Tag: technology

Destroyer Has Become First U.S. Navy Ship To Deploy Artificial Intelligence System

The Navy destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) became the first warship to deploy with a program-of-record artificial intelligence (AI) platform. Its creators say the system will help the fleet predict and tackle maintenance needs in a far less disruptive fashion. The system aims to reduce surprise equipment casualties while ensuring that more of the fleet is available should an all-out war break out, requiring a surge of forces. 

Known as Enterprise Remote Monitoring Version 4 (ERM v4), the system is the shipboard aspect of a Pentagon program called Condition Based Maintenance Plus, which in part aims to leverage machine learning to help ship crews, ashore commands, logistical nodes, and other units keep more assets ready to fight, Zac Staples, a retired Navy officer whose Austin-based company, Fathom5, created the system, told TWZ Wednesday. Staples spoke at the annual WEST conference in San Diego this week, which TWZ attended, about his company’s innovation before chatting with TWZ. 

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New brain implant lets Parkinson’s patient forget symptoms

A brain implant has allowed a Parkinson’s patient to “forget about” his debilitating condition for days at a time. Kevin Hill, a 65-year-old from Sunderland, received a computer-controlled device in his chest wall, connected to wires that run into his brain. The system delivers precision electrical signals to manage his symptoms, and thanks to a recent upgrade, it can now automatically read and respond to his brain activity in real time.

The impact was immediate and dramatic. “I forget about Parkinson’s for days and days and days,” Hill told the BBC. Before the implant, his symptoms were so severe his wife banned him from the kitchen – his hand tremors caused him to spill hot drinks and even led to a finger injury. When doctors activated the device after surgery, his tremors “stopped instantly,” reducing Hill to tears of joy.

The technology, called adaptive deep brain stimulation (DBS), represents a major advancement over traditional treatments. Dr. Akbar Hussain, a neurosurgeon at Newcastle Hospitals and one of the first doctors worldwide to offer this Brainsense treatment, explains: “The electrical impulses provided to the brain by the device are controlled and adjusted automatically, according to individual patient’s recordings from the device in their chest.”

“While evidence is still being gathered to assess the benefits of adaptive DBS versus the standard type, it’s great to see movement towards this becoming a new, more effective treatment for people with Parkinson’s,” says Dr. Becky Jones from Parkinson’s UK, highlighting the technology’s promise for the 153,000 UK residents living with the condition.

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The Legally Blind See Again With an Implant the Size of a Grain of Salt

Seeing is believing. Our perception of the world heavily relies on vision.

What we see depends on cells in the retina, which sit behind the eyes. These delicate cells transform light into electrical pulses that go to the brain for further processing.

But because of age, disease, or genetics, retinal cells often break down. For people with geographic atrophy—a disease which gradually destroys retinal cells—their eyes struggle to focus on text, recognize faces, and decipher color or textures in the dark. The disease especially attacks central vision, which lets our eyes focus on specific things.

The result is seeing the world through a blurry lens. Walking down the street in dim light becomes a nightmare, each surface looking like a distorted version of itself. Reading a book or watching a movie is more frustrating than relaxing.

But the retina is hard to regenerate, and the number of transplant donors can’t meet demand. A small clinical trial may have a solution. Led by Science Corporation, a brain-machine interface company headquartered in Alameda, California, the study implanted a tiny chip that acts like a replacement retina in 38 participants who were legally blind.

Dubbed the PRIMAvera trial, the volunteers wore custom-designed eyewear with a camera acting as a “digital eye.” Captured images were then transmitted to the implanted artificial retina, which translated the information into electrical signals for the brain to decipher.

Preliminary results found a boost in the participants’ ability to read the eye exam scale—a common test of random letters, with each line smaller than the last. Some could even read longer texts in a dim environment at home with the camera’s “zoom-and-enhance” function.

The trial is ongoing, with final results expected in 2026—three years after the implant. But according to Frank Holz at the University of Bonn Ernst-Abbe-Strasse in Germany, the study’s scientific coordinator, the results are a “milestone” for geographic atrophy resulting from age.

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The Nvidia Story Is A Narrative Scam Attack On US Markets

Simple fact: You must have maximum powered servers, high speed computing (HSC), and superconductor chip production to make AI. Where did this “small China lab” get the chips and power

CNBC reported that perhaps the Chinese lab “found a way to work around the rules, or that the export controls were not the chokehold Washington intended.”

