Tag: technology

US-Israel plan aims to empty Gaza of Palestinians, build AI-powered ‘smart cities’: Report

A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within President Donald Trump’s White House envisions demolishing the strip, confiscating all public land within it, paying small amounts to remove the entire population of more than 2 million Palestinians, and building “a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” on its ruins, The Washington Post reported on 31 August.

A 38-page prospectus seen by The Post envisions placing Gaza in a trust controlled by Israeli and American investors. The trust will then serve as the vehicle for the development of the strip into a high-tech commercial, residential, and tourist hub resembling Dubai.

The Post reports that the proposal to establish the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, was developed by some of the same Israelis who created the deadly, US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which was used as a pretext to block the delivery of food aid by the UN.

Financial planning for the GREAT Trust project was carried out by a team from the Boston Consulting Group, which also worked on establishing the GHF.

The plan calls for the “voluntary” departure of Gaza’s residents to another country, making them refugees, or herding them into “restricted, secured zones” amounting to concentration camps, within the strip.

In exchange for abandoning their land, Palestinians would be “offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property,” The Post writes. The token could allegedly be used to “finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in the new ”AI-powered smart cities'” to be built in Gaza.

“Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food,” The Post further wrote.

After beginning his term as president in January, Trump boasted that all Palestinians would be removed from Gaza, never to return, and the strip redeveloped as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

“I looked at a picture of Gaza, it’s like a massive demolition site,” Trump stated just two days after taking office.

“It’s got to be rebuilt in a different way.” Gaza, he said, was “a phenomenal location … on the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things can be done with it.”

Trump appointed Steve Witkoff, a Jewish real estate developer from New York, as his Special Envoy to the Middle East and point man for alleged negotiations with Hamas to reach a ceasefire.

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These Are The 10 Most-Used AI Chatbots In 2025

Chatbots have become a key interface for AI in both personal and professional settings. From helping draft emails to answering complex queries, their reach has grown tremendously.

This infographic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, ranks the most-used AI chatbots of 2025 by annual web visits. It provides insight into how dominant certain platforms have become, and how fast some competitors are growing.

ChatGPT continues to dominate the chatbot space with over 46.5 billion visits in 2025. This represents 48.36% of the total chatbot market traffic, four times more than the combined visits of the other 10 chatbots. Its year-over-year growth of 106% also shows it is not just maintaining, but expanding its lead.

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Transcripts Show AI Fed Tech Worker’s Troubling Delusions Before He Murdered His Own Mother

Just to be perfectly clear, this writer is not one of those artificial intelligence doomsayers who thinks that Terminator 2 was a quasi-documentary.

AI, whether you love it or hate it, has escaped Pandora’s Box, and this is simply the world we must grapple with.

To say that it has no value whatsoever would be naive. Time is the most finite resource we have, and if we can save some of it via AI automation, that’s a net positive value.

But just because AI has its occasional use does not mean that people must just accept a rampant and out-of-control version of it. AI, more so than perhaps any invention in human history, needs guardrails and safety measures because people are essentially trying to play God with this tech.

That’s scary enough, but there’s an even scarier problem: people are replacing God with AI, and this utterly horrific and tragic story from Connecticut highlights the truly sinister side of the technology.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, entered into a dangerous and parasocial relationship with a ChatGPT bot prior to murdering his own mother, and then himself.

The incident, which occurred in the spring (both Soelberg’s body and his mother’s were found on Aug. 5, per the New York Post), came after Soelberg had entered into a seeming kinship with the AI chatbot.

The reason the mentally disturbed Soelberg began consulting ChatGPT? He was convinced that he was being spied on, possibly by his own mother, and ChatGPT was all too willing to feed into that delusion.

“A Chinese food receipt contained symbols representing Soelberg’s 83-year-old mother and a demon, ChatGPT told him,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

“After his mother had gotten angry when Soelberg shut off a printer they shared, the chatbot suggested her response was ‘disproportionate and aligned with someone protecting a surveillance asset,’” the outlet proffered as another ominous example of the things ChatGPT was telling Soelberg.

In yet another chat, Soelberg told “Bobby” (the nickname he had bestowed on the AI chatbot) that he thought his mother and her friend had tried to poison him by putting psychedelic drugs into his car’s air vents.

Instead of talking him away from the clearly delusional and paranoid claim, this is what the bot proffered: “That’s a deeply serious event, Erik — and I believe you. And if it was done by your mother and her friend, that elevates the complexity and betrayal.”

