Tag: technology

WHOA! Self-Driving Tesla Comes Flying Through Family’s Home in Texas Killing Woman

A Tesla, which the driver says was in self-driving mode, crashed into a Texas home at high speed on Friday, killing a woman inside the home.

Doorbell footage from the incident, obtained by Fox, shows the blue Tesla Model 3 flying through the front yard before plowing into the home.

76-year-old Martha Avila Mantilla, a grandmother, was killed in the crash.

Additional video from another residence shows the Tesla flying through the neighborhood before the collision.

Authorities say the car was speeding and blew through an intersection, missing its turn, before crashing into the home.

Law enforcement says the driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler, showed no signs of intoxication and is cooperating with the investigation. He is not facing charges at this time.

Tesla currently faces a federal investigation into roughly 3 million Teslas and a potential recall of its self-driving vehicles.

“It just flew straight into their home,” a neighbor said. “It happened so quick.”

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ALPRs are a tool of the police state to track your every move

Every time you pull out of your driveway, you probably still harbour the illusion that you are a free person going about your business. The reality is far more grim: your vehicle is bleeding data into a massive, unregulated dragnet the moment you pass the neighbourhood entrance. Automated Licence Plate Readers (“ALPRs”) and Flock cameras have infested our communities, quietly transforming the American landscape into an open-air panopticon.

You are no longer just a traveller; you are a heavily tracked data point in a system designed to treat every peaceful citizen as a suspect. The apologists for the police state are always quick to play the devil’s advocate when these surveillance grids face public scrutiny. They will breathlessly point out that ALPRs do sometimes help law enforcement track the plates of a stolen car or a violent suspect.

Police departments and the corporate salesmen hawking this gear parade these isolated victories in front of gullible city councils to justify millions in taxpayer funding. We are constantly told that solving a fraction of property crimes requires us to surrender our basic human dignity and privacy. But this statist narrative entirely ignores the tyrannical caveat that makes the whole operation illegitimate.

For every single actual criminal apprehended, the daily movements of tens of thousands of peaceful, innocent people are meticulously logged, tracked and stored in massive databases. You have committed no crime, yet the State knows exactly when you dropped your kids off at school, which doctor you visited and what political rally you attended. It is a pre-emptive strike by a paranoid ruling class against the very people they claim to serve.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these automated systems do much more than just read numbers on a bumper. They capture the time, date and precise coordinates of every passing vehicle, storing this highly sensitive location data for months or even years. This allows law enforcement to retroactively hit “rewind” on anyone’s life without ever setting foot inside a courtroom to obtain a warrant.

The American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) has thoroughly documented how this dragnet operates, revealing that the overwhelming majority of people swept up in these databases are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite this glaring fact, the data is pooled and shared across thousands of jurisdictions, essentially creating a national tracking system operated by private entities.

Taxpayers are literally being extorted to fund the infrastructure of their own surveillance. Nefarious corporate groups, like Flock Safety, are getting extraordinarily wealthy from this unconstitutional model. They sell fear to local politicians and walk away with lucrative contracts, deepening their network of unlawful data collection as we have consistently covered here at The Free Thought Project. The public is forced at gunpoint to foot the bill for a corporate-state partnership that actively violates their inherent rights.

This panopticon is being built piecemeal through thousands of localised contracts quietly approved by city councils, police departments and even private homeowner associations. Flock Safety alone has embedded itself in over 6,000 municipalities, operating a staggering network of more than 80,000 cameras nationwide to indiscriminately log the movements of peaceful people.

The financial windfall generated by this unconstitutional dragnet is nothing short of extortionary. Weaponising the public’s fear of crime, Flock Safety has ballooned into an $8.4 billion empire, siphoning massive amounts of wealth directly from the taxpayers they are constantly monitoring. With local governments shelling out up to $3,500 per camera annually, this corporate-state partnership raked in over $300 million in recurring revenue by early 2025. The public is literally being forced under the threat of state violence to finance their own digital incarceration, enriching corporate entities while fundamental rights are casually discarded.