They are referring to ITARs, and with such demand and control on the GPUs, there is absolutely NO WAY. Nvidia or other such tech chip firms had to have facilitated this Chinese effort to produce this AI. PERIOD.

And that is against FEDERAL LAW.

This was an attack on the US Market and the new Trump Administration.

If I were a betting man, I would expect that the Deep State of the US that was just unseated, assisted the CCP to build this AI. It’s the ONLY way China would have been able to put this perfect storm together.

Remember the Wuhan lab and U.S. cooperation to develop a gain-of-function enhanced coronavirus?

Get ready, the truth is going to come out fast.

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Phone Metadata Suddenly Not So ‘Harmless’ When It’s The FBI’s Data Being Harvested

The government’s next-best argument (after “Third Party Doctrine yo!”) in support of its bulk collection of US persons’ phone metadata via the (now partly-dead) Section 215 surveillance program was this: hey, it’s just metadata. How harmful could it be? (And if it’s of so little use to the NSA/FBI/others, how is it possible we’re using it to literally kill people?)

While trying to fend off attacks on Section 215 collections (most of which are governed [in the loosest sense of the word] by the Third Party Doctrine), the NSA and its domestic-facing remora, the FBI, insisted collecting and storing massive amounts of phone metadata was no more a constitutional violation than it was a privacy violation.

Suddenly — thanks to the ongoing, massive compromising of major US telecom firms by Chinese state-sanctioned hackers — the FBI is getting hot and bothered about the bulk collection of its own phone metadata by (gasp!) a government agency. (h/t Kevin Collier on Bluesky)

FBI leaders have warned that they believe hackers who broke into AT&T Inc.’s system last year stole months of their agents’ call and text logs, setting off a race within the bureau to protect the identities of confidential informants, a document reviewed by Bloomberg News shows.

[…]

The data was believed to include agents’ mobile phone numbers and the numbers with which they called and texted, the document shows. Records for calls and texts that weren’t on the AT&T network, such as through encrypted messaging apps, weren’t part of the stolen data.

The agency (quite correctly!) believes the metadata could be used to identify agents, as well as their contacts and confidential sources. Of course it can. That’s why the NSA liked gathering it. And that’s why the FBI liked collections it didn’t need a warrant to access. (But let’s not pretend this data was “stolen.” It was duplicated and exfiltrated, but AT&T isn’t suddenly missing thousands of records generated by FBI agents and their contacts.)

The issue, of course, is that the Intelligence Community consistently downplayed this exact aspect of the bulk collection, claiming it was no more intrusive than scanning every piece of domestic mail (!) or harvesting millions of credit card records just because the Fourth Amendment (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) doesn’t say the government can’t.

There are real risks to real people who are affected by hacks like these. The same thing applies when the US government does it. It’s not just a bunch of data that’s mostly useless. Harvesting metadata in bulk allows the US government to do the same thing Chinese hackers are doing with it: identifying individuals, sussing out their personal networks, and building from that to turn numbers into adversarial actions — whether it’s the arrest of suspected terrorists or the further compromising of US government agents by hostile foreign forces.

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Automation in Retail Is Even Worse Than You Thought

Brianna Bagley’s favorite hobby is playing Horizon Zero Dawn, a role-playing game featuring a young hunter who battles murderous robotic organisms on a postapocalyptic planet overrun by machines. When she isn’t leveling up in the game, Bagley is hard at work in the produce department of a chain supermarket in Salt Lake City, Utah. Seven years in the grocery industry has given her plenty of experience with the real-world technology that is automating stores.

During the pandemic, Bagley earned about $15 per hour in a supermarket e-commerce department dedicated to filling online orders and preparing them for delivery. The department was unable to fill the flood of orders that came in each day. Managers pulled employees from other parts of the store to double the department’s staff—but only about half were actually employed in the e-commerce department. The rest were cashiers, baggers, and others conscripted into emergency service. Bagley was grateful for the help, but recognized that it came at others’ expense. “It was harder for those departments to provide customer service with fewer employees,” the 26-year-old said.

