Only months after it was disclosed that the Pentagon was using artificial intelligence (AI) to hunt for terrorists, officials have now acknowledged that Google has been collaborating with the Department of Defense to use AI in analyzing drone footage. The disclosure comes amid an uproar among Google employees who aren’t happy to be assisting in the development of military applications.

While Google has had controversial contracts with the government before — most notably with the NSA — this is its “pilot” project with Project Maven, which is itself the Pentagon’s own flagship weaponized AI program. The purpose of Project Maven is to implement Big Data and machine learning into the U.S. military, which officials say is currently in a new AI arms race with China and Russia. According to information from an internal mailing list, Google will now join this arms race and assist the DoD with storing and analyzing the massive troves of data from aerial drones.

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC reminds investors that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Intel Corporation ("Intel" or the "Company") (NASDAQ:INTC) and certain of its officers, on behalf of shareholders who purchased Intel securities between July 27, 2017 and January 4, 2018, both dates inclusive (“Class Period”). Such investors are encouraged to join this case by visiting the firm’s site: http://www.bgandg.com/intc.

This class action seeks to recover damages against Defendants for alleged violations of the federal securities laws under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

An inspector general audit found dozens of systems across the agency's networks were running old and outdated software, and in some cases, computers hadn't received security patches for five years.

Late last year, Internet Brands, a company under the global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR & Co.) umbrella, announced its acquisition of WebMD Holdings. Purchase price: $2.8 billion.1,2,3 The company also bought the wellness company Nature's Bounty Co. last year,4 and already owns a number of other health-related internet brands, including DentalPlans.com, eHealthForum.com, HealthBoards.com, AltMD.com and FitDay.com.5

And, since WebMD owns Medscape and MedicineNet.com, these sites now belong to KKR's Internet Brands as well.6 Internet Brands' CEO Bob Brisco told Forbes:7

"WebMD and Medscape are the market leaders in online health with unparalleled reach to consumers and health care professionals. Since its founding, WebMD has established itself as a trusted resource for health information. We look forward to delivering that resource to even more users, by leveraging our combined resources and presence in online healthcare to catalyze WebMD's future growth."

A day before she resigned as White House communications director, Hope Hicks told the House Intelligence Committee last week that one of her email accounts was hacked, according to people who were present for her testimony in the panel's Russia probe.

Under relatively routine questioning from Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., about her correspondence, Hicks indicated that she could no longer access two accounts: one she used as a member of President Donald Trump's campaign team and the other a personal account, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the closed meeting of the Intelligence Committee was supposed to remain private.

Hicks, who portrayed herself as not savvy in matters of technology, told lawmakers that one of the accounts was hacked, according to two sources who were in the room. It is unclear if Hicks was referring to the campaign or the personal account.

In 2017 Harvard and Columbia Journalism Review found that The Gateway Pundit was the 4th most influential conservative news source in the 2016 election.
Because of this we were targeted and have seen our numbers related to Facebook and Twitter decline dramatically.

In every single Facebook category our numbers are down. In page visits our numbers were skyrocketing before the election. Then in three distinct periods our numbers were cut off.

This had nothing to do with the quality of our posts as we have proof that our generic numbers are up and and continue to increase.

In all statistical categories provided to us by Facebook our current numbers are below linear projections of where we should be.

In February Facebook launched another algorithm change to their platform. With the changes we saw our traffic dwindle even further.

Tech Giants Google and Facebook are currently purging conservative content from Facebook and YouTube — They are hiding conservative stories on Google — They are shadow-banning conservative news on all social media.

In February Facebook launched a new algorithm to ensure that conservative news would not spread on the social media platform.

This was after Facebook announced it was losing 50,000,000 user hours a day in the previous quarter.

The algorithm change caused President Donald Trump’s engagement on Facebook posts to plummet a whopping 45%.

In contrast, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) do not appear to have suffered a comparable decline in Facebook engagement.

