Tag: technology

200,000 Fake AI ‘Victims’ Deployed To Scam-Bait Online Fraudsters

Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.

Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.

“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle. 

The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.

”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says. 

Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia. 

“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”

The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.

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Cop Fired After Allegedly Using Flock Cameras to Stalk Former Boyfriend – She Abused System 166 Times

A South Carolina police officer has been fired for allegedly using a Flock camera system to check on an individual with whom she had had a relationship.

Ellie Anna Hammond, 24, was fired on Aug. 3, the Mauldin Police Department said, according to KOCO-TV.

A department representative said no comment on the action would be coming, because it’s “a personnel matter.”

Hammond was fired due to alleged misconduct between March and July, according to documents from the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy.

During that period, Hammond was accused of accessing the Flock camera system 166 different times to track a vehicle that belonged to an individual with whom she once had a relationship.

Every time the system was accessed, a reason was provided, but the documents said those reasons were bogus.

The reasons were variously listed as a warrant check, traffic infraction, or welfare check.

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U.S.-Registered Drone Detected at Site of Suspected CIA Boat Strike

In the hours after a mysterious attack on an Ecuadorian fishing boat near the Galápagos Islands on March 17, a drone registered to U.S. defense contractor Shield AI was hovering just 500 meters from the burning vessel, La Negra Francisca, according to a review of flight tracking data by Drop Site News. This represents the first known vehicle to arrive at the site of the strike.

The unattributed bombing of three Ecuadorian fishing boats in January and March, and the subsequent abduction and torture of 36 fishermen, was first reported by Drop Site in April. Last week, The Washington Post, building on Drop Site’s ongoing investigation, reported that the attacks were part of a covert CIA operation.

According to flight and vessel tracking data from Radar 24 and Global Fishing Watch, the drone was a V-BAT model, primarily used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, but capable of carrying a weapons payload and switching its signal on and off to avoid detection.

The Shield AI drone matches the fishermen’s descriptions of the drones that circled their boats before the bombing, and bears the same red and green lights eyewitnesses reported seeing as they photographed the explosion.

Shield AI did not respond to a request for comment.

The CEO of Shield AI, Brandon Tseng, has publicly stated that the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy are using V-BAT drones “to interdict and destroy billions of dollars’ worth of drugs that were headed for the United States of America.” In 2024, the U.S. Coast Guard signed a $198 million contract with Shield AI for V-BAT drones; in April 2026, Shield AI announced it had received an $800 million contract for V-BAT drones from the U.S. Navy.

No drugs were found on any of the three fishing boats investigated by Drop Site—the Negra Francisca, Don Maca, and Fiorella—all of which were searched and cleared by Ecuadorian coast guard personnel prior to the strikes.

Last month, Drop Site published NASA thermal imagery consistent with an explosion at coordinates 1.5822°N, 87.6958W°, recorded at 1:02 p.m., the time fishermen say they were hit, and in the location where their transponder stopped broadcasting.

Tracking data suggests that the drone launched from a nearby boat on March 17, seven hours after the strike on La Negra Francisca and then circled near the site, its signal disappearing and reappearing. Ascending and descending patterns of movement indicate that the drone may have been landing on a boat and then resuming its flights.

Drop Site previously reported that vessel tracking data showed a U.S. Coast Guard cutter leaving a Galápagos military base a day before the Negra Francisca bombing—despite claiming it only deployed the cutter as a post-incident rescue effort. The Coast Guard vessel’s signal went dark and later appeared in Central American waters 24 hours before the fishermen were placed in El Salvador’s custody.

Video recordings, taken by eyewitnesses to the bombing, show the U.S. Coast Guard patrolling in the aftermath of the airstrike. Drop Site asked the U.S. Coast Guard in June to account for the cutter’s movements after its signal went dark. The Coast Guard responded that it “does not disclose cutter movements during law enforcement missions for operational security.”

In June, the U.S. Coast Guard told The Guardian it deployed its Bertholf cutter for a search-and-rescue operation after receiving a Mayday alert, contradicting prior statements by the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees maritime operations in the Pacific, that it had no knowledge of any U.S. involvement in the incidents. To date, the U.S. Coast Guard has not acknowledged using drones in its purported rescue efforts.

The U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Southern Command, and the Central Intelligence Agency did not respond to questions for this article.

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Comcast Turns Millions Of Routers Into Motion Sensors – The Same WiFi Signals Can ID You With 99.5% Accuracy

Dear Comcast customers: The internet gateway in your living room is now a motion sensor. It’s free of charge, and the data can go to law enforcement without further notice. What’s more, researchers have already shown that these same signals can identify exactly who is in the room.

On Tuesday, Comcast unveiled Xfinity Shield, a home security platform built entirely around the WiFi network. Its centerpiece, WiFi Motion, turns the leased gateway into a motion detector at no extra charge. According to Comcast, a typical customer has roughly 36 devices connected to their WiFi.