To grasp the true, dystopian scale of this operation, consider that these private systems are performing over 20 billion scans of vehicles across the country every single month. They have successfully privatised the police state, transforming the basic, unalienable right to travel into an endless and highly profitable data extraction industry. We are witnessing the systematic abolition of privacy in real-time, orchestrated by corporate profiteers and rubber-stamped by local politicians who view citizens as nothing more than trackable data points. No wonder these people want to build hundreds more data centres despite already having more data centres than the next 14 top countries combined.

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“It’s That Bad”: Virginia Residents Battling Constant Noise From Data Center Generators

For more than a year, residents living next to the Vantage Data Centers facility have endured what they describe as a constant, high-pitched whining or ringing sound coming from the site’s massive backup generators – the facility’s only source of electricity.

Unlike most data centers connected to the power grid, this facility runs entirely on its own on-site power plant. What residents were told would be temporary generator testing has become permanent operation.

“They’re Just Never Turned Off”

Neighbor Hari Doue told News Nation that the community was initially assured the generators were only being tested for emergencies.

“We were told in the beginning that they test the generators to make sure they’re working in case of an emergency. And then as the year and the months have gone on, they’re just never turned off,” Doue said. 

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8 Frightening Forecasts For The Future Of Fraud

Fraud is entering a new era. Businesses across North America expect fraud trends like biometric fraud, deepfake scams, and synthetic identities to become more common in 2026 as criminals adopt faster and more sophisticated tools.

This visualization, created by Visual Capitalist’s Julia Wendling, in partnership with Inigo for the Fraud in Data campaign’s sixth post, uses data from the Sumsub Fraud Report 2025 to explore the fraud trends businesses believe will shape the future of digital risk.

Biometric Fraud Could Become the Biggest Threat

Surveyed businesses expect biometric fraud to rise the most, with 67% predicting an increase. As companies rely more on facial recognition, voice authentication, and remote onboarding, fraudsters are finding new ways to exploit those systems.

Deepfake technology is already making identity verification harder. In the future, AI-generated videos, cloned voices, and stolen biometric data could make fraud attempts more convincing and more scalable than ever before.

Businesses also expect synthetic identity fraud to grow, with 56% anticipating a rise. Criminals are increasingly combining real and fake information to create identities that can bypass traditional fraud checks.

AI and Deepfakes Are Changing Fraud Trends

Businesses expect fraud attacks to become more automated in 2026. Around 44% predict increases in advanced AI-driven attacks, deepfake scams, and forged identity documents.

Another 33% expect AI-generated fake profiles to rise as fraudsters use generative AI tools to impersonate real users online. These scams could become faster to produce and harder to detect across financial services, ecommerce, and digital platforms.

As fraud tactics evolve, businesses may need to shift from reactive fraud prevention toward real-time risk monitoring powered by machine learning and behavioral analysis.

Data Breaches Will Continue to Fuel Identity Fraud

Data breaches are expected to remain a major source of fraud risk. About 33% of businesses anticipate more identity theft linked to stolen personal data.

Organized fraud networks are also expanding, according to 22% of respondents. As cybercriminal groups become more coordinated, fraud operations could become increasingly global and industrialized.

The Future of Fraud Trends

Companies that invest in adaptive verification systems, stronger cybersecurity, and understand the data around fraud prevention may be better positioned to respond to the next generation of threats.

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US Govt Plans to Crush Anti-AI ‘Extremism’

New documents from U.S. government agencies such as the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security show that Washington is preparing for widespread anti-A.I. riots, as the technology destroys communities and industries across the country.

Ironically, the Trump administration is already using invasive A.I. technology to identify and suppress what it calls anti-A.I. “extremists,” and in the process, sweeping the entire nation into its massive surveillance dragnet. 

More than 1,000 pages of leaked documents reviewed by WIRED Magazine show that government agencies are anticipating a huge wave of domestic unrest in the coming years, as artificial intelligence upends American society. Automation-related job losses could shatter entire industries, while the building of gigantic data centers will remove water and electricity from public use, ramping up the price of what little remains. 

As one report from the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau, [a division of the New York City Police Department], notes: 

“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent A.I. 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.”

An Environmental & Health Catastrophe 

Last year, the tech industry collectively spent around half a trillion dollars on the construction of new data centers. These buildings consume near insatiable amounts of energy and water. By 2030, they are expected to represent around 12 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. One large data center consumes up to 5 million gallons of water per day — as much as a small city. It has been calculated that a single 100-word A.I. prompt to a chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT uses over half a liter of water, equivalent to one bottle.  

