Tag: technology

FBI shuts down over 40 North Korean laptop farms used by fake remote workers — over 200 devices seized in Texas, although no arrests were made so far

The FBI has dismantled a major North Korean laptop farm operation in the U.S. with the help of CrowdStrike, which assisted in the identification and disruption of these networks. According to The New York Times, the agency shut down over 40 laptop farms in Texas, resulting in the seizure of over 200 devices. No arrests have been made so far, as the authorities wanted to take down the operations as soon as possible and did not wait for prosecutors to file charges against those involved, although they also warned that they could face criminal penalties if they continue to be involved with remote fraud.

North Korea has been using fake remote workers to earn income despite the economic sanctions placed against the hermit kingdom. It has been reported that it earns around $500 million a year under this scheme, which affects both startups and Fortune 500 companies. Amazon’s IT department actually caught one North Korean infiltrator after it noticed a 110ms keyboard input lag, betraying their distant location.

The U.S. has been clamping down on this scheme since last year, after it shut down 29 North Korean laptop farms across 16 states that were facilitating the employment of North Korean IT workers across over a hundred U.S. companies. Four U.S. citizens and a Ukrainian national were convicted over scams like this in November 2025, with the Justice Department unsealing indictments against two U.S. citizens and 10 China-based North Koreans recently. Prosecutors said that the last group defrauded more than $3 million from 70 companies over a span of six years from 2019, and that the identities of two more individuals involved in the case remain under seal.

Despite the number of networks that U.S. authorities have been able to shut down since last year, CrowdStrike’s Adam Meyers, who’s in charge of the company’s counter adversary operations, says that this scheme is “increasing both in prevalence and complexity.” He noted that it’s difficult to know how truly widespread the problem is and that even though CrowdStrike has identified an average of two new cases daily last month, it was most probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Facilitators are the one crucial aspect that North Korea’s operations rely on. These are people based in the United States who help bypass security measures by hosting the work laptops that companies send to the fraudulent North Korean IT workers to make it appear as if they’re based in the country. While the job looks like easy money from that start, it would eventually become more complicated as the operation progresses. “They get kind of hooked on it initially, and then more gets asked of them, and they’re kind of in too deep at that point,” Meyers told the publication.

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The Transcendent Tech Economy: Abundance and Mass Poverty Will Arrive Together

Token Abundance Will Bring Abundance to Some, and Abject Poverty to Many Others

I believe the future will deliver staggering AI-driven abundance and mass poverty at the same time, not universal wealth. This is not a prediction I make lightly; it is a conclusion I have reached after tracking AI compute economics, memory supply chains, and the brutal realities of automation. We are not heading toward a Star Trek utopia where everyone shares in the spoils. We are heading toward what I call a “slumdog Star Wars” future: advanced “Godboxes” (a term Zach Vorhies introduced to me during a recent interview) and instant intelligence coexisting with slums, shantytowns and destitution.

The dividing line will not be access to information, because information is becoming free. The dividing line will be ownership of AI compute and tokens. If you own the hardware that generates intelligence, you capture the wealth. If you merely rent access from someone else’s cloud, you remain a subject. I have said repeatedly that personal liberty is good and decentralization is critical, and nothing proves that faster than the coming AI economy. I believe the assumption that AI automatically makes everyone richer is dangerously wrong, and it is the single most costly mistake interested observers can make right now.

Token Abundance Is Coming Faster Than Most People Realize

Token abundance is rapidly arriving because AI architecture is shifting from sequential autoregressive generation to diffusion and parallel chunk generation (this is a very big deal). Older models generated text word-by-word in a linear chain, which is computationally expensive and slow. Diffusion models refine noise into whole blocks of code or content at once, not word-by-word, which radically changes the economics of inference.

TypeSafe AI’s new decision model is reportedly 200 times faster than ChatGPT on certain narrow decision tasks, offering free output tokens, proving that parallel processing can make AI blazing fast and cheap [1]. This is not a minor optimization; it is a fundamental change in how machines think and how tokens are produced.

