Tag: technology

CBP Memo Reveals Cartel Members Are Deploying Weaponized Drones for Potential Use Against CBP Officers

Cartels at the southern border are reportedly escalating violent threats against U.S. border and law enforcement officers, with social media posts encouraging violence and the authorization of weaponized drones for use against border officers.  

Copies of recent memos sent to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers detail the threats on social media, NewsNation reports.

Additionally, officers are warned that the cartels are expected to use drones armed with explosives.

This news comes as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently said, “All options are on the table,” when he was asked if the U.S. will use military force against the cartels in Mexico.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, President Trump also sent a message to “all who would attack Americans” on Saturday, stating, “WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!” after announcing precision air strikes against ISIS in Somalia.

“This action further degrades ISIS’s ability to plot and conduct terrorist attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians and sends a clear signal that the United States always stands ready to find and eliminate terrorists who threaten the United States and our allies, even as we conduct robust border-protection and many other operations under President Trump’s leadership,” Hegseth said following the execution of the airstrikes indicating strikes on the cartels could be considered.

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The Demoralizing Downward Spiral Of Algorithmic Culture

In need of a letter certifying that I do not suffer from a disease of international concern, I headed out to my primary care practitioner last Monday.

Knowing how busy most doctor’s offices are these days, I decided I’d make it easy on the staff by bringing a) a copy of the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR) regulations on diseases of international concern b) a list of the diseases currently covered under this rubric and c) explicit instructions about the elements such a letter must include (i.e. letterhead of the practice, stamp of the practice, doctor’s signature etc.).

They assured me that they were familiar with this procedure and that it would be no problem.

And when I mentioned that it would be great if they could do it in both English and Spanish, I was assured that would be no problem either as there was a Spanish-speaking provider on staff who could write it up in that language.

But again, in the interest of facilitating things, I provided them with a copy of this very type of certification letter written for me some time back by a doctor in Spain. This “letter,” such as it was, consisted of one sentence of 27 words in Spanish and a couple more than that when rendered into English.

Given that there were two staff members present, and that one of them was scrolling on her phone, I figured it would be a simple matter of one of them quickly writing up the letters, checking my file to see if I had any of the diseases of international concern (I had been there a week previous for my annual checkup) and catching my doctor (or one of his colleagues) between patients for a quick signature.

However, when I asked the woman in front of me how long it would take, she replied, “Three to five business days. That’s the procedure. We’ll call you when it is done”.

When I told them that I needed it for an appointment first thing on the following Monday in New York and that if I didn’t have all the documents, it would be months before I got another one, they just repeated the mantra that it would be done toward the end of the week, probably late on Friday.

On Friday, at 1:45 I received a call saying the letter was ready for pickup. Relieved, I entered the office, checked the letter quickly, and headed out. Upon rechecking it at home, however, I realized that it had not been signed by the doctor, which was one of the first requirements on the list of directions I had handed them on Monday.

So back I went to the office and explained to them it would be inadmissible for the bureaucratic procedure in question without that signature. By this time it was getting toward 3:15 in an office scheduled to close at 5:00.

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The Hidden Dangers Of AI In Finance

Jim Rickards recently published a compelling article on AI risk for Insider Intel subscribers.

In it, Jim discusses a different way in which AI could crash markets. One that is totally separate from the DeepSeek, China, and NVIDIA angle we’ve been covering for the past week.

Today we’re going to review his key points and explore them in detail.

Here’s Jim:

“The ultimate danger arises when a large cohort of asset managers controlling trillions of dollars of assets all employ the same or similar AI algorithms in a risk management role. An individual robot working for a particular asset manager tells the manager to sell stocks in a crashing market. In some cases, the robot may be authorized to initiate a sale without further human intervention.

Taken separately, that may be the best course of action for a single manager. In the aggregate, a selling cascade with no offsetting buy orders from active managers, specialists or speculators takes stock prices straight down. Amplification through feedback loops makes matters worse.

Individual AI systems have various trigger points for selling. Not all will be triggered at once, yet all will be triggered eventually as selling begets more selling, which triggers more automated systems that add to the selling pressure, and so on. There are no contrarians among the robots. Building sentiment into systems is still at a primitive stage.”

This is a good example of why I read Jim’s work. He always approaches issues from a unique and thoughtful angle.

This risk is clearly real. We are now at the point where trading firms are integrating LLMs (AI models) into their proprietary algorithms.

What happens if a majority of trading firms are using the same AI software to drive their trading? For example, it’s likely that many money managers have integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT models into their algos.

Now that DeepSeek R1 is the new shiny object, maybe a significant portion of firms are switching to that model.

