Free Republic

A “battery fire” at a rural New York solar farm has triggered warnings from authorities for local residents to avoid the toxic smoke plumes billowing from the site. Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a warning Thursday night for locals to stay away from the site near Lake Ontario. The blaze began around 1 pm at a solar farm in Jefferson County, outside the village of Chaumont, according to WWNY-TV. The village is about 78 miles north of Syracuse and near the Canadian border. Photos and videos aired by the local news station show smoke shooting from a solar panel array...

A group of cybersecurity researchers has uncovered what they believe is an intentional backdoor in encrypted radios used by police, military, and critical infrastructure entities around the world. The backdoor may have existed for decades, potentially exposing a wealth of sensitive information transmitted across them, according to the researchers. While the researchers frame their discovery as a backdoor, the organization responsible for maintaining the standard pushes back against that specific term, and says the standard was designed for export controls which determine the strength of encryption. The end result, however, are radios with traffic that can be decrypted using consumer...

Kevin Mitnick, former 'most wanted' hacker who police said could launch nukes by whistling into a phone, has diedBy Joshua Wolens published about 22 hours ago A legend in the history of computing, Mitnick died on July 16 due to complications from pancreatic cancer.Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous computer hackers in the world and the subject of an over two-year manhunt in the 1990s, died of complications from pancreatic cancer last Sunday, aged 59. His death has been confirmed to the New York Times. Mitnick is a legendary figure, one of those people whose life story reads like...

Russia's latest military aviation project. While "ukraine" scours the world for leftover P38s, F16s and other semi-flying museum pieces....

WASHINGTON — The Navy has published the final draft of its environmental impact statement assessing how it should go about dismantling the former aircraft carrier Enterprise (CVN-65), a process that will likely set decades-long precedents for future nuclear-powered ships. Environmental impact statements, as the name implies, are lengthy documents that outline the dangers to the ecosystem that disposing of decades-old nuclear reactors can pose, as well as identify one of several courses of action with which the Navy prefers to move forward. Due to the numerous state and federal agencies that must weigh in, as well as considering the general...

PALMDALE, Calif. — House appropriators don’t intend for the Pentagon to re-engine the F-35 with a new adaptive powerplant, the chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee (HAC-D) said this week. “It states pretty specifically in the appropriation bill that we’re not looking or seeking to change out the Pratt & Whitney engine,” Rep. Ken Calvert, a California Republican, said in a Wednesday interview with Breaking Defense at the inaugural North LA Defense Forum hosted by Rep. Mike Garcia at Northrop Grumman’s facilities here in Palmdale. “Unless there’s a catastrophic failure on the part of [current engine maker] Pratt &...

WARTON, United Kingdom — BAE Systems executives this week expressed confidence that the Global Combat Air Platform (GCAP), currently in development with Italy and Japan, will achieve its projected in-service date of 2035, with a “manned, supersonic and low observable jet” demonstrator taking flight within the next five years. And more than that, the company leaders believe they can find an export market of “several hundred” jets globally. Meeting with the media at BAE Systems’ assembly plant in Warton, Lancashire, Herman Claesen, BAE Systems’ Future Combat Air System Managing Director, called the international export of GCAP a “key feature” in...

WASHINGTON — The first space-based hyperspectral imaging sensor built by San Francisco startup Orbital Sidekick, founded in 2016, literally went from the garage of CEO and co-founder Dan Katz to the International Space Station as an experiment for Air Force Research Laboratory. “That was a kick ass little sensor we … integrated in my garage in San Francisco, and then handed it off to SpaceX, which launched it. And then NASA, the astronauts, took it from the Dragon capsule and installed it,” Katz told Breaking Defense in an interview. Hyperspectral cameras break down pixels into hundreds of frequency bands and...

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Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Sergey Brin are part of a drug movement that proponents hope will expand minds, enhance lives and produce business breakthroughs Elon Musk takes ketamine. Sergey Brin sometimes enjoys magic mushrooms. Executives at venture-capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in SpaceX and Facebook, have thrown parties that include psychedelics. Routine drug use has moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture, leaving boards and business leaders to wrestle with their responsibilities for a workforce that frequently uses. At the vanguard are tech executives...

