Tag: technology

Trump Admin Launches National Security Probe Into Pharma, Semiconductor Imports

The Trump administration has launched an investigation into the effects on national security of importing semiconductors and pharmaceutical products, according to Federal Register filings on Monday.

The Commerce Department, in a pair of Federal Register notices set to be published on April 16, said that the probes were initiated under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act—which allows the president to impose tariffs on imports considered a threat to national security.

The department stated that it began investigating the national security implications of importing semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) on April 1.

This includes “semiconductor substrates and bare wafers, legacy chips, leading-edge chips, microelectronics, and SME components,” as well as derivative products of those items, according to one of the filings.

The probe will assess current and projected demand for semiconductors and SME in the United States; the extent to which domestic production can or is expected to meet that demand; the role of foreign fabrication and assembly; the concentration of U.S. semiconductor imports; and the potential for export restrictions by other nations; among other issues.

In another notice, the department said it was investigating imports of pharmaceuticals and their ingredients. This includes “finished generic and non-generic drug products, medical countermeasures, critical inputs such as active pharmaceutical ingredients and key starting materials, and derivative products of those items.”

Keep reading

TAKE IT DOWN Act Advances in House Despite Major Censorship Concerns

The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce has passed the TAKE IT DOWN (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks) Act in a 49 to 1, bipartisan vote, and the legislation is now headed for the House of Representatives.

If the bill clears that hurdle as well, it will be up to President Trump to sign it into law.

Backed, among others, by First Lady Melania Trump, TAKE IT DOWN was introduced as a way to stop the spread of real, and AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). If, as it seems likely, TAKE IT DOWN becomes law, it will force platforms to remove flagged content within 48 hours.

But the bill’s critics continue to warn that the text lacks proper safeguards and other requirements that would prevent it from being misused, or abused as a tool of censorship, instead of narrowly serving its declarative purpose.

These concerns are not addressed in a press release the Committee on Energy and Commerce issued after adopting the proposal, as it focused instead on the benefits the legislation would provide to victims of dissemination of explicit imagery, with an emphasis on that which is AI-generated, i.e., on deepfakes.

However, campaigners, among them the Center for Democracy and Technology and the EFF, believe that the bill’s actual wording does not live up to its good intent, specifically around the takedown requirement which “lends itself to abuse.”

While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be tasked with issuing penalties for non-compliance, under TAKE IT DOWN, there are no consequences for those making false reports, which could lead to legitimate content quickly disappearing from the internet.

The bill doesn’t lay out how those affected might appeal once their content is falsely flagged and removed, while platforms are under no threat of penalty for removing constitutionally protected speech.

Keep reading

Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People

A powerful Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database, parts of which have been seen by 404 Media, allows the federal government to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories. Surveillance experts say the database is a tool that could possibly be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport people who are suspected of relatively minor infractions or who fit certain characteristics, but said the fact that we don’t necessarily know the exact mechanisms by which people are being identified and detained is a major problem. 

The database, called “Investigative Case Management” (ICM), “serves as the core law enforcement case management tool for ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI),” according to a 2021 privacy impact assessment for the tool. 

404 Media saw a recent version of the database, which allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, which include things like resident status and entry status (“refugee,” “border crossing card,” “nonimmigrant alien refused admission,” “temporary protective status alien,” “nonimmigrant alien transiting without visa,” “undocumented alien,”); “unique physical characteristics (e.g. scars, marks, tattoos)”; “criminal affiliation”; location data; license plate reader data; country of origin; hair and eye color; race; social security number; birthplace; place of employment; driver’s license status; bankruptcy filings, and hundreds more. A source familiar with the database told 404 Media that it is made up of “tables upon tables” of data and that it can build reports that show, for example, people who are on a specific type of visa who came into the country at a specific port of entry, who came from a specific country, and who have a specific hair color (or any number of hundreds of data points). 

ICM was created by Palantir, the powerful and controversial surveillance and data management company. In 2022, Palantir signed a $95.9 million, five-year contract to work on ICM.  