Inference engines now offload mixture-of-experts models and N-gram lookup tables into system RAM or SSDs, reducing the need for ultra-expensive GPU RAM. This means the bottleneck is shifting away from exotic hardware and toward commodity memory, which is precisely why the GDDR7 shortage I documented is so devastating for consumers [2]. When AI-driven supply chains prioritize data centers over personal computing, the average person gets squeezed out of the hardware market entirely. Zach Voorhees calls the endpoint a “Godbox”: a portable device that knows almost everything and solves problems almost instantly.

That AI-powered future is real, in other words, but it will not be evenly distributed.

This will create massive compute and token abundance, but abundance alone does not equal broad prosperity. As Chris Martenson has written, factions in society already receive entirely different information diets, and AI will amplify that fragmentation rather than heal it [3]. Abundance of tokens in the hands of a few owners means abundance of wealth for those owners. For everyone else, it means they can ask a machine questions for free while their labor becomes increasingly worthless due to automation. Thus, I believe the technology is real; the egalitarian fantasy about it is not.

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AI sector wipeout risks global financial contagion, IMF report warns — 14 deals drove $1.4 trillion in circular orders on $650B in loans

Watchers and reporters in the AI space have long pointed out how its circular economy could implode, potentially taking associated investments with it. The IMF has examined those fears in its latest Global Financial Stability Report, and its conclusions are stark. In the IMF’s view, the global economy is becoming increasingly dependent on capital flows to the AI world, and a crash could result in harm to global GDP, investment, and consumption by 2028.

The report makes a distinction between “core” AI firms and others in the space. Presumably, core firms include companies like TSMC, Nvidia, and AMD, memory makers like SK hynix and Micron, and storage vendors like Western Digital. Those firms are seeing historical windfalls, and most of their production is currently spoken for years in advance. In other words, in this gold rush, these are the companies making bank selling the shovels.

In theory, if non-core players fail, only their investors would suffer harm, but according to the report, there’s still risk to worry about. Hedge funds have increased leveraged positions and margin borrowing, further exposing themselves to the blast radius of a potential bubble pop. Adding to that, the IMF states that the share of single stocks in leveraged ETFs increased to 28%, likely fueled by demand for AI and tech stocks. By our reckoning, a sharp drop in those equities could trigger a massive sell-off by the ETF issuers and lenders, triggering a feedback loop.

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America’s AI ambitions threaten Indigenous lands in the Philippines

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. arrived at the Grand Hyatt Manila on Sept. 10 to address hundreds of foreign business representatives assembled for the Luzon Economic Corridor investors’ forum.

Outside the hotel, hundreds of demonstrators had also gathered, carrying signs that read “No to Pax Silica!” The scene reflected both the government’s ambitious plans to ride the artificial intelligence wave and deep ambivalence in civil society.

Police confronted the crowd, shoving them with riot shields and batons on the street outside the hotel lobby. Activists say police injured at least 27 protesters and arrested five. Police, meanwhile, reported minor cuts and injuries to 16 personnel. 

Protester Jona Yang, from the activist-scientist group AGHAM, said she was negotiating with the police to cool tensions when they arrested her. “We want the Marcos government and investors to see the outrage all of this has caused,” Yang told Mongabay. “They’re taking away our resources and our lands.”

The Luzon Economic Corridor, or LEC, is an economic initiative focused on the Philippines’ biggest island, begun in 2024. Pax Silica, the U.S.-led global pact to build an AI and semiconductor supply chain that is not reliant on China, includes the LEC. In April, Washington and Manila announced plans to build a 4,000-acre high-tech manufacturing hub in the Central Luzon region.

Pax Silica has become a lightning rod for political and environmental contentions. The government maintains it’s a boon for the Philippine economy. But opponents of the project, including Indigenous and local communities living on the land designated for the project, say it’s an international land and resource grab in the name of U.S. AI ambitions.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Manila in July to affirm bilateral commitment to the project, with a final agreement slated for signing in November.