Top conservative Facebook pages with daily traffic in the millions have seen 75% to 95% drop in traffic.

Young Cons, Western Journalism, SarahPalin.com, Independent Journal Review, Right Wing News, and several others have seen dramatic loss in traffic.

Every time the techno-tyrants try to destroy free speech, it backfires on them. When YouTube terminated my entire Health Ranger channel last Saturday without any justifiable reason whatsoever, it became obvious to me that the time had come to pull the trigger on a p2p file distribution technology I’ve been researching for several years.

Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are at war with human freedom. They’ve decided to selectively terminate content based purely on political bias, wiping out extremely valuable channels of human knowledge and freedom in the process. Understand that freedom of the press is now being utterly destroyed by these techno-tyrants that have been infested with radical left-wing crybullies and snowflakes who now serve as “trusted flaggers” to selectively censor their targets.

The unverified claim was contained within a multitude of memos compiled by Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was conducting opposition research on then-candidate Donald Trump for Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

Of note, the 35-page "Trump-Russia" dossier used in part by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant on one-time Trump campaign advisor Carter Page was comprised of seventeen of Steele's memos - including one which alleged that Trump had paid "a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him," which would defile a bed that Barack and Michelle Obama had slept in during a state visit - an allegation attributed to four individuals' second-hand reporting.

On Tuesday, we learned that Peter Strzok, the FBI investigator in charge of looking into Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private email server, actually ignored an indication that a foreign power hacked into the server, thus putting national security at risk.

Remember: former FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the Hillary server was indeed hacked. And we also know that Strzok, who was viscerally anti-Trump during the election and openly wished that Hillary would wallop him in the presidential race, actually changed the wording on the final FBI report on the server usage to effectively help Clinton avoid federal charges.

Now, it turns out, the corruption goes deeper. Much deeper. All the way to the White House, in fact.

Fox News is reporting that Strzok’s ignoring of the breach was actually approved of with the consent of then-President Barack Obama.

Amid talk of workplace automation in the US, it seems humans are fighting back, quite literally. Crash reports filed in California in 2018 reveal that humans are going on the rampage against robot cars.

Of six crash reports involving driverless cars filed in California in 2018, two involved a human approaching the car and attacking it.

If you did not receive Wednesday's CLG Newsletter (Headline: EMS, Deputies Ordered Not to Enter Florida School After Shooting Began), please check your spam bin! This particular edition was chock filled with nuggets regarding the very strange incident aka the Parkland school shooting. The sociopaths/NSA best buds at Google decided that you don't have the right to read it. Addendum: Yahoo also determined this edition to be spam-worthy.

If you can't locate this edition, please feel free to write me: lori@legitgov.org, and ask for a re-send. It was an important edition.

After the prosecution of a California doctor revealed the FBI’s ties to a Best Buy Geek Squad computer repair facility in Kentucky, new documents released to EFF show that the relationship goes back years. The records also confirm that the FBI has paid Geek Squad employees as informants.

One user reportedly tried to turn the lights off in their home but Alexa repeatedly turned the lights back on, eventually uttering an 'evil laugh,' according to BuzzFeed.

Another Echo Dot owner said they told Alexa to turn off their alarm in the morning and she responded by letting out a 'witch-like' laugh.

Alexa is programmed in many voice-activated devices with a preset laugh, which can be prompted by asking: 'Alexa, how do you laugh?'

But so far, it's unclear why Alexa is laughing even when users don't ask her to.

Disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok was notified of a potential breach into Hillary Clinton’s server, but failed to follow up in a ‘significant way,’ reports FOX News.

Social media giants Google and Facebook, which together soak up nearly 80 percent of all online ad revenue, have declared war on conservative media and conservative figures.

Recent changes in the companies’ algorithms that allegedly were made to ‘weed out’ fake news instead have been weaponized to weed out independent media and right-leaning voices that don’t comport with the Marxist Left ideology of the sites’ owners.

Some sites and conservatives that have Facebook pages have seen their traffic drop anywhere from 75 percent to 95 percent.

