Tag: technology

‘Legitimate targets’: Medvedev on Russian MOD’s Ukraine-linked drone network list

A list of Ukraine-linked manufacturing facilities scattered across Europe, which was published by the Russian military, should be treated as a register of potential targets, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said.

The Russian Defense Ministry rolled out the list earlier on Thursday, claiming that Kiev’s Western backers have been planning to sharply ramp up production of long-range drones to target Russia. The plan is bound to drag European nations involved in the effort closer to direct conflict with Moscow, the military warned.

Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, urged European nations to take the warning at face value.

“[The] Russian Defense Ministry’s statement must be taken literally: the list of European facilities which make drones & other equipment is a list of potential targets for the Russian armed forces. When strikes become a reality depends on what comes next. Sleep well, European partners!” the ex-president wrote on X.

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A Court Banned a Man from ChatGPT. No One Asked If That’s Constitutional.

On April 13, a California Superior Court judge granted a temporary restraining order requiring OpenAI to keep a user locked out of ChatGPT until at least May 6.

The user, identified in court filings only as “John Roe,” has been arrested on four felony counts, found incompetent to stand trial, and recently ordered released from custody on a technicality.

His ex-girlfriend, proceeding as “Jane Doe,” filed a lawsuit and emergency application alleging that ChatGPT fed Roe’s delusional thinking, generated fake psychological reports about her, and helped facilitate a months-long stalking campaign.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

The facts in the complaint are disturbing. But the court’s order raises a question that no one in the courtroom appears to have seriously grappled with, and that matters far more than this one case: can a judge order a person cut off from an AI platform without considering whether that violates the First Amendment?

OpenAI at least mentioned the problem. The company’s opposition brief cited Packingham v. North Carolina, the 2017 Supreme Court decision that struck down a state law barring sex offenders from social media.

Justice Kennedy, writing for a unanimous Court, called the internet “the modern public square” and warned against broadly restricting access to platforms where people speak, read, and think.

OpenAI’s lawyers argued that a court-ordered ban on a user’s access to a general-purpose AI service raises the same kind of constitutional concern. The plaintiff’s lawyers did not address it at all.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn granted the TRO anyway, ordering Roe’s accounts to remain suspended.

According to Eugene Volokh, the George Mason law professor and First Amendment scholar who followed the hearing through a research assistant, there was no meaningful discussion of the user’s speech rights by the court.

That should worry anyone who cares about the principle that the government cannot casually strip individuals of access to communications technology, even individuals who have done terrible things.

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OpenAI Supports Illinois Bill to Limit AI Companies’ Liability for Mass Casualty Incidents, Financial Disasters

OpenAI is backing an Illinois state bill that would protect AI companies from legal responsibility when their technology contributes to severe societal harms, including mass deaths or catastrophic financial losses.

Wired reports that the ChatGPT maker has testified in favor of Illinois Senate Bill 3444, legislation that would shield frontier AI developers from liability for critical harms caused by their models under certain conditions. The bill represents what several AI policy experts describe as a notable evolution in OpenAI’s legislative approach, which until now had focused primarily on opposing measures that would increase liability for AI companies.

SB 3444 would define critical harms as incidents causing death or serious injury to 100 or more people, or at least $1 billion in property damage. Under the proposed law, AI labs would be protected from liability as long as they did not intentionally or recklessly cause such an incident and had published safety, security, and transparency reports on their websites. The bill defines frontier models as those trained using more than $100 million in computational costs, a threshold that would likely apply to major American AI company including OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

The legislation specifically identifies several scenarios of concern to the AI industry, including the use of AI by malicious actors to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons. It also covers situations where an AI model independently engages in conduct that would constitute a criminal offense if committed by a human, provided such actions lead to the extreme outcomes defined in the bill.

Jamie Radice, an OpenAI spokesperson, said in an emailed statement: “We support approaches like this because they focus on what matters most: Reducing the risk of serious harm from the most advanced AI systems while still allowing this technology to get into the hands of the people and businesses—small and big—of Illinois. They also help avoid a patchwork of state-by-state rules and move toward clearer, more consistent national standards.”

Caitlin Niedermeyer, a member of OpenAI’s Global Affairs team, delivered testimony supporting the bill and echoed the call for federal AI regulation. Her arguments aligned with the Trump administration’s opposition to inconsistent state-level AI safety laws. Niedermeyer emphasized the importance of avoiding what she called “a patchwork of inconsistent state requirements that could create friction without meaningfully improving safety.” She also suggested that state laws can be valuable when they “reinforce a path toward harmonization with federal systems.”

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Our Post-Truth, Post-Trust World

That we inhabit a post-truth world seems to accepted wisdom. But that’s only half of it. We also live in a post-trust world. In a post-truth world, everything is shaped by the implicit goals of the entity claiming to state the “truth,” as the entire point of claiming to state the “truth” is to persuade the target populace to agree to something favorable to the issuer of the claimed “truth.”

