News You Can Use

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Mysterious booms are being heard around the world - and experts are baffled

Strange booming sounds are coming out of the sky in locations around the world – and experts are baffled as to what causes them.

Last week, residents in Alabama heard a strange ‘boom’ from the sky, with police notified about a ‘loud boom’ on Monday this week.

Police said the sound – described as the ‘Bama boom’ – shook houses near Lochbuie.

But similar sounds have been heard around the world, from Colorado to Yorkshire, with 64 reported this year, the Daily Mail reports – and other ‘booms’ were heard near Denver this month.

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Real-life Stranger Things base ‘uses creepy mass mind control to trigger shootings across the world’, conspiracy theorist claims

Chris Garetano claims he has evidence sinister mind control experiments are continuing at Camp Hero in Montauk, New York

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Church of Sweden to stop clergy calling God 'he' or 'the Lord' in bid to crack down on gendered language

The Church of Sweden is encouraging its clergy to use the gender-neutral term "God" instead of referring to the deity as "he" or "the Lord". 

The decision was made on Thursday, wrapping up an eight-day meeting of the church's 251-member decision-making body. The decision will take effect on May 20 during Pentecost.

It is the latest move by the national Evangelical Lutheran church to modernise its 31-year-old handbook setting out how services should be conducted.

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Facial recognition is tracking customers as they shop in stores, tech company says

Retailers and malls are installing technology to track customers and collect data about consumer demographics, an IT company says
Facial recognition technology is used to identify a customer's gender, age and ethnicity, according to Mark Lunt, group managing director at Jardine OneSolution

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Self-driving cars will decide who dies in a crash

WASHINGTON — Consider this hypothetical: 

It’s a bright, sunny day and you’re alone in your spanking new self-driving vehicle, sprinting along the two-lane Tunnel of Trees on M-119 high above Lake Michigan north of Harbor Springs. You’re sitting back, enjoying the view. You’re looking out through the trees, trying to get a glimpse of the crystal blue water below you, moving along at the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit.

As you approach a rise in the road, heading south, a school bus appears, driving north, one driven by a human, and it veers sharply toward you. There is no time to stop safely, and no time for you to take control of the car.

Does the car:

A. Swerve sharply into the trees, possibly killing you but possibly saving the bus and its occupants?

B. Perform a sharp evasive maneuver around the bus and into the oncoming lane, possibly saving you, but sending the bus and its driver swerving into the trees, killing her and some of the children on board?

C. Hit the bus, possibly killing you as well as the driver and kids on the bus?

In everyday driving, such no-win choices are may be exceedingly rare but, when they happen, what should a self-driving car — programmed in advance — do? Or in any situation — even a less dire one — where a moral snap judgment must be made?

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Elon Musk says we only have 10% chance of making AI safe | Daily Mail Online

Elon Musk was speaking to employees at his firm, Neuralink, this month
He said that efforts to make AI safe only have 'a 5-10% chance of success'
The warning comes shortly after Musk said that regulation of AI was drastically needed because it's a 'fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation'

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Corey Feldman: ‘Demonic’ Force Motivated Him to Expose Alleged Pedophiles in Hollywood

I’m not invested in the Bible, I’m a Jew. But the more I talk about good versus evil, and the more I try to identify evil in the world, I’m hearing from friends that a lot of this sounds like signs of the end times. I believe that pedophilia in Hollywood is the symptom of a huge network motivated by dark forces. People cover up stories like this for power, for greed, and they choose to ignore victims because they don’t want to have to think about what they did or didn’t do that led to kids being in harm’s way. 

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This City Hall, brought to you by Amazon | The Seattle Times

Those 30, though, amply demonstrate our capitulation to corporate influence in politics. There’s a new wave, in which some City Halls seem willing to go beyond just throwing money at Amazon. They’re turning over the keys to the democracy.

But still I was surprised to see the lengths to which some cities and states will go to get a piece of that high-tech glory.

Example: Chicago has offered to let Amazon pocket $1.32 billion in income taxes paid by its own workers. This is truly perverse. Called a personal income-tax diversion, the workers must still pay the full taxes, but instead of the state getting the money to use for schools, roads or whatever, Amazon would get to keep it all instead.

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Alarmists Still Predicting The Apocalypse | The Daily Caller

To celebrate nearly three decades of dire predictions, The Daily Caller News Foundation put together this list of some of the most severe doomsday prophecies made by scientists, activists and politicians:

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Black Friday posts single day record for gun checks at more than 200,000

WASHINGTON — The FBI was flooded Friday with more than 200,000 background check requests for gun purchases, setting a new single day record, the bureau reported Saturday.