Keep reading

Forget Radio Telescopes—Aliens Could Be Using Gravitational Waves to Communicate

One of the most exciting breakthroughs in astronomy over the past decade was the detection of gravitational waves. Since the days of Galileo Galilei, astronomy was about the detection of electromagnetic signals with telescopes. As it turns out, the main constituents of the Universe are not observable in that way.

Our current data indicates that 85% of the matter in the Universe is invisible electromagnetically, constituting dark matter. In addition, 70% of the energy budget of the Universe is dark energy. Cosmologists infer these constituents because they affect visible matter gravitationally. Can we build a detector of near-Earth objects that would sense the gravitational signal of passing dark objects?

If dark matter is made of asteroid-mass objects, like primordial black holes, our telescopes would not notice them even when they pass near Earth. In a recent paper, I showed that the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational wave observatories could detect a dark object if it moves close to the speed of light and its mass is larger than a hundred million tons. Such an object would cross the radius of the Earth within two hundredths of a second and produce a gravitational tidal signal in the frequency band of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. Needless to say, no such object was detected so far.

Within a decade, the LISA space observatory will expand gravitational wave detection to the frequency range between milli- and micro-Hertz and a smaller spacetime strain. This will usher in a new era of sensitivity to dark near-Earth objects in the asteroid mass range. It could also open the door to the detection of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) gravitationally, which the Galileo Project observatories are attempting to detect electromagnetically. Pulsar Timing Arrays(PTAs) probe a frequency range of a few nano-Hertz, but so-far they were only sensitive to the cumulative gravitational wave background at these frequencies – which constitute the noise floor for the detection of individual sources.

Gravitational wave detectors are the most exciting telescopes of the next millennium as they will open the door for detecting objects that we had never noticed before. As I showed in another recent paper, it is impossible to block or dissipate gravitational wave signals. They offer the optimal communication method, detectable through Earth or the Sun.

It is conceivable that extraterrestrial technological civilizations communicate in gravitational signals, and our failure to notice them so far is because traditional SETI relied on seeking electromagnetic signals with traditional telescopes. If so, the silence that triggered Fermi’s question: “Where is everybody?” stems from our blindness to gravitational signals at the appropriate frequency.

Aliens would choose a communication channel that does not interfere with the frequencies of the loudest natural sources of gravitational waves in the cosmos. These are black hole binaries of stellar mass – to which LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA is tuned, as well as supermassive black hole pairs – to which LISA and PTAs are tuned. In that case, gravitational-SETI will need to develop sensitivity in other frequency bands.

The main challenge in producing detectable gravitational signals is the requirement to move large masses at high speeds. To within an order of magnitude, the gravitational wave strain is of order the gravitational potential produced by the transmitter divided by the speed of light squared times the square of the characteristic speed by which its mass moves in units of the speed of light. For context, the gravitational wave strain produced by the nearest stellar binary, Alpha-Centauri A & B – as the two stars orbit each other every 80 years, is only of order 10^{-24} and extremely challenging to detect.

Five years ago, a team led by Marek Abramowicz published a paper on the possibility that an advanced technological civilization harvests energy from the supermassive (4 million solar-mass) black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way and uses it for communication. They found that a Jupiter-mass structure in the innermost stable circular orbit around the black hole would emit an unambiguous gravitational wave signal that could be observed by LISA.

Keep reading

Shopify CEO mandates AI-first hiring policy, reshaping workforce expectations

  • Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke mandates that employees must justify why a role can’t be automated before hiring, signaling AI adoption as essential for productivity and efficiency. AI proficiency will now factor into performance reviews.
  • Companies like Shopify, Google and Meta are cutting jobs while heavily investing in AI tools (e.g., Shopify Magic, GitHub Copilot) to handle tasks from customer service to coding, redefining traditional roles.
  • While AI displaces some jobs, it also creates opportunities for higher-value work. Critics warn of disproportionate impacts on junior or repetitive roles, citing challenges in rapid upskilling.
  • Shopify’s workforce shrank from 8,300 in 2023 to 8,100 by late 2024, reflecting a broader trend of tech layoffs (152,000+ in 2024) as companies prioritize AI-driven efficiency over traditional hiring.
  • Industries like legal, marketing and finance are adopting AI for tasks like contract review and data analysis. Experts predict a future where human-AI collaboration dominates, requiring new policies for reskilling and worker protections.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke is making one thing clear to employees: artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool—it’s a fundamental requirement. In a memo sent to staff last month, the e-commerce executive announced that teams must now justify why a job can’t be automated before requesting additional hires, signaling a seismic shift in corporate hiring strategies amid the AI revolution.