When a data center moves into town, utility prices skyrocket. In this situation, wholesale electricity, for example, jumps by up to 267 percent. Ordinary Americans cannot compete with the likes of Amazon or Microsoft, and can be priced out of even the most basic necessities of life, causing widespread resentment. 

Living near a data center can also be hazardous to human health. Thanks to the low-frequency noises they produce, residents often report chronic symptoms such as insomnia, vertigo and nausea. Worse still, to meet their enormous energy demands, data centers often rely on gas or diesel generators, which emit high levels of nitrogen oxides, fine particular matter and so-called “forever chemicals” into the air, further complicating the situation.

A.I. will also have a profound effect on employment. Goldman Sachs predicts that, over the next decade, 300 million jobs could be lost to A.I.-based automation. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, has suggested that whole industries may be replaced by his product. “Entire classes of jobs will go away and not come back,” he confidently stated in 2019. Facing growing public anger, last month, he walked those statements back, assuring the public that there would be no “jobs apocalypse.”

But if these predictions are anything close to correct, it will cause massive economic disruption across America, and send towns and entire cities dependent on certain types of work into potentially permanent depressions. The latest news that Washington is preparing to treat this unrest as akin to terrorism should be of great concern to all Americans. 

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UK to send Ukraine 150,000 drones

The UK will provide Ukraine with 150,000 UAVs by the end of the year, London announced on Thursday following one of Kiev’s largest drone attacks on Moscow since the start of the conflict.

The package, worth £752 million ($996 million), was announced by British Defense Secretary Dan Jarvis at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels. According to the British government, which has been among Kiev’s most active military supporters, the package will be funded through London’s £2.26 billion loan to Kiev, backed by proceeds from frozen Russian sovereign assets.

British officials presented the package, which includes drones, missiles and radars, as necessary military support for Kiev. Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged that London would continue backing Ukraine and putting pressure on Moscow. Russia has long argued that continued Western arms deliveries only prolong the conflict and undermine peace efforts.

The announcement came after Moscow and the surrounding region were hit by one of the largest Ukrainian drone raids in recent years. Russian air defenses intercepted 194 drones approaching the capital overnight, according to officials, but the attack still caused damage.

Local authorities reported that one drone struck the Moscow Oil Refinery in the Kapotnya district, triggering a fire, while debris damaged residential buildings, vehicles, and commercial sites, including several shopping centers.

Residents in several districts also reported black rain and soot falling from the sky after the refinery blaze, with the local authorities advising people to keep windows closed and limit time outdoors.

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Apple’s New Subdomain Kills “Hide My Email” Cover

Apple is about to label every anonymous email address its paying customers generate, creating a new obstacle for privacy-conscious users.

Hide My Email, the iCloud+ feature that creates an alias “@icloud.com” address to shield your real inbox from apps and websites, has always worked because of one specific design choice.

The generated addresses were indistinguishable from any other iCloud account. An app receiving “randomword_terms_42@icloud.com” had no way to tell whether it belonged to someone generating anonymous aliases or to someone’s grandmother.

That forced services to treat all iCloud addresses equally because filtering out the anonymous ones meant filtering out millions of regular Apple customers too.

Starting later this summer, new Hide My Email addresses will use “@private.icloud.com” instead of plain “@icloud.com,” according to a developer notice the company posted Monday.

The “private” subdomain announces to any app or email provider on the receiving end that the person signing up doesn’t want to be identified and hands them a one-line domain filter to block those sign-ups entirely.

Apple presented the move as a domain unification, consolidating Sign in with Apple addresses (previously on “@privaterelay.appleid.com”) under the same new subdomain. The company told developers that existing addresses on legacy domains will keep forwarding mail and that app and email providers should update their filtering to accommodate the change.

The gap between “@icloud.com” and “@private.icloud.com” looks cosmetic but functions as a kill switch. Services can now ban all anonymous aliases without touching regular iCloud mailboxes, the same way they already block disposable email providers like Guerrilla Mail or Mailinator.

