Tag: technology

‘Revenge porn’ betrayal of thousands of women: 40,000 cases identified but only three per cent of suspects charged as new AI apps help abusers humiliate victims

Women are being ‘failed’ by revenge porn laws because most perpetrators are avoiding justice, official data suggests.

Just 3 per cent of suspects were charged in 40,000 cases probed by police over the past five years.

The problem – in which intimate private photos or video footage are shared without consent by a former partner – is likely to grow, as experts warn that AI apps capable of generating lifelike fake sexual images will make it easier for abusers to humiliate victims.

Thousands of distressing cases were left unsolved or closed over the five-year period due to a lack of crucial evidence, the Home Office statistics revealed.

The data showed that 40,110 offences were reported to the police – roughly one every hour. Yet just 3.2 per cent of cases ended with a criminal charge.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said last night: ‘The statistics are absolutely staggering. We must do more to ensure perpetrators are held accountable and victims are properly supported so the system doesn’t fail women.

‘We were unapologetic in government about standing up for women and protecting victims of domestic abuse. 

‘We toughened up sentences for rapists and stalkers, outlawed upskirting and revenge porn, and made violence against women and girls a national policing priority – but it is clear more needs to be done.’

Love Island star Georgia Harrison took her ex-boyfriend to court for uploading online sexual footage of her in 2023.

Ms Harrison, 31, gave evidence against Stephen Bear, 35, at Chelmsford Crown Court, where he was jailed for 21 months for voyeurism and two counts of disclosing private sexual images without consent.

Experts fear the number of cases could soar as culprits use so-called ‘nudification’ apps, which can edit an ordinary photograph of a person to make it appear that they are naked. 

Other powerful AI software can be used to insert a victim’s face into sexually explicit pictures or videos – known as deep-fakes – such as the high-profile clips of pop star Taylor Swift that caused outrage last year.

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China Deploys Humanoid AI Robots to Guard Border

China is dispatching a new kind of recruit to its bustling border with Vietnam: humanoid robots. The UBTECH Walker S2 machines will patrol the Fangchenggang crossing in a high-stakes trial of AI technology.

The above video from UBTECH shows hundreds of these bipedal bots marching in formation, “staring” out at the world with two eye-sized cameras mounted over digital displays. Sophisticated sensors and software help them balance and navigate crowded spaces, and the droids also autonomously swap their own batteries to minimize downtime. At the end of the video, the bots file into multiple Chinese shipping containers and give a salute.

Border officials claim the robots’ roles will be diverse, from guiding passenger lines to checking cargo IDs and seals. The deployment is part of China’s national strategy to lead the global robotics race; footage released earlier this month shows a different model of android soldier deployed near the country’s border with India.

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Bill Gates Thinks Anything He Disagrees with Is ‘Misinformation’ that Should Be Policed by AI

Billionaire tech tycoon Bill Gates has expressed concern about the impact of “misinformation” on future generations, claiming that AI should be used to police ideas he disagrees with online. The creepy Microsoft founder has a long history of taking radical positions on issues including climate alarmism that he’d like to stifle dissent against.

Fortune reports that in a recent interview, Bill Gates discussed what he sees as the growing problem of misinformation and its potential to negatively affect the lives of his children and future generations. Gates, who reinvented himself as a creepy advocate for climate alarmism and other leftist causes,, noted that the spread of false information online has become a significant concern for him and his family.

The billionaire’s comments came in light of a recent incident involving his daughter, Phoebe Gates, who claims she was subjected to online harassment. This experience led Gates to reflect on the broader implications of misinformation and its ability to cause harm to individuals and society as a whole.

“Seeing my daughter targeted by false claims and harassment online was a wake-up call,” Gates said. “It made me realize that the problem of misinformation is not just about the present, but it’s also about the future we’re leaving for our children.”

Gates argues that the spread of what he considers to be “misinformation” can have far-reaching consequences, from undermining public trust in institutions to hindering progress on critical issues such as public health and climate change. He noted that the proliferation of false information online has the potential to erode the foundations of democracy and create a more polarized and divided society.

“Misinformation is a complex problem that requires a multi-faceted approach,” Gates explained. “We need to invest in media literacy programs, support fact-checking organizations, and encourage responsible behavior from social media platforms. But we also need to foster a culture of critical thinking and healthy skepticism, so that people are better equipped to distinguish between credible information and false claims.”