The directive underscores a broader trend in the tech industry, where businesses are aggressively investing in AI while simultaneously trimming headcounts. For Lütke, the mandate is about optimizing efficiency. “What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?” he wrote in the memo, later shared publicly on X. “This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”

Keep reading

100+ Meta employees, including Head of AI Policy, confirmed as ex-IDF

Meta’s recruitment of vast numbers of former Israeli soldiers raises serious questions about the tech giant’s commitment to free speech – and provides a peek into a biased content moderation process that’s been heavily censoring pro-Palestinian accounts amid the Israeli siege of Gaza.

This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!

More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers work for tech giant Meta, including its head of AI policy, who served in the IDF under an Israeli government scheme that allows non-Israelis to volunteer for the Israeli army.

Shira Anderson, an American international rights lawyer, is Meta’s AI policy chief who voluntarily enlisted for the IDF in 2009 under a program which enables non-Israeli Jews who aren’t eligible for military conscription to join the Israeli army.

Through this program, known as Garin Tzabar, many non-Israelis who have fought for the IDF have been implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity since Israel’s genocide of Gaza began in October 2023.

Anderson served as a non-commissioned officer in the IDF for over two years where she worked in the Military Strategic Information Section, writing dossiers and public relations propaganda for the IDF. She was also the liaison between the IDF and foreign military attaches stationed in Israel, and liaison to the Red Cross.

With AI a critical emerging technology for tech giants and militaries, Anderson’s role at Meta is an important one. She develops the legal guidance, policies and public relations talking points concerning AI issues and regulation for all of Meta’s key areas, including its product, public policy and government affairs teams.

At Meta, Anderson, who is based in Meta’s Washington DC office, is in familiar company. More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers are employed by the company, my new investigation shows, many of whom worked for Israel’s spy agency Unit 8200.

These ex-IDF members are based evenly across Meta’s US offices and in its Tel Aviv office, and a significant number of them, like Anderson, have a specialization in AI. Given that Israel has made extensive use of AI not just to conduct its genocide, but to establish its prior system of apartheid, surveillance and occupation, Meta’s recruiting of IDF AI specialists is particularly insidious. Did these former Israeli spies use their Unit 8200 connections to help the tech giant collaborate with the IDF to build kill lists? According to a report last year, Unit 8200 infiltrated WhatsApp groups and marked every name in a group for assassination if just one alleged Hamas member was also in the group, no matter the size or content of the group chat.

Keep reading

UK creating ‘murder prediction’ tool to identify people most likely to kill

The UK government is developing a “murder prediction” programme which it hopes can use personal data of those known to the authorities to identify the people most likely to become killers.

Researchers are alleged to be using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences.

The scheme was originally called the “homicide prediction project”, but its name has been changed to “sharing data to improve risk assessment”. The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it “chilling and dystopian”.

The existence of the project was discovered by the pressure group Statewatch, and some of its workings uncovered through documents obtained by Freedom of Information requests.

Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.

The government says the project is at this stage for research only, but campaigners claim the data used would build bias into the predictions against minority-ethnic and poor people.

The MoJ says the scheme will “review offender characteristics that increase the risk of committing homicide” and “explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide”.

The project would “provide evidence towards improving risk assessment of serious crime, and ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis”, a spokesperson added.

The project, which was commissioned by the prime minister’s office when Rishi Sunak was in power, is using data about crime from various official sources including the Probation Service and data from Greater Manchester police before 2015.

The types of information processed includes names, dates of birth, gender and ethnicity, and a number that identifies people on the police national computer.

