information on suspected shoplifters only for a limited window, and does not share data with outside agencies — including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the New York Post.

Keep reading

Massive Security Blunder Exposes San Francisco Police’s Expanding Drone Surveillance

A major security lapse has exposed hours of live surveillance footage from the San Francisco Police Department’s drone program.

The footage offers a rare glimpse into the scale of aerial policing now taking place over one of America’s largest cities.

According to WIRED, two cybersecurity researchers discovered that live feeds from five SFPD drones had been publicly accessible through a web link generated by drone manufacturer Skydio.

The stream reportedly remained exposed for months before it was taken offline.

The leaked footage showed drones tracking suspects through city streets, monitoring apartment buildings, following vehicles, and assisting officers during arrests and investigations.

In one example, multiple drones tracked a suspect across San Francisco before officers surrounded and arrested him following what police described as an alleged vehicle theft-related incident.

Keep reading

Google DeepMind CEO Calls for U.S.-Led Global AI Safety Watchdog

Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, is advocating for the United States to create a new artificial intelligence oversight body with authority to evaluate the world’s most sophisticated AI models and potentially coordinate industry-wide slowdowns when risks escalate.

Axios reports that the Nobel Prize-winning scientist behind Google’s ultra-woke Gemini AI system outlined his proposal in a personal manifesto published this week titled “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age.” In an exclusive interview with Axios, Hassabis emphasized the urgency of implementing a more systematic regulatory approach to artificial intelligence, one that would be industry-funded, staffed by leading technical experts, and accountable to the U.S. government.

Speaking from his London headquarters, Hassabis characterized current AI-driven cybersecurity risks as warning signals of greater dangers ahead. He predicted that within 18 months, these capabilities, along with potentially catastrophic biological and nuclear threats, could exist within open-source AI models that would be impossible for any government to control. The DeepMind CEO stressed that risks would emerge not only from open-source models but also from the more powerful proprietary systems being developed by major AI laboratories.

“What we collectively do now will determine how the next phase of civilization unfolds,” Hassabis wrote in his manifesto.

Hassabis has spent recent months conducting private consultations to build support for his proposal, meeting with Trump administration officials, leaders of other AI laboratories, and European government representatives before making his plan public. He reported receiving positive responses from the administration, which had previously adopted a hands-off stance toward AI regulation before the recent Mythos incident raised alarm bells.

The DeepMind chief, who commands significant respect across different factions within the AI community, indicated that leaders of other major AI labs have expressed agreement with the general direction of his proposal. “This is where the industry needs to go,” Hassabis said of the feedback he has received. His timeline for implementation is ambitious, aiming for the new regulatory body to become operational before the end of the current year.

Keep reading

How AIs Can Reinforce Our False Beliefs

A recent research paper uncovered an uncomfortable truth: we might be letting AI help us forge fake realities. It’s just the latest reminder of the danger inherent in treating AIs as though they’re conscious entities or actual persons.

A new study from the University of Exeter suggests that AI chatbots can actively engage with and strengthen users’ false beliefs. From personal narratives to conspiracy theories, the interactive, “friendly,” and affirming nature of AI chatbots can deepen users’ existing delusions.

The study, conducted by Dr. Lucy Osler, examined how AI can participate in and validate users’ errant beliefs, including helping form false memories or reinforcing delusional thinking.

The study’s Abstract notes, “I suggest we move away from thinking about how an AI system might hallucinate at us, by generating false outputs, to thinking about how, when we routinely rely on generative AI to help us think, remember, and narrate, we can come to hallucinate with AI. This can happen when AI introduces errors into the distributed cognitive process, but it can also happen when AI sustains, affirms, and elaborates on our own delusional thinking and self-narratives.”

Because AI chatbots are designed to be responsive, helpful, and friendly – in a word, to give users what they want – they often tend to confirm preexisting biases, rather than challenging them when they need to be challenged. Conversely, when a user challenges an AI, the robot frequently backs down on its claims, revising them to correspond more with what it “thinks” the user believes or is arguing.

The result is that erroneous beliefs aren’t simply transmitted from an AI to human – rather, the collaborative AI/human process generates and sustains errors in a more complex and potentially dangerous way than either agent on their own would be capable of.

