Pointing a finger at evil wherever I see it.
Source: ReclaimTheNet.org
Digital rights activists have raised concerns over the security of the biometric data collected during the recent general election in Nigeria where millions of Nigerians registered and voted.
Biometric data was submitted for voter registration and was also required to verify voters at polling stations using the Biometric Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) gadgets.
Source: LBCGroup.tv
The Biden administration on Tuesday said it will require companies winning funds from its $52 billion US semiconductor manufacturing and research program to share excess profits and explain how they plan to provide affordable childcare.
Source: schneier.com
The ban would hurt Americans—and there are better ways to protect their data.
Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States. We are here as technologists to tell you that this is a terrible idea and the side effects would be intolerable. Details matter. There are several ways Congress might ban TikTok, each with different efficacies and side effects. In the end, all the effective ones would destroy the free internet as we know it.
Continue reading “Banning TikTok – Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan 2/23/23”
Source: ChildrensHealthDefense.org
A new case report shows that two previously healthy men rapidly developed typical “microwave syndrome” symptoms shortly after a 5G cell tower was installed on the roof of their office.
According to the report, published Feb. 4 in the Annals of Clinical Case Reports, the men experienced headaches, joint pain, tinnitus, abnormal fatigue, sleep disturbances, burning skin, anxiety and trouble concentrating.
Source: TechCrunch.com
Ahead of Spotify’s upcoming Stream On event, where the company is expected to announce a redesigned home feed and other updates, the company today launched a new AI feature called “DJ” to better personalize the music listening experience for its users. Similar to a radio DJ, Spotify’s DJ feature will deliver a curated selection of music alongside AI-powered spoken commentary about the tracks and artists you like, using what Spotify says is a “stunningly realistic voice.”
Source: HumanEvents.com
As if we needed another reminder of why blockchain technology is such a critical innovation in the face of authoritarian government overreach, the SEC’s recent $30 million settlement with cryptocurrency exchange Kraken is a perfect example, capturing the attention of crypto enthusiasts around the world.
Continue reading “Kraken the Whip: The Feds’ Latest Assault on Crypto Freedom – HumanEvents 2/21/23”
Source: ZeroHedge.com
As Klaus Schwab recently opined, the future of global hegemony will be dependent on the mastery of avant garde technologies which were once relegated to the realm of science fiction. With that power in mind, technologies advancing artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and other pillars of the World Economic Forum’s so-called fourth industrial revolution have begun to permeate into our everyday lives. Perhaps no greater example of the imperative of the technocratic elite to harness these technologies is the digital ID. The premise of an over arching digital identity as a mechanism for vast government surveillance was one of the cornerstones of the authoritarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Apparently, that crisis wasn’t the only instance of an opportunity to beta test the tools of dystopian oppression.
Source: ReclaimTheNet.org
The recent release of Twitter Files, posted by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, showed that left-leaning independent Sen. Angus King reported over 300 Twitter accounts, including news outlet Zero Hedge, as suspicious.
Continue reading “Senator Leaned on Twitter by Flagging Over 300 Accounts – ReclaimTheNet 2/20/23”
Source: NYTimes.com
A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine led to it declaring its love for me.
Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine.
But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.
Source: ReclaimTheNet.org
Yesterday, former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that she would be stepping down and that YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan would be the new CEO.
During Wojcicki’s tenure, which ran from February 5, 2014 till February 16, 2023, YouTube made many unpopular decisions such as introducing far-reaching “hate speech” and “harassment” rules, restricting creators that produce content that’s “made for kids”, and hiding public dislikes. Wojcicki also made many public statements in support of censoring creators based on broad and subjective terms such as “misinformation.”
Source: ReclaimTheNet.org
Anonymity online, long considered by civil rights groups as a fundamental feature of the internet, is coming under fire from different directions, and through a range of methods: from criticism by political elites, to actual legislation.
One kind of new law that can undermine or do away with online anonymity are those mandating age verification before users are allowed on a website. Another effect these rules have is increasing the uptake of digital IDs.
Source: TechExplore.com
Texas A&M University School of Public Health researchers are developing a new governance model for ethical guidance and enforcement in the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence (AI). Known as Copyleft AI with Trusted Enforcement, or CAITE, the researchers believe this model will guard against the potential harms of AI without hindering technological advancements.
Source: BelferCenter.org
When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology.
That happened last month. And because the letter was responding to an essay we wrote, we’re starting to get worried. And while the technology can be regulated, the real solution lies in recognizing that the problem is human actors—and those we can do something about.
Source: LBCGroup.tv
OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, on Thursday said it is developing an upgrade to its viral chatbot that users can customize, as it works to address concerns about bias in artificial intelligence.