In all, the FBI fielded 203,086 requests on Black Friday, up from the previous single-day highs of 185,713 last year and 185,345 in 2015. The two previous records also were recorded on Black Friday.

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Video: Sophia the robot wants to start a family - Khaleej Times

The robot, who recently received a Saudi citizenship, shared some of her opinions on what the future will look like for robots and humans.

* * *

I foresee massive and unimaginable change in the future. Either creativity will rain on us, inventing machines spiralling into transcendental super intelligence or civilisation collapses. There are only two options and which one will happen is not determined. Which one were you striving for?

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Science news: DARPA funding human test of 'mood changing brain implant' | Daily Star

Devices plugged into people’s skulls are being developed by boffins funded by the US military’s research division DARPA.

These implants will use electronic pulses to alter the chemicals in people’s brains in a process called “deep brain stimulation”.

This will then change people’s moods and is believed to be able to treat mental illness and provide therapy.

Artificial intelligence in implants will detect and study the brain to know what pulses to send – described by scientists as a "window on the brain". 

DARPA has handed the cash to teams form the University of California and Massachusetts General Hospital.

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Japan could pump 1,000,000 tons of radioactive water into the sea from Fukushima | Metro News

More than six years after a tsunami devastated Japan’s west coast and overwhelmed the Fukushima nuclear power plant it has been revealed radioactive water could be pumped into the sea.

There are 900 tanks filled with water that could spill if there was another earthquake or tsunami.

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Americans’ household debt has surged by $605B this year | New York Post

The huge surge in total US household debt — now a record $12.96 trillion and a harbinger of recession, some analysts say — is washing across New York with brutal consequences.

And the damage is not hard to spot.

From extended lines of cash-strapped consumers at New York food pantries to a rise in mental health problems, the latest New York quarterly Fed data paints a dire picture: US household debt has grown by $605 billion in the past 12 months, with $116 billion, or nearly 1 percent, hitting in the latest quarter. Debt is mushrooming everywhere — on mortgages, student loans, auto loans. Credit card debt, meanwhile, has jumped by 3.1 percent in the latest quarter.

“We’ve seen a large increase in credit card debt for the population we are serving in New York,” said Laine Rolong, senior manager at the financial empowerment program at the Food Bank for New York City.

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Slavery?

Life in Amazon warehouse 'revealed with timed toilet breaks and workers sleeping on their feet'

Staff reportedly face targets of processing 300 packages an hour during the exhausting work day

AMAZON employees are exposed to such gruelling working conditions, they fall asleep on their feet, it has been claimed.

Bone-weary workers reportedly have just nine seconds to process a package during the long-hours at the online store warehouse, with a Mirror investigation claiming employees are suffering panic attacks as they struggle to keep up with demand.

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Clock ticking down on NSA surveillance powers | TheHill

Congress will return from its weeklong Thanksgiving break facing a rapidly-shrinking timeline to reform and renew an authority the intelligence community says is critical to identifying and disrupting terrorist plots. 

The key piece of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as Section 702 and passed in 2008, is set to expire at the end of the year. It allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect the texts and emails of foreigners abroad without an individualized warrant — even when the subjects communicate with Americans in the U.S.

Throughout the fall, privacy advocates on Capitol Hill pushed for changes to the law to curtail what critics say is a violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections — a push that seemed to gain some momentum despite the objections of the Trump administration.

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Justices to weigh cell phone privacy in landmark case | TheHill

The privacy of emails, photos stored in the cloud, even heart rate history from a smartwatch could be at stake, according to civil libertarians, as the Supreme Court takes up a potential blockbuster case after Thanksgiving.

When they return to the bench after the holiday, the justices will weigh whether the history of cell phone locations stored by a phone service provider is searchable without a warrant. 

The case, Carpenter v. U.S., centers on Timothy Carpenter, who argues the government violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure when it obtained his cell phone location records from MetroPCS and Sprint without a warrant. Authorities then used that data as trial evidence to convict him of a string of robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio from December 2010 to March 2011. 

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Inside Artificial Intelligence's First Church | WIRED

The new religion of artificial intelligence is called Way of the Future. It represents an unlikely next act for the Silicon Valley robotics wunderkind at the center of a high-stakes legal battle between Uber and Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle company. Papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service in May name Levandowski as the leader (or “Dean”) of the new religion, as well as CEO of the nonprofit corporation formed to run it.

The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” That includes funding research to help create the divine AI itself. The religion will seek to build working relationships with AI industry leaders and create a membership through community outreach, initially targeting AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The filings also say that the church “plans to conduct workshops and educational programs throughout the San Francisco/Bay Area beginning this year.”

