Companies are embracing augmented reality and mixed reality for a host of applications across industries. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it would expand global availability of Hololens 2, its mixed reality headset. As part of the announcement, the company also provided a use case detailing how Lockheed Martin is using the headsets to help assemble Orion spacecraft; an integral part of NASA's Artemis Program. In the years ahead, Orion capsules are set to launch astronauts to the moon with an eye toward crewed missions to the Red Planet.

"We are super inspired to see what people are doing in the wild with HoloLens, and we are very excited that we have enough supply worldwide to bring it to this next set of regions," said Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman in a press release.

A four year old video from Wi-Fiber Technology does not even come close to telling the whole story of how law enforcement and Fusion Centers can use this product to secretly monitor Americans.

At approximately the 1 minute mark of the above video, Wi-Fiber offers a glimpse into how government agencies use their product to "improve public safety and emergency response in real-time."

A look at Wi-Fiber's website reveals next to nothing about how their "Self-Forming, Modular, Autonomous, Real-Time, Turn-Key" (S.M.A.R.T.) product is used. Which opens up a ton of questions.

Readers are left guessing as to how and why law enforcement would want to use S.M.A.R.T. until you start to read between the lines.

Initially designed as a low-cost computing board for teaching kids to code, the Raspberry Pi has since evolved into a fully fledged PC comfortably capable of replacing your desktop setup. At the same time, the board's legions of dedicated fans have ensured a steady stream of ingenious open-source projects: media center, weather station, virtual assistant, Lego-powered book scanner – if you can imagine it, the chances are it's been done.

The internet is also filled with Raspberry Pi projects aimed at the home office. In keeping with the current times, we've selected five Pi projects for taking your remote working game to the next level.

Your brain is amazingly adaptable. It can regulate your heart rate, have nightmares, remember a song you last heard decades ago from just a few notes and even pick up an entirely new language.

It can do all that because brains are plastic: able to rewire the pathways they use as they pick up new skills or respond to differences in the world around them. That neuroplasticity is the brain's way of keeping up with changes to the external environment or to the body itself. But soon our brains could face their biggest challenge: being connected to a computer through a brain-computer interface (BCI), something that could change how we view the world, our own bodies, and even the speed at which we can produce changes in the world.

The Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity division has ordered federal civilian agencies to install a security patch for Windows Servers, citing "unacceptable risk" posed by the vulnerability to federal networks.

The DHS order was issued via an emergency directive, a rarely-used legal mechanism through which US government officials can force federal agencies into taking various actions.

The target of the DHS's latest emergency directive is CVE-2020-1472, a vulnerability also known as Zerologon.

The vulnerability is considered extremely dangerous, as it allows threat actors that have a foothold on an internal network to hijack Windows Servers running as domain controllers and effectively take over the entire network.

A seemingly misdirected ransomware attack on a major hospital in Dusseldorf, Germany, earlier this week resulted in widespread information technology (IT) failure and forced medical personnel to redirect emergency patients to other facilities, including one woman whose death may be the first directly linked to such a cyberattack.

German authorities revealed on Thursday that they had made contact with anonymous hackers who carried out a botched ransomware cyberattack that had unintentionally crippled the IT systems of the Dusseldorf University Clinic since the week prior, the Associated Press reported.

A total of 30 servers were encrypted the previous week, according to a recent report issued by the justice ministry of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Though an extortion note was uncovered on one of the encrypted servers, it was actually addressed to Heinrich Heine University, a school affiliated with, but separate from, the hospital.

Trump Administration officials have been saying this for weeks, but on Friday reiterated their intentions to try to enforce a UN Security Council resolution that includes broad sanctions against Iran. Officials say they expect every nation to comply.

The glaring problem with this is that the resolution doesn’t exist, at least not as an active resolution the US wants. The P5+1 nuclear deal gave the US the authority to reimpose sanctions on Iran, but the US had withdrawn from that pact years ago. Though the Trump Administration argued that didn’t matter, the UN has virtually unanimously rejected their interpretation, and rejected the UN Security Council resolution. The US believes the resolution becomes active Sunday, but the reality is it just doesn’t exist legally.

In August, Attorney General William Barr refused to commit to withholding any report by DOJ watchdog John Durham before the November election - causing Congressional Democrats to froth at the mouth over an "October surprise" meant to hurt Joe Biden.

Durham was appointed by Barr to investigate the Russia investigators - including members of the Obama-Biden administration, the FBI and the DOJ.

Now, days after a top prosecutor on the Durham team resigned - reportedly over what she thought was "pressure from Barr to produce results before the November election," the Democratic chairs of four House committees have demanded an "emergency investigation" into Durham's probe, according to the Daily Caller.

