Free Republic

Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night. Why it matters: The U.S. and China are racing to build the world's most advanced AI systems — and it appears Chinese propaganda has infiltrated American circles with the hope of slowing the U.S. down. Driving the news: The X Safety team probed suspected Chinese accounts involved in influence operations and identified 200,000 accounts, including 200 accounts "posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy,"...

On Dec. 13 last year, a stranger in a Brown University bathroom noticed a man dressed head to toe in black, wrong for the weather, mere hours before that same man opened fire on Brown University’s campus, killing two and wounding eight before vanishing. Investigators had almost nothing: no name, no plate, just a tip describing a gray Nissan with Florida plates. But that was enough: Providence police ran it through a network of more than 70 Flock Safety cameras, which reached back through 30 days of history, and found the car had passed 14 times since Dec. 1. “We...

The reactor was produced under President Trump’s 2025 nuclear reactor plan. It was designed by Australian Bobby Gallagher and his team in Houston. It can produce one megawatt of power, at a cost of 15 cents per kilowatt hour, for five years before refueling is required. The entire reactor can fit on the bed of a Ford F150 pickup. More importantly, it can be manufactured in a factory, fits into one 20-foot shipping container, uses the existing conventional supply chain, and requires no exotic custom-made components.

Researchers found that ordinary WiFi routers could quietly identify people with nearly 100% accuracy, potentially turning everyday wireless networks into invisible surveillance systems. Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com WiFi signals could potentially be used to identify people and map their surroundings without relying on cameras or requiring the person being observed to carry a connected device. "By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present," says Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL, KIT's Institute of Information Security and Dependability. "This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our...

The UK Ministry of Defense has discovered that the Royal Navy’s new fleet of spy drones, being operated by elements of the Royal Marines since March, have been secretly transmitting information from the drone’s primary camera to China, according to an investigation from The Telegraph. Components of the camera on the K3 Scout, a 27-foot-long multirole uncrewed surface vessel (drone boat) built by Kraken Technology in the United Kingdom, were produced in and secretly transmitting data to a device in China. An investigation into the drones revealed that the cameras were transmitting “heartbeat communications” – data to confirm they were...

Missing UK tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s associate Stephen Chamberlain, who stood trial for fraud alongside him after the sale of software company Autonomy, died just days before the entrepreneur vanished in a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily. Chamberlain was out for a run in Cambridgeshire, England, on Saturday when he was struck by a vehicle and died after being rushed to a nearby hospital. Chamberlain and Lynch, who remains missing after a yacht he was on with his wife and 18-year-old daughter sank Monday, were co-defendants in the decade-long fraud case that arose after the $11 billion sale to...

President Donald Trump on Wednesday blasted New York's new pause on AI data center development, arguing the state is turning away one of the biggest economic opportunities of the AI boom. "One of the biggest Driving Forces in the Future for Jobs, are Data Centers," Trump wrote on Truth Social, calling the facilities "Money Machines" and "Cash Cows" that generate jobs and tax revenue. He urged New York to reverse course "IMMEDIATELY," arguing companies would instead build projects in states such as Texas, Arizona, Alabama, and Florida.

Ukraine has carried out what it described as the first known fully robotic amphibious assault, using a naval drone to transport an armed ground robot into Russian-occupied territory. The operation was announced on Monday by Ukraine’s 123rd Separate Territorial Defense Brigade. According to the brigade, a naval drone was remotely guided across the Black Sea toward the Kinburn Spit, located at the end of Ukraine’s Kinburn Peninsula and directly west of Kherson. Once the maritime drone reached the coast, it deployed an uncrewed ground vehicle fitted with a mounted machine gun.

President Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday he would grant Kyiv a license to make its own critically needed Patriot air-defense missiles, joking: “This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough.” “One of the things I think we’re going to be talking about today, a little birdie told me this, about the fact that we’ll give them the right to make Patriots,” Trump said ahead of his closed-door sitdown with Zelensky on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Turkey. Patriot missiles have long been in short supply, but now are running critically low — forcing...

