Tag: technology

China shuts down AI tools during nationwide college exams

Chinese AI companies have temporarily paused some of their chatbot features to prevent students from using them to cheat during nationwide college exams, Bloomberg reports. Popular AI apps, including Alibaba’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Doubao, have stopped picture recognition features from responding to questions about test papers, while Tencent’s Yuanbao, Moonshot’s Kimi have suspended photo-recognition services entirely during exam hours.

The increasing availability of chatbots has made it easier than ever for students around the world to cheat their way through education. Schools in the US are trying to address the issue by reintroducing paper tests, with the Wall Street Journal reporting in May that sales of blue books have boomed in universities across the country over the last two years.

The rigorous multi-day “gaokao” exams are sat by more than 13.3 million Chinese students between June 7-10th, each fighting to secure one of the limited spots at universities across the country. Students are already banned from using devices like phones and laptops during the hours-long tests, so the disabling of AI chatbots serves as an additional safety net to prevent cheating during exam season.

When asked to explain the suspension, Bloomberg reports the Yuanbao and Kimi chatbots responded that functions had been disabled “to ensure the fairness of the college entrance examinations.” Similarly, the DeepSeek AI tool that went viral earlier this year is also blocking its service during specific hours “to ensure fairness in the college entrance examination,” according to The Guardian.

Keep reading

China Strikes Hard: Chinese Satellite Pulverizes Starlink With a 2-Watt Laser 36,000 KM From Earth

In a stunning leap forward for space technology, Chinese scientists have achieved an unprecedented breakthrough in satellite communication, using a laser as weak as a nightlight to outpace the speeds of Starlink. Operating from an altitude of 36,000 kilometers—more than 60 times higher than SpaceX’s Starlink network—this Chinese satellite has demonstrated a level of data transmission far superior to what Starlink can offer, pushing the boundaries of what many thought possible.

An Astonishing Achievement

At the heart of this success is a 2-watt laser, which was able to transmit data at an astounding 1 Gbps. This speed is five times faster than Starlink’s capabilities, which are limited to a few megabits per second despite operating at a lower altitude of around 550 kilometers. According to InterestingEngineering, the laser, though faint as a candle’s glow, managed to push data through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, overcoming a challenge that has long plagued satellite communications: atmospheric turbulence.

The team behind this achievement, led by Professor Wu Jian from Peking University and Liu Chao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed an innovative method to address the interference caused by atmospheric turbulence. Their solution, known as AO-MDR synergy, combines Adaptive Optics (AO) and Mode Diversity Reception (MDR) to sharpen and stabilize the laser signal, ensuring that even through highly turbulent conditions, the transmission remained clear and reliable.

Keep reading

Russia conducts heavy missile and drone strike on Ukrainian military airfield – MOD

The Russian military struck a military airfield and energy infrastructure in Ukraine in an overnight attack involving missiles and kamikaze drones, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has reported.

In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said that the attack, which was carried out with high-precision air-, land-, and sea-based weapons, as well as explosive-laden unmanned aerial vehicles, targeted the infrastructure of a military airfield and an energy facility that supplied Ukrainian forces in Donbass with fuel.

“The goal of the strike has been accomplished. All designated targets have been hit,” Russian military officials reported, without disclosing the location of the targets.

In a separate statement on Saturday, the ministry claimed that Russian warplanes, drones, missiles, and artillery had destroyed several UAV production workshops, as well as ammunition depots in Ukraine.

Keep reading

What do we know about Israel’s own nuclear weapons?

Donald Trump has repeated in recent days, often in capital letters on his Truth Social account, that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. 

His view is shared by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who has said that Israel’s surprise attack on Iran, which has killed hundreds since 13 June, is a pre-emptive measure to stop Iran from creating a nuclear weapon. 

Iran denies it is trying to produce nuclear arms, and that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.

It is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which says that states that do not already have nuclear weapons cannot obtain them. 

The NPT gives the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the power to monitor and verify that non-nuclear states are complying.

Last week, the watchdog said that Iran had breached its obligations – an action Tehran strongly condemned, and claimed provided a pretext for Israel’s surprise assault.

But unlike Iran, Israel has not signed the NPT, and is one of only five countries not to be party to the 1968 treaty. This means that the IAEA has no way to monitor or verify Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

Little is known about Israel’s nuclear programme, which it has a policy of neither confirming nor denying.