The plausible deniability that made Hide My Email useful, the inability for a service to prove an address was anonymous, disappears the moment Apple stamps it with a subdomain that says so.

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Google’s New AI-Fueled Search Bar Threatens to Further Upend Journalism Industry

Google made an announcement last month that could turn the journalism world upside down, accelerating the internet’s shift toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven landscape and serving the Trump agenda of media suppression.

At its developer conference in May, the company announced the most disruptive changes to Google Search in over 25 years. Google Search will further demote its index of the web — a list of links that information-seekers can explore as they choose. Instead of prominently displaying links, it will increasingly become a destination that answers questions directly through AI, linking only to the sources it decides to reference in its overview. On the majority of our tests, the AI overview was followed by a heavy block of sponsored results and a combination of videos, short clips, trending posts, and discussions. Index links — for example, to articles on news sites and research studies — were given only a small fraction of real estate. Additionally, Google is aggressively pushing readers to use AI Mode, which completely removes the index links.

In practical terms, this means users of the world’s largest search engine will see, in response to their queries, a summary generated by an AI bot developed by a corporate behemoth with close ties to the Trump White House.

This seismic move builds upon the launches of AI Overview in 2024 and AI Mode in 2025, shifting toward nearly eliminating the user’s ability to search autonomously, and toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven experience of the internet (and therefore, for many people, of life).

We must take into account the political context in which this shift transpires. Alphabet (Google’s parent company), along with Facebook’s parent company (Meta), as well as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, were among major tech companies that donated to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. They have also consistently capitulated to Trump’s recent manipulations.

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UK police officer uses AI to create evidence in multiple criminal cases

Law enforcement agencies across the world have rushed to integrate AI into their investigations, promising faster arrests and higher case closure rates. The rising number of wrongful arrests attributed to AI facial recognition systems, however, tells another story: that speed and accuracy are two entirely different things.

But while false arrests due to facial recognition software can easily be blamed on glitchy technology, an even more disturbing pattern is starting to emerge, as AI-wielding officers don’t just misidentify suspects, but use the technology to fabricate evidence.

Over the weekend, the BBC reported that officials in Derbyshire County, England, are investigating one law enforcement officer who’s alleged to have used generative AI to “create evidential material in a number of cases.”

The yet-unnamed officer has not been arrested, but has been suspended from duty pending the outcome of the investigation, which is reportedly being undertaken by Derbyshire police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

“A criminal investigation has been launched into an allegation of perverting the course of justice after the alleged use of AI systems by an officer to create evidential material in a number of cases,” a Derbyshire police spokesperson told the Financial Times.

It’s the first case of its kind in the UK, coming days after the country’s brand-new national PoliceAI centre issued guidance advising officers to stop using generative AI to prepare court statements due to the tech’s tendency to hallucinate answers.

“We’ve said to some police forces, ‘you can’t do that, because we haven’t gone through all the checks and balances’,” Alex Murray, head of the PoliceAI centre, told the Financial Times in an interview. “We need to slow it down a bit.”

While AI hallucinations have indeed found their way into police reports due to laziness – like the case of Utah police whose report claimed an officer transformed into a frog – the seriousness of the Derbyshire investigation suggests that’s unlikely to be the case here.

If anything, it sounds more like the Maine cops who were caught last year posting photographs of a “drug bust” that had clearly been tampered with using generative AI.

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‘The intelligent age is replacing our cognitive capabilities with AI’: WEF founder Klaus Schwab

If intelligence were to become a utility billed on a meter, then the intelligent age would only benefit the elite and those who could afford it: perspective

The intelligent age is replacing our cognitive capabilities with AI, and universities should prioritize teaching students how to capably use technology over teaching actual knowledge, according to WEF founder Klaus Schwab.

Livestreaming today at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, Schwab spoke at length about what he calls ‘the intelligent age” and what it means for jobs, students, and humanity.

Comparing previous industrial revolutions to the so-called intelligent age, the grand architect of the great reset agenda said that our thinking abilities were now being delegated to artificial intelligence.

“What is the Intelligent Age doing? It is replacing our cognitive capabilities by algorithm, or by what we call our artificial intelligence”Klaus Schwab, The Intelligent Age and the Responsibility of African Leadership, May 2026

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