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Category: Tech Cartel

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

WC Fields warned never to work with kids and animals – advice Ring founder Jamie Siminoff should have heeded.

Ring , the surveillance camera that monitors your doorstep, produced what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy Superbowl ad, showing the device using neighborhood surveillance to locate a missing family pet. Milo found! Be a hero and add to the unbridled neighborhood surveillance! Ok, so that’s not what they said, but that was the viewing public’s takeaway.

“Many viewers on both the right and left were disturbed by the privacy implications of the advertised “Search Party” feature. This AI tool is designed to reunite lost dogs with their owners, and the Super Bowl ad claims that one lost pet is found every day thanks to the technology,” reports Mashable. “Here’s how Search Party works: When a dog is lost, pet owners can upload a picture of their pet, at which point their neighbors’ Ring video doorbells and security cameras will start looking for the lost pup. Of course, as viewers quickly realized, if Ring can do this for lost dogs, there’s no reason it couldn’t identify a human face just as easily.” Read More...

The Tech Bros and Dick Moves

The Tech Bros and Dick Moves

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Illustration courtesy of Pixabay

“About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party… and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend. The places change, but many of the players and the purpose remain the same,” Jebmo posted some eight years ago in blog about Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side.

The bacchanals for all we know are ongoing and still consensual.

“…they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule. Read More...

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

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Image by NVD from Pixabay

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that software is eating the world, and that something big is happening, thanks to Matt Shumer’s piece on the subject, which is  a must-read. Make no mistake about it, AI is here to stay, and it’s no longer a nice-to-have in your professional toolkit. Equally importantly, it’s critical to update it regularly, given the exponential rate at which it’s improving. Also, it’s important to be specific in your requests when utilizing it: It’s up to the user to use the AI and not vice versa.

“Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic…has a thought experiment. Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

“Amodei says the answer is obvious: “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” Read More...

The Games People (in Big Tech) Play

The Games People (in Big Tech) Play

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Photo by ooneiroslyl on Unsplash

Re the headline/lead-in, in the case of Microsoft, it’s a word game. Work with us here. The CEO of Microsoft “Suddenly not sounding too confident about AI not being a bubble,” Futurism reported. “Speaking at the World Economic Forum, (Satya) Nadella pontificated about what would constitute such a speculative bubble, and said that the long-term success of AI tech hinges on it being used across a broad range of industries — as well as seeing an uptick in adoption in the developing world where it’s not as popular, the Financial Times reports. If AI fails, in other words, it’s everyone else’s fault for not using it.”

“He also begged the public to stop using the term “slop,” the rapidly accepted new lingo for describing the shoddy text, images, and videos churned out by AI models. Nadella’s thesis seemed to be that we should stop being mean about AI as it refines its “jagged edges” — which could take a while, by his own admission.”

Fine. We’ll wait. Remember, a huge number of first-to-market Web 1 companies disappeared when the bubble burst. The internet didn’t go away then, either. Read More...

The Internet’s Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Day.

The Internet’s Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Day.

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Image by Luan Luan Rezende from Pixabay

It was just another Tuesday, until it wasn’t. 20% of the internet vanished in a heartbeat, all because Cloudflare, “which is supposed to protect the internet from attacks, accidentally “attacked” itself… when a  routine configuration change (database permission update) triggered a hidden bug in its bot protection system, and in an instant, this “gatekeeper” locked everyone out,” Bitget reported.

It’s not the first major outage we’ve witnessed in the past few months. “Amazon’s AWS Goes Down, Takes Out “Half of the Internet,” said Futurism. “Apps and platforms relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing service, were in a jam… in a striking example of how infrastructure consolidation makes the modern internet vulnerable to a failure by a single major provider.”

And this keeps happening. Days after AWS went dark Microsoft Azure experienced a major outage. “Cisco’s network monitoring service has logged 12 major outages in 2025 so far, 23 in 2024 and 13 in 2023. Cloud service provider outages climbed from 17% to 27% of all outages in 2024, while ISP outages decreased from 83% to 73%,” the Times of India reported. Read More...