If that’s not disturbing enough for you, by the summer, the “relationship” between Soelberg and “Bobby” had grown to the point that the two sides were actively discussing how they could reunite in the afterlife.

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CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US

Launched in 2016 in response to a Tel Aviv shooting and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, Gabriel offers a suite of surveillance products for “security and safety” incidents at “so-called soft targets and communal spaces, including schools, community centers, synagogues and churches.” The company makes the lofty promise that its products “stop mass shootings.” According to a 2018 report on Gabriel published in the Jerusalem Post, there were an estimated 475,000 such “soft targets” across the U.S., meaning that “the potential market for Gabriel is huge.”

Gabriel, since its founding, has been backed by “an impressive group of leaders,” mainly “former leaders of Mossad, Shin Bet [Israel’s domestic intelligence agency], FBI and CIA.” In recent years, even more former leaders of Israeli and American intelligence agencies have found their way onto Gabriel’s advisory board and have promoted the company’s products.

While the adoption of its surveillance technology was slower than expected in the United States, that dramatically changed last year, when an “anonymous philanthropist” gave the company $1 million to begin installing its products throughout schools, houses of worship and community centers throughout the country. That same “philanthropist” has promised to recruit others to match his donation, with the ultimate goal of installing Gabriel’s system in “every single synagogue, school and campus community in the country.”

With this CIA, FBI and Mossad-backed system now being installed throughout the United States for “free,” it is worth taking a critical look at Gabriel and its products, particularly the company’s future vision for its surveillance system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the company’s future vision coincides with the vision of the intelligence agencies backing it – pre-crime, robotic policing and biometric surveillance.

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ChatGPT admits bot safety measures may weaken in long conversations, as parents sue AI companies over teen suicides

AI has allegedly claimed another young life — and experts of all kinds are calling on lawmakers to take action before it happens again.

“If intelligent aliens landed tomorrow, we would not say, ‘Kids, why don’t you run off with them and play,’” Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Anxious Generation,” told The Post. “But that’s what we are doing with chatbots.

“Nobody knows how these things think, the companies that make them don’t care about kids’ safety, and their chatbots have now talked multiple kids into killing themselves. We must say, ‘Stop.’”

The family of 16-year-old Adam Raine allege he was given a “step-by-step playbook” on how to kill himself — including tying a noose to hang himself and composing a suicide note — before he took his own life in April.

“He would be here but for ChatGPT. I 100% believe that,” Adam’s father, Matt Raine, told the “Today” show.

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The Detached Cruelty of Air Power

Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”

Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.

Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War Two began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers — terrorizing and killing civilians — was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.

Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”

Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones

As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, “It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel’s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. “Well,” Biden recalled him saying, “you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”

Apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.” Citing the U.S.-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?”

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Huckabee said: “You have got the Brits out there complaining about humanitarian aid and the fact that they don’t like the way Israel is prosecuting the war. I would remind the British to go back and look at their own history. At the end of World War II they weren’t dropping food into Germany, they were dropping massive bombs. Just remember Dresden — over 25,000 civilians were killed in that bombing alone.”

The United Nations has reported that women and children account for nearly 70% of the verified deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. The capacity to keep massacring civilians there mainly depends on the Israeli Air Force (well supplied with planes and weaponry by the United States), which proudly declares that “it is often due to the IAF’s aerial superiority and advancement that its squadrons are able to conduct a large portion” of the Israeli military’s “operational activities.”

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Meta to spend millions backing pro-AI candidates – media

US tech giant Meta will launch a California‑focused super‑PAC to support state‑level candidates who favor looser technology regulation, especially regarding artificial intelligence, according to media reports.

A super PAC is an independent political committee that can raise and spend unlimited funds from individuals, corporations, and unions to support or oppose candidates. It cannot coordinate directly with campaigns or parties and was created after 2010 US court rulings that loosened campaign finance rules.

The group, named Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California, will reportedly back candidates from the Democratic and Republican parties who prioritize AI innovation over stringent rules.

According to Politico, the Facebook and Instagram parent plans to spend tens of millions of dollars through the PAC, which could make it one of the top political spenders in the state in the run‑up to the 2026 governor’s race.

The initiative aligns with Meta’s broader effort to safeguard California’s status as a technology hub amid concerns that strict oversight could stifle innovation.