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Canada Is Building The Wrong Army For The War That Is Coming

The next major land war will not reward elegance, boutique modernization, or the comforting belief that advanced technology can replace mass and endurance. It will expose armies built on fragile assumptions. Concealment has largely disappeared. Attrition has returned as a central fact of combat. Sustainment shapes outcomes as decisively as firepower. Yet the Canadian Army remains organized, equipped, and intellectually anchored to a vision of warfare that belonged to yesterday’s world. The problem is not a simple modernization lag or a lack of new kit. It is a deeper conceptual failure—a refusal to absorb how radically and irreversibly the character of land warfare has changed.

That is the larger point. The key change is not this or that technology. The battlespace itself has changed. Artificial intelligence, proliferated drones, commercial satellites, autonomous strike systems, and persistent ISR have combined into a transparent, data-rich battlespace where everyone is on the move, movement is tracked instantly, concentrations are targeted rapidly, and supply lines are targeted as soon as they begin to form—an environment already documented in assessments of modern conflict. An army that cannot scatter, regenerate while under fire, and sustain itself while under persistent observation is not going to muddle through. It is going to break.

Transparency and the End of Concealment

Western armies have operated on the assumptions of concealment and intermittent detection for a generation. Those assumptions are no longer valid. The contemporary battlespace is full of aerial surveillance, open-source commercial satellite imagery, digital emissions that reveal every vehicle and headquarters location, and loitering munitions that make ground above those locations perpetually contested—patterns captured in recent operational analyses.

The issue is time: the time between being discovered and being targeted. The time between when a headquarters can command and when it becomes a targeting point. The time between declaring a movement and becoming a target.

Survival requires dispersion, deception, mobility, and an entire operating paradigm built on the idea that you are observed all the time. The Canadian Army knows about the emergence of drones, ISR, and digital exposure, but it has not yet internalized the ways that they change land warfare’s fundamentals.

Attrition Has Returned—and Canada Is Not Ready

Precision fires promised surgical, inexpensive war. In reality, they have intensified attrition: the ability to strike targets more often, more reliably, and more predictably. Ukraine has demonstrated the scale of this shift: modern war is industrial, not surgical. It consumes people, equipment, ammunition, drones, and spare parts at rates far beyond what most Western forces planned for in peacetime, as shown by studies of wartime industrial demand.

The Canadian Army is not designed for this reality. It is small and brittle. It is optimized for controlled, expeditionary contributions, not for open-ended, high-intensity conflict. Ammunition stocks are low. Maintenance capacity is thin. Replacement cycles are slow. Mobilization—across industry, reserve forces, and training pipelines—is largely theoretical, even as official modernization documents highlight the fragility of the current model.

You can have a small and lethal army if it is small and lethal through design and deliberate choice. You cannot have a small, hollow, and unprepared army if it has to fight for extended periods. In an attritional war, those features are decisive.

Sustainment as a Front-Line Fight

The rise of long-range strike, drones, and cyber means that the old rear area is no more. Supply lines are now a front-line fight from start to finish. Supply depots, railheads, ports, repair facilities, and fuel infrastructure are all high-priority targets. If an enemy cannot stop forward brigades, it will attempt to starve them. Analyses of modern logistics under fire emphasize that industrial capacity and resilient supply networks—not efficiency—determine strategic endurance.

An army for the future must be able to fight under conditions of intermittent resupply, contested and damaged infrastructure, disrupted and overloaded communications, and near-constant threats to supply lines. Planning and organization must prioritize resilience, redundancy, and regeneration rather than peacetime efficiency and timeliness.

The Canadian Army still plans as if reliable resupply were a given and rear areas could stay intact. The moment a capable adversary enters the fight, those assumptions are shattered.

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MIT scientist poised to upend fossil fuel industry before assassination linked to Brown University shooter

The murdered professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was on the brink of revolutionizing the energy sector and upending fossil fuel use as we know it. 

Nuno Loureiro, 47, was gunned down at his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline on Monday.

Authorities believe that the same alleged gunman, Claudio Neves Valente, who carried out the mass shooting at Brown University, may have assassinated Loureiro, but the investigation is still ongoing.

Before his death, Loureiro was leading MIT’s efforts to revolutionize energy production by making a game-changing clean power source that needs just a fraction of the fossil fuels current machines and vehicles use today.

His team’s research at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) centered on plasma physics, the study of super-hot, ionized gases, and how to apply them to fusion energy, a promising clean power source.