Limbic Capitalism and the Age of AI

Limbic Capitalism and the Age of AI

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Image by Mircea Iancu from Pixabay

With AI advancing at breakneck speeds – 11% of the global population are using it – the real question is: is it fast approaching the point where we’re crossing the Rubicon and reaching the point of no return? Let’s be honest, we live in an age of limbic capitalism,  greatly accelerated by the Age of Social, and now AI. Limbic capitalism, according to danieldashnawcouplestherapy.com “refers to a system where businesses exploit human psychology, particularly the limbic system, to encourage excessive consumption and addiction. This concept highlights how modern capitalism increasingly targets emotional and psychological aspects of human behavior to maximize consumer engagement and spending. This practice involves more than just creating addictive products; it involves engineering environments, behaviors, and economies that trap both consumers and employees in cycles of dependence and harm.” And isn’t this the apotheosis of AI, especially when it comes to  LLMs?

Consider: says Futurism, “People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners. Case in point, new research published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans reveals the startling depths some users are plumbing in their relationships with AI chatbots.

“The level of romantic dedication people showed to their bots was startling, to say the least. Many participants told the researchers they were in love with their chatbot, which often involved roleplaying marriage, sex, homeownership, and even pregnancies. Read More...

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

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Photo by Patrick Weissenberger on Unsplash

We have a place outside of the city, with fruit trees and a blueberry bush, which we purchased years ago, at the end of the season, when they were basically dead. We have a green thumb, so we went for it, and nursed it back to life. Our bush is now flourishing. The fruit come ripe in July, one by one, then all at once when it hits peak season. It’s behind a fence to protect it from the animals, but birds are a different story. Try as you might, birds always find a way to get to the fruit, and we do our best to scatter them.

We needed to go into the city for a few days for meetings, just as the blueberries were beginning to hit their prime. We expected that the birds would have a field day in our absence, but we were looking forward to enjoying at least a few berries.

We were wrong: the ripe berries had been picked clean. Read More...

The Rabbit Hole of No Return?

The Rabbit Hole of No Return?

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Image by Leo from Pixabay

While we might personally believe that it’s a bit nuts to pour your heart and soul out to AIs, people do just that and this just in: “A small but growing number of users of artificial intelligence engines like ChatGPT are developing psychotic delusions from their conversations with the services,” former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson warned.

“People claimed a range of discoveries: A.I. spiritual awakenings, cognitive weapons, a plan by tech billionaires to end human civilization so they can have the planet to themselves. But in each case, the person had been persuaded that ChatGPT had revealed a profound and world-altering truth,” the New York Times reported.

“Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and an author of a forthcoming book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman A.I. Would Kill Us All,”… said OpenAI might have primed ChatGPT to entertain the delusions of users by optimizing its chatbot for “engagement” — creating conversations that keep a user hooked. Read More...

Does AI Have an Agenda?

Does AI Have an Agenda?

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

It certainly seems to, although it is a technology created by humans.* But given, say, Meta’s manipulation of people’s emotions that was revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (and which we reported on), the proverbial men behind the curtain do appear to have one, and the question is, given the past behavior of the tech bros, will AI be used for good instead of evil during this next iteration of tech?

Ah, it’s that old “Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It” George Santayana thing again and if there’s one thing we cannot shrink from doing, it’s connecting dots.

First up, “A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company’s Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court,” TechCrunch reported. Read More...

Exactly Who Was Behind that TikTok Ban?

Exactly Who Was Behind that TikTok Ban?

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Whether the TikTok ban was short-lived or not, time will tell. It’s back for now, which is good news for the said 170M Americans who depend on the platform for income.

So, with all of the egregious behavior we’ve seen on the part of platforms like Google/Alpha with its globally recognized monopolistic practices and Facebook, which has how many lawsuits against them,  it was TikTok that suddenly went dark?

If you’re wondering why Congress moved so quickly and decisively against TikTok, you need to look no further than to Mark Zuckerberg himself. Read More...