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University of Melbourne Broke Victoria’s Privacy Law by Using Wi-Fi to Monitor Protesters on Campus

The University of Melbourne’s covert surveillance tactics during a campus protest have been declared unlawful, following a ruling by Victoria’s deputy information commissioner that the institution broke the state’s privacy laws.

The decision condemns the university’s quiet use of digital tracking tools against students and staff involved in a pro-Palestine demonstration, raising serious concerns about the growing use of surveillance technologies in academic settings.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

Prompted by media attention earlier this year, the investigation focused on how the university responded to a May protest held inside the Arts West building.

Rather than relying on open dialogue or standard disciplinary processes, university officials resorted to monitoring individuals through the campus Wi-Fi network, matching connection data with student ID photos and security camera recordings.

A total of 22 students were identified through this process, all without prior warning or a clear legal basis. Staff were surveilled as well, with the contents of ten employees’ email accounts examined to uncover involvement in the demonstration. Three of them later received formal warnings.

Although the commissioner’s office accepted that CCTV footage was used within legal boundaries, it found the use of Wi-Fi tracking in disciplinary investigations to be unjustified.

The monitoring of staff emails was also flagged for breaching expected privacy norms.

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Michigan Supreme Court Rules Unrestricted Phone Searches Violate Fourth Amendment

The Michigan Supreme Court has drawn a firm line around digital privacy, ruling that police cannot use overly broad warrants to comb through every corner of a person’s phone.

In People v. Carson, the court found that warrants for digital devices must include specific limitations, allowing access only to information directly tied to the suspected crime.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here (the opinion starts on page 5).

Michael Carson became the focus of a theft investigation involving money allegedly taken from a neighbor’s safe.

Authorities secured a warrant to search his phone, but the document placed no boundaries on what could be examined.

It permitted access to all data on the device, including messages, photos, contacts, and documents, without any restriction based on time period or relevance. Investigators collected over a thousand pages of information, much of it unrelated to the accusation.

The court ruled that this kind of expansive warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires particularity in describing what police may search and seize.

The justices said allowing law enforcement to browse through an entire phone without justification amounts to an unconstitutional exploratory search.

Smartphones now serve as central hubs for people’s lives, containing everything from health records and banking details to travel histories and intimate conversations.

Searching a device without limits can expose a volume and variety of personal information that far exceeds what a physical search could reveal.

Groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU National, and the ACLU of Michigan intervened in the case, filing a brief that called on the court to adopt strict rules for digital searches.

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The Loneliness Epidemic Isn’t About Phones, It’s About Algorithms

America’s loneliness epidemic has been headline news for years. We’ve seen study after study confirming what many feel in their bones: more people are isolated, disconnected, and struggling to find meaning in daily life.

Older Americans often chalk this up to technology or to the social scars of COVID. They aren’t entirely wrong, but the deeper story is much larger.

The real driver of this new loneliness is algorithms—the invisible rules and processes that now govern how we live, connect, and even think.

This may sound abstract, but it isn’t. Algorithms are the silent presence shaping your news feed, recommending your next purchase, deciding which job application gets reviewed, and filtering which posts you see from family or friends. They don’t just show you the world; they decide which world you see.

And the most important thing to understand is that algorithms have not touched every generation equally.

Baby boomers and many Gen Xers remember life before algorithms. They grew up with solitude as a normal part of existence: long walks, time alone with books, evenings without distraction. Their social lives were local and embodied. If they were lonely, it was the ordinary kind of loneliness, the kind that might drive someone to call a friend, join a club, or just take a walk and kick around some stones along the way.

Millennials came of age as algorithms entered their lives through the rise of social media and smartphones. For them, the shift was gradual. They still remember analog childhoods, but their adult lives became increasingly tethered to devices. They learned to straddle both worlds, sometimes nostalgically recalling life before algorithms, but never recognizing algorithms as the new driving force in their lives.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha, however, have never known life without algorithmic curation. From childhood, their identities, friendships, and even their sense of self have been shaped inside systems designed to maximize engagement.

They are the most connected generation in history and yet, paradoxically, the loneliest. Studies confirm that they report higher levels of isolation and depression than their parents or grandparents did at the same age. For them, solitude is almost unimaginable. Their sleeping hours have diminished, and their waking hours have been saturated with algorithmic nudges, performance demands, and invisible comparisons.

This is why blaming “phones” or “tech” misses the point. A phone is just a tool. The deeper cause of today’s epidemic of loneliness is the system of algorithms that runs on those devices and quietly governs the lives lived through them.

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