US surveillance firms run a victory lap amid Trump’s immigration crackdown | Technology
Hello and welcome to Techscape. I am her host Blake Montgomery and currently enjoy Shirley Jackson's scary final novel, which we always lived in the castle.
A age of corporate surveillance
Monitoring is industrialized and privatized. It is a big business in the United States and it grows.
My colleagues Johana Bhuiyan and Jose Olivares report on the companies that support Donald Trump's procedure in immigration, which according to their last quarterly financial reports organizes a round of victory:
Palantir, the technology company, and the Geo Group and Corecivic, the private prison and surveillance company, said this week that they were expecting more money than Wall Street due to the government's procedure.
“Well, as always, I was warned against making our bombastic numbers a little modest,” said Alex Karp, the managing director of Palantir, in an investor call at the beginning of this week. Then he crossed the “extraordinary numbers” of the company and its “enormous pride” in his success.
The executives of the private prison company could hardly contain their excitement during their respective calls and mark the possibilities for the “unprecedented growth” in the area of the immigration authority.
Read the whole story: Companies that support Trump's traddown
In the meantime, Microsoft's cloud computing product enables the mass surveillance of Palestinian telephone lines, according to an examination published in the Guardian.
With Azure's almost limited storage capacity of Azure, the IDF unit 8200 began building up a powerful new mass monitoring instrument: a comprehensive and intrusive system that collects and stores the recordings of millions of mobile phone calls that were made every day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The cloud-based system das was put into operation for the first time in 2022-GERMANTED 8200 to save a huge abundance of calls every day over longer periods.
Read the whole story: “One million calls per hour”: Israel, who rely on Microsoft Cloud
Microsoft was not publicly enthusiastic about the surveillance initiative and has started an internal request Consequences of history.
Hear: How Israel used Microsoft Technology to spy on Palestinians – Podcast
Turbulence in technology
Meta is again under the hard lens of an examination of the US congress, again about questions about the safety of children. Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation by the company at the end of last week. Reuters had appeared an internal document of the company in which the guideline of the AI chatbots was described in order to have “romantic or sensual” conversations with children. The company has mixed the guidelines since then.
Everything about the counter reaction is known.
The same reporter who published the first Reuters history, Jeff Horwitz, broke the history of the Facebook files in Wall Street Journal, in which documents were shown that Meta understood that the use of their social networks, especially girls, could lead to depression. The Senator, who opened the recent investigation, Hawley, also grilled Zuckerberg on child safety problems in early 2024.
Since so many elements of controversy are so familiar, will it stimulate outrage or apathy? Plausible logic lines could lead to both. Will this turmoil bring strict regulation on Zuckerberg's head? Or will the US population and legislators bat and say that they have ever seen it?
Read the whole story: Meta faces AI guidelines that enables bots to have “sensual” conversations with children
Robot against people, physically and emotional
People compete against robots Irl and online. My colleague Amy Hawkins reports from the Arena of China's Robot Games:
After the audience in the National Speed Skating Oval with 12,000 seats, which were built for the 2022 Winter Olympics, stood for the Chinese national anthem on Friday morning, the games supported by the government began.
In addition to kickboxing, humanoids took part in athletics, football and dance competitions. A robot had to get out of the 1500-meter robot because his head flew on the track on the track.
After newsletter promotion
Read the whole story: Box, run, crash: China's humanoid robot games show progress and restrictions
Act online KI chatbots manufacturers less combative. Anthropic programmers give their creations with characteristics to defuse conflicts. My colleague Rob Booth reports on the latest security measure by Anthropic, with which the chat bot potentially “disturbing” conversations with users, whereby the need to “welfare” the AI is necessary according to the company's announcement:
Anthropic, whose advanced chatbots are used by millions of people, discovered that his Claude Opus 4 tool performed harmful tasks for his human champions, e.g.
The company based in San Francisco with a value of 170 billion USD has now given Claude Opus 4 (and the Claude Opus 4.1-update)-a large language model (LLM) that understand, generate and manipulate human language to “end potentially depressing interactions”.
Read the whole story: Chatbot who gave the authority to close “disturbing” chats to protect his “well -being”
Our online lexicon according to the value
The Cambridge Dictionary announced on Sunday that it added a number of new words to the dictionary. With the new entries, British lexicographs nodded the influence of the Internet in the way we speak and write.
“Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and catch in the dictionary,” said Colin Mcintosh, the lexical program manager of the dictionary.
The words included “Tradwife”, short for “traditional woman” and “Delulu”, an extended abbreviation of “delusion”. Both are rather remarkable for their connotations – the former of social conservatism, which is expressed by marriage behavior and the latter of knowledge and the choice winked to follow an incorrectly informed way – than their names.
Read the whole story: 'Skibidi', 'Delulu' and 'Tradwife' among words that have been added to Cambridge Dictionary
Another, more interesting in my head, the word was entered in the dictionary: Skibidi, from “Skibidi Toilet”, which refers to a series of animated shorts in which threatening human heads appear from toilets and fight with TV chief men in complaints. The toilets begin to sing part of the song Cathedral cathedral yesIncluding the line “Shtibididob DOB DOB DOB DOB DOB yes” when the viewer watches with sound. The first word was transferred to “Skibidi” for English speakers.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines Skibidi as “a word that can have different meanings such as” cool “or” bad “or can be used as a joke without real meaning. An example of its use is:” What the ski bidi do? “
When I was a child, my parents watched the siblings confused and I looked at Spongebob -Quadratiker on Saturdays. The show was incomprehensible to them in every respect – premise, actions, graphics, voices. Imagine the animated toilets as a gener alpha successor, which is delightful for children in bizzing, twice the fact that they are amazed on their parents' faces.
“Tradwife” and “Delulu” have fixed meanings that relate to real human actions and emotions. “SkiBidi”, on the other hand, with his use as a emphatic, humorous filler word with “non -real meaning” refers via Cambridge to nothing like the frenzied feeling of scrolling through too many videos in a session. Which words are useful? Maybe only skibidi.
Jean Baudrillard shaped the concept of the “Simulacra” words or pictures without an origin in reality and which do not refer to a real thing – when writing about the media of his day, especially television. “SkiBidi” is also a hyperreal word that only refers to the strange and continuous breaking of the meaning that has subjected a specific word online.
“The territory no longer goes in front of the card, nor will it survive. From now on it is the map that precedes the territory,” he wrote in 1981.
The word is not preceded by the TikTok, nor are it surviving. From now on it is the video that precedes the definition.