At the LEC forum, Pax Silica was discussed behind closed doors, and officials gave few details about its future. Angela Ignacio, an undersecretary at the Philippine Department of Finance, told reporters it would be premature to share any details on Pax Silica before plans are finalized. But she did call it a chance for the Philippines to become a “global player when it comes to technologies that will shape the future.”

Heather Variava, senior adviser to the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs, added that “the goal of the U.S. is always to be an additive, to bring more power, to bring water, to bring more benefits to the Philippines.”

The Pax Silica hub will be built within New Clark City, a government-planned “smart” city inside the greater 79,000-acre Clark area, a former U.S. military complex. Clark is titled and managed by the Bases Conversion and Development Authority, or BCDA, an office under the supervision of the president. At a press briefing, development authority chief Joshua Bingcang shared a “conservative” estimate that the facility would need around 3 gigawatts of energy to run. He also said that it would be green and mainly solar powered.

“We are blessed with 300 days of sunshine,” Bingcang added.

Running consistently, the Pax Silica facility would demand about 26.3 terawatt-hours each year; by contrast, the Philippines’ entire service sector consumed about 28 TWh in 2024.

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Big Tech Pushes Back On Paying For A Grid That Was Crumbling Long Before AI

When Big Tech signed President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, promising to pay for all the new grid infrastructure upgrades required to service their data centers, we cautioned that “voluntary pledges from trillion-dollar tech giants have a habit of evolving.“

Seven months later, the hyperscalers are pushing back on how much of the grid’s bill is theirs to pay.

The past week brought a Democratic Senate report and a North Carolina utility settlement, and FERC is expected to rule on whether new data centers must bring their own power.

But before anyone grabs a pitchfork, ask the question none of them answers: how much of this bill is really AI’s, and how much is the cost of decades of grid neglect?

On Friday, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Richard Blumenthal released Power and Profits, the result of a nearly yearlong investigation into seven data center operators including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft. The headline finding is as you would expect: the companies’ promises to cover their full costs apply to infrastructure serving only their own facilities, not the full cost of shared grid upgrades their arrival triggers.

The companies broadly opposed the “but-for” standard consumer advocates are pushing, under which a data center pays for any shared upgrade that “would not have been built but for the data center.” One hyperscaler told Senate staff that such upgrades often provide a “system benefit which should be shared among all ratepayers.”

They also balked at minimum bills, which advocates want set at 80% to 90% of contracted demand whether the power gets used or not. One Big Tech firm called a 90% floor “insanely high.” Another called 85% to 90% “unreasonably high,” since facilities often don’t use all of their projected demand.

Two days earlier, Duke Energy announced a settlement, signed by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and North Carolina’s utility consumer advocate, that it says ensures data centers “will pay upfront for all costs to connect to the grid.“

The settlement itself is more nuanced. Data centers prepay the full cost of equipment that serves only them, such as a dedicated substation. For shared transmission upgrades, they post a letter of credit covering the estimated cost, collateral that starts shrinking once the facility consistently draws 75% of its contracted demand.

Whether data centers get directly charged for any slice of those shared costs is punted to a Duke study due a year after approval, and would apply only to future contracts.

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FBI Arrests OpenAI Engineer Over a Hidden Listening Device

OpenAI builds technology that answers complicated questions. Yet federal investigators say one of its engineers tried to get answers by secretly listening to executives. The alleged equipment was a recording device plugged into a television inside a restricted conference room in San Francisco.

For a company developing some of America’s most valuable technology, that’s a chilling failure.

From the DOJ:

“According to the complaint unsealed today, Abdulrahman Alfozan allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “Protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities. Thank you to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and our law enforcement partners for their support — and we will continue working closely with our partners across the U.S. government and private sector to keep American businesses and citizens safe and to ensure our country maintains its competitive edge.”

The FBI arrested Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national, on October 9. Prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint Tuesday charging him with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He had worked at OpenAI since July 2025. The company has since fired him, and federal investigators are examining his alleged activities.

OpenAI personnel discovered the device on September 30, connected to a USB port behind a television. Someone had concealed it in toilet paper, and its stored contents were encrypted. Investigators believe someone installed it around September 28. The room regularly hosted discussions of proprietary research, future products, business arrangements, government contacts, and technical progress OpenAI hadn’t disclosed publicly.

