technocrit

As Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’ Blue Origin, and other companies expand into space, they risk causing more problems for Earth in the process: air pollution, climate effects, and light pollution. The practice of downplaying these negative consequences while trumpeting the message that space operations can make life better on Earth has a new name: “starwashing,” a term the space researcher Melissa E. Yingling helped popularize in an article published in The Conversation earlier this month.

It’s a play on the term “greenwashing,” used to critique companies that highlight small sustainable investments to divert attention from the pollution their businesses cause. Space companies are appealing to a sense of “cosmic wonder” and making promises to benefit humankind, along with promoting their environmental bona fides, Yingling wrote.

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that states can regulate prediction markets like gambling, dealing a major blow to the booming industry.

Despite being branded as autonomous and self-sustaining, artificial intelligence relies heavily on human labor — an army of data workers all over the world, primarily in the Global South. These workers “are purposely hidden by the companies that produce AI because they are the secret ingredient of AI itself,” says sociologist Antonio Casilli, the author of Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation and co-writer of the documentary In the Belly of AI. Casilli estimates that over 160 million people are involved in data work around the world.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to buy at least a million dollars worth of robots from Boston Dynamics, the company that makes the dog-like SPOT robots, with the purpose of improving “officer safety,” according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement.

For her safety, Doe has opted to receive alerts from the US Department of Justice Victim Notification System any time she may be a victim in a new criminal investigation. Although she has received countless alerts, she was shocked when the CCCP notified her that it had identified AI-generated CSAM on xAI that depicted her. This re-traumatized Doe, whose complaint alleged that messages were found on online forums “between offenders chatting about creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.”

Now, Doe fears that xAI has not only made it easier to make more violative images of the most distressing time in her life, but also that xAI allegedly has stored the images that Grok generates and uses those outputs to further train Grok. Because of this, she believes that Grok has been trained on both the initial set of images that have haunted her for more than 20 years and the more recent AI-generated ones.

This is the first case to accuse xAI of training on CSAM, and the complaint does not go into great detail on that claim. Previously, Ars reported on a controversial dataset that was later scrubbed after researchers found CSAM in the training data, but there’s no indication xAI trained on that data. In a press release from lawyers representing Doe, it explained that Doe’s images were included in a CSAM Hash List maintained by NCMEC, and “that same material” allegedly “was part of the dataset xAI used to build Grok’s image and video generating capabilities.” The complaint similarly only alleged that “CSAM depicting Plaintiff with its longstanding well-known hash values has been used as a part of the dataset used by xAI.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed on Tuesday his intention to visit Israel soon, underlining the firm's objective to double its staff in the country from the current 5,000 employees.

The company, which six years ago bought the Israeli networking firm Mellanox recently announced a mega campus in northern Israel in Kiryat Tivon.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly subpoenaed several major Wall Street lenders to glean more information about their role in the near-collapse of AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness.

Regulators are seeking insights into Situational Awareness’s trades, use of leverage and communications with the investment banks, which include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America, according to Reuters, citing a source familiar with the matter.

Situational Awareness plunged from about $45 billion to around $10 billion in late July after it was hammered in last month’s tech sell-off.

The hedge fund, led by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, was forced to unwind much of its publicly listed portfolio of large, concentrated, levered positions — which included SK Hynix and CoreWeave — after losses sparked several margin calls among its prime brokers.

An eye-opening glimpse at the links between two congressional committees and more than 100 defense contractors, consultants, and lobbyists.

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The interactive display below illustrates one piece of the defense revolving door as it has evolved over the last decade. During that time, former congressional officials have strolled through the door and wound up working not just at the largest defense contractors (often called “primes”) but also for a new class of high-technology firms—often involved in artificial intelligence and headquartered in Silicon Valley—that has aggressively expanded its Pentagon contracting efforts. And to be clear, the door leads in both directions; private sector bigwigs sometimes move into influential government positions that could affect the fortunes of their companies.

eBay and three former executives agreed to pay nearly $56 million in a settlement over a macabre campaign of cyberstalking and harassment that targeted two journalists in 2019.

As we’ve previously written, the case involved deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, a book about surviving the loss of a spouse, and a bloody pig mask to the home of a couple who run a news website. There were also harassing messages sent via email and Twitter, and an attempt to install a GPS tracking device on the victims’ car. Criminal charges resulted in guilty pleas and prison terms for former eBay employees.

They finally made tiktok safe... for genocide, zionism, fascism, imperialism, etc....

It records ambient conditions over time, stores readings in non-volatile memory, and displays current data along with a history graph. The device is designed for low power consumption, over 1 week of operation on a small Li‑Po battery.

The TRUMP token is down 96% from its peak, and 85% of secondary market wallets for WLFI are underwater, reflecting a broader downturn in the sector.