logo

A Brave New World: A dystopian high-tech future

  • Home
  •  
  • A Brave New World: A dystopian high-tech future
    • 11 MAR 24

    Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power (The Washington Post)

    Comment: In Australia, the discussion over the urgent need to upgrade  Australia’s.power grid infrastructure is over the need to incorporate new sustainable power sources, supporting EVs. as well as the necessity to replace aging power plants, many of which are coal powered. In America however, it’s another far bigger challenge, with successive federal administrations essentially “kicking the can down the road” so that now the US ranks 13th in the world for having a modern national infranstructure . Estimates of the cost of upgrading America’s power grid vary but can be as high as $2.59 trillion by 2035. If America hopes to catch up with the world’s largest electricty producer; China, which produces approximately 30% of the world’s electricity production they have one hell of a long way to go. SNIP

    Excerpt from The Washington Post,

    AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up. Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

    In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades. Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma. The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants. “When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
    SNIP

    Read more →
    • 10 DEC 22

    How low can Ericsson go? Getting the Girl Scouts to flog 5G and the IoT.

    Excerpt: The Girl Scouts’ Latest Business Project: Hailing 5G Cellphone Technology

    Beyond developing their camping skills, participating in a food drive to aid the hungry and donating pajamas for seniors, Girl Scouts across America this year were offered a new way to earn a special uniform patch: learning about the wonders of 5G cellphone technology and, in some cases, promoting it.

    The opportunity came courtesy of Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications giant, which sponsored the “Ericsson Limited Edition 5G & IoT” (Internet of Things) patch program. The program, still available on at least one Girl Scout website, targets all age levels, from Daisies (kindergarten-age Scouts) to Ambassadors (those in high school), with an array of activities intended to “introduce Girl Scouts to 5G and the Internet of Things.”…SNIP

    Read more →
    • 30 NOV 22

    Astronomers Worldwide Troubled by New [5G] ‘Cell Phone Towers in Space’

    Excerpt: … It isn’t just Bluewalker 3 that concerns astronomers, but rather the fact it serves as a test model for a constellation of over 100 so-called Bluebirds the company aims to launch as part of its plan to build a network of satellites to provide 5G connectivity from orbit to Earth — “cell phone towers in space,” as the IAU describes them….SNIP

    Read more →
    • 28 OCT 22

    A cosmic risk for the future of our digital civilization (University of Queensland study)

    Excerpt: What is a Miyake Event? – its more like a cosmic explosion that may last weeks, months, or even years. They have demonstrated in the UQ study that they are not associated with solar flares. They are huge bursts of cosmic radiation, and have occurred approximately once every thousand years but what causes them is not yet clear. The 993-994 CE spike was a rapid increase in carbon-14 content from tree rings, and followed the 774-775 CE carbon-14 spike.

    What happened in 774 CE? In the year 774 an enormously powerful blast of matter and energy from space slammed into Earth. The worst recorded solar storm in history was the 1859 solar storm, better known as the Carrington Event. It was powerful enough to cause sparks and fires in telegraph machines and caused power grid failures. The 774 event was so powerful that the storm started multiple forest fires. A study published in Nature journal where a group of Japanese researchers analysed tree ring data to find out about the existence of this ‘solar storm’. According to it, this particular event took place between 774-775 CE. It is estimated that its intensity was 10 times higher than the Carrington event. The evidence was found in Cedar trees in Japan which all show a huge spike in carbon-14. SNIP……….

    THE UQ STUDY

    Read more →
    • 15 JAN 22

    Julian Cribb : It’s the end of politics as we know it

    Excerpt: Politicians are increasingly grappling with phenomena beyond their limited expertise – if they’re paying attention at all.
    Paralysis. Atrophy. Inertia. Perplexity. These terms describe the state of mind of governments around the world, grappling with an existential crisis they do not understand and whose course they appear impotent to change.

    None of the usual levers work, push them or pull them how you will. You can’t halt wildfires by printing money, settle COVID with tax breaks, subsidise the sea so it stops rising, or battle global overheating with armies. The whole political juggernaut, lovingly hammered, screwed and bolted together by politicians and economists over nearly two centuries, is at last seen for what it is: a fantastic, rust-bucket contraption of whistles and wheels that no longer works, if indeed it ever did.