Ordinarily, that’d be just fine — unfair but fine given that as private companies, they can run their businesses as they see fit.

But there’s more to it than that. There’s a legal aspect as well.

Your ability to speak freely is under extreme assault as YouTube, Facebook, Google and Twitter are now pursuing the most outlandish censorship purge they’ve ever attempted. (They’re going for broke to desperately try to control the narrative on everything…)

At stake is our very democracy, for without the ability to engage in public debate that’s free from interference by the tech giants, we no longer have the knowledge base from which a sustainable democracy can exist at all. Censorship is tyranny, and it is by definition anti-democratic. Censorship by the tech giants is a form of bullying aimed at selected political targets to silence their views and expel them from public discussion or debate.

Dart, Objective-C, Coffeescript, Lua, and Erlang top the list of coding languages that developers should avoid learning in 2018 due to their lack of community engagement, jobs, and growth.

The Anti-Defamation League has stated that social media companies YouTube, Twitter and Facebook may use the group’s “Online Hate Index” to detect hate speech on their platforms.

The ADL published a video on their YouTube page recently outlining the use of their new “Online Hate Index.” The video features Brittan Heller, the director of the ADL Center for Technology and Society. Heller explains the goal of the new index is to “help tech platforms better understand the growing amount of hate on social media, and to use that information to address the problem.” The index will reportedly use machine learning, artificial intelligence, and social science to identify trend and patterns in so-called “hate speech.”

"Flippy" is now on active duty.
Flippy, a burger-flipping robot, has begun work at a restaurant in Pasadena, Los Angeles. It is the first of dozens of locations for the system, which is destined to replace human fast-food workers.

Flippy is being installed in 50 locations.

Each flippy costs $60,000 and costs $12,000 a year to operate. One Flippy can cook 12 burgers. A worker making $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, working 50 weeks a year would cost $31,200 plus benefits (assuming 2 weeks paid vacation).

But Flippy can work two shifts and it never gets sick. For it to be employed in 50 locations, someone must think Flippy is worth it.

The Saudi Public Prosecutor has accused the renowned social networking site YouTube of contributing to spreading extremist ideology and helping recruit young people to join terrorist groups.

The prosecutor made the accusations during the trial of eight Saudis and two Yemenis accused of shooting at a security patrol in Riyadh in 2005.

The prosecution said investigations revealed that the group members received instructions to carry out their terrorist attacks from a Daesh leader through videos published on YouTube.

The prosecutor accused the defendants of 63 charges, including listening to lectures by Daesh thinkers via YouTube, responding to an inflammatory lecture calling to kill foreigners and security men, as well as carrying out instructions from one of the organisation’s leaders to shoot at security men with the intention of killing them.

Just a week after code repository GitHub was knocked offline by the world's largest recorded distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the same technique has been used to direct an even bigger attack at an unnamed US service provider.

According to DDoS protection outfit Arbor Networks, that US service provider survived an attack that reached an unprecedented 1.7Tbps.

Last week Arbor, Cloudflare and Akamai reported an uptick in amplification attacks that abuse memcached servers to ramp up by traffic by a factor of 50,000.

Digital forensics firm Cellebrite - which helped the FBI crack iPhone used by the terrorist in the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, offers "Unlocking & Extraction Services" for several devices, including iPhones, iPads and iPods running iOS 5 through 11 - and Android devices including the Samsung Galaxy, Galaxy Note, and other devices running the Google OS such as Alcatel, Nexus, HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola, ZTE and more. The service costs as low as $1,500 per device.

Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that's become the U.S. government's company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11 (right up to 11.2.6). That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology.

From the instant replay that decides a game to the bodycam footage that clinches a conviction, people tend to trust video evidence as an arbiter of truth.

But that faith could soon become quaint, as machine learning is enabling ordinary users to create fabricated videos of just about anyone doing just about anything.