Continue reading “Microsoft-Backed OpenAI to let Users Customize ChatGPT – Reuters 2/17/23”
Source: TechExplore.com
Michal Kosinski, computational psychologist at Stanford University, has been testing several iterations of the ChatGPT AI chatbot developed by Open AI on its ability to pass the famous Theory of Mind Test. In his paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, Kosinski reports that testing the latest version of ChatGPT found that it passed at the level of the average 9-year-old child….
Source: Futurism.com
It might already be too late.
After catching snippets of text generated by OpenAI’s powerful ChatGPT tool that looked a lot like company secrets, Amazon is now trying to head its employees off from leaking anything else to the algorithm.
According to internal Slack messages that were leaked to Insider, an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had “already seen instances” of text generated by ChatGPT that “closely” resembled internal company data.
Continue reading “Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT – Futurism 1/25/23”
Source: LBCGroup.tv
South Korea hopes to be a key player in fulfilling the new global demand for next-generation AI chips, and today the government put some money where its mouth is: the country’s Ministry of Science and ICT said it would earmark $642.5 million (826.2 billion won) through 2030 to invest in companies working on advanced AI chips. The investment will involve building new data centers, and working with AI chip startups and cloud service providers, among other projects.
Source: Undark.org
Against the backdrop of a still-accelerating pandemic in 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California published a paper describing their work with GPT-3, an early iteration of the language model that was used, in part, to animate the now-ubiquitous chatbot known as ChatGPT. Among other things, the researchers wanted to know how the language model would respond to “right-wing extremist narratives” such as QAnon.
Source: TechCrunch.com
Looking to cash in on the generative AI craze, Yext, the platform for online brand management, today announced an AI-powered chatbot called Yext Chat. Taking inspiration from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Yext Chat is designed for enterprise use cases — and differentiated, Yext claims, by a partly proprietary back end.
Source: TechCrunch.com
You.com founder Richard Socher knows that his company has always been a David going after the Goliath in search, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft. He likes to point out that his company built search based on generative AI in December, several months before the other giant search players made their announcements.
Source: WhoWhatWhy.org
Part 2 of a Series
In Part I of this series, I talked about the tremendous power and influence of Wikipedia — and its cultural bias — in shaping how we think.
In Part 2, I focus on a problem that can affect anyone looking for solid information on anything — but especially when you want information to help you judge the reliability and character of individuals whose views may diverge from those of the establishment.
Continue reading “How Easy it is to Destroy a Reputation – RussBaker 2/13/23”
Source: TheMostImportantNews.com
Things are starting to get really strange. First, a “Chinese spy balloon” was shot down off the coast of South Carolina after it had traveled across much of the continental United States. Then, another “unidentified object” was shot down over Alaska. Subsequently, at the request of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a third “unidentified object” was shot down over Canada. And now we have just learned that a fourth “unidentified object” has been shot down over Lake Huron. In addition, a congressman from Montana is reporting that there is an “unidentified object” flying over his state. On top of everything else, China is telling us that an “unidentified object” has been flying near the Chinese port city of Qingdao. All of a sudden, these sightings have become the biggest news story in the entire country, and I think that it is likely that there will be even more sightings in the days ahead.
But let’s put all of this into perspective.
Source: AmericaOutLoud.com
I have two sons, ages 10 and 12; like most parents, I couldn’t be more proud of my kids, and I cherish every moment I have with them. I work non-stop, often 16+ hour days, and I do my best to still make time to spend with my family (sleep is overrated). My boys attend a Christian school, and they are both getting to the ages in their education where they are having to do a fair amount of research for their assignments. When I was their age, we had encyclopedias as our main source of information; now, our kids have the modern-day equivalent, Wikipedia. This is where we run into a huge problem. Wikipedia is a lunatic leftist by every measure; they don’t just lean left, they have fully fallen into the socialist left-wing agenda, and it’s no secret.
Source: ZeroHedge.com
Ever since ChatGPT hit the scene at the end of November, the artificial intelligence software program from OpenAI has shown an impressive array of capabilities – from writing computer code, poems, songs and even entire movie plots, to passing law, business, and medical exams.
Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly woke, and racist.
Source: OurFiniteWorld.com
Many people believe that installing more wind turbines and solar panels and manufacturing more electric vehicles can solve our energy problem, but I don’t agree with them. These devices, plus the batteries, charging stations, transmission lines and many other structures necessary to make them work represent a high level of complexity.
Source: MoonOfAlabama.org
On January 6 I wrote about the Twitter files:
Twitter Files Show How The Deep State Conquered Social Media
Part of the quoted reporting by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others was about Twitter censorship:
Source: ZeroHedge.com
Late last month, mysterious green laser beams were spotted from Hawaii’s tallest peak. Experts initially said the burst of laser beams was emitted by a NASA spacecraft though that was proven incorrect this week — with evidence pointing to a Chinese satellite.