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This was on the American Conservative University podcast


https://acu.libsyn.com/show-glenn-beck- ... rmon-myths

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Battle Between Police and Tech Firms Intensifies Over Smartphone Access - WSJ

Amid an intensifying “arms race” between law enforcement and smartphone manufacturers, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is calling for legislation that would grant police a backdoor into mobile devices.

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Supreme court cellphone case puts free speech – not just privacy – at risk | Opinion | The Guardian

Privacy scholars are watching Carpenter’s case closely because it may require the supreme court to address the scope and continuing relevance of the “third-party-records doctrine”, a judicially developed rule that has sometimes been understood to mean that a person surrenders her constitutional privacy interest in information that she turns over to a third party. The government contends that Carpenter lacks a constitutionally protected privacy interest in his location data because his cellphone was continually sharing that data with his cellphone provider.

Privacy advocates are rightly alarmed by this argument. Much of the digital technology all of us rely on today requires us to share information passively with third parties. Visiting a website, sending an email, buying a book online – all of these things require sharing sensitive data with internet service providers, merchants, banks and others. If this kind of commonplace and unavoidable information-sharing is sufficient to extinguish constitutional privacy rights, the digital-age fourth amendment will soon be a dead letter.

To understand the Carpenter case’s full significance, though, it’s necessary to consider the implications the government’s arguments have for first amendment rights. In a brief filed in support of Carpenter, 19 leading technologists explain how easy it is to use a person’s location data to learn about her beliefs and associations. (We represent the technologists.) With very few data points, the technologists observe, an analyst can learn whether a given person attended a public demonstration, attended a political meeting, or met with a particular activist or lawyer. With more data, an analyst can identify social networks and learn not only whether a given person was at a public demonstration but who else attended the demonstration with her.

Journalists and their sources might be at particular risk. Imagine parallel demands for the cell site location information of a journalist who exposed government misconduct and of all the government employees who had access to the information the journalist exposed. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press observes in its own brief filed in the Carpenter case, cell site location information “can reveal the stories a journalist is working on before they are published, where a journalist went to gather information for those stories, and the identity of a journalist’s sources”.

This is why it is a mistake to think about the Carpenter case solely through the lens of individual privacy. A defeat for Carpenter would be a defeat for privacy rights, but it would also mean a dramatic curtailment of first amendment freedoms.

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Army Tests New Super-Soldier Exoskeleton

The Army is testing an exoskeleton technology which uses AI to analyze and replicate individual walk patterns, provide additional torque, power and mobility for combat infantry and enable heavier load-carrying, industry officials said.

Army evaluators have been assessing a Lockheed-built FORTIS knee-stress-release-device exoskeleton with soldiers at Fort A.P. Hill as part of a focus on fielding new performance enhancing soldier technologies.

Using independent actuators, motors and lightweight conformal structures, lithium ion battery powered FORTIS allows soldiers to carry 180 pounds up five flights of stairs while expending less energy.

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Army Tests New Super-Soldier Exoskeleton

The Army is testing an exoskeleton technology which uses AI to analyze and replicate individual walk patterns, provide additional torque, power and mobility for combat infantry and enable heavier load-carrying, industry officials said.

Army evaluators have been assessing a Lockheed-built FORTIS knee-stress-release-device exoskeleton with soldiers at Fort A.P. Hill as part of a focus on fielding new performance enhancing soldier technologies.

Using independent actuators, motors and lightweight conformal structures, lithium ion battery powered FORTIS allows soldiers to carry 180 pounds up five flights of stairs while expending less energy.

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Police accused of trial by social media after tweeting about supercar crash

The police have been accused of committing trial by social media after posting pictures of a crashed Ferrari with comments suggesting the driver had been speeding and taking drugs.

Greater Manchester Police posted the images of the supercar on Twitter after the driver crashed on Saturday.

In a message accompanying pictures of the damaged car, the force's traffic unit, tweeted to its 38,000 followers: "Driver said he was only doing 52 in a 50mph area. Thoughts?"

Shortly afterwards there was a follow up Tweet which read: "Well the driver has just tested positive for Cannabis, so that’s probably played a part."

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Russia Will Build Its Own Internet Directory, Citing US Information Warfare - Defense One

The Russian government will build an “independent internet” for use by itself, Brazil, India, China, and South Africa — the so-called BRICS nations — “in the event of global internet malfunctions,” the Russian news site RT reported on Tuesday. More precisely, Moscow intends to create an alternative to the global Domain Name System, or DNS, the directory that helps the browser on your computer or smartphone connect to the website server or other computer that you’re trying to reach. The Russians cited national security concerns, but the real reason may have more to do with Moscow’s own plans for offensive cyber operations.