    The science has been in for some time. Modern industrial civilisation is headed for collapse under the onset of 10 catastrophic threats which, singly, severally and collectively, traditional national politics now seems powerless to resolve. It doesn’t help that the world has recently chosen many political leaders – both democratic and autocratic – without the intelligence, learning or ability to understand what is happening. But don’t they look good on TV? SNIP

    Read more →
    • 13 JAN 22

    Cell towers on the Ocean Floor

    Excerpt:
    In 2018, on land and in space, preparations to deploy millions of antennas were very publicly being made and advertised, for “5G,” “Smart Cities,” and the “Internet of Things.” At the same time, and without any publicity, governments, research laboratories, and commercial and military interests were collaborating on plans to create “Smart Oceans” and the “Internet of Underwater Things” (IoUT). They did not consult the fishes, whales, dolphins, octopuses, and other inhabitants of those depths….SNIP

    Read more →
    • 09 NOV 20

    An Electric vehicle may not be as safe as thought.

    Excerpt: In the latest Wall Street International Magazine, in the section on Science and Technology there is a very interesting article on emissions from the production of Electric vehicles (EV). What I found of particular thought provoking interest, is the following:
    An EV’s computers, power systems, motors, active sensors and antennas emit electromagnetic radiation (EMR). The U.S.’s Federal Communications Commission determined that EMR exposure from such devices is safe because it has no significant, immediate effect on body temperature. However, EMR-exposure can cause non-thermal effects: it can damage DNA and increase risk of cancer and other diseases. A vehicle’s EMR emissions can cause a deep brain stimulator (DBS) (a medical implant for neurological diseases like Parkinson’s) to shut off or reprogram. I know a woman who drove her hybrid car after she had a DBS implanted. Each time the car’s battery-charger turned on at stoplights, the computers’ magnetic fields shut off her implant. In 2000, 8-10% of the U.S. population had an implant. If someone has a DBS, they cannot ride in an electric vehicle….SNIP

    Read more →
    • 13 MAY 20

    Legal Action Against 5G in the UK

    Consequence of 5G implementation: The consequence of doing nothing will allow irreparable harm to all life, most particularly the unborn, children, the elderly, anyone with underlying health conditions and people with metal implants. There will be a fundamental difference in our lives, we will lose our privacy as surveillance and social control by industry and governments becomes ubiquitous, tracking and monitoring leading to behaviour modification. We might ask ourselves whether we wish to have our lives become the property of any corporation for control and profit. Are we to be obedient to the interests of others, with choices reduced and decisions determined by an algorithm? Or do we value our right to self determination without coercion, and free from harm?…SNIP

    Read more →
    • 12 MAY 20

    In a post COVID-19 dystopian world “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”

    Excerpt: For a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed. “We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious about it. … We realize that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way.”The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life…SNIP

    Read more →
    • 24 APR 20

    Hacking vulnerabilities with the Internet of Things (IoT)

    Excerpt: Red faces in Red Square, again. Last July, I reported on the hacking of SyTech, an FSB (Federal Security Service) contractor working on internet surveillance tech. Now, reports have emerged from Russia of another shocking security breach within the FSB ecosystem. This one has exposed “a new weapon ordered by the security service,” one that can execute cyber attacks on the Internet of Things (IoT)–the millions of connected devices now in our homes and offices.The goal of the so-called “Fronton Program” is to exploit IoT security vulnerabilities en masse–remember, these technologies are fundamentally less secure than other connected devices in homes and offices. In fact, one of the breached technical documents reported by BBC Russia even explains that “the Internet of Things is less secure than mobile devices and servers.” The security contractors highlight retained default “factory” passwords as the obvious weakness, one that is easy to exploit… SNIP