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The Biggest Threat To Today’s Data Centers Is In The Battery Room

As data centers continue to multiply, facilities are deploying industrial-scale Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units by the hundreds and substation-size front-of-the-meter Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) to secure against grid failure, power surges, or other disruptions.

But while the battery units are looking after the servers, who is looking after the batteries?

In the last few years, lithium-ion batteries have become the backup power of choice for data center UPS and BESS systems, and for good reason. They have long lifespans, a small footprint, and superior energy density. While data centers tend to be safe, things can and do go wrong. When they do, it’s almost always related to lithium-ion batteries.

The September 2025 data center fire in South Korea that led to a paralyzing nationwide outage in government services started with a single lithium battery explosion. Last year, a battery room at the Chirisa Technology Parks data center in Virginia caught fire twice in two months. Firefighters who responded to a May 2025 fire at an Oregon data center leased by X flagged the battery room as the source of the blaze. As the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) noted recently, “Nearly every notable fire event in data centers in recent years has involved lithium-ion batteries in some way.”

The biggest safety threat to modern data centers’ backup battery systems falls on a single culprit: hydrogen. When a lithium-ion cell begins to fail, internal temperatures rise rapidly, forcing a breakdown in the battery’s internal chemistry. Hydrogen, the smallest and lightest molecule, is often the most measurable gas during the initial stages of failure. Unlike traditional vented lead-acid batteries, lithium-ion cells do not regularly emit hydrogen gas. When ‘off-gassing’ does occur, it usually means something has gone very wrong. Overcharging, cell damage, separator defects, internal short circuits, or even the formation of tiny lithium dendrites can trigger a state known as thermal runaway. If early warning detection systems are not installed, this is when things get dangerous fast.

Once thermal runaway is triggered, it’s a self-sustaining chain reaction. Rising heat melts the battery’s internal separator, causing a short circuit that rapidly generates heat. The extreme heat drives internal thermal decomposition, which releases fuel and oxygen. The release of oxygen feeds sustained combustion that can spike to more than 1,000°F (538°C) in a matter of seconds. Because the cell is sealed, the extreme heat and pressure cause the battery to burst into flames that can ignite neighboring cells and equipment.

While industry data shows a steady decline in BESS failure rates per gigawatt-hour of deployed capacity, the stakes are still high. Because the large-scale shift to lithium-ion battery configurations has only taken place during the last 3-5 years, hyperscalers, regulators, and insurers are beginning to catch up to the reality that lithium-ion deployments do not conform to legacy safety protocols.

Previous safety best practices that focused on ventilation to prevent critical concentrations of hydrogen during regular off-gassing are no longer sufficient for today’s battery rooms. Energy-dense lithium-ion cells are often packed in enclosed cabinets. This makes for a small footprint that can trap volatile gas beyond the reach of traditional ventilation units. Given the potential for a sudden flare-up, the safety approach for these configurations has shifted from ventilation to early-stage off-gas detection.

Regulations and standards are evolving accordingly to prioritize early detection and prevent worst-case scenarios. Standards like NFPA 855 were designed specifically for lithium-ion deployments, mandating continuous gas detection alongside standard exhaust systems.

Destructive testing standards, like UL 9540A, generate the fire-propagation data that inform spacing and suppression requirements in model codes and standards like NFPA 855. Additionally, UL 2075, a standard covering gas and vapor detector performance, is now being used in modern BESS and UPS environments to certify specific gas or off-gas detectors used to monitor hydrogen and hazardous gas accumulation in battery rooms.

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Indiana Democrat Mocked Online After Sounding Drunk During Bizarre Candidate Forum Rant — Vows to “Fire All Republicans,” Warns “We Have Guns Too,” and Demands Data Centers Pay Every Resident $10,000

A Democrat candidate for Fayette County Council in Connersville, Indiana, is facing widespread online mockery after a candidate forum appearance that observers have described as a “drunken, vodka-riddled tirade.”

