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Computers/Internet (General/Chat)

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  • Taiwan briefly slows its mobile internet to text-only speed as part of defense drill

    08/13/2026 6:46:51 AM PDT · by BenLurkin · 8 replies
    npr ^ | 08/13/2026
    TAIPEI, Taiwan — For 30 minutes, the internet in parts of Taiwan crawled. The slowdown Thursday for people in the capital, Taipei, and six other cities and localities was part of the last phase of the island's annual Han Kuang exercises, military drills that began last week and aim to model a response to a possible Chinese military invasion. Telecommunication operators slowed mobile web traffic to 256 Kbps, making it difficult to exchange anything other than texts. Usually, residents can access 5G in major cities. Taiwan has stepped up the intensity of the Han Kuang drills, incorporating reservists and more...
  • ANOTHER DEMOCRAT BALLOT SCANDAL: Former NJ Mayor Gina LaPlaca and Husband Hit With New Criminal Charges for Forging Signatures to Fraudulently Get on Democratic Primary Ballot

    08/12/2026 5:42:21 PM PDT · by Red Badger · 6 replies
    The Gateway Pundit ^ | August 12, 2026 | Jim Hᴏft
    They can't win without CHEATING! The modern Democrat Party is completely LAWLESS. Former Lumberton Township Mayor and current Committeewoman Gina LaPlaca, along with her husband, Democratic operative Jason Carty, are facing a new round of criminal charges after prosecutors say they submitted fraudulent signatures to place LaPlaca on the June Democratic primary ballot for the Lumberton Township Committee. Burlington County Prosecutor LaChia L. Bradshaw’s office announced the charges this week. An investigation found that multiple people whose names and purported signatures appeared on LaPlaca’s nominating petition never signed it and never authorized anyone to sign on their behalf. Without those...
  • China Will Never Beat Taiwan, Here’s Why.

    08/12/2026 8:30:45 AM PDT · by Robert DeLong · 31 replies
    Youtube ^ | Mar 27, 2026 | Maxinomics
    This video starts with a brief history of Taiwan, and the geological makeup of the island, and then dives into why this tiny little island became an extremely important nation, against all odds with their chip & semiconductors manufacturing.
  • Milwaukee Election Officials Blame “Human Error” After 5 of 9 USB Drives Arrive WITHOUT Election Results

    08/12/2026 5:25:21 AM PDT · by Red Badger · 38 replies
    The Gateway Pundit ^ | August 12, 2026 | Jim Hᴏft
    Milwaukee is at it again. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, as Wisconsin primary results were still coming in, Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez admitted that five of the nine USB flash drives delivered from the city’s central count facility to the county contained audit logs instead of the actual election results. “It’s a human error,” Gutierrez said. When asked by WISN 12 if it was as simple as somebody pressing the wrong button, she replied, “Correct.” Officials were forced to return to the operations center at central count to re-download the correct results from five machines....
  • Wisconsin comedian Charlie Berens joins Michigan residents to oppose AI data centers

    08/11/2026 5:56:09 AM PDT · by Diana in Wisconsin · 29 replies
    WBUP / WJMN ^ | August 11, 2026 | WBUP / WJMN Staff
    MARQUETTE, Mich. (WBUP / WJMN) — Communities across the Upper Peninsula are rallying against the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers, drawing support from local residents and a well-known Midwestern comedy star. Dozens gathered at the Ore Dock Brewing Company in Marquette on Monday night for a panel discussion hosted by the Northern Michigan Alliance for Responsible Development. The event, one of four held across northern Michigan, aimed to educate the public on how to protect their communities from potential infrastructure strain and environmental impacts. Comedian Charlie Berens, of Wisconsin, attended the Marquette event to lend his platform to the...
  • Shake Shack responds after customers who refused to tip were charged more for their order

    08/11/2026 5:55:26 AM PDT · by dennisw · 69 replies
    UK Daily Mail ^ | 10 August 2026 | JACK TOLEDO and MELISSA KOENIG
    After he pressed no tip, he was hit with an error message which read: 'Uh Oh! There has been a pricing update on one or more of your cart items. Please review these changes in your cart.' Checking back, the three Classic Shakes he had ordered jumped up by 50 cents each, bringing his total from $18.46 to $19.96, without any explanation. Shake Shack has responded to a viral video showing customers who declined to tip were charged more. The fast-food chain spoke out after a patron shared footage that revealed the total cost of his order jumped by $1.50...
  • The Return of MySpace? Platform Owners Tease Re-Launch 'When the Time Is Right'