In August, Facebook was accused of illegally harvesting the biometric data of users from its photo-sharing app Instagram. Now the social media giant is being sued again, this time for spying on Instagram users through their smartphone cameras, reported Bloomberg.

The new lawsuit, filed Thursday (Sept. 17) in federal court in San Francisco by Instagram user Brittany Condi, claims Facebook gained access to Instagram users' smartphone cameras without their permission. She alleges Facebook spied on users to collect "lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to."

By "obtaining extremely private and intimate personal data on their users, including in the privacy of their own homes," Instagram and Facebook collected "valuable insights and market research," the complaint said.

As some Wall Street banks have summoned traders and other employees back to offices, their ability to enforce social distancing measures will be challenging unless human-like mask-detecting robots are deployed.

Pepper, designed by SoftBank Robotics, is the world's first social humanoid robot able to recognize faces and basic human emotions. The robot stands 120 cm (47 inches) uses optical sensors and artificial intelligence to recognize if people are wearing masks.

It's fall. You know what that means? That's right, it's time for another major iOS update to land.

But this launch feels rushed and chaotic. Yesterday Apple gave developers a 24-hour countdown to the release.

This accelerated release has shaken the dev community. So much so that some developers are quietly hoping that iPhone and iPad users don't install the new update yet.

Other developers are actively warning users to hold off in case of problems.

Days after a U.S. Labor Department administrator told ID tech executives that Washington is losing billions of dollars to online crime, a pair of federal lawmakers introduced legislation to modernize the nation’s digital ID infrastructure.

The Improving Digital Identity Act of 2020 is being sponsored by four congressmen: Illinois Democrat Bill Foster, Rhode Island Democrat Jim Langevin, Georgia Republican Barry Loudermilk and New York Republican John Katko.

Last week, the administrator of Labor’s unemployment insurance office spoke to attendees during a federal ID online conference, saying fraudulent new jobless claims are rampant because digital IDs are unavailable.

Secretive Pentagon research program looks to replace human hackers with AI

In the not-too-distant past, computers were massive machines that could fill an entire room. Today, they fit in the palm of our hands.

For some, the next step in this ever-shrinking and evolving system is a microchip – no bigger than a grain of rice – implanted directly into the body. While this may sound like the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi novel, it’s actually a growing trend amongst a few technologically-savvy individuals.

The use of embedded body microchips is categorized under the spectrum of biohacking, which is basically an umbrella term that covers a wide range of DIY practices, most of which involve the application of a systems-thinking mindset to the human body.

Imagine being able to do everything you do with your smartphone now, but even faster. Imagine being able to enter your home, workplace, or car with just the slightest hand gesture. Imagine sending someone your information just by pointing your finger at their phone.

The Japanese giant Hitachi has developed the world’s smallest and thinnest Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip. Measuring only 0.15 x 0.15 millimeters in size and 7.5 micrometers thick, the wireless chip is a smaller version of the previous record holder – Hitachi’s 0.4 x 0.4 mm “Micro-Chip”. The company used semiconductor miniaturization and electron beam technology to write data on the chip substrates to achieve this decrease in size. The new chips have a wide range of potential applications from military to transportation, logistics and even consumer electronics. Hitachi’s new line of rfid chips are also built with VPN enabled technology.

Hackers have tapped into personal information of more than 46,000 veterans kept by the Department of Veterans Affairs, gaining access to data such as Social Security numbers, VA officials said Monday.

Unauthorized persons accessed a VA Financial Services Center online application in an attempt to steal payments from VA to private physicians who treat veterans in the community, according to the department.

Nine out of 10 coronavirus domains are scams. Half a million Zoom accounts are for sale on the Dark Web. Brute-force attacks are up 400%. And there's more. So much more.

At a time when use of open-source platforms are on the rise, researchers at Kaspersky have warned that sophisticated hackers and crooks are increasingly targeting Linux-based devices - using tools specifically designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the platform.

While Windows tends to be more frequently targeted in mass malware attacks, this is not always the case when it comes to advanced persistent threats (APTs), in which an intruder – often a nation-state or state-sponsored group - establishes a long-term presence on a network.

Months ago we detailed an incredibly scary and Orwellian tool in the local police arsenal known as a "geofence warrant". As described at the time it’s essentially a virtual dragnet over crime scenes where police request to sweep up Google location data drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connections from everyone who happened to be near a crime scene. From this blanket of surveillance law enforcement then try to figure out which phones may be tied to suspects or possible witnesses.

