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A high school student held onto a 2016 video of a young girl saying a racial slur, then posted it online after she had chosen to attend her dream school, the New York Times reported. “I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” 18-year-old Jimmy Galligan told the New York Times. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. In 2019, Galligan was sent a three-second Snapchat video of fellow Heritage High School student Mimi Groves saying “I can drive” before uttering a racial slur. When...

You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."--George Orwell, 1984 It had the potential for disaster. Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube. The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the...

Imagine: Blank ballot paper pre-printed over the entire surface with “Q” codes in permanent inks not visible to the naked eye, and then provided to all states ONLY from the Federal Election Comission to state election offices. States then use that paper to print the “human readable” ballot in permanent black ink. Those ballots are then “read” by optical scanners also provided ONLY by the FEC and whose software source code and construction specs are publicly available to all citizens interested. Those optical scanners then retain all scanned ballots in locked compartments, whose keys are also issued to state elections...

In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit, investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into the county jail for sexual assault of a child. The Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was...

We’re hearing Gestapo thrown around a lot lately. It’s almost as though the legions of easily-propagandized ignorants wore out the constant mis-use of Nazi, Fascist and Hitler. Most of the Gestapo iterations of this are complete nonsense. Most. Not all. The Chinese Communist government’s police state apparatus is the modern day equivalent of the Gestapo. A report leaked to the Washington Post shows that the Chinese Communist government has tested, and is presumably using, AI facial recognition software developed by Huawei to identify the Muslim ethnic minority of Uighurs and alert police — read, Gestapo. The Post story reports: “The...

A college student with a desire to alleviate his father's suffering has invented an app that helps people with PTSD stop having night terrors.Tyler Skluzacek's father, Patrick, a US Army Commander with PTSD, was suffering from debilitating night terrors.Patrick served in Iraq in 2007 and at night his dreams took him back to Fallujah. He could only fall asleep with the help of alcohol and pills -- and his life slowly fell apart."[I] pretty much lost everything," he told NPR, fighting back tears. "My house, everything, my job, everything went."Tyler was a senior at Macalester College when he entered a...

A high-level Chinese official acknowledged at a forum on Nov. 28 that many of China’s investment projects in the semiconductor industry were short-sighted and ultimately failed. Wang Zhijun, one of the deputy ministers at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, made the comments while speaking at the China Development Forum hosted by the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, according to Chinese state-run media. What’s happening now in the semiconductor industry has happened to other Chinese sectors, such as steel, cement, and photovoltaics, leading to production overcapacity, said Wang. He said the semiconductor industry needed greater supervision and that companies...

A lot is known about the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, but many of its details will remain very much shrouded in mystery. This week the action to correct hardware issues that contributed to the crash of a single-engine F-35A Lightning II that was part of the 58th Fighter Squadron, 33rd Fighter Wing in May will remain a secret. The F-35 Joint Program Office announced the decision on Monday. “Explicit details related to corrective actions have the potential to compromise operational security,” a JPO spokeswoman told Air Force magazine, without elaborating. What the JPO did confirm is...

To adapt former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's famous 2002 press statement, the world's next big shooting war will be a consequential event masked by known unknowns. The human historical record tells us a major armed (kinetic) conflict involving powerful nations will eventually erupt. Given contemporary economic interdependence and the lethality of modern weaponry, the conflict will have disruptive global consequences, many of them grim. However, what geopolitical issues shape and misshape The Next Big War; who wages the hostility and for what reasons; how the combatants prepare to wage it; where and how the combatants engage; and how the...

TUCSON, Ariz. – Today, Wei Sun, 49, a Chinese national and naturalized citizen of the United States, was sentenced to 38 months in prison by District Court Judge Rosemary Marquez. Sun previously pleaded guilty to one felony count of violating the Arms Export Control Act (AECA). Sun was employed in Tucson for 10 years as an electrical engineer with Raytheon Missiles and Defense. Raytheon Missiles and Defense develops and produces missile systems for use by the United States military. During his employment with the company, Sun had access to information directly related to sensitive defense technology. Some of this defense...

