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Category: Technology

Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking – here’s how to minimize the risk

Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking – here’s how to minimize the risk

If you’re going to record ICE agents, recognize that the risks go beyond physical confrontation. Madison Thorn/Anadolu via Getty Images By Nicole M. Bennett, Indiana University When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026, what happened next looked familiar, at least on the surface. Within hours, cellphone footage spread online and eyewitness accounts contradicted official statements, while video analysts slowed the clip down frame by frame to answer…

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AI-powered disinformation swarms are coming for democracy

AI-powered disinformation swarms are coming for democracy

Wired reports: In 2016, hundreds of Russians filed into a modern office building on 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg every day; they were part of the now-infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency. Day and night, seven days a week, these employees would manually comment on news articles, post on Facebook and Twitter, and generally seek to rile up Americans about the then-upcoming presidential election. When the scheme was finally uncovered, there was widespread media coverage and…

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Science is drowning in AI slop

Science is drowning in AI slop

Ross Andersen writes: On a frigid Norwegian afternoon earlier this month, Dan Quintana, a psychology professor at the University of Oslo, decided to stay in and complete a tedious task that he had been putting off for weeks. An editor from a well-known journal in his field had asked him to review a paper that they were considering for publication. It seemed like a straightforward piece of science. Nothing set off any alarm bells, until Quintana looked at the references…

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Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

The Guardian reports: Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned. The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and…

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‘Minority Report policing’: UK believes that through AI ‘the eyes of the state can be on you at all times’

‘Minority Report policing’: UK believes that through AI ‘the eyes of the state can be on you at all times’

The Telegraph reports: Criminals could be stopped before they strike under Minority Report-style policing plans. Police chiefs are evaluating around 100 projects in which officers are trialling the use of AI to help combat crime. The expanded use of AI and technology by police – with the aim of putting the “eyes of the state” on criminals “at all times” – is expected to be part of police reforms by Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, in a white paper next…

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The tech billionaires behind Trump’s push to acquire Greenland

The tech billionaires behind Trump’s push to acquire Greenland

Lois Parshley writes: President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. When Trump first proposed buying the arctic nation during his first administration, it was treated like a joke. But in a phone call last week with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his efforts to seize power. In the “aggressive and confrontational” conversation, Trump threatened tariffs if he didn’t get his way. In a news…

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Corruption: Tech companies’ access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups

Corruption: Tech companies’ access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups

The Guardian reports: Tech companies have been meeting government ministers at a rate of more than once per working day, enjoying high-level political access that dwarfs that of child safety and copyright campaigners, who called the pattern “shocking” and “disturbing”. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s X, whose Grok AI image generator has sparked outrage with its sexualised images of women and children, were among the US tech companies holding hundreds of meetings with people at the heart of government,…

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The real AI talent war is for skilled tradespeople

The real AI talent war is for skilled tradespeople

Wired reports: AI companies like Meta and OpenAI have been offering multimillion-dollar pay packages to top talent, hoping to lure the best researchers and engineers away from their competitors. But there’s another dimension of the AI talent wars that has garnered far less attention: the massive shortage of electricians, plumbers, and heating and cooling technicians in the US who can build the physical data centers that power AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between 2024 and 2034, there…

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The AI debt surge: How tech’s borrowing binge may drive up interest rates

The AI debt surge: How tech’s borrowing binge may drive up interest rates

WebProNews reports: The artificial intelligence boom is fueling an unprecedented wave of capital spending, but it’s not just innovation that’s accelerating—it’s debt. Major technology companies, often dubbed hyperscalers, are issuing bonds at a record pace to finance the massive data centers required for AI advancements. This borrowing frenzy, while enabling rapid expansion, is raising alarms among economists and investors about potential upward pressure on interest rates. As these firms tap debt markets to fund their ambitions, the sheer volume of…

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Eoin Higgins: How tech billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the left

Eoin Higgins: How tech billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the left

  In this episode of Dystopia Now, we talked to journalist Eoin Higgins about his book “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left” which examines how Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk have used their wealth to shape media narratives, especially through journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.

AI companies’ large language models don’t learn. They steal

AI companies’ large language models don’t learn. They steal

Alex Reisner writes: On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books. In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and Frankenstein, in addition…

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Fusion breakthrough: Energy researchers report tokamak experiments that exceed mysterious ‘plasma density limit’

Fusion breakthrough: Energy researchers report tokamak experiments that exceed mysterious ‘plasma density limit’

The Debrief reports: In a potential new milestone for fusion energy research, researchers in China report achieving a state once only theorized for fusion plasmas, enabling stable operation under conditions that significantly exceed normal limits. The achievement was made during experiments with China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), which reportedly produced fusion plasmas in a “density-free regime,” overcoming a longstanding hurdle to nuclear fusion ignition. The team’s findings were featured in a new study in Science Advances, offering a fresh…

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Bipartisan opposition to data center boom puts AI industry’s growth plans at risk

Bipartisan opposition to data center boom puts AI industry’s growth plans at risk

CNBC reports: Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and right-wing Gov. Ron DeSantis agree on virtually nothing. But they found common ground this year as leading skeptics of the artificial intelligence industry’s data center boom. The alignment of two national figures on the left and right signals that a political reckoning is brewing over the AI industry’s impact on electricity prices, grid stability and the labor market. The opposition could slow the industry’s development plans if it reaches a broad bipartisan…

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How big a threat is AI to the climate?

How big a threat is AI to the climate?

The Guardian reports: During a golden sunset in Memphis in May, Sharon Wilson pointed a thermal imaging camera at Elon Musk’s flagship datacentre to reveal a planetary threat her eyes could not. Free from pollution controls, the gas-fired turbines that power the world’s biggest AI supercomputer were pumping invisible fumes into the Tennessee sky. “It was jaw-dropping,” said Wilson, a former oil and gas worker from Texas who has documented methane releases for more than a decade and estimates xAI’s…

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Grok generates artificial apology for promoting real pedophilia

Grok generates artificial apology for promoting real pedophilia

Parker Molloy writes: Over the past week, users on X discovered something horrifying: strangers were replying to women’s photos and asking Grok, the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, to “remove her clothes” or “put her in a bikini.” And Grok was doing it. Publicly. In the replies. For everyone to see. This wasn’t happening in some private chat window. Unlike other AI image generators that operate in closed environments, Grok posts its outputs directly to X, turning the platform into a…

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When it all comes crashing down: The aftermath of the AI boom

When it all comes crashing down: The aftermath of the AI boom

Jeremy Hsu writes: Silicon Valley and its backers have placed a trillion-dollar bet on the idea that generative AI can transform the global economy and possibly pave the way for artificial general intelligence, systems that can exceed human capabilities. But multiple warning signs indicate that the marketing hype surrounding these investments has vastly overrated what current AI technology can achieve, creating an AI bubble with growing societal costs that everyone will pay for regardless of when and how the bubble…

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