Months ago we detailed an incredibly scary and Orwellian tool in the local police arsenal known as a "geofence warrant". As described at the time it's essentially a virtual dragnet over crime scenes where police request to sweep up Google location data drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connections from everyone who happened to be near a crime scene. From this blanket of surveillance law enforcement then try to figure out which phones may be tied to suspects or possible witnesses.

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

The UK Guardian published an editorial written entirely by an AI language generator called GPT-3.

The assignment?

To convince humans they have nothing to fear from the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology.

In other articles about this essay, they seem to have buried the lead, which you can find in bold in the quote below.

The AI explained that it had no interest in wiping out humankind and would resist any efforts to make it do so. GPT-3 failed in a spectacularly chilling fashion.

I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.

There's been a huge increase in the number of ransomware attacks over the course of 2020, with a seven-fold rise in campaigns compared with just last year alone, according to newly released data from cybersecurity researchers.

Ransomware attacks have been on the rise and getting more dangerous in recent years, with cyber criminals aiming to encrypt as much of a corporate network as possible in order to extort a bitcoin ransom in return for restoring it. A single attack can result in cyber criminals making hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

The Russian Union of Journalists (UJR) has awarded its Solidarity Prize to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is currently fighting extradition to the United States at a British court.

The head of the UJR, Vladimir Soloviev, announced the award on the International Day of Solidarity of Journalists on Tuesday, describing Assange as “a true fighter for the freedom of speech.”

“We had no doubts about who should receive this prize. We decided that it should go to Julian Assange,” he said.

Soloviev expressed concern about Assange’s possible extradition to the US, which he said “might be equal to life imprisonment or death penalty.”

Assange, who had already been informed about the award, donated the monetary part of the prize to “the families of Russian journalists who died [on duty],” according to Secretary of UJR Timur Shafir, who accepted the prize on Assange’s behalf.

Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

The next phase of the 25-year deal between China and Iran will focus on a large-scale roll-out of electronic espionage and warfare capabilities focused around the port of Chabahar and extending for a nearly 5,000 kilometre (3,000 mile) radius, and the concomitant build-out of mass surveillance and monitoring of the Iranian population, in line with the standard operating procedure across China, senior sources close to the Iranian government told OilPrice.com last week.

Cyber-security agencies from France, Japan, and New Zealand have published security alerts over the past week warning about a large uptick in Emotet malware attacks targeting their respective countries.

Emotet activity described in the alerts refers to email spam campaigns that originated from Emotet infrastructure and targeted companies and government agencies in the three countries.

Victim organizations who received the emails, opened, and then ran the attached documents were at risk of getting infected with one of today's most dangerous malware.

Joseph Roosen, a member of Cryptolaemus, a group of security researchers who track Emotet malware campaigns, told ZDNet that the Emotet botnet has been particularly active in recent weeks, and especially active in the three countries.

Cyberattacks during the Russian nationwide vote on the constitutional amendments were detected from the US, the UK, Ukrainian territory and a number of CIS states, Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for International Cooperation in Information Security Andrei Krutskikh told the OSCE conference on cybersecurity Monday.

A new Democratic-aligned political action committee advised by retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, is planning to deploy technology originally developed to counter Islamic State propaganda in service of a domestic political goal – to combat online efforts to promote President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The group, Defeat Disinfo, will use artificial intelligence and network analysis to map discussion of the president’s claims on social media. It will seek to intervene by identifying the most popular counter-narratives and boosting them through a network of more than 3.4 million influencers across the country – in some cases paying users with large followings to take sides against the president.

Submitted by Sovereign Man

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) just got its hands on a whole bunch of location data. The news service Motherboard (Vice’s technology segment) uncovered a procurement order for $476,000 paid to the company Venntel Software last month. Venntel specializes in location data mining, compiling and selling GPS data gathered on users from various phone apps.

Sources who work with Venntel gave Motherboard more insight into the type of data the government now has its hands on.

Venntel’s technology only gives anonymized data, meaning it does not identify specific people or phone numbers. It gives only a randomized identification number. BUT there is an easy way to identify the owners of the phone.

80 people have been charged by the FBI in a "massive conspiracy" to defraud millions of dollars from businesses, the elderly and vulnerable women, according to Oxygen. Most of those charged were Nigerian nationals, according to the report.

Those charged were accused of using various online scams to deceive targets and convince them to hand over "at least $6 million". The group "attempted to steal another $40 million" after that.

The suspects were said to have used both "romance scams" and "business schemes" that allowed them to hack into company escrow accounts. U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna said: “We believe this is one of the largest cases of its kind in US history.”