Perhaps DeepSeek approaches trading in a completely different way. What happens if ChatGPT interprets data bullishly, but DeepSeek sees the same information as bearish?

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Face Scanning App Developed to Identify Unconscious Patients Decades After Human Microchips Failed to Gain Traction

The Dubai Corporation for Ambulance Services has announced a smartphone app that utilizes facial recognition technology aimed at identifying unconscious patients in emergency scenarios. By the middle of 2025 it is expected to be operational in the United Arab Emirates’ ambulatory setting.

“With the app, a patient in an emergency situation such as in a state of unconsciousness can have their face scanned by paramedics for their personal identification information to be retrieved, thanks to the system’s integration with the UAE national identity database,” Biometric Update said Friday.

Dubai is undergoing a so-called ‘digital transformation‘ where facial recognition is taking center stage in the areas of public transit and palm print scanning is being implemented in the areas of payments and commerce.

Being face scanned while unconscious may be the least of someone’s worries, as in the U.S. unconscious patients are being enrolled into medical experiments and administered lethal Covid vaccines.

While face scanning may be seen as invasive by some, American company VeriChip Corporation took things a step further, much further, when they developed an Orwellian implantable human microchip called the VeriChip in the early 2000s with the express purpose of identifying patients in the medical setting as well as identifying children.

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Evidence in new case suggests Obama admin colluded with Big Tech to steal invention that led to Chinese dominance

Jeff Parker, the CEO of the small Florida-based technology company ParkerVision, explained to Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck Thursday how tech giant Qualcomm allegedly stole one of the most revolutionary patented innovations in American history with the help of elements of the Obama administration — technology that was ultimately offshored to China, possibly giving America’s pre-eminent adversary a competitive edge.

“We are at the beginning of seeing corruption exposed like never before in America,” said Beck.

Long war

ParkerVision has spent around 11 years fighting Qualcomm over the tech giant’s alleged infringement of its patented technology concerning “down-converting” electromagnetic signals — a process now used in virtually every phone, wireless device, and Bluetooth device.

Representatives of the two companies apparently met in the early 2000s, with Qualcomm expressing an interest in acquiring rights to ParkerVision’s invention, which would have helped it connect phones to the internet. Qualcomm, a multinational company headquartered in San Diego, reportedly signed multiple special nondisclosure agreements in order to learn about how ParkerVision’s down-converting system worked, particularly its energy sampling technique, which differed from the voltage sampling technique previously used in conventional down-converting systems.

According to Parker, the two companies were unable to reach a licensing agreement and went their separate ways. A few years later, Qualcomm started using a revolutionary new chip for smartphones that created major waves, apparently taking the company from around 30% to roughly 90% market share. The phones that drove this growth allegedly relied on ParkerVision’s patented technology.

After spotting what appeared to be its technology discussed in a Qualcomm conference paper, ParkerVision launched an investigation and determined, partly on the basis of reverse engineering, that its patented technology had been stolen. ParkerVision filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm in 2011.

Parker told Beck that emails exposed during discovery showed frustrated Qualcomm engineers who were facing pressure to make a third-generation chip discussing a return to the ParkerVision technology.

Court documents reveal that the jury that saw that and other internal communications returned a unanimous verdict in 2013 “finding that Qualcomm directly and indirectly infringed” upon multiple claims across four asserted patents and awarded ParkerVision $173 million in damages.

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Investigation: Healthcare Driven by AI Technology Will Lead to More Mass Surveillance of Americans

During a press conference with Silicon Valley luminaries during his second day in office, President Donald Trump threw his political support behind a $500 billion private-sector artificial intelligence (AI) project called Stargate.

The joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and others will fund infrastructure for AI. Among other things, part of that funding will develop AI for early cancer detection and the rapid creation of mRNA cancer vaccines.

But well before Trump’s announcement, Silicon Valley and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) had already teamed up to transform U.S. healthcare into an AI-driven system — a system designed to unleash the power of “predictive medicine” for the early detection and treatment of disease, in an individual or population, sometimes even before an illness manifests, according to a new investigative report by Unlimited Hangout’s Max Jones.

The future of predictive medicine depends on data sharing between the DOD, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees 13 public health agencies, and the private tech sector, Jones wrote.

Predictive medicine will be used for mass surveillance of Americans, and will inform future approaches to pandemics, Jones reported.

Jones said that at the heart of this new system is the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA). Announced last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), CFA aims to establish “a National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases” — using mass data collection to predict and control disease outbreaks, The Defender reported.

To launch the initiative, HHS announced an estimated $262 million in grant funding over five years to establish a network of 13 infectious disease forecasting and analytics centers to coordinate this work across the U.S.