Statewatch’s claim that data from innocent people and those who have gone to the police for help will be used is based on a part of the data-sharing agreement between the MoJ and GMP.

A section marked: “type of personal data to be shared” by police with the government includes various types of criminal convictions, but also listed is the age a person first appeared as a victim, including for domestic violence, and the age a person was when they first had contact with police.

Also to be shared – and listed under “special categories of personal data” – are “health markers which are expected to have significant predictive power”, such as data relating to mental health, addiction, suicide and vulnerability, and self-harm, as well as disability.

Sofia Lyall, a researcher for Statewatch, said: “The Ministry of Justice’s attempt to build this murder prediction system is the latest chilling and dystopian example of the government’s intent to develop so-called crime ‘prediction’ systems.

“Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for ‘predicting’ crime are inherently flawed.

Keep reading

Copperhead Torpedo-Like Underwater Kamikaze Drones Rolled Out By Anduril

Anduril has rolled out a new family of modular torpedo-like uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUV) called Copperhead. This includes kamikaze types designed with a particular eye toward arming larger uncrewed undersea platforms like the company’s Ghost Shark. Today’s announcement follows last week’s unveiling of the rapidly deployable Seabed Sentry submarine surveillance system that could also potentially be configured to launch UUVs, which TWZ was first to report on.

The Copperhead family of UUVs, which Anduril also refers to as autonomous undersea vehicles (AUV), currently consists of the 100 and 500-pound-class types, as well as “M” munition subvariants of each. The Copperhead-100 has an overall length of just under nine feet (approximately 2.7 meters) and is 12.75 inches in diameter, while the Copperhead-500 is just over 13 and a half feet (just over four meters) long and 21 inches wide. Exactly what kind of propulsion system either of the UUVs use is also not currently known, but the company says they can both reach top speeds in excess of 30 knots.

Keep reading

US outpost not given proper air defenses before deadly attack

For three years the United States has been giving Ukraine everything it needs by way of offensive and defensive weapons in its war with Russia. Critically, this has included air defense systems, much of it taken from our own national stockpiles.

Now it turns out that our own troops may have been denied access to anti-drone air defense systems and more sophisticated radar detection months before a lethal attack on a small American outpost in Jordan on Jan. 18, 2024. The drone assault, reportedly launched by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an Iranian-backed militia group, resulted in the deaths of three American Army soldiers.

According to the Washington Post, which obtained access to the massive Army internal investigation of the incident through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the small outpost was ill-prepared for the attack on a number of levels. But this is key:

The investigation’s findings appear to have some contradictions. For instance, investigators faulted Tower 22’s leaders for failing to “visualize risk” and not appreciating the likelihood of an attack.

Yet commanders above them also failed to envision the base’s vulnerability. Four months before the attack, Army Central, which oversees operations throughout the Middle East, denied a request for an air defense system capable of shooting down drones because, investigators found, only one such system was available and troops in the United States needed it to prepare for deployments. A request for a radar system that could better detect drones also was denied, the report said.

The only counter-drone defenses at Tower 22 were electronic warfare systems designed to disable the aircraft or disrupt their path to a target, according to the investigation and previous reporting by The Post.

A spokesperson for Army Central did not respond to repeated requests for additional information, including regarding who at Army Central denied Tower 22’s appeal for an air defense system.

Keep reading

The Return of the Dire Wolf

Romulus and Remus are doing what puppies do: chasing, tussling, nipping, nuzzling. But there’s something very un-puppylike about the snowy white 6-month olds—their size, for starters. At their young age they already measure nearly 4 ft. long, tip the scales at 80 lb., and could grow to 6 ft. and 150 lb. Then there’s their behavior: the angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans—trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses—is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches. Even one of the handlers who raised them from birth can get only so close before Romulus and Remus flinch and retreat. This isn’t domestic canine behavior, this is wild lupine behavior: the pups are wolves. Not only that, they’re dire wolves—which means they have cause to be lonely.

The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences. 

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.

The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.

If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf.

Keep reading