Bagley’s experience is of a piece with the broader trend in retail toward automation and other technological shortcuts. From self-checkout machines to payment by app, technology is rapidly changing the way we buy groceries. Progressive members of Congress are sounding the alarm: Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and 13 colleagues wrote to the CEO of the supermarket behemoth Kroger in November about electronic price tags (often called electronic shelf labels or ESLs). These digital displays allow companies to change prices automatically from a mobile app. Tlaib warned that this so-called “dynamic pricing” permits retailers to adjust prices based on their whims. Just as Uber raises prices during storms or rush hour, retailers like Kroger use ESLs to adjust prices based on factors like time of day or the weather. Supermarkets could conceivably mine a shopper’s personal data to set prices as high as possible. “My concern is that these tools will be abused in the pursuit of profit, surging prices on essential goods in areas with fewer and fewer grocery stores,” Tlaib wrote.

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Davos: UN Introduces AI As “The Next Existential Threat”

At Davos, Guterres slams backsliding on climate commitments

22 January 2025

The world’s political and business elite present in Davos on Wednesday faced an uncompromising address from UN chief António Guterres as he rounded on a lack of multilateral collaboration in an “increasingly rudderless world” at risk from two existential dangers: climate change and unregulated Artificial Intelligence (AI).

…

‘Fossil fuel addiction’

Likening fossil fuel addiction to Frankenstein’s monster – “sparing nothing and no one” – the Secretary-General noted the irony that 13 of the world’s biggest ports for oil supertankers are set to be overwhelmed by rising sea levels, a consequence of rising temperatures and sea ice melt, caused overwhelmingly by burning coal, crude oil and natural gas.

….

AI’s untold promise 

The next existential threat, AI, is a double-edged sword, Mr. Guterres continued, as it is already revolutionizing learning, diagnosing illnesses, helping farmers to increase their yields and improving the targeting of aid.

But it comes with profound risks if it is left ungoverned: it can disrupt economies, undermine trust in institutions and deepen inequalities, the Secretary-General warned.

…Read more: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1159271

OK, maybe by “the next existential threat”, the UN just meant “another existential threat”. But it is an interesting turn of phrase.

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Hot Topics at Davos: Long-acting Injectables, ‘Climate-sensitive’ Vaccines and ‘Misinformation’

Tech-driven precision medicine, long-acting injectables, “climate-sensitive” vaccines, and mRNA therapeutics for non-communicable diseases were among the topics of discussion at this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

“Misinformation” is also high on this year’s agenda. The WEF’s Global Risks Report 2025, released alongside this year’s annual meeting, named misinformation as the greatest global risk over the next two years.

President Donald Trump, in a speech to WEF participants on Thursday, said “misinformation” is a label used to censor people.

The meeting, held in Davos, Switzerland, focused on artificial intelligence (AI), as reflected by this year’s theme, “A Call for Collaboration in the Intelligent Age.” Over 350 governmental figures, 60 national leaders and 1,600 business leaders attended.

This year’s meeting was relatively subdued compared to previous years. Several key global figures, including the leaders of the U.K., China, France, India and Italy, were absent from the event, as were prominent figures like Bill Gates.

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US Army’s Next-Gen Hybrid Tactical Vehicle To Replace Humvee Tested In Germany

The US Army’s 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, recently tested General Motors Defense’s Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV), built on the chassis of a Chevrolet Colorado truck, in the snowy Bavarian mountains of Germany. 

GM Defense’s mobility solutions team designed the ISV with commercial off-the-shelf parts. ISV is based on the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 midsize truck platform, using a 2.8L Duramax turbo-diesel engine with an advanced 12-module battery pack. 

“The testing occurred during the annual Combined Resolve 25-1 exercise, where the Army’s 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, maneuvered the vehicle across various operational scenarios, demonstrating its adaptability and effectiveness in challenging terrains,” Interesting Engineering wrote in a note, adding, “The trial emphasized ISV’s capabilities in advanced reconnaissance missions, which are crucial for troops to collect and transmit vital battlefield intelligence, especially in adverse conditions.” 

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Strava Security Breach Scandal: NATO Soldiers in Poland Expose Sensitive Data by Negligent Usage of Fitness App

The worldwide scandal involving security breaches connected to the popular fitness app Strava continues to gain global headlines.

Initially reported by the French paper Le Monde, investigations over the usage of this app revealed glaring security failures involving security personnel for leaders like Macron, Biden and Trump.

A second report also showed how French nuclear submarine crews were giving away sensitive information by using the app.

Now, it’s revealed that NATO soldiers stationed in Poland are also suspected of the same security breaches.

News portal Służby i Obywatel, reports soldiers at Polish bases unknowingly shared information about their travel routes by their Strava usage.

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