In other words, the “truth” as something that has no intentional spin of self-interest no longer exists. What is passed off as “truth” is spin intended / designed to serve the interests of those doing the spinning.

This is the definition of propaganda and marketing, which are pure expressions of self-interest, and they’ve been around since the dawn of civilization, as persuading others to do what serves your private interests is much lower cost / more profitable than having to modify their behaviors with force.

The first step in the con of propaganda and marketing is to win the trust of the mark. This is a fascinating process, as some people are willing believers and others are skeptical, and so the trust campaign must speak to both the skeptics and those primed to embrace the message for reasons that have less to do with the entity issuing the message and more to do with their internal beliefs.

The trick with skeptics is to present persuasive evidence–the “facts.” These can be first-person accounts, scientific studies, or something presented as self-evident. The con artist presents the facts as if they are objective and the mark is invited to “decide for yourself:” the con artist claims he has no intent to persuade.

This is humorously illustrated in Melville’s classic novel The Confidence-Man.

The rise of the collection of data and the scientific method introduced the idea of “objective truth” that was based on facts collected from observations that were repeatable by anyone able to isolate the same variables. In other words, these truths could be verified by anyone using the same tools to collect data that isolated the same variables, so it wasn’t a private truth, it was a public truth everyone had to accept as fact.

The power of “objective fact” was too good to pass up, and so manipulating the metrics of data collection and analysis became the new territory of developing trust and establishing “truth” to serve private interests. Sample sizes were kept small, subjects were selected for their likelihood of yielding the desired data, and analytic tools weeded out outliers that undermined or contradicted the pre-selected “results.”

As McLuhan observed, The medium is both the message and the massage, and so the synthetic media that broadcast the human voice and visual images captured our attention and imagination in ways the written word could not. Now we have AI, which mimics human speech so engagingly that we attribute it with human characteristics: intelligence, emotions, empathy, etc.

With social media and smartphones, these media/ AI technologies have scalable visibility and virulence: they are ubiquitous (everywhere) and extremely contagious / virulent, spreading quickly through vast populations.

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Ukrainian Forces Say They Captured Russian Positions With Drones And Robots – Terminator Is Here?

In a significant milestone for unmanned warfare, Ukrainian forces have for the first time seized a Russian position exclusively with drones and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), without deploying any infantry or sustaining casualties, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on Monday.

“For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms—UGVs and drones. The occupiers surrendered, and this operation was carried out without the participation of infantry and without losses on our side,” Zelenskyy said in a statement.

The president hailed the operation as a breakthrough in modern combat tactics, emphasizing Ukraine’s accelerating shift toward high-technology systems to minimize risks to troops. He noted that various robotic platforms—including the Ratel, Termit, Ardal, Lynx, Snake, Protector, and Volya—have conducted more than 22,000 missions in the past three months alone, often venturing into the most hazardous areas in place of soldiers, reported SOFX.

“Lives were saved more than 22,000 times—a robot went into the most dangerous areas instead of a soldier. This is about high technologies in defense of the highest value—human life,” Zelenskyy added.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense has reported a dramatic surge in UGV deployments on the front lines. In March 2026, the systems completed more than 9,000 missions, up sharply from roughly 2,900 in November 2025. Across the first three months of 2026, UGVs carried out approximately 24,500 missions in total. The number of units actively employing the technology has also grown significantly, rising to 167 from 67 the previous year.

The latest success builds on earlier demonstrations of unmanned systems in combat and support roles. In June 2025, Ukrainian forces used the Ardal UGV to evacuate wounded personnel from forward positions. Unmanned platforms have also assisted in rescuing captured Ukrainian soldiers with drone support and have been deployed in non-combat humanitarian efforts.

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Missing nuclear official becomes TENTH person tied to dark pattern surrounding U.S. secrets

Another person with links to America’s nuclear secrets has gone missing as the disturbing list of deaths and disappearances in recent years continues to grow. Steven Garcia, 48, vanished without a trace on August 28, 2025. He was last seen leaving his Albuquerque, New Mexico home on foot, carrying only a handgun. An anonymous source told the Daily Mail that Garcia was a government contractor working for the Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), a major facility in Albuquerque that plays a key behind-the-scenes role in America’s national defense. Garcia allegedly served as a property custodian at KCNSC’s New Mexico facility, giving him a top security clearance and broad access to the entire site’s nuclear secrets. The source described Garcia’s work as “a very high-level, overseeing position for all the assets.” The government contractor’s sudden disappearance marks the tenth person with ties to America’s space or nuclear secrets who has died or mysteriously vanished in recent years, putting U.S. national security experts on edge.