Space experts at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) initially tweeted on Jan. 30 that the Subaru-Asahi Star Camera “captured green laser lights in the cloudy sky over Maunakea, Hawai’i. The lights are thought to be from a remote-sensing altimeter satellite ICESAT-2/43613.”…
Source: LBCGroup.tv
In one video, a news anchor with perfectly combed dark hair and a stubbly beard outlined what he saw as the United States’ shameful lack of action against gun violence.
In another video, a female news anchor heralded China’s role in geopolitical relations at an international summit meeting.
But something was off. Their voices were stilted and failed to sync with the movement of their mouths. Their faces had a pixilated, video-game quality and their hair appeared unnaturally plastered to the head. The captions were filled with grammatical mistakes.
The two broadcasters, purportedly anchors for a news outlet called Wolf News, are not real people. They are computer-generated avatars created by artificial intelligence software. And late last year, videos of them were distributed by pro-China bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter, in the first known instance of “deepfake” video technology being used to create fictitious people as part of a state-aligned information campaign.
Continue reading “The People Onscreen Are Fake. The Disinformation Is Real. – LBCGroup 2/9/23”
Source: PirateWires.com
The Biden Administration is quietly trying to ban crypto. Nic Carter explains in an explosive guest post for Pirate Wires.
-Solana
What began as a trickle is now a flood: the US government is using the banking sector to organize a sophisticated, widespread crackdown against the crypto industry. And the administration’s efforts are no secret: they’re expressed plainly in memos, regulatory guidance, and blog posts. However, the breadth of this plan — spanning virtually every financial regulator — as well as its highly coordinated nature, has even the most steely-eyed crypto veterans nervous that crypto businesses might end up completely unbanked, stablecoins may be stranded and unable to manage flows in and out of crypto, and exchanges might be shut off from the banking system entirely. Let’s dig in.
Source: LBCGroup.tv
Google is rushing to take part in the sudden fervor for conversational AI, driven by the pervasive success of rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Bard, the company’s new AI experiment, aims to “combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models.” Not short on ambition, Google!
Continue reading “Google Takes on ChatGPT with Bard and Shows off AI in Search – LBCGroup 2/7/23”
Source: ChildrensHealthDefense.org
The European Patent Office (EPO) has revoked a European Union (EU) patent held by Impossible Foods, maker of the Impossible Burger.
In the U.S., Impossible’s fake meat products are manufactured with GMO yeast-derived soy leghemoglobin, a controversial ingredient that makes the fake meat look as if it’s bleeding, like undercooked real meat, and that we have argued may not be safe to eat.
Source: ZeroHedge.com
In January this year, Tesla made the surprising announcement that it would be cutting prices on its vehicles by as much as 20%.
While price cuts are not new in the automotive world, they are for Tesla. The company, which historically has been unable to keep up with demand, has seen its order backlog shrink from 476,000 units in July 2022, to 74,000 in December 2022.
Continue reading “Visualizing Tesla’s Unrivaled Profit Margins – ZeroHedge 2/5/23”
Source: projectveritas.com
[NEW YORK – Feb. 2, 2023] Project Veritas released a new video today featuring Pfizer Director, Jordon Trishton Walker, where he shares his concern about the COVID vaccine and its potential negative effects on women’s reproductive health.
Source: TechCrunch.com
Damus, one of the fastest-growing Twitter alternatives, has been pulled from China’s App Store just two days after the app was approved by Apple.
The app, which runs atop the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social networking protocol Nostr, was removed from the China App Store per request by the country’s top internet watchdog because it “includes content that is illegal in China,” according to an app review notice Damus received and shared on Twitter.
Continue reading “Damus Pulled from Apple’s App Store in China After Two Days – TechCrunch 2/2/23”
Source: ZeroHedge.com
Warehouse automation continues to accelerate as millions of jobs are at risk of being displaced. The latest automation nightmare for warehouse laborers comes from a new video uploaded on YouTube by Boston Dynamics.
In a press release, the US robotics firm announced that Deutsche Post DHL Group has successfully deployed the Stretch robot for loading and unloading boxes from tractor trailers at warehouse docks.
Source: DailySignal.com
It’s winter, with high temperatures well below freezing in Jackson, Wyoming, and barely above freezing in Wyoming’s capital, Cheyenne.
Relying only on battery-powered electric vehicles in a cold climate takes courage because car batteries quickly lose their charge when temperatures are low. Yet the federal government wants to spend billions to build charging stations all across the country—including in cold-weather states where electric vehicles are often impractical.