Tag: technology

Guilt by Algorithm: Woman Wrongly Accused of Shoplifting Due to Facial Recognition Error

A woman was left “fuming” after being erroneously accused of stealing toilet paper and ejected from two Home Bargains stores in Greater Manchester, UK, due to an apparent mix-up with a facial recognition system designed to prevent shoplifting.

BBC News reports that Danielle Horan, a makeup business owner, found herself in a distressing situation when she was escorted out of Home Bargains branches in Salford and Manchester, without initially being given any explanation for her removal. It was later discovered that Horan had been falsely accused of stealing approximately £10 worth of items after her profile was added to a facial recognition watchlist used by the stores.

The incident unfolded on May 24, when Horan visited the Home Bargains store on Regent Road in Salford. As she was shopping, the store manager approached her and asked her to leave, causing Horan to feel embarrassed and confused in front of other customers. Despite her protestations, the manager advised her to contact Facewatch, the retail security firm that provides the facial recognition technology, directly.

Horan’s attempts to reach out to both Facewatch and Home Bargains initially proved futile. However, when she visited another Home Bargains store in Fallowfield, Manchester, with her 81-year-old mother on June 4, she was once again surrounded by staff and told to leave the premises as soon as she entered the store. This time, Horan stood her ground and demanded an explanation for her treatment.

After persistent emails to Facewatch and Home Bargains, Horan finally learned that there had been an allegation of theft involving approximately £10 worth of toilet rolls in early May. Somehow, her picture had been circulated to local stores, alerting them not to allow her entry. Horan checked her bank account and confirmed that she had, in fact, paid for the items in question.

Eventually, Facewatch responded to Horan, stating that a review of the incident showed she had not stolen anything. The firm acknowledged the distressing nature of Horan’s experience and noted that the retailer had since undertaken additional staff training. However, Horan’s ordeal had already taken a toll on her mental well-being, causing anxiety and stress as she questioned her actions and felt sick to her stomach for a week.

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BritCard: Inside Labour’s “Progressive” Digital ID

A new report from a British government think tank offers some clear insights into the Starmer administration’s plan to introduce a universal digital ID.

That digital ID – in one form or another – is a major part of the endgame is not any kind of revelation. We’ve known that was the plan for years, but the report tells us quite a lot about how it’s going to be sold to the public.

I guess we should go ahead and dive in.

The Thinktank

The report was published just this week by Labour Together – formerly “The Common Good” – a thinktank founded in “Labour’s wilderness years” to help “make Labour electable again”, according to their about page.

Translation: They’re centrist globalist Blairite shills who helped undermine and destroy the only vaguely genuine movement in the last 50 years of British “democracy” and now publish reports to push a globalist agenda.

According to the Electoral Commission, they received over £ 9 million in donations last year (from only 234 donors), much of which seems to have been “donated” by Labour Together Limited, a for-profit company. The murky world of Westminster finances is not my focus, however, and I’m sure it’s at least passably legal and no more corrupt than is standard practice in those circles.

Exactly how a think tank with eighteen employees, ten advisors, four policy fellows and five board members manages to spend 9 million pounds writing a newsletter a week, a report every two months and doing some online polls I have no idea.

It’s a good question for another time, perhaps. For now, we know everything we need to know – Labour Together are old-fashioned New Labour types shilling for globalist tyranny.

The Authors

We won’t talk long about the authors, because there’s not much point. They’re names on a title a page, and while I’m sure they believe in the words they write (or at least, asked ChatGPT to write), it’s also true their job requires they believe it.

I just wanted to point out that the three supposed authors of this work on technology have no tech backgrounds at all. The closest any of them comes is Laurel Boxall, the “about the authors” section of the report proudly declares she has a Masters from Cambridge “focusing on AI”, but a bit a of digging reveals it’s a Masters in “Digital Humanities” with a focus on fictional portrayals of AI in media. Apparently, that qualifies you to become a “tech policy advisor”.