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“Muthaf***in’ Robot Dog In The Muthaf***in’ Hood”

Residents in Atlanta are staring down robot dogs patrolling their own apartment parking lots — with live foreign operators apparently calling the shots through the machines.

Another viral video posted to X captures the raw street-level reaction as locals confront one of the mechanical units.

The operator responds in real time, and the accent leaves little doubt about the location of the person on the other end of the feed.

The post continues… “There are plenty of videos of these dogs calling the police on people, so that means someone sitting in India is patrolling our streets and calling the police on Americans. These robotic dogs are equipped with 360° cameras, thermal imaging, headlights, sirens, speakers, and sensors. Despite this they are not fully autonomous, they typically have a live human operator monitoring the feed remotely”

Another of these droids was seen recently giving commands to Americans in Atlanta. Even when citizens complied peacefully, the bot issued orders and summon real police — all while the eyes and ears behind the machines sit overseas.

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Tech company launches AI Jesus you can talk to for $2 a minute

A tech company has set up a new platform that allows users to have conversations with an AI avatar of Jesus Christ.

Just Like Me is a tech company that creates AI versions of certain celebrities, experts and personalities. According to the company, these “digital twins” are intended to “provide guidance, mentorship, support and friendship” to users of the site.

Users can pay to have “video calls” with AI versions of personalities such as MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, deceased political commentator Charlie Kirk, or fictional characters such as Santa Claus.

How the model was trained

The latest personality to be added to the website is an avatar of Jesus Christ. The AI version of Jesus is said to offer words of prayer and encouragement, speak a variety of languages, and recall prior conversations with Just Like Me users.

Just Like Me CEO Chris Breed said their model was trained on both the King James Bible and its understanding of scripture comes from sermons given by various preachers. Visually, the avatar was based on actor Jonathon Roumie’s portrayal of Jesus in the TV show The Chosen.

Just Like Me charges $1.99 per minute to speak to the avatar. Alternatively, a package deal priced at $49.99 gives users 45 minutes with the AI Jesus each month.

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Another Wrongful Arrest Based on Faulty Facial Recognition Raises Growing Concerns

Jason Killinger walked into Reno’s Peppermill Casino in September of 2023, later that evening as he was exiting the building he would be arrested. The casino’s facial recognition system had flagged him as a “100 percent match” for an individual that had previously been banned from the property. The only problem? It was completely wrong.

After the system flagged Killinger, casino security would approach him, referring to him as “Mike”, an individual who had been previously removed from the property. Despite his insistence and ability to prove that he was in fact not Mike, security would surround and handcuff Killinger before calling the Reno Police Department. Shortly thereafter rookie Officer Richard Jager would arrive on the scene.

Killinger quickly proved he was not the man identified in the system, as he was carrying three valid forms of identification, including a Nevada Real ID compliant drivers license, his Peppermill player’s card, and a debit card, all with his name on it. When this wasn’t enough he offered to retrieve more from his vehicle, which included a pay stub, vehicle registration, and a medical card. Despite all of this copious documentation proving who he was, Officer Jager declined to investigate further, not bothering to look at any of his other identifying documents. Killinger would be arrested and charged with criminal trespass.

He would then spend 11 hours in police custody, only after a fingerprint check at Washoe County jail confirmed his identity would he finally be released.

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AMD’s senior director of AI thinks ‘Claude has regressed’ and that it ‘cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering’

Anthropic’s Claude has reportedly gotten much worse at generating code recently. That’s according to a head member of the AI Group at AMD.

Last week, user StellarAccident took to the Claude Code GitHub to vent their frustrations at Claude’s AI-generated code. This account was soon discovered to be tied to Stellar Laurenzo, the senior director of AI at AMD, who linked to that GitHub account for a post on LinkedIn (via The Register) three weeks prior.

In their GitHub complaint, they state that “Claude has regressed to the point it cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering.”

Laurenzo claims Claude performed better in January, and says it now ignores instructions, suggests fixes that are incorrect, directly contradicts requests and claims completion despite, well, not completing the task. Laurenzo is using the Opus model and claims the result they get is replicable with the same prompt.

Laurenzo says, “We have a very consistent, high complexity work environment and data mined months of logs to understand why—essentially—starting in February, we have noticed a degradation performing complex engineering tasks.” She goes on to say, “Claude has been good to us, and we are leaving this in the hopes that Anthropic can address these concerns.”

What follows this is a report on what has changed since January and how to improve it, which is, rather ironically, generated by Claude. It argues that Claude shows its thinking less, and it ‘thinks’ less deeply now, often editing code before fully ‘reading it’.

Users have been complaining about Claude’s February update for some time now. Over on the Claude Code Subreddit, one user says, “I can no longer in good conscience recommend Claude Code to clients.”

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