However, declassified documents, investigative research and whistleblower revelations from the 1980s have pointed to what it has.

What nuclear weapons does Israel possess?

Israel is one of nine countries that are known to have nuclear weapons, along with the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea.  

It is believed to possess around 90 nuclear warheads and enough plutonium to produce around 200 more nuclear weapons, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Israel has between 750 and 1,110kg of plutonium, which would be enough to build 187 to 277 nuclear weapons.

Keep reading

Palantir Denies Claims It Is Building Master Database

Palantir Technologies is roundly denying claims it’s building a massive, unified database containing Americans’ personal information, following media coverage implying its work for various federal agencies could enable unprecedented surveillance.

On May 30, the New York Times published an article highlighting the potential impact of the more than $900 million worth of federal contracts awarded to the Denver-based technology company since the beginning of the Trump administration.

“We are not building, we have not been asked to build, and we’re not in contract to build any kind of federal master list or master database across different agencies,” Courtney Bowman, the company’s global director of privacy and civil liberties, told The Epoch Times, “Each of those contracts are separate and fulfill specific mandates that are scoped and bound by congressional authorities and other laws.”

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to limit wasteful spending by “eliminating information silos” among federal agencies. The order mandates that federal agencies must share data with each other. Furthermore, it requires the federal government to have unrestricted access to data from state programs receiving federal funding.

In the days following the report, various media outlets published reports that interpreted Palantir’s work as tantamount to developing a “’master database‘ or ’central intelligence layer’ drawing on Interal Revenue Service, Social Security, immigration and other records,” the Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub at George Washington University said in June.

“Collecting and linking such a vast array of sensitive records could create an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure. … There is a heightened risk of sensitive data being repurposed for uses beyond its original intent, or being used for political purposes,” a team led by Michael Moreno, a research associate at the Hub said.

Keep reading

Britain has fallen to the technocratic death cult

Politicians twist words and abuse language to ‘make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’, said George Orwell. That has never rang more true than it does today. In the House of Commons this afternoon, MPs spoke in deceitful tongues to make suicide sound attractive and death sound liberal. They voted to legalise what they call ‘assisted dying’, but which I think we should call state-sanctioned suicide. For strip away all the linguistic trickery about a ‘right to die’ and what we are left with is a new regime of state-appointed death merchants who will have the power not only to propose self-destruction to the ill, but to facilitate it, too.

Make no mistake, this is a dark day for Britain. MPs voted by 314 to 291 to pass the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This is the private members’ bill, spearheaded by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, that will empower the state to aid and abet the destruction of lives judged to be less good or less happy than others. It applies to England and Wales. It will permit sick people who are expected to die within six months to get ‘medical assistance’ to end their lives. To be eligible for this state-sanctioned suicide, you must be over 18, have mental capacity and get the agreement of two doctors, seven days apart. Then the state will give you poison to bring about your death.

Ms Leadbeater and her supporters big up the bill’s ‘safeguards’. They insist the law will not be a slippery slope to a culture of death, to self-obliteration as a consumer choice for the merely sad or dejected. It’s about ‘assisting’ the terminally ill only, they say. Yet even on this front, its flaws are glaring. Doctors are often wrong when they estimate how long the sick have left. You might be given six months but get two years. What’s more, people often feel suicidal upon receiving a terminal diagnosis, but then reflect and change and come to cherish the time they have left. This law, unquestionably, would lead to the state-faciliated deaths of people who had so much more living to do.

All the technical blather about ‘safeguards’ distracts us from the profound moral questions thrown up by the bill. Let’s be clear: this law would represent one of the most dramatic and destructive overhauls of the relationship between the state and the individual that we have ever seen. Overnight we would transform from a society that seeks to prevent suicide into one that facilitates it. The health service, once proudly devoted to saving life, would now be charged with ending life in certain circumstances. The Hippocratic cry of ‘First do no harm’ would lie in tatters, replaced by a new deathly creed: ‘Do no harm, unless they’re very sick, in which case maybe kill them?’