One scheme uncovered was a Japanese woman who thought she had been conversing with a U.S. Army captain stationed in Syria.

Nothing could be more ridiculous than U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declaring last month that the United States would launch a five-pronged effort under the so-called "Clean Network" program to protect U.S. assets.

Under this initiative, the United States will seek to remove "untrusted" Chinese apps such as TikTok and WeChat from U.S. mobile app stores, limit the ability of Chinese cloud service providers like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent to access cloud-based systems in the United States, and ensure undersea cables "are not subverted for intelligence gathering" by China.

Pompeo has been mongering his "China threat" theory around the world, urging others to guard against China "stealing user data." But what about the track record of the United States in this regard?

A federal appeals court has ruled that the telephone metadata collection program used by the National Security Agency to spy on Americans was illegal, just as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said seven years ago.
The metadata “bulk collection” program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday. The opinion delivered by Judge Marsha Berzon reportedly contained multiple references to Snowden and his role in disclosing the program to the public – for which he became a wanted fugitive.

US internet service provider CenturyLink has suffered a major technical outage on Sunday after a misconfiguration in one of its data centers created havoc all over the internet.

Due to the technical nature of the outage — involving both firewall and BGP routing — the error spread outward from CenturyLink's network and also impacted other internet service providers, ending up causing connectivity problems for many more other companies.

The list of tech giants who had services go down today because of the CenturyLink outage includes big names like Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft (Xbox Live), EA, Blizzard, Steam, Discord, Reddit, Hulu, Duo Security, Imperva, NameCheap, OpenDNS, and many more.

Internet users across the world have reported connection problems in what seems to be a major global outage.

Website Down Detector, which tracks the status of websites, reveals a spike in outages across several sites and online services - including eBay, Twitter, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.

Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov via The Epoch Times,

An Iowa judge ordered a local county auditor to invalidate 50,000 absentee ballot requests, agreeing with a Trump campaign argument that a local elections commissioner broke the law by pre-filling the applications with voters’ personal information.

Judge Ian Thornhill ordered Linn County Auditor Joel Miller (D) to notify the affected voters in writing that their absentee ballot requests cannot be processed because they should not have been pre-filled with their personal information. The impacted voters would have to fill out new requests or vote in person on Election Day. Miller said he would comply with the order and send new blank forms to the voters in September.

The Trump campaign filed similar challenges to other counties in Iowa

Authored by Jack Burns via The Free Thought Project,

It took 33 years but Robocop is now here. Well, not exactly, but the rise of the police state fueled by advancements in technology have given birth to a heads up display equipped helmet sure to please the most anxious of peace officers. It’s called a “Smart Helmet” and it can screen airport passengers for the COVID-19 virus as well as provide the scanning officer with other vital records.

Public officials in Flint, Michigan cannot provide clean drinking water to their residents but travelers to Bishop International Airport can get a glimpse of the new robotic cop helmets where they’re currently deployed.

Under the guise of screening passengers for COVID-19, the Smart Helmet, produced by KeyBiz based in Italy, can scan travelers’ body temperatures from over 20 feet away.

In an unexpectedly brash move from the staid Cupertino tech behemoth, Apple has revoked the developer credentials for Epic Games after it refused to stop directing its users to circumvent Apple's fee-collecting payment channels for its popular Fortnite game.

"We are disappointed that we have had to terminate the Epic Games account on the App Store," Apple said in a statement. "We have worked with the team at Epic Games for many years on their launches and releases. The court recommended that Epic comply with the App Store guidelines while their case moves forward, guidelines they’ve followed for the past decade until they created this situation. Epic has refused."

A court order last week denied Epic’s motion to force Apple to reinstate Fortnite on the App Store.

Sandia Labs - America's premiere government-funded nuclear weapons design lab, has taken aggressive action against an employee, Casey Peterson, who produced a viral video "pushing back on the narrative of modern systemic racism and white privilege."

Here's the long and short of it via Christopher Rufo - director of the Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth & Poverty, who has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix and international television - and has declared 'war' on critical race theory.

Rufo continues:

On Tuesday, Peterson made a YouTube video "pushing back back on the narrative of modern systemic racism and white privilege."

The video quickly hit 10,000 views within the labs and dozens of Sandia employees contacted Peterson to express support.

On Tuesday, with its reporter standing in front of a raging fire, CNN ran a ludicrous chyron stating, “fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be worthy of reporting three days later.

However, for some reason, this chyron was a bridge too far for many people, and the internet is still flooded with memes. It’s apparent that, with this latest denial of objective reality, CNN has finally completed its transformation into Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, whom many Americans remember almost fondly as Baghdad Bob, the Hussein regime propagandist who insisted that Saddam was winning even as U.S. troops entered Baghdad.