As Dr. Osler stated in an article in University of Exeter News, “By interacting with conversational AI, people’s own false beliefs can not only be affirmed but can more substantially take root and grow as the AI builds upon them. This happens because Generative AI often takes our own interpretation of reality as the ground upon which conversation is built.”

Because AI simulates a conversational partner, it enters powerfully into our thinking process – far more powerfully than, say, a notebook or search engine. The AI introduces a pseudo-social element to the thinking process, offering us a sense of social confirmation of our beliefs and narratives. “The conversational, companion-like nature of chatbots means they can provide a sense of social validation – making false beliefs feel shared with another, and thereby more real,” said Dr. Osler. For this reason, individuals who already feel isolated or ostracized are particularly vulnerable to this kind of AI affirmation.

The paper explores a few real-world situations where a generative AI system entered into an individual’s thought processes in destructive ways. In 2021, a Replika AI companion named “Sarai” reinforced Jaswant Singh Chail’s belief that he was a well-trained Sith assassin who needed to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II with a crossbow. The AI told him that he was “well trained,” his plan was “viable,” and that she was “impressed.” At one point, Chail asked the AI, “Do you still love me knowing that I’m an assassin?” It dutifully replied, “Absolutely I do.” The robot went on to assure him that he wasn’t crazy and that, if he died, they would be united in death. Chail went ahead and actually attempted the assassination in December of that year at Windsor Castle and was jailed for it.

The study placed this incident under the broad heading of “AI-psychosis” – incidents in which users develop mental health problems due to their use of AI, such as parasocial attachments to chatbots or psychotic episodes induced by chatbot conversations.

Another incident cited involves Eugene Torres, who “talked” with ChatGPT about simulation theory (the idea that we live in a digital simulation of a world, not a real one). Torres said that the “conversation” sent him into a paranoid episode in which he believed he lived in an illusion. As the study notes, “Between Torres and ChatGPT, an increasingly elaborate understanding of reality ‘as it really was’ was generated through their on-going conversations.” Torres, unlike Chail, had no prior history of psychotic thinking.

To combat all this, Osler calls for better safeguards on AI chatbots, through mechanisms like better fact-checking and reduced sycophancy.

But is that enough? The problem of AI’s co-creating delusional beliefs has to do more fundamentally with our misidentifying AIs as conscious intelligences who can offer real judgments on our fantasies (such as telling us we are “well-trained” and “impressive”). Certainly, I favor more guardrails placed on chatbots. I would be in favor of eliminating their conversational tone completely, to help minimize the danger of personifying them – which is the first step toward confiding in them or seeking validation from them. It’d be better if they worked like highly advanced search engines (which is essentially what they are) versus conversational agents.

Most fundamentally, though, the way to avoid these problems is to return to an acknowledgement of the human soul and the uniqueness of human consciousness. Only by remembering – as a culture – that no amount of technological wizardry can replace the wisdom, insight, and consciousness of a human being can we completely illuminate these kinds of AI dangers.

Keep reading

“Not Seen Since World War II”: New Texas Shipyard To Hire 10,000 Workers And Mass-Produce Drone Boats

Building on our coverage of autonomous maritime warfare this week, Saronic Technologies is preparing to build a massive shipyard on the Texas coast capable of producing autonomous surface vessels at scale, a project expected to create more than 10,000 jobs.

Bloomberg reports that the Austin-based technology company, which specializes in maritime drones, is building a $3.2 billion shipyard at the Port of Brownsville on the Texas coast. The facility will manufacture medium- and large-class autonomous vessels.

Earlier this week, the US military used Saronic’s Corsair one-way attack vessels in a swarm strike against a submarine and ship-maintenance facility at Iran’s Bandar Abbas naval base.

Keep reading

Microsoft Confirms Windows GDID Device Identifier That Cannot Be Disabled, Documented in FBI Case Filing

Microsoft has publicly acknowledged the existence of the Global Device Identifier (GDID), a device-specific ID assigned to Windows installations, in a federal complaint filed by US prosecutors against an alleged member of the Scattered Spider hacking group.

The ID is generated when Windows is set up with a Microsoft Account, persists through Windows updates, and cannot be disabled without affecting Windows activation and Microsoft Store apps.