What would C. S. Lewis have thought of artificial intelligence? I doubt he would have begun with the machine. Indeed, Lewis always began with man. He would not have asked first whether AI can write a poem, draft a law, tutor a child, or write a sermon. He would have asked, “What sort of people want a machine to do these things for them?” He would have asked, “What have we already lost when we greet such a tool not with care, but with wonder?” That is why reading The Abolition of Man in 2026 makes the work feel more...

Still Works -- Not Supported

At a recent “counter-disinformation” conference at the University of Cambridge, European technologist Robin Berjon suggested that “military force” may have to be used against American tech platforms to bring them into line.“I’m not advocating that we should go and start shooting Google just yet,” said Berjon. “But the thing is, if you want to do just regulation, you have to be willing to go all the way up to force.”(snip)Above all, it must be remembered that this new hostility to the tech giants, from every corner of the progressive universe both foreign and domestic, is almost entirely downstream of Silicon...

My brain has been percolating on this for a bit, so apologies for not having all the background here. Tuesday morning, 0645, bad night's sleep, and my brain decided it wanted to tackle AI governance. Some thoughts I couldn't shake: Every time someone tries to incorporate Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into AI governance, it fails. Asimov himself proved why — he didn't write them as a blueprint. He wrote them as a story engine for exploring how they break. Every single Robot story was about the edge cases, paradoxes, and unintended consequences of three seemingly simple rules. The Laws...

Two years ago, I rented a Tesla Model 3 for 1 day in order to drive it for the first time in my life and make a Tesla review from the perspective of a petrolhead. I ended up actually enjoying the driving itself, I hated the user interface, the buttonless screens and probably most of all I hated the fact that the car was constantly beeping. When I went over the speed limit, when I changed lanes without signaling, when I got too close to the edge of the road and so on. After fiddling with the screen and the...

Nuclear energy is about to play a huge role in powering America, but the new reactors that will do the heavy lifting are surprisingly small. Some are so small they are classified as microreactors—mobile powerhouses capable of being transported anywhere they’re needed to provide power, including the most remote sites on the planet. Spotlight on America traveled to the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), where these microreactors are about to be powered up and tested for the very first time inside a facility already famous for making history. Now, history is unfolding here once again. The newly renovated and reconfigured Dome...

Microwaving Saddam: New weapons likely to see combat Prototypes could paralyze Iraqi militarySpace-age warfare may be used in attack against Baghdad regimeEd Blanche Special to The Daily StarSaddam Hussein may be in for a shock - literally - after telling US President George W. Bush to do his worst in the looming war against Iraq. It seems possible that his command network will become the first target of high-power microwave (HPM) weapons, probably carried by cruise missiles or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These squirt pulses of high-frequency energy that can knock out electronic and communications systems in milliseconds, scrambling computer...

"I test the Army’s new 30×42mm Precision Grenade Rifle and break down how it’s changing infantry combat. The Squad Support Rifle System or SSRS 30mm grenade launcher. It fires ammunition from airburst rounds to counter-drone and anti-armor munitions, this weapon delivers insane accuracy and firepower. Here’s why it might replace traditional grenade launchers like the M203 and M320 and M32 and become the squad’s most lethal system." Cappy Army

A tech investor who shaped the Trump administration’s pro-industry artificial intelligence policies will depart the White House at the end of the month. Sriram Krishnan has informed administration officials that he plans to leave his post as the White House senior policy adviser for AI to start an outside institution that will influence technology policy, according to a person familiar with his plans.

I started out asking Copilot about a news story that identified an organization as racially segregated, and ended up having a very interesting discussion about AI's political biases. I've skipped the initial parts of the conversation and omitted identifying details, because I don't know it's not racist, and that's not the point of posting this here. My point is to identify the grave situation conservatism is in with AI, and how to have useful discussions anyway. User: Since journalists have been dominated by those whose politics align with a single political party [rephrased], do you really think it's fair to...

For nearly thirty years, Lycos occupied a strange corner of internet history. It started as a search engine project in the early web era and grew into a portal packed with hosting services, personal websites, and email. Lycos launched its email service in October 1997, at a time when having an email address still felt novel rather than mandatory. At the olden times of 1997, they had partnered with USA.NET (NetAddress) to offer a co-branded free email service to its portal users, before ditching it in favor of their newly acquired proprietary platform (MailCity) in 1998.For many users, an @lycos.com...