A federal judge denied a motion Monday for a new trial in the case of a Chinese-born engineer convicted of conspiring to export U.S. defense technology to China. U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney rejected Chi Mak's motion after a hearing that included testimony from several defense witnesses. Carney set Mak's sentencing for March 24. Mak could face up to 45 years in prison. Mak, 67, was convicted last May of conspiring to export U.S. defense technology to China, including data on an electronic propulsion system that prosecutors said could make submarines virtually undetectable. A jury also found him guilty of...

Whenever Benjamin Kaila, a database administrator who immigrated from India to the United States in 1999, applies for a job at a U.S. tech company, he prays that there are no other Indians during the in-person interview. That’s because Kaila is a Dalit, or member of the lowest-ranked castes within India’s system of social hierarchy, formerly referred to as “untouchables.” Silicon Valley’s diversity issues are well documented: It’s still dominated by white and Asian men, and Black and Latino workers remain underrepresented. But for years, as debates about meritocracy raged on, the tech industry’s reliance on Indian engineers allowed another...

MANILA, Philippines — Demonic spirits can send text messages to cell phones and use modern technology to harass or lure people to the dark side. Fr. Jose Francisco Syquia, chief exorcist of the Archdiocese of Manila, also says receiving messages from demons is an experience common to priests helping possessed persons liberate themselves. “We did not expect [demons] could do so but if you ask other exorcists, they would tell you the same experience. Usually [the demons would swear at you] or say, ‘This person will never get away from us,’” he says in an interview. ..... But more than...

Days before the State of Wisconsin denied Foxconn's request for state tax credits - in the form of direct payments from the state to Foxconn's bank account - related to the "factory" built by the world's largest contract tech manufacturer in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. The project was announced shortly after President Trump's upset election victory, but quickly ran aground as reporters complained that the facility being built by Foxconn bore little resemblance to the enormous Gen 10.5 LCD factory the company had promised. In fact, the factory isn't even big enough to serve as a smaller Gen 6 LCD...

STOCKHOLM—Sweden on Tuesday banned on security grounds the use of telecom equipment from China’s Huawei and ZTE in its 5G network ahead of a spectrum auction scheduled for next month, joining other European nations that have restricted the role of Chinese suppliers.The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) said the setting of the licence conditions followed assessments by the Swedish Armed Forces and security service, which called China “one of the biggest threats against Sweden”.European governments have been tightening controls on Chinese companies building 5G networks, following diplomatic pressure from Washington, which alleges Huawei equipment could be used by...

COLUMBUS, OH—In response to growing concerns over celebrity election meddling, several states have introduced voting machines with new technology that will immediately discard your ballot if it determines you are voting because a celebrity told you to. "We are extremely concerned about celebrity influence in this election," said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. "According to several authoritative studies, celebrities are literally the worst. We can't allow our future to be determined by celebrities or anyone insane enough to listen to them." Polls have shown that there are actually a few people out there who rely on celebrities like Mark...

Read full article at CNAS Some highlights: The U.S. military is at a high-stakes inflection point: it must take a series of much bigger and bolder steps to keep its military-technological edge over great power competitors such as China, or it could lose that edge within the decade... this conceptual shift toward great power competition has not been matched by a requisite re-alignment of concepts, culture, and service programs and budgets. The DoD is talking a far better game than it is actually playing. The proverbial clock is ticking, and while the Pentagon and Congress continue to make changes largely...

An overview of the antennas used for surveillance.

The British defense committee reported on Oct. 8 that there’s “clear evidence of collusion between Huawei and the Chinese state” and urged the government to urgently remove Huawei’s equipment from the country’s telecommunications infrastructure by 2025. In July, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered that Huawei be purged from Britain’s 5G networks by 2027 amid fears of spying and sabotage, and following tough U.S. sanctions against the company affecting its supply of up-to-date chips. The defense committee report, however, states that the purging should be done years earlier even if it involves recompense for current operators. “The Government should take necessary...

While we often discuss expansion into the Solar System as a step leading to interstellar flight, the movement into space has its dark side, as author Daniel Deudney argues in a new book. As Kenneth Roy points out in the review that follows, it behooves everyone involved in space studies to understand what the counter-arguments are. Ken is a newly retired professional engineer who is currently living amidst, as he puts it, “the relics of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” His professional career involved working for various Department of Energy (DOE) contractors in the fields of fire protection...