Fusion provides what scientists call ‘baseload electricity,’ a steady supply of power 24/7, using tiny amounts of fuel with no air pollution or climate-warming emissions, unlike carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels.

A breakthrough in this field could disrupt the trillion-dollar fuel industry by reducing demand for oil, gas, and coal, especially for generating power and transportation. High-demand users like data centers could also switch to fusion for reliable, green energy.

‘This is a very advanced technology, and whatever nation masters it first is going to have an incredible advantage,’ Loureiro said on December 8.

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The Surveillance State Is Making a Naughty List—and You’re On It

The Surveillance State is making a naughty list, and we’re all on it.

Unlike Santa’s naughty list, however, the consequences of landing on the government’s “naughty list” are far more severe than a stocking full of coal. They can include heightened surveillance, loss of privacy, travel restrictions, financial scrutiny, police encounters, or being flagged as a potential threat—often without notice, explanation, or recourse.

What was once dismissed as a joke—“Santa is watching”—has morphed into a chilling reality. Instead of elves, the watchers are data brokers, intelligence agencies, predictive algorithms, and fusion centers. Instead of a naughty-or-nice list, Americans are sorted into databases, risk profiles, and threat assessments—lists that never disappear.

The shift is subtle but profound.

Innocence is no longer presumed.

Everyone is watched. Everyone is scored. Everyone is a potential suspect.

This is the surveillance state in action.

Today’s surveillance state doesn’t require suspicion, a warrant, or probable cause. It is omnipresent, omniscient, and inescapable.

Your smartphone tracks your location. Your car records your movements. License plate readers log when and where you drive. Retail purchases create detailed consumer profiles. Smart speakers listen to everything you say. Home security cameras observe not just your property, but your neighbors, delivery drivers, and anyone who passes by.

In a dramatic expansion of surveillance reach, the Transportation Security Administration now shares airline passenger lists with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enabling ICE to identify and arrest travelers at airports based on immigration status.

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Bernie Sanders Wants To Pause New Data Centers To Stop the Economy From Growing Too Much

The United States is leading a global data center boom. Investors are plowing some $7 trillion into the infrastructure necessary to support AI development, with 40 percent of that investment happening here in the United States.

This boom in data center investment is so pronounced that many analysts argue it’s propping up an economy that’d otherwise be wobbling under the strain of tariffs and high borrowing costs.

Some skeptics credibly argue that the money flowing into AI research and the physical infrastructure needed to support it is a bubble that will eventually pop.

Unconvinced by the skeptics is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who seems to believe that data center investment will generate large profits, produce technological innovations, and drive economy-wide productivity growth.

Therefore, he wants to shut it down.

In a video posted to Instagram, the socialist senator called for a federal moratorium on data center construction until our politicians can figure out just what the hell is going on.

According to Sanders, the development of artificial intelligence and robotics technologies powered by data centers “is moving very, very quickly, and we need to slow it down.”

He warns that the current boom, if left unchecked, could well end up enriching already wealthy billionaires investing in the technology, leading to job automation and powering a distracting and alienating technology.

A “moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing and make sure the benefits of these technologies work for all of us,” Sanders concludes.

Given general bipartisan support for “winning the AI race” and the amount of growth being generated by data center investment, it’s unlikely that any such moratorium will come to pass.

The fact Sanders is proposing it anyway is reflects just how much anxiety he and other members of the socialist left feel whenever capitalism is working.

Whether it’s driverless cars or choices in deodorant brands, Sanders cannot stop worrying and learn to love it when capitalists make productive investments and give consumers what they want.

Any economic growth that is not planned by the bureaucrats and approved by the electorate is inherently suspicious and perhaps downright malicious.

Sanders’ call for a data center moratorium is to prevent investment in this infrastructure from yielding productive fruit.

He’s worried that investors will reap profits from data center construction. Those same profits would be a signal that their investments were a prudent use of capital that’s driving real growth in the economy.

Likewise, the job automation Sanders worries about would be another sign that data center investments were well-placed. A primary purpose of capital investment and technological innovation is to shift more labor off the backs of human beings and onto machines.

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Senators press toy makers on AI-powered toys exposing children to inappropriate content

“Many of these toys are… exposing children to inappropriate content, privacy risks, and manipulative engagement tactics.”

“These chatbots have encouraged kids to commit self harm and suicide, and now your company is pushing them on the youngest children.”

US Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to the Chief Executive Officers of Little Learners Toys, Mattel, Miko, Curio Interactive, FoloToy, and Keyi Robot sounding the alarm on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their toys. The Senators demanded answers on what safeguards these companies have in place to protect kids from sexually explicit, violent, or otherwise inappropriate content for children.

AI Chatbots in Toys Pose Serious Risk to Children’s Healthy Development

“We write today to express our concern with the sale of toys powered by artificial intelligence (AI). These AI toys—specifically those powered by chatbots imbedded in everyday children’s toys like plushies, dolls, and other beloved toys—pose risks to children’s healthy development.

While AI has incredible potential to benefit children with learning and accessibility, experts have raised concerns about AI toys and the lack of research that has been conducted to understand the full effect of these products on our kids.

Many of these toys are not offering interactive play, but instead are exposing children to inappropriate content, privacy risks, and manipulative engagement tactics. These aren’t theoretical worst-case scenarios; they are documented failures uncovered through real-world testing, and they must be addressed.”

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US Suspends $41 Billion Tech Deal with UK over Online Censorship Laws

The great transatlantic tech romance has hit the skids. What was sold as a landmark agreement binding Silicon Valley brains to British ambition has been shoved into neutral, all because Britain decided it quite fancies telling American machines what they are allowed to say.

Washington has now suspended the much-trumpeted US-UK technology agreement, a decision driven by mounting alarm over Britain’s new censorship law, the Online Safety Act.

The idea that a British regulator might fine or muzzle American firms has landed in Washington like a dropped wrench.

One participant in the talks put it bluntly, telling The Telegraph, “Americans went into this deal thinking Britain were going to back off regulating American tech firms but realized it was going to restrict the speech of American chatbots.”

The Online Safety Act gives Britain the power to fine companies it believes are enabling “harmful” or “hateful” speech, concepts elastic enough to stretch around just about anything if you pull hard enough.

The communications regulator Ofcom has not been shy about using these powers.

Enforcement notices have already landed on the desks of major American firms, even when their servers, staff, and coffee machines are nowhere near Britain.

From Washington’s perspective, this looks less like safety and more like Britain peering over the Atlantic with a ruler, ready to rap American knuckles.

The White House had been keen on the £31 ($41) billion Tech Prosperity Deal, seeing it as a front door to closer ties on AI research and digital trade.

Instead, officials began to see the Online Safety Act as a mechanism for deciding what American platforms, and their algorithms, are allowed to say. Chatbots like ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok suddenly looked like potential defendants in a British courtroom, accused of wrongthink.

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YouTube Shuts Down Channels Using AI To Create Fake Movie Trailers Watched By Millions

 YouTube has terminated two prominent channels that used artificial intelligence to create fake movie trailers, Deadline can reveal.

The Google-owned video giant has switched off Screen Culture and KH Studio, which together boasted well over 2 million subscribers and more than a billion views.

The channels have been replaced with the message: “This page isn’t available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else.”

Screen Culture and KH Studio were approached for comment. They are based in India and Georgia, respectively.

Earlier this year, YouTube suspended ads on Screen Culture and KH Studio following a Deadline investigation into fake movie trailers plaguing the platform since the rise of generative AI.

The channels later returned to monetization when they started adding “fan trailer,” “parody” and “concept trailer” to their video titles. But those caveats disappeared In recent months, prompting concern in the fan-made trailer community.

YouTube’s position is that the channels’ decision to revert to their previous behavior violated its spam and misleading-metadata policies. This resulted in their termination.

“The monster was defeated,” one YouTuber told Deadline following the enforcement action.

Deadline’s investigation revealed that Screen Culture spliced together official footage with AI images to create franchise trailers that duped many YouTube viewers.

Screen Culture founder Nikhil P. Chaudhari said his team of a dozen editors exploited YouTube’s algorithm by being early with fake trailers and constantly iterating with videos.

For example, Screen Culture had created 23 versions of a trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps by March, some of which outranked the official trailer in YouTube search results. More recent examples include HBO’s new Harry Potter series and Netflix’s Wednesday.

Our deep dive into fake trailers revealed that instead of protecting copyright on these videos, a handful of Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros Discovery and Sony, secretly asked YouTube to ensure that the ad revenue from the AI-heavy videos flowed in their direction. The studios declined to comment.

Disney properties featured prominently on Screen Culture and KH Studio. The Mouse House sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google last week, claiming that its AI training models and services infringe on its copyrights on a “massive scale.”

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