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Weird! Lockheed Martin Boasted Of Remote Blackhawk Helicopter Technology Three Months Before Tragic DC Aerial Disaster

The internet is buzzing with rumors and speculation following the tragic airplane and helicopter crash in Washington D.C. Wednesday.

An American Airlines passenger jet and Army Black Hawk helicopter collided around 9 p.m. Eastern near Reagan National Airport, causing both aircraft to fall into the Potomac River where 67 people died according to officials.

In the aftermath of the disaster, a video went viral showing top U.S. military contractor Lockheed Martin advertising technology that allows Black Hawk helicopters to be flown autonomously.

During the October 2024 Association of the United States Army National Convention, the “Black Hawk of the future” was advertised by Sikorsky Vice President Richard Benton.

Stephanie Hill, the president of Rotary and Mission Systems boasted the technology would allow the military to “fly this optimally piloted autonomous Black Hawk in Connecticut from three hundred miles away right here in Washington D.C.”

With the push of a button on an iPad, Hill commanded the helicopter to take off and simulate “tested logistic operations.”

The Lockheed video said its “MATRIX flight autonomy system” will deliver the future of flight.

According to the U.S. Army, the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that crashed into the American Airlines flight was engaged in a training flight carrying three soldiers from “Bravo Company, 12th Aviation Battalion, out of Davison Army Airfield, Fort Belvoir.”

Is it possible the new autonomous tech was being tested during the flight or that the aircraft was somehow hacked?

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AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt

Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.

And it wasn’t the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit’s CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were “a pain in the ass to block,” despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect “no scraping” robots.txt rules.

Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we’ll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers “clobbering” websites that he told Ars he hoped would give “teeth” to robots.txt.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

Tarpits were originally designed to waste spammers’ time and resources, but creators like Aaron have now evolved the tactic into an anti-AI weapon. As of this writing, Aaron confirmed that Nepenthes can effectively trap all the major web crawlers. So far, only OpenAI’s crawler has managed to escape.

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US Seeks to Boost Semiconductor Chip Manufacturing

The chip shortage has been at the top of mind over the last week after the launch of DeepSeek, a novel AI service intended to compete with ChatGPT. Semiconductor manufacturers have left the US and previous plans to attract domestic production have failed. President Donald Trump has proposed a new idea to force production back to the states through tariffs.

The CHIPS and Science Act launched under the Biden Administration injected $52 billion into American chip manufacturing. Intel was awarded $7.9 billion in 2024 to boost factories in Ohio, Oregon, New Mexico, and Arizona. Still, these incentives have not been sufficient to attract new chip manufacturers to the US, with the bulk residing in Taiwan.

Trump believes that throwing cash at companies is not enough to boost domestic production. “They’re gonna build their factory with their own money. We don’t have to give them money,” Trump added, later claiming: “They’re giving the money, they don’t even know what they’re going to do with it.” Instead, he is proposing tariffs between 25% to 100%, believing companies will come to the US to avoid these impossible taxes.

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Lithium-Ion Batteries, Melted EVs Create New Hazards In SoCal Fire Zones

This month’s deadly and destructive Los Angeles fires that claimed 28 lives burned with such intensity that electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries melted to the ground, creating hazardous conditions as residents began returning to their communities Jan. 28.

Specialists with the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were leading the large-scale cleanup of the batteries Tuesday.

The Palisades Fire burned more than 36 square miles and tore through neighborhoods full of electric vehicles and solar panels after years of state-sponsored green-energy policies.

The size of the Palisades fire and number of lithium-ion batteries left behind make it one of the largest hazardous-materials cleanups that local first responders have seen, according to Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Adam VanGerpen.

“We’ve never seen it on this scale,” VanGerpen told The Epoch Times. “We are talking a very large scale.”

Lithium-ion batteries are used in cellphones, tablets, laptops, wireless headphones, electric cars, and solar panel storage.

Many of the batteries and electric vehicles melted after they were abandoned by fleeing residents starting Jan. 7, VanGerpen said.

“We have to remove the entire vehicle,” he added.

Actor and Pacific Palisades homeowner James Woods said in a post on social media platform X Monday that the melted electric cars were “creating a real problem for safe debris removal.”

“While I am grateful to have President Trump in charge of the federal assistance so desperately needed, we can’t ignore that the electric cars have literally melted into the earth where they stood,” Woods wrote.

LAFD hazmat crews have surveyed the fire zone, searching through 6,837 destroyed homes and buildings, and 12,317 others that were damaged, according to numbers issued Tuesday by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

The teams used software to locate and flag the zone’s lithium-ion batteries, according to VanGerpen.

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