Earlier this month, the popular online forum Reddit shut down r/deepfakes, a subreddit discussion board devoted to using open-source machine-learning tools to insert famous faces into pornographic videos. Observers say this episode represents just one of the many ways that the this technology could fuel social problems, particularly in an age of political polarization. Combating the negative effects of fabricated video will require a shift among both news outlets and news consumers, say experts.

During the final months of the Clinton email investigation, FBI agent Peter Strzok was advised of an irregularity in the metadata of Hillary Clinton’s server that suggested a possible breach, but there was no significant follow up, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.

Sources told Fox News that Strzok, who sent anti-Trump text messages that got him removed from the ongoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, was told about the metadata anomaly in 2016, but Strzok did not support a formal damage assessment.

One source said: “Nothing happened.”

Facebook can be a wonderful thing. It allows you to connect with people that you haven’t seen in twenty years, keep up with family who live in other states in a photo-driven way that phone calls can’t provide, share cat memes with everyone you know, even those who hate cats.

But Facebook isn’t all nice and harmless. You wouldn’t believe the information that they track about you, and this raises serious concerns for both our privacy and our children’s privacy.

For example, did you know that Facebook never deletes any information that it gathers about you. Never. An article by The Free Thought Project provides some details:

Once social media companies and websites began acquiescing to EU Commission demands for content takedown, the end result was obvious. Whatever was already in place would continually be ratcheted up. And every time companies failed to do the impossible, the EU Commission would appear on their virtual doorsteps, demanding they be faster and more proactive.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft all agreed to remove hate speech and other targeted content within 24 hours, following a long bitching session from EU regulators about how long it took these companies to comply with takedown orders. As Tim Geigner pointed out late last year, the only thing tech companies gained from this acquiescence was a reason to engage in proactive censorship.

Knowing how long your device will last is important when weighing up whether to lay down hard-earned cash on a product.

Now you can do the calculation yourself following instructions from Asymco mobile analyst Horace Dediu, who has crunched the numbers on Apple sales and active devices to calculate the average lifespan of Apple devices.

The average lifespan of all Apple products, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, and iPod touch between 2013 and today is four years and three months, according to Dediu's calculation.

Often, the best way to get something is to simply ask for it. That’s probably what the Israeli government thought when it sent an email to several American researchers and firms who make so-called zero-days, tools that take advantage of vulnerabilities in software that are unknown to the company that makes the software.

Motherboard has obtained a copy of the letter, which more than half a dozen sources described as unsolicited and unusual in how blunt and direct it was. Motherboard confirmed that at least five American firms received the letter, and multiple sources told us it was sent to many more. The letter provides a rare peek into how governments approach researchers who find, develop, and sell zero-day exploits, which are sensitive and often expensive hacking tools that are used to break into smartphones, computers, and internet browsers.

Now openly admitted, governments and militaries around the world employ armies of keyboard warriors to spread propaganda and disrupt their online opposition. Their goal? To shape public discourse around global events in a way favourable to their standing military and geopolitical objectives. Their method? The Weaponization of Social Media.

Security experts have voiced their concern about the worsening scale of the data breach.

Tom Kemp, CEO of identity and access management specialist Centrify, described the 147.9 million affected consumers as an “alarming” number.

“Despite an increase in security investments, breaches continue to rise," Kemp said in an email to Fox News. "The fact is, four out of five breaches (including those experienced by Equifax, Yahoo!, Uber, HBO, and more) exploit compromised identities, stolen passwords or privileged access.”

In what has been dubbed the “big bitcoin heist,” 600 computers used to mine cryptocurrencies have been stolen in Iceland. The powerful computers are worth almost $2 million.

The computers were stolen from data centers across the country. Police said it’s the biggest series of robberies to happen in Iceland, and it’s believed to be connected to organized crime, Iceland Monitor reports.

“This is a grand theft on a scale unseen before,” Reykjanes police chief Olafur Helgi Kjartansson said, AP reports. “Everything points to this being a highly organized crime.”