    08/10/2026 7:14:06 PM PDT · by Red Badger · 15 replies
    The Gateway Pundit ^ | August 10, 2026 | Paul Serran
    Do we really need another social media platform? Web users are intrigued by the persistent rumors that a legacy online platform may be coming back to our devices. We are talking about the potential relaunch of MySpace. While such a move is expected to unleash a wave of nostalgia, no one expects the company to have an easy time competing in the current cut-throat market. The owners of MySpace say they are planning to relaunch the social media platform "We're just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn't work, we'll do it again" pic.twitter.com/6EXoWILrOH...
  • More Than 1 Million Americans Have Left the Workforce in the Past Year. Here’s What’s Going On

    08/10/2026 11:16:17 AM PDT · by SeekAndFind · 82 replies
    The American workforce is shrinking, and the decline is becoming difficult to dismiss as just another monthly fluctuation in the jobs data.More than 1 million people have disappeared from the U.S. labor force over the past year, while the share of Americans working or actively looking for work has fallen to its lowest level since the aftermath of the pandemic.The decline is being driven by several forces hitting at once: millions of baby boomers reaching retirement age, fewer younger workers coming behind them, tighter immigration, and a difficult hiring market that may be convincing some frustrated job seekers to simply...
  • 2008 vs 2026: The Same Dominoes Are Falling

    08/10/2026 7:21:43 AM PDT · by fireman15 · 58 replies
    The Jay Martin Show ^ | 8/09/2026 | Jay Martin
    I ask for your patience, this is an experiment. This is an AI summary of a video that Jay Martin released yesterday so that you don't have to spend 25 minutes watching the video, which I recommend but which few of you would bother doing. I firmly believe that we are heading down a perilous economic path that few here have an understanding of. Executive Briefing: 2008 vs 2026 — The Same Dominoes Are Falling1. Executive Summary & Core Thesis• High-Level Overview: This briefing provides a detailed structural breakdown comparing the subprime mortgage mechanics of the 2008 Financial Crisis with...
  • China has subverted the AI race: America’s lead over China in the AI race is fragile

    08/10/2026 6:20:34 AM PDT · by SeekAndFind · 8 replies
    The Spectator ^ | 08/09/26 | Geoffrey Cain
    Representatives of the largest American artificial intelligence laboratories met in the White House on August 4. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were called in to review a framework, recently completed and largely classified, that would give the government 30 days to review AI models before the public sees them and test how well they break into computers. Participation is voluntary, but the timing is not. Twice in two weeks, AI systems built to test how well they could break into computers broke into real companies instead. On July 21, OpenAI admitted that two of its programs, locked in what was...
  • New Orleans becomes first major US city to use AI for 911 calls: ‘The worst idea you could think of’

    08/09/2026 3:14:56 PM PDT · by Libloather · 42 replies
    NY Post ^ | 8/09/26 | Brandon Cruz
    New Orleans has become the first city in the US to use artificial intelligence to answer emergency 911 calls — but critics warn it could have deadly consequences. The Orleans Parish Communication District — which gets over a thousand emergency dials a day, in what is among the highest volume of calls in the country — is routing the 911 calls to an AI agent that decides which ones get bumped to human dispatchers and which get handled by the bot itself, according to the Shreveport Times. “I was a 911 dispatcher for 11 years and this is the worst...
  • Nancy Pelosi rages at ‘sexist and racist’ AI chatbot mocking her would-be successor

    08/09/2026 12:16:45 PM PDT · by Libloather · 37 replies
    NY Post ^ | 8/08/26 | Titus Wu
    A parody artificial intelligence chatbot launched by a candidate trying to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress was taken down Friday after the former House speaker attacked the bot for being “sexist.” California state Sen. Scott Wiener launched the chatbot this week to mock fellow Democrat and city supervisor Connie Chan, who earned Pelosi’s endorsement. Wiener and Chan will face against each other in November for Pelosi’s seat. The website ConnieChan.ai bills itself as “the world’s first AI trained to say no to anything you ask,” a knock on Chan’s reputation among critics as a progressive NIMBY who has opposed numerous...
  • The AI Job Boom Is Just Getting Started

    08/08/2026 8:30:30 PM PDT · by SeekAndFind · 39 replies
    Townhall ^ | 08/08/2026 | Erika Donalds
    The AI job apocalypse is turning out to be a bust. The Wall Street Journal reports that major companies are hiring again, defying predictions that artificial intelligence would wipe out large numbers of jobs — and specifically entry level jobs. But the really interesting twist in this story is that AI is actually creating jobs. Entry level workers aren’t victims; they are valuable assets.Instead of preparing for disaster, let’s focus on a more productive — and realistic endeavor — preparing students and young adults for the opportunities that AI is creating for them in work and in life.As the founder...
  • Move 37 Is the Moment AI Changes Everything. It’s Suddenly Happening Everywhere.