Which is interesting, because it demonstrates that they consider fictional portrayals of AI to be as relevant to this work as real AI experience. An apposite commentary on the state of society in general.

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OpenAI snags $256 million contract with US Defence Department

OpenAI has won a US$200 million (S$256 million) contract for a pilot programme aimed at helping the US Defence Department determine how it could use artificial intelligence (AI) for a range of administrative and security tasks.

The one-year contract, which the Defence Department disclosed on June 16, is the latest push by the ChatGPT maker to sell its technology to the US government. 

In a blog post on June 16, OpenAI said the contract is the company’s first project under a new entity it is calling OpenAI for Government. 

As part of the effort, OpenAI will work with the Defence Department to come up with ways that AI can help with administrative tasks, such as getting healthcare for US military members and helping prevent cyber attacks.

OpenAI for Government consolidates all of OpenAI’s existing government projects in one area of the company, including ChatGPT Gov – a version of ChatGPT meant for government workers – as well as its work with US space agency Nasa, the National Institutes of Health, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Treasury Department.

The company also said late in 2024 that it would partner with weapons maker Anduril Industries to build AI for anti-drone systems, in another sign of its expanding work with the US government, particularly around national security. 

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Spy Satellite Uncovers Massive Stealth Flying Wing At Secretive Chinese Base

China is well aware that Western spy satellites, including those operated by the U.S., maintain constant overhead surveillance of high-value military assets, such as bases and research facilities. 

The deliberate exposure of a previously unseen, large, low-observable flying-wing HALE (High-Altitude Long-Endurance) unmanned aerial vehicle at the Malan test facility may not have been an accident. 

Instead, it appears to be a deliberate act of signaling by Beijing to the Trump administration, highlighting the rapid acceleration of China’s next-generation air combat capabilities at a time when the global security environment is rapidly deteriorating.

With the war in Ukraine ongoing and tensions in the Middle East escalating into a hot crisis, Beijing’s timing suggests an intent to assert technological parity and deterrence against the U.S. Broadly speaking, the world is entering a more dangerous and unstable era — a shift from a unipolar world with the U.S. in control to a bipolar geopolitical order, where volatility is expected to intensify throughout the 2030s.

The War Zone’s Tyler Rogoway cited new satellite spy images via Planet Labs that show the previously unseen HALE drone at a secretive test base near Malan in Xinjiang province. 

“Specifically, the craft was parked outside of a sprawling new facility that was built very recently to the east of the base, connected to it by a very long taxiway leading to a security gate,” Rogoway said.

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Russia tests new laser weapons 

Russia has successfully tested eight anti-aircraft laser systems, the government said on Friday. They were designed specifically to tackle drone threats, the statement added.

The trials were attended by senior Russian officials, including Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov. The tests were conducted at specialized proving grounds and organized by Russia’s Military-Industrial Commission and Ministry of Industry and Trade.

“During the tests, the accuracy of guidance, range of destruction, reaction speed of the systems to moving air targets, and resistance to various weather conditions were checked,” the Russian government said in its statement.

Eight new weapons, ranging from “compact mobile devices to stationary high-power systems,” were tested during the trials. The laser weapons faced assorted targets, including small-sized commercial drones and “more complex devices simulating reconnaissance and attack drones,” the Kremlin said.

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Radio trick secretly turns laptop into a spy speaker that talks through walls

Security researchers at the University of Florida and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan have revealed that modern digital microphones used in laptops and speakers can leak audio as electromagnetic signals.

This could lead to the creation of a new network of wireless eavesdropping without needing any malware, hacking, or even physical access to your device.

In the aftermath, this vulnerability could affect billions of devices worldwide, exposing private conversations to corporate spies and government surveillance.

How does this attack work?

All devices, such as speakers and laptops, have MEMS microphones, which are a tiny part of the system tasked with converting audio into digital pulses that contain remnants of the original speech. These pulses create weak radio emissions that can be captured by invisible broadcasts.