Keep reading

Top Iranian Nuclear Scientists Killed By Secret Israeli Weapon: Report

As Israeli jets struck military targets, high-ranking officers and nuclear-related facilities in Iran during the opening salvo of Operation Rising Lion, there was another extremely high-stakes clandestine mission taking place. Code-named Operation Narnia, Israeli operatives reportedly used a “secret weapon” to simultaneously kill nine of Iran’s top nuclear scientists as they slept in their beds, according to Israel’s N12 news outlet. It was the latest move in Israel’s long-time effort to blunt Iranian nuclear ambitions by killing off the people capable of advancing the program.

Officials declined to say what this special weapon, “which remains under censorship and has not been disclosed publicly,” was, the Times of Israel explained. The War Zone cannot verify these claims. However, as we have previously reported, Israel hit residences of high-value individuals with smaller munitions and Mossad used drones and anti-tank guided missiles inside Iran (more on those later) on the first night of its attack. These targeted assassinations continue today, although not in the same volume seen during the opening acts of the war. It remains possible that some of these systems were used in the assassination of the scientists.

Israeli intelligence deliberately orchestrated simultaneous hits as the opening blow of the war to avoid any chance of warning or escape, according to the N12 report. In previous incidents, Iranian nuclear scientists had often been targeted with car bombs and drive-by shootings while commuting. As a result, these public events set off alarms and spurred increased protection for other potential high-value targets.

For a reason not yet clear, while nine scientists were killed, a 10th scientist escaped the initial attack but was killed later.

“These scientists believed their homes were safe zones,” a senior Israeli official told N12. “They never imagined they would be reached in their bedrooms.”

Israeli intelligence officials told N12 that killing the scientists was the most important part of the opening phase of Operation Rising Lion. Air defenses, ballistic missile systems, and command and control nodes are important and difficult to replace. However, the officials emphasized that “the knowledge of these people is irreplaceable. It takes many years, if any, to regroup these minds who each worked for 20-40 years on the nuclear and weapons program.”

“There is a long-term effect here for more than many years,” the officials added.

The nuclear scientists who were eliminated “had been involved for decades in promoting nuclear weapons – an essential component of the Iranian regime’s plan to destroy the State of Israel,” according to the publication.

Keep reading

Review of Bilderberg 2025: AI Drones, Technocracy and the Transatlantic Alliance

The Bilderberg conference, an elite three-day get-together of business, political and academic elites — largely ignored by the mainstream media — is over for another year. At the 2025 conference, held at a five star hotel in Stockholm, around 120 politicians, military leaders, academics and corporate CEOs discussed the pressing issues of the day such as the US economy, depopulation, the Middle East, Ukraine and AI.

Gathered at the Grand Hotel alongside the Finnish president and the King of the Netherlands were the heads of huge multinational companies such as BP, Santander, Saab, Citigroup, Microsoft and a healthy smattering of tech billionaires such as PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former Google boss Eric Schmidt. The amount of private wealth at Bilderberg is giddying, many of the biggest conglomerate bosses are representatives of vast family holdings, such as Robert Maersk Uggla, chair of Møller-Maersk, the fifth generation of the Maersk family to lead the company.

American delegates at this year’s conference included Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Republican congressman Jason Smith, and one of Trump’s closest economic advisors, Robert Lighthizer, who has been a vocal advocate of US trade tariffs against China. They were joined by two senior members of the Trump administration: Kevin Harrington, a senior director at the National Security Council and Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Kratsios and Harrington are both, predictably, former employees of Peter Thiel. Looking somewhat exhausted, Thiel was in and out of the Bilderberg venue all weekend, never resting, perhaps never even sleeping. Too much to do. Too many side meetings to attend.

The list of power players at the meeting would be less concerning were it not for the plethora of public officials also attending the conference, including the Greek PM, the vice president of the EU parliament, the Polish foreign minister, the UK minister for Health and Social Care, and a handful of EU commissioners. The summit was also thick with finance ministers, including those from Canada, Germany, Sweden and Turkey. The Norwegian finance minister was also present – Jens Stoltenberg, former co-chair of the group, is a conference veteran attending as the head of NATO, until he was replaced in the role by another Bilderberg regular, former prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte.