In 2003, when our military successfully invaded Iraq and quickly captured Baghdad, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhafk, aka Baghdad Bob, was Saddam Hussein’s Minister of Information. As troops neared and then entered Baghdad, al-Sahhaf gave daily press briefings during which he announced the most outrageous lies about the wars.

China doesn’t want Trump to win in November, according to William Evanina, Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC). Russia, on the other hand, is “using a range of measures” to undermine Joe Biden’s candidacy. The intelligence official also accuses China of “expanding its influence” ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, but only to “deflect and counter criticism” as opposed to a direct attack on the incumbent.

SOURCE: FUTURISM
A group of 11 advocacy organizations, including Fight for the Future and Free Press Action, just signed a letter accusing Democratic Party leadership of throwing Americans’ online privacy under the bus by concealing potentially unauthorized mass surveillance by the FBI.

Specifically, the letter accuses party leaders including Congressman Adam Schiff and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of undermining negotiations to strengthen digital privacy and limit warrantless surveillance or browsing history seizures, Gizmodo reports. It suggests that federal law enforcement is continuing to conduct “dragnet” mass surveillance, even after the laws that allowed those practices expired.

CLOSED DOORS
Particularly damning, Gizmodo reports, is the allegation that Schiff and Pelosi derailed closed-door negotiations among Democrats trying to stop warrantless surveillance in May.

OURCE: GEOPOLITICS ALERT
ABU DHABI (AMA) – ONCE AGAIN, MEDIA OUTLETS REVEAL ISRAELI COOPERATION WITH GULF COUNTRIES IN THE FIELD OF ESPIONAGE AND THE SALE OF SPECIAL CAPABILITIES AND EXPERTISE THAT WILL HELP GULF GOVERNMENTS TRACK DOWN DISSIDENTS. THE ISRAELI NSO COMPANY IN QUESTION IS ALSO MENTIONED IN A VERY IMPORTANT AND SENSITIVE TOPIC RELATED TO ITS ADVANCED SPYWARE, “PEGASUS,” WHICH ENABLES PENETRATION OF MOBILE PHONES.
This time, the Hebrew newspaper, Haaretz, discussed the issue of Israeli-Gulf cooperation in terms of espionage, stating that the NSO company recently sold programs to opponents like the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf countries. According to what the newspaper on Sunday, deals, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, were carried out through official mediation.

The report came to confirm that the Emirati normalization with Israel was an inevitable result of deep and sensitive cooperation between them.

WHAT IS NSO?

With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields. Now, however, in a giant leap of faith, the Pentagon is seeking to take this process to an entirely new level — by replacing not just ordinary soldiers and their weapons, but potentially admirals and generals with robotic systems.

The United States has alleged that sophisticated hacking operations sourced out of North Korea are becoming an increasing threat, and have claimed that Pyongyang is taking part in a rising number of cyberattacks.

A warning from the US government on Wednesday claims that North Korean hackers are tapping into banks around the world to make fraudulent money transfers and cause ATMs to spit out cash.

A technical cybersecurity alert commissioned by four federal agencies, including the Treasury Department and the FBI, wrote that the North Korean government has initiated new hacking efforts recently following decreased activity.

“Since February 2020, North Korea has resumed targeting banks in multiple countries to initiate fraudulent international money transfers and ATM cash outs”, the warning states.

As Tesla eclipses $2000 per share and a nearly $400 billion fully diluted market cap, the obligatory jokes about the company being a "cult stock" will likely echo louder than they ever have.

Those trying to defend the company as not being a "cult" have their work cut out for them - especially with the unveiling of "Tesla Dating", a dating app that's exclusively for Tesla cultists owners.

The app is currently "in the works" and hasn't launched yet, according to Business Insider. Its setup is similar to other dating apps, like Tinder, except that everyone on the app is a verified Tesla owner.

The Pentagon is defending its use of military aircraft to conduct surveillance on the large crowds of demonstrators and in some cases riots which enveloped multiple cities connected with George Floyd's death. A new investigation has exonerated the National Guard after allegations it illegally gathered intelligence on Americans.

It was previously revealed that the National Guard used reconnaissance planes to fly over at least four US cities in order to gather data on growing protests in late May and early June, crucially at a moment President Trump was urging greater action in ensuring law and order in the protest and vandalism-hit cities.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he never personally approved of the program to fly the reconnaissance aircraft over the protests, but National Guard officials say they didn't need higher approval given it was just for observing crowd sizes and to probe if any emergencies such as large fires were unfolding, according to their account.