“With an FM radio receiver and a copper antenna, you can eavesdrop on these microphones. That’s how easy this can be,” said Sara Rampazzi, a professor of computer and information science and engineering at the University of Florida who co-authored the new study. “It costs maybe a hundred dollars, or even less.”

The experiment that proved it all

The team of researchers proved their theory using eerie sounds. A woman’s distorted voice emerged from the radio equipment as she spoke test sentences like “The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks.” and “Glue the sheet to the dark blue background.” Each transmission penetrated through concrete walls up to 10 inches thick.

Laptops proved to be the weakest link as their microphones are connected through long internal wires that act as antennas, amplifying the leaked signals.

Now comes the dangerous part. For the leak to happen, your microphone does not necessarily need to be in an active state. Simply having applications like Spotify, Amazon Music, or Google Drive – can enable the microphone to leak radio signals.

AI in the scenario

The researchers didn’t just stop at this stage. They went beyond and processed the intercepted signals with AI speech-to-text tools from OpenAI and Microsoft. These LLMs then cleaned the audio and converted the recordings into clear, searchable text.

Surprisingly, in tests, the attack had recognized spoken digits with 94.2% accuracy from up to 2 meters away, even through a concrete war. It kept a 14% transcription error rate, making majority of the conversations understandable.

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Avril Haines Is the Allen Dulles of the Plandemic, Her Father Was a Rockefeller Scientist Who Helped Develop the Lipid Nanotechnology Used in the mRNA Vaccines, and Her Husband Runs His Own Palantir

In my last article, “Another Cause of Adverse Events,” I explored the scientific literature explaining how the mRNA lipid-nanoparticles in the COVID-19 vaccines are vaccine adjuvants, meaning that they cause the cell death and inflammation necessary to trigger an immune response—and the vaccine injuries this causes.

In this article, I intended to trace the history of the use of lipid-nanoparticles. Prior to the invention of the synthetic lipid-nanoparticles created for mRNA vaccines, squalene, a naturally occurring lipid nanoparticle that’s found in large quantities in shark’s liver, was used as a vaccine adjuvant and drug delivery system. This became a huge controversy during the Gulf War Syndrome crisis when the disease was linked to the anthrax vaccine through the squalene antibodies detected in affected soldiers. Squalene-based adjuvants are still very common.

What I was most surprised to learn while researching this article is that squalene was one of the research focuses of Director of National Intelligence and Event 201 participant Avril Haines’s father Thomas H. Haines, a Rockefeller University scientist.

That Avril Haines’s dad helped develop the lipid nanotechnology that is one of the reasons why the vaccine bioweapons of both 9/11 anthrax and the Plandemic are so deadly and debilitating (as you will learn below) is even more interesting when examined alongside the other intergenerational links between the Plandemic and past Deep State operations. Johnny Vedmore’s series on J. Stanley Pottinger, who covered up government involvement in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., among other crimes, and his son Matt Pottinger who coordinated the Plandemic lockdowns of 2020, is fascinating. And, famously, there are Joe & Hunter Biden’s ties to Metabiota (now Ginkgo Bioworks), the company launched in 2008 by Google.org to mismanage Ebola, set up Pentagon bioweapons labs in Ukraine, and hunt for bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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Chronocide: How technocracy is erasing the past, present and future

The past is another country, according to LP Hartley’s opening line of The Go-Between. Nowadays, we may say the same of the present, as the pace of technological and demographic change quickens.

As for the future, what confidence and certainties can we have for our children and grandchildren?

Countries might not exist in any recognisable form as a new world order is cemented. But it is not only borders that are being undrawn. When Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ on the fall of communism, perhaps he was inadvertently priming for the globalists’ most dramatic impact on humanity: the erasure of time. As warned by David Fleming, whose philosophy of continuism offers a unifying rationale for preserving humanity against the technocratic onslaught, ‘chronocide’ is a strategy.