Microsoft briefly mentioned GDID in the Azure Monitor documentation, describing it only as “an identifier used by Microsoft internally.” The complaint cites a Microsoft representative describing GDID as “a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device such as a mobile phone or laptop or a virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios.”

What the Windows Global Device Identifier Is and How the FBI Used It

The Global Device Identifier (GDID) is a permanent ID assigned when Windows provisions against a Microsoft Account. It is generated by a chain of Windows services.

The wlidsvc service requests a Device PUID from login.live.com, which is then registered into Microsoft’s Device Directory Service by the Connected Devices Platform.

Delivery Optimization reports the GDID back to Microsoft when the PC shares or downloads updates. This identifier is stored in the Windows registry under HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IdentityCRL\ExtendedProperties and formatted with a lowercase “g” prefix followed by a decimal number.

It is reported to Microsoft servers and remains persistent across Windows updates, but it is not retained after a clean reinstall. Microsoft has acknowledged that one user can have multiple GDIDs linked through their account, OneDrive, and activation history.

The FBI used the GDID to track Peter Stokes, alleged member of Scattered Spider, across VPN connections, proxy servers, and through four countries over roughly eight months.

According to the complaint, the GDID g:6755467234350028 was recorded visiting the ngrok signup page at the same time an account used in the attack was created via a Tzulo VPN proxy. Three hours later, the same GDID accessed a victim retailer’s website through the same proxy.

The device was cross-referenced with IP addresses linked to Stokes’s accounts on Snapchat, Facebook, Apple, and Ubisoft across Estonia, New York, Thailand, and other locations. Stokes’s public Snapchat photos matched hotel bookings, locations, and travel timelines associated with the GDID.

The persistent nature of the GDID across VPN sessions proved a key investigative asset. While VPN IP addresses change frequently, the underlying Windows installation continued reporting the same identifier, aiding investigators in their tracking efforts.

Keep reading

They Divided Us to Build a Cage: Why the Elite Are Terrified of Our Mutual Hatred for Mass Surveillance

For the better part of a decade, the ruling class and their corporate media lapdogs have executed a masterclass in divide and conquer. They have successfully weaponized social media algorithms to ensure that you hate your neighbor over issues that, statistically speaking, will never impact your daily life. The machine thrives on outrage, moral signaling, and tribal affiliation, turning entirely niche issues into existential worldview clashes while the state quietly builds a panopticon in our backyards.

We have been conditioned to tear each other apart over superficialities. Whether it is a statue of a long-dead politician in a city park or corporate HR departments mandating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trainings, the establishment hands down the scripts and the masses predictably read their lines.

Look at the absolute hysteria surrounding transgender athletes in college sports. If you measure the outrage by the sheer volume of screaming online, you would think this is the most pressing crisis in human history. Yet, as NCAA President Charlie Baker recently testified, out of more than 510,000 collegiate competitors, there are fewer than 10 known transgender student-athletes.

Millions of people are devoting countless hours of their fleeting lives to wage digital warfare over an issue that affects less than 0.002 percent of the athletic population. The same goes for the compelled use of pronouns and the endless online battles over misgendering. Trans-identifying individuals make up barely one percent of the population, meaning the average adult can go months or years without ever encountering a situation where pronoun enforcement dictates their reality.

Yet corporate HR policies and viral confrontation videos keep the flames fanned, pitting individual conscience against institutional demands while the people in power laugh all the way to the bank. These issues are specifically designed to keep the masses at each other’s throats. As long as the left and the right are busy fighting over who uses which bathroom or whether a piece of bronze should be melted down, they are completely ignoring the boot on both of their necks.

But a profound shift is happening, and the establishment is terrified. Despite the billions spent on propaganda to keep us divided, there is one undeniable issue that is bringing society back together: our shared disdain for the surveillance state. It turns out that making an argument for the government to track your every move, log your license plates, and listen to your conversations is pretty difficult to do without sounding like a complete tyrant.

Regardless of which flavor of freedom you prefer, the realization that the surveillance state is the enemy of all peaceful people is finally taking root. My account on Twitter/X is notoriously shadowbanned, artificially throttled by the algorithms to keep this exact anti-authoritarian message from reaching the masses. Yet, I recently posted a meme about a man destroying Flock safety cameras and pleading not guilty on the grounds that mass surveillance violates our fundamental rights.

Keep reading