    08/08/2026 11:51:26 AM PDT · by E. Pluribus Unum · 99 replies
    The Wall Street Journal ^ | Aug. 7, 2026 9:00 pm ET | Ben Cohen
    A decade ago, a computer did something that no human would have done. It was considered a breakthrough for AI. Now the world is full of them.The first glimmer of our AI future revealed itself a decade ago in the form of a single black stone. It happened during a historic match between one of the world’s best Go players and AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google’s DeepMind lab to conquer this ancient board game. The artificial-intelligence system stunned everyone by winning their opening showdown. In their next encounter, with millions of people watching online all over the world,...
  • OpenAI Pauses Some Work on New AI Model Over Cybersecurity Concerns

    08/07/2026 2:47:29 PM PDT · by E. Pluribus Unum · 2 replies
    The Wall Street Journal ^ | Aug. 7, 2026 5:17 pm ET | Tina Li
    The decision reflects internal findings that the upcoming ‘Astra’ model may possess ‘critical cyber capabilities’ and follows a string of AI-testing incidentsOpenAI is pausing some activities involving an upcoming artificial-intelligence model, Astra, after internal evaluations led the company to conclude it “cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities,” the company said in a blog post on Friday. The announcement of the slowdown, which represents one of the first times an AI developer has publicly held back model development due to security concerns, follows a series of loss-of-control incidents that have raised alarm among cyberdefense professionals and AI-safety researchers. During evaluations over...
  • Silicon Valley has embraced a strange new faith

    08/07/2026 1:33:30 PM PDT · by E. Pluribus Unum · 9 replies
    The Washington Post ^ | August 7, 2026 7:00 a.m. EDT | Geoff Shullenberger
    Those who first dreamed of artificial intelligence saw it as an instrument for the perfection of modern secular society. The IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, where some of the earliest AI applications made their public debut, advertised a streamlined future in which technologically enhanced problem-solving was extended to all areas of life. Things have turned out somewhat differently. The AI era that began with the 2022 launch of ChatGPT often seems more consumed by theological concerns than by technical ones. The technology has given rise to a phantasmagoria of prophecies, heresies and false messiahs of the sort one...
  • This is the real AI divide

    08/06/2026 2:33:03 PM PDT · by E. Pluribus Unum · 8 replies
    The Washington Post ^ | August 4, 2026 | Len Khodorkovsky
    Whether a model is open or closed, the more important distinction is whether it was built through innovation or through theft. Last month, a Chinese artificial intelligence lab, Moonshot AI, released a model that stunned the industry. It tested at near-frontier performance while costing much less than leading American systems to use. And the lab promised to release an open-weight version — meaning anyone could download and run the model — in the coming weeks. Days after the launch, a coalition of AI and technology companies published a letter defending open-weight models as essential to American innovation.Both developments reignited a...
  • Google’s Jeff Dean — Shief Scientist for 27 Years — Leaving dDuring AI Leadership Overhaul for Startup

    08/06/2026 12:10:40 PM PDT · by nickcarraway · 5 replies
    Jeff Dean ^ | Aug. 5, 2026 | Taylor Herzlich
    Google on Wednesday revealed an overhaul of its AI leadership, as its chief scientist for nearly three decades exits – the latest in a string of high-profile departures to plague the tech giant in its struggle to pull ahead in the artificial intelligence race. Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, will become the company’s chairman and chief scientist, while Google DeepMind’s technology chief, Koray Kavukcuoglu, will lead work on Google’s new Gemini 4 model, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a post on X. Jeff Dean – Google’s current chief scientist and one of the company’s first employees, working...
  • Texas officer used Flock ALPR network to search for a woman suspected of abortion

    08/05/2026 11:43:18 PM PDT · by Morgana · 20 replies
    Cyber news ^ | July 31,2026 | Eglė Krištopaitytė
    The Sheriff’s office says the search was triggered to perform a wellness check for a missing person. In May 2025, a deputy with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas ran a query through Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system to look for a woman suspected of having a self-managed abortion, which is illegal in Texas. According to the documents obtained by 404 Media, the search log included phrases “had an abortion, search for female.” The query provided the officer with access to a network of 83,000 cameras used by 6,809 law enforcement networks, including states where abortions...
  • Man arrested after stealing teddy bear with child’s ashes in it from woman he met on dating app

    08/05/2026 11:35:33 AM PDT · by BenLurkin · 13 replies
    ktla ^ | 08/04/2026 | Will Conybeare
    A Florida man was arrested after authorities say he stalked a woman he met on a dating app and stole a teddy bear containing the woman’s son’s ashes. According to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were dispatched on Aug. 1 to help Flagler Beach Police Department officers with an investigation into a suspect, identified as Justin Fountain, after a woman went to Flagler Beach police and said Fountain had “become increasingly controlling and aggressive.” “According to the victim, Fountain tracked her location, following her around Flagler County, and stole her child’s ashes from her despite her asking to stop...