As social animals, human beings create society. Over generations, each community establishes and maintains its customs, beliefs, roles and relationships. While ideologically progressive humanists emphasise that we have more in common than our differences in race, religion or region, a person from one culture cannot simply move to a place of different culture and expect life to go on as normal.

The crucial component of society is time, measured in lifetimes of immersion. Indeed, human beings + time = culture. In this equation, important factors may be understood as nature or nurture in the human-temporal complex, such as terrain, resources, climate, commerce, conflict and technology. Each society writes and curates its history.

In the classic dystopian novels of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, the past was deleted by design. Winston’s job is to revise records of events to comply with the current narrative, as it evolves. In Aldous Huxley’s futurism, babies are born by machine, and the idea of a woman giving birth is disturbing.

As the Marxists of the Frankfurt School realised in the 1920s, and as every management consultant knows, nothing really changes unless the culture changes. Social bonds and traditions are bulwarks against radical plans imposed from above. Piecemeal, incremental policies are prone to regression to norms, but major restructuring or other shocks to the system break social connections and shatter stability. The more dramatic and sudden the change, the more readily resistance is overcome.

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Executives from Meta, Palantir, OpenAI Join Army Innovation Corps Dubbed ‘Detachment 201’

Top executives from Silicon Valley giants Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are trading their corporate suits for military uniforms as they join a newly formed Army Reserve unit focused on upgrading military technology.

The Wall Street Journal reports that in an unprecedented collaboration between the U.S. military and the tech industry, a group of Silicon Valley executives are set to be sworn in as officers in the Army Reserve on Friday. The inaugural cohort of this new innovation corps, dubbed Detachment 201, includes Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir; Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, CTO of Meta Platforms; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI executive.

The tech recruits will serve around 120 hours a year, focusing on projects that leverage their expertise in AI, data analysis, and other cutting-edge technologies to enhance the Army’s capabilities. Their mission is to help the military prepare for future conflicts, which are expected to heavily rely on ground robots, drones, sensor networks, and AI-powered coordination systems.

Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, emphasized the importance of this collaboration, stating, “We need to go faster, and that’s exactly what we are doing here.” The program marks a significant shift in the relationship between the Pentagon and the tech industry, which was once hesitant to work on defense-related projects.

The tech reservists will enjoy some unique accommodations, such as the flexibility to work remotely and asynchronously, and will be exempt from basic training. They will hold the rank of lieutenant colonel due to their private-sector status and will be deployed based on their specialized skills, making it unlikely for them to find themselves in combat situations.

Instead, the executives will work on projects that teach soldiers how to use AI-powered systems or utilize health data to improve fitness. They will also advise the service on acquiring more commercial technology and help the Defense Department recruit other high-tech talent. To avoid conflicts of interest, the recruits will not work on projects involving their employers and will be firewalled from sharing information or participating in projects that could provide financial gain to themselves or their companies.

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Fake meetings, secret drones, smuggled missiles: How Israel’s Mossad covertly infiltrated Iran to launch unprecedented attack

Israeli spies smuggled missiles and secretly hid explosive drones deep inside Iran in a series of covert operations leading up to Friday’s deadly onslaught – before tricking military leaders into gathering for a meeting so they could be wiped out.  

Intelligence agents with Mossad, Israel’s top spy agency, started infiltrating the heart of Iran several months back in order to pull off the surprise attack aimed at obliterating Iranian nuclear and military facilities, as well as a swath of top military commanders.

The spy agency planted the explosive drones inside Iran ahead of time as they laid the groundwork for the major strikes, according to Israeli security sources.  

Agents also managed to smuggle precision weapons into central Iran so Israel could target Tehran’s defenses from within.

The stealth campaign, dubbed Operation “Rising Lion,” was eventually conducted in three separate operations early Friday – with the airstrikes each targeting specific weaponry and defense systems in Iran, one Israeli security source told The Post.

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