Jamie West (also listed as Jaime West), the Democrat nominee for Fayette County Council District 4 in Connersville, introduced herself as a mother of three grown children, owner of Queen Bees Cleaning LLC, and a gig worker who delivers groceries and packages.

She told the audience that if voters trust her with their groceries, they should trust her with their vote.

From there the interview quickly veered into an emotional, hard-to-follow monologue about state legislation, fire services, data centers, and her dislike of Republicans.

The full forum, hosted by LocalTV3 and the News-Examiner, is available on YouTube. West’s segment begins roughly 33 minutes in.

A clipped version highlighting her appearance was shared by Bradley Brewer on X and quickly spread, with a caption calling the performance a “drunken, vodka-riddled tirade” and the “craziest, most unhinged interview” he had seen in some time.

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Canadian YouTuber builds ‘Flock-like’ camera to exclusively track police vehicles, gets a visit from police — officers visit his home to express privacy concerns

A YouTuber has received an unexpected visit from the police over an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera he built to specifically track police cars, using the same technology law enforcement has infamously used to track ordinary citizens. In a video posted to his channel on October 7, Anthony Sistilli says two police officers showed up at his doorstep on September 20th to ask questions about the device, asking what his intentions were with the project.

Sistilli, a Canadian software engineer and YouTuber, pointed out the irony of the officers’ concerns, explaining that they mirror the privacy concerns of ordinary citizens who are growing increasingly weary of the recent spike in blanket surveillance brought about by a mass installation of ALPR cameras. Flock Safety, a U.S. public safety technology company, recently scaled its centralized national surveillance network to over 120,000 cameras operating across 49 states, according to the company, capturing billions of vehicle scans every month.

The development sparked widespread public backlash, with critics arguing that Flock has quietly built a massive government surveillance dragnet without a public vote or federal oversight, since any police department on the network can search across state lines. Security researchers later discovered the network included 335,701 Flock cameras and created a “Flock Surveillance Map,” exposing their locations.

Similar ALPR camera surveillance networks exist in Canada, where Sistilli resides, prompting him to build his own device, but this time, encoded to exclusively track police cars. He detailed the build in several TikTok videos, describing it as “a personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers.” He then posted a video of himself using the device in real life. The video brought Peel Regional Police, the local law enforcement serving Sistilli’s city, Brampton, Ontario, to his doorstep two weeks later.

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Google Signs 20-Year Nuclear Deal with Constellation Energy to Power Data Centers

Google and Constellation Energy announced a 20-year nuclear-power agreement this week that will boost output at 11 existing reactors across Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey to feed the incredible power needs of AI data centers.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the deal centers on an 890-megawatt power-purchase agreement. Upgrades at the plants amount to adding a new large reactor to the grid, and Constellation, the country’s largest owner of nuclear-power reactors, is calling it the largest-ever “uprate” project between a nuclear-power provider and a tech company. The company plans to invest more than $4.3 billion in the plants. The first uprate project is expected in 2028, and construction on the rest will continue through 2032 or 2033.

Google and Constellation also struck a separate 15-year supply deal for an additional 2,700 megawatts of electricity in the PJM power market, which covers the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. The companies plan to work together on new power generation, battery storage and demand response programs as well.

“These are expensive things to be done, and we’ve known that we could do this for a number of years now,” said Joe Dominguez, Constellation’s chief executive. “But it’s really Google stepping up to the plate and providing the financial backing for us to be able to bring on what is effectively a new reactor.”

Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of energy and power, said the company wanted power that could come online quickly without compromising its environmental goals. “The speed to firm, clean power in a responsible way was incredibly important to us,” she said, adding that the deal comes “in a moment where data centers are under a lot of criticism.”

The agreement is the latest in a run of moves by Google to lock in nuclear power. Last month, the company said it would support nuclear-plant upgrades in Georgia. It’s also working with NextEra Energy to restart the Duane Arnold Energy Center, a nuclear reactor in Iowa, and has partnered with reactor developer Kairos Power to buy electricity from its projects.

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