WiFi Motion works because a human body moving through a room disturbs the signal field between the gateway and stationary connected devices, like a printer or a game console. While the feature is opt-in and – according to Comcast’s rollout materials – does not track phones or reach through WiFi extenders, those limitations are choices Comcast made in software, not limitations of the technology itself.

Comcast says WiFi Motion works “without recording video, capturing images or identifying individuals.”

The company is not shy about identification as a product. The $15-a-month tier, Xfinity Shield Select, adds AI-powered cameras that identify people, pets, packages and vehicles. The free tier’s restraint is a line drawn one product SKU away.

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Robot Reportedly Runs Faster Than Usain Bolt, Jumps Higher Than Any Human Athlete

It’s the fast-approaching dawning of the robot era.

We live in a race to produce the stronger, faster, and more useful robots on the planet – and the Chinese seem to have gathered some pace.

Robot firm Unitree has unveiled a ‘super-humanoid’ that – they are claiming – is faster than Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest sprinter.

The droid also performs other athletic tasks.

The New York Post reported:

“They unveiled the abilities of the cybernetic specimen, dubbed ‘Superman’, in an X video with nearly 950,000 views.

According to Unitree, the robot was developed in just three months but can already high jump 2 meters (6.56 feet) and achieve a top speed of 12.66 m/s (28.3 mph), allegedly eclipsing ‘the records of all humans around the world’.”

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AI causes higher interest rates

AI companies have borrowed so much money this year that they’re pushing up interest rates for the entire economy. Nomura estimates tech borrowing alone now equals 25% of what the US Treasury issues in bonds, five times more than last year. Bank of America says the surge has added about 0.3 percentage points to the 10-year yield.

Bond managers are selling Treasuries to buy AI corporate debt instead because it pays more. My Take AI companies are now competing with the US government for the same pool of lenders, and the lenders are picking the corporate bonds. Alphabet’s 30-year pays 6.4%. A Meta data center bond pays over 7.5%.

At those rates, a 5.2% Treasury loses the fight for capital every time. That’s one of the reasons long-term rates have stayed so stubborn even as the Fed tries to bring them down. JPMorgan expects $5.5 trillion in AI infrastructure spending through 2030, and most of it will be borrowed. That borrowing raises the cost of money for everyone, the government, your mortgage, small businesses trying to get a loan.

The AI buildout has reached the scale where it moves rates for the whole economy, and most people paying higher borrowing costs have no idea that a data center arms race is one of the reasons why. 

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‘Antisemitic’ Fla. Congressional candidate Dan Bilzerian receives heavy backlash after posting highly offensive AI ad targeting Rep. Fine

Bipartisan leaders in Washington are uniting to condemn an increasingly bitter Republican primary in Florida’s 6th Congressional District.

The backlash follows social media personality Dan Bilzerian’s release of an AI-generated attack ad against incumbent U.S. Representative Randy Fine, one of just four Jewish Republicans currently serving in the House.

Bilzerian, who is running in the Republican primary in Florida’s 6th Congressional District, has previously expressed immense respect for the Muslim community, praised aspects of Islamic culture and stated that he began reading the Quran out of personal interest — during podcast appearances and interviews.

He has also been an outspoken critic of Israel and a vocal advocate for “Palestinian rights.”

You can watch Bilzerian’s AI-generated attack ad here.

In the most shocking attack ad, Representative Fine (R-Fla.) appears adorned with the Star of David alongside images of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, using artificial intelligence (AI) to sprout devilish horns from Fine’s head while referring to him as a “satanic whore.”

“It is unheard of to share an opponents television commercial. But I want you to watch it. Every second. Celebrating Hitler. Having horns grow out of the heads of Jews. Showing me violently assaulted. And if this appeals to you, I don’t want your vote. We have a choice on Tuesday, to embrace the kind of Nazism that led to the Holocaust or to repudiate this filth and reaffirm American values and character. Let’s send a resounding message on Tuesday,” Fine (R-Fla.) posted on X.

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Russia Hypes ‘Nuclear War’ Threat After British Drones Launched By Ukraine For First Time

British-made drones have been used by the Ukrainian armed forces for deep-strike missions against the Russian economy for the first time, a report states, prompting Moscow to make one of its periodic allusions to the threat of nuclear war.

Drones built by two British companies have been successfully used for long-range deep strikes into the Russian hinterland against military and economic targets in recent months, a report in The Sunday Times states, citing both Ukrainian and British government sources. The report states one of the weapons transferred from Britain to Ukraine is the Callen-Lenz / BAE Systems developed ‘Nyan’ drone, which has been used on strikes said to include targets such as “oil refineries in Volgograd, southwest Russia, and Yaroslavl, near Moscow”.