The Stockholm conference appears to have been conceived as a welcome to Sweden and Finland upon first entering NATO. In fact, the negotiator for the Scandinavian NATO deal, Oscar Stenstrom, was also the Bilderberg 2025 conference organiser. He now works for the Bilderberg steering committee member, Marcus Wallenberg, who hosted the meeting — funding it largely through donations from the Wallenberg family’s Investor AB group. The Wallenberg family was also represented at the conference by Marcus’s cousin Jacob, also a former Bilderberg steering committee member; it’s clear that the Swedish seat on the Bilderberg steering committee is a family one .

Although the celebratory NATO party, attended by the Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristofferson, lasted for Thursday night, it wasn’t long before the hangover set in when Sweden and Finland woke up to being part of NATO with World War 3 very much on the horizon. Several delegates such as the Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis quickly and discreetly left the conference on the Friday morning — an interesting development given that the Israeli government’s official plane, The Wing of Zion, landed in Athens, Greece at 1.06pm on Friday 13th June.

Keep reading

Chinese Lab Creates Mosquito-Sized Spy Drones

Chinese state media reported on Friday that the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Hunan has created a surveillance “microdrone” the size of a mosquito.

“Here in my hand is a mosquito-like type of robot. Miniature bionic robots like this one are especially suited to information reconnaissance and special missions on the battlefield,” NUDT student Liang Hexiang told the state-run China Central Television (CCTV).

The device Liang showed off had a stick-thin body, three hairlike “legs,” and tiny leaf-shaped wings. The report did not go into details about its range, endurance, control systems, or surveillance capabilities.

Drones that could be mistaken for insects are a holy grail for the fast-growing surveillance robot industry. The Wyss Institute at Harvard University unveiled its “RoboBee,” a microdrone with superficial similarities to China’s mosquito drone, in 2019.

RoboBee is allegedly about half the size of a paper clip, weighs a tenth of a gram, and flies by contracting tiny artificial “muscles “ with jolts of electricity. At present, the microdrone can only operate within the carefully controlled confines of its laboratory, but its developers hope it will someday be capable of navigating in the outside world with senses comparable to a real bee.

The designers of RoboBee hope the fully independent version of their creation could assist with environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and even pollination of crops, much as real bees do. Of course, it requires little imagination to see how microdrones could be weaponized for surveillance or assassination.

According to Chinese state media, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already has some drones that weigh less than a kilogram, fly in AI-controlled swarms, and can carry small explosives.

Under current definitions, a “microdrone” is any unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that weighs less than 250 grams (a little under 9 ounces).

Most existing microdrone designs are fairly slow because their tiny frames cannot carry engines that generate much thrust, but in May a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen set a world speed record with a palm-sized drone that flew at over 211 miles per hour.

The smallest drone currently employed by Western armed forces is the Black Hornet 4, a Norwegian design that looks like a palm-sized toy helicopter. The Black Hornet 4 boasts thermal imaging and low-light optics. It comes in a travel case that is small enough for soldiers to carry on their belts.

Keep reading

The AI Slop Fight Between Iran and Israel

As Israel and Iran trade blows in a quickly escalating conflict that risks engulfing the rest of the region as well as a more direct confrontation between Iran and the U.S., social media is being flooded with AI-generated media that claims to show the devastation, but is fake.

The fake videos and images show how generative AI has already become a staple of modern conflict. On one end, AI-generated content of unknown origin is filling the void created by state-sanctioned media blackouts with misinformation, and on the other end, the leaders of these countries are sharing AI-generated slop to spread the oldest forms of xenophobia and propaganda.

If you want to follow a war as it’s happening, it’s easier than ever. Telegram channels post live streams of bombing raids as they happen and much of the footage trickles up to X, TikTok, and other social media platforms. There’s more footage of conflict than there’s ever been, but a lot of it is fake.

A few days ago, Iranian news outlets reported that Iran’s military had shot down three F-35s. Israel denied it happened. As the claim spread so did supposed images of the downed jet. In one, a massive version of the jet smolders on the ground next to a town. The cockpit dwarfs the nearby buildings and tiny people mill around the downed jet like Lilliputians surrounding Gulliver.

It’s a fake, an obvious one, but thousands of people shared it online. Another image of the supposedly downed jet showed it crashed in a field somewhere in the middle of the night. Its wings were gone and its afterburner still glowed hot. This was also a fake.

Keep reading