Sam Altman’s Greatest FearThe Alignment Problem and the Future of HumanityYesterday Sam Altman testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the first of a series of hearings on AI safety.Altman, CEO of the company that created ChatGPT, agreed with senators about the potential dangers of AI. He spoke of the need for regulation, the importance of privacy, and he even advocated creating a government agency to license AI companies.The academic, Gary Marcus, called Altman out and declared that “he never told us what his worst fear is, and I think it’s germain to find out.”Altman did answer...

Computer engineers and tech-inclined political scientists have warned for years that cheap, powerful artificial intelligence tools would soon allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election. […] Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost. When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low. The implications for the 2024 campaigns and...

The Harm Caused by MasksA new study suggests that the excess carbon dioxide breathed in by mask-wearers can have major health consequences.Evidence continues to mount that mask mandates were perhaps the worst public-health intervention in modern American history. While concluding that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” in preventing the spread of viruses, a recent Cochrane review also emphasized that “more attention should be paid to describing and quantifying the harms” that may come from wearing masks. A new study from Germany does just that, and it suggests that the excess carbon dioxide breathed in by mask-wearers may...

One month ago, to much dismay and widespread denial, Goldman predicted that AI could lead to some 300 million layoffs among highly paid, non-menial workers in the US and Europe. As Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius put it, "using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation" as up to "two...

A popular lesbian dating app has one message for users who don’t want transgender people on the platform: “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” HER, a global dating and network platform for lesbians and other queer people looking for love and friendship, sent a mass notification to its users on Wednesday: “A Message for Transphobes: Time to delete HER,” it said, in part. “We have a very big thriving lesbian community on HER, and so we want to make that message really clear,” Robyn Exton, who founded the platform in 2015, told NBC News on Friday....

FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared before a House Appropriations Committee budget hearing Thursday and claimed that Beijing has stolen more personal and corporate data from the U.S. than any other nation, and that their vast ranks of internet spies hugely outnumber the FBI’s forces:Today’s cyber threats are more pervasive, hit a wider variety of victims, and carry the potential for greater damage than ever before. You take China. A key part of the Chinese government’s multi-pronged strategy to lie, to cheat and to steal their way to surpassing us as the global superpower is cyber.The director went on to explain...

A top U.S. official is concerned that many of the unexplained encounters between military aircraft and unidentified flying objects his office is investigating could be adversaries such as China spying on the country, rather than wayward extraterrestrials.The director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office updated the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on Wednesday about what his office has been doing since its creation last year.“This is a hunt mission for what might somebody be doing in our backyard that we don’t know about,” AARO Director Sean M. Kirkpatrick said. “That is what we are doing.”The special...

Concrete is an incredibly useful and versatile building material on which not only today’s societies, but also the ancient Roman Empire was built. To this day Roman concrete structures can be found in mundane locations such as harbors, but also the Pantheon in Rome, which to this day forms the largest unreinforced concrete dome in existence at 43.3 meters diameter, and is in excellent condition despite being being nearly 1,900 years old.Even as the Roman Empire fell and receded into what became the Byzantine – also known as the Eastern Roman – Empire and the world around these last remnants...

Newly-released communications between the Biden administration and Meta show an effort to crack down on so-called "vaccine-skeptical" content shared on the private communications platform WhatsApp. Independent journalist David Zweig reported on Friday that the White House went beyond Twitter to curb COVID-related posts. Emails obtained through discovery from the ongoing Missouri v Biden legal battle show email exchanges from the White House to the tech giant began just days after President Biden took office. Zweig stressed that unlike Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta, WhatsApp is an encrypted direct messaging platform, Citing Meta, "90% of WhatsApp...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Over the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts — perhaps hundreds of thousands of them — to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump. Besides posting adoring words about the former president, the fake accounts ridiculed Trump’s critics from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador who is challenging her onetime boss for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. When it came to Ron DeSantis, the bots aggressively suggested that the Florida governor couldn’t beat Trump, but would be a great running mate. As Republican...