The Nyan cited in the Times report is a compound delta-winged, jet-powered, carbon-fibre drone — also known as a “One-Way Effector (OWE) Uncrewed Air System (UAS)” — designed to do the job of a cruise missile at a fraction of the cost. Crucially for the Ukraine conflict, the design has some ‘stealth’ properties, it has backup navigation systems to find its target in areas where heavy radio jamming means guidance systems like GPS can’t be guaranteed, and it can be mass produced quickly to a price.

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Something Sparked a Technological Revolution in China 146,000 Years Ago—Archaeologists Have Now Linked It to a Mysterious Extinct Human Species

During the harsh conditions that prevailed in ice age China 146,000 years ago, a remarkable survival strategy was being developed by early humans—something that led to one of the region’s earliest technological revolutions.

In a series of recent discoveries at the Lingjing site in Northern China, archaeologists have unearthed evidence of sophisticated stone tools associated with Homo juluensis, an extinct human relative that inhabited parts of East Asia long ago, and which may even have interacted with ancestors of modern humans.

The findings, reported in the Journal of Human Evolution, have now revealed that stone crafting at the site began nearly 20,000 years earlier than previous estimates, placing these ancient toolmakers amid some of the harshest glacial period conditions, rather than the later warmer climate associated with past evaluations of the site.

The findings add to recent discoveries that have revealed surprising features about ancient archaic humans that thrived during this period, which include not only their unexpected size, but also their understanding of complex stone crafting techniques.

Creativity Driven by Cold

“People often imagine creativity as something that flourishes in good times,” said lead author Yuchao Zhao, the assistant curator of East Asian archaeology at Chicago’s Field Museum, in a statement. “Finding out that these stone tools were made during a harsh ice age tells a different story.

“Hard times can force us to adapt,” Zhao adds.

For more than a decade, archaeologists have undertaken excavations at Lingjing, where everything from animal remains to ancient tools has been uncovered.

Something else that the ancient human presence at this site has revealed is a surprisingly sophisticated ice age lithic industry, where the ancient humans who once thrived here employed a technologically complex manufacturing process for their time.

Evidence of this comes in the form of disc-shaped stone cores, which are deceptively simple in appearance. To craft them, their ancient makers had to carefully work them in ways that produced useful cutting flakes. Some of them were shaped evenly on both sides, while other examples reveal asymmetrical designs where one side served as a striking platform, and the other appears to have been prepared for controlled flake removal.

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3D-printing enthusiast creates ‘Flock Sock’ to blind controversial cameras, shares design — slip-on cover attaches to broom handle to make it easy to put on devices placed on traffic and streetlights

Privacy concerns and multiple incidents have led many citizens to take it upon themselves to block or disable Flock cameras. They often do this either by placing black trash bags over them or by spraying paint or insulating foam onto their lenses. Now, the former can be dangerous, especially if you don’t have equipment, as you need to reach high enough to cover the camera and secure the plastic bag over it. The latter can get you into deeper trouble, as paint or foam can damage the camera. So, 3D printing enthusiast SquidInk decided to create an easy-to-use model that would take seconds to install without damaging the camera and posted it on Maker World.

While the public was initially concerned about their privacy with Flock’s AI-powered cameras, this concern eventually turned into outrage after it was discovered that some police officers had been misusing the system. There were also a couple of high-profile incidents where procedural errors led to the mistaken apprehension of innocent people. Because of these incidents, some jurisdictions have voted to remove these cameras, to the chagrin of some of their most ardent supporters. As for towns and cities that voted to keep their Flock AI cameras operational, some citizens are taking matters into their own hands and deliberately blocking these cameras to prevent them from capturing video. Note that actions like these are probably illegal and will get anyone caught doing so in hot water. Possible charges include vandalism, criminal mischief, property damage, tampering with public infrastructure, obstruction, and more.

The Flock Sock itself doesn’t encourage anyone to commit a crime. Its description says, “The Flock Sock is a slip on cover designed to help protect a Flock camera from the harmful radiation of the sun. Your city spent their very own hard-earned tax dollars scattering these cameras everywhere to keep you safe, all it cost you was a little privacy. The very least you can do is help protect these valuable civil servants from getting a bad sunburn.”

The creator also said that Flock commonly uses three different models, and that they’re working on profiles for the other two so that there’s a 3D-printable Flock Sock for every Flock camera you may find in the wild.

Aside from being easy to print, it’s also easy to use and deploy. It slides onto Flock cameras in seconds, and you can easily lift it into position with a 1-inch broom handle through the built-in adapter. They also highlighted that it’s 100% non-permanent, saying, “No glue, no screws, and zero structural changes. Because it pops off instantly with absolutely no damage caused and costs exactly $0 to revert, it conveniently avoids some of the troublesome labels that Uncle Sam might stick to you. It’s just a removable accessory.” While SquidInk recommended using ABS/ASA for its excellent heat and UV resistance, they also suggested using PLA “if you prefer your Flock Sock to develop a long term relationship with the summer heat.”

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