    Read more →
    • 28 MAR 20

    EPA Suspends Enforcement of Environmental Laws Indefinitely Due to Coronavirus

    Excerpt: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a sweeping suspension of its enforcement of environmental laws Thursday, telling companies they would not need to meet environmental standards during the coronavirus outbreak.The temporary policy, for which the EPA has set no end date, would allow any number of industries to skirt environmental laws, with the agency saying it will not “seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations.” Cynthia Giles, who headed the EPA’s Office of Enforcement during the Obama administration, called it a moratorium on enforcing the nation’s environmental laws and an abdication of the agency’s duty. “This EPA statement is essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future. It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way ’caused’ by the virus pandemic. And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was,” she wrote in a statement to The Hill…SNIP

    Read more →
    • 02 MAR 20

    Brain Scans Reveal Structural Differences In People With “Smart Phone Addiction”

    Excerpt:
    Children entering into the world today are being birthed into a sea of technology that their parents never grew up with. As a result, we don’t really know the long-term consequences these technologies could have on these generations as they age. Preliminary research, however, is already showing significant cause for concern, and one of the latest examples comes from a study published in the journal Addictive Behaviours via German researchers.The researchers examined 48 participants using MRI imaging, and 22 of the participants had smartphone addiction (SPA), and 26 of them were non-addicts. The main findings were that individuals with SPA showed “significant lower” grey matter volume (GMA) in the insula and in certain regions of the temporal cortex compared to the individuals without smartphone addiction, known as the controls. Secondly, right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity was “significantly lower” in individuals with SPA compared to controls. Third, the researchers found associations between the smartphone addiction inventory (SPAI) scores and GMV as well as amplitude of low frequency fluctuations (ALFF), converged on the ACC.The authors wrote that:…SNIP

    Read more →
    • 18 FEB 20

    The Largest Unethical Medical Experiment in Human History (Monograph)

    Excerpt: This monograph describes the largest unethical medical experiment in human history: the implementation and operation of non-ionizing non-visible EMF radiation (hereafter called wireless radiation) infrastructure for communications, surveillance, weaponry, and other applications. It is unethical because it violates the key ethical medical experiment requirement for “informed consent” by the overwhelming majority of the participants. The monograph provides background on unethical medical research/experimentation, and frames the implementation of wireless radiation within that context….SNIP

    Read more →
    • 25 JAN 20

    The Road to Driverless Hell is Paved with Good Deceptions

    One of the prime reasons why 5G is being promoted is that it is claimed that the fast 5G millimeter frequency data rates are necessary to enable the technology where autonomous vehicles unproblematically rule the roads and all those unreliable accident prone human drivers (that’s all of us!) will be finally taken off the roads once and for all time.

    Not necessarily so according to the Tom Lewis article “The Road to Driverless Hell is Paved with Good Deceptions”, published in The Daily Impact. Some good links too! Recommended reading!

    Don

    Read more →
    • 09 JUN 19

    Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain. ( plus an article “Forget Self-Driving Cars. Bring Back the Stick Shift” )

    The following article in the Washington Post has interesting implications for the future of today’s society as we enter the world of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), where more and more of our thinking, and most importantly, our children’s, is done for us by our devices. How will, what has been called the Google Effect, change they way we think and our ability to think independently of our devices? A shrinking brain perhaps?… From the Washington Post By M.R. O’Connor June 5 Excerpts: M.R. O’Connor is a journalist who writes about science, technology and ethics, and is the author, most recently, of “Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World.”It has become the most natural thing to do: get in the car, type a destination into a smartphone, and let an algorithm using GPS data show the way. Personal GPS-equipped devices entered the mass market in only the past 15 or so years, but hundreds of millions of people now rarely travel without them. These gadgets are extremely powerful, allowing people to know their location at all times, to explore unknown places and to avoid getting lost.But they also affect perception and judgment. When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings. And neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions. In a study published in Nature Communications in 2017, researchers asked subjects to navigate a virtual simulation of London’s Soho neighborhood and monitored their brain activity, specifically the hippocampus, which is integral to spatial navigation. Those who were guided by directions showed less activity in this part of the brain than participants who navigated without the device. “The hippocampus makes an internal map of the environment and this map becomes active only when you are engaged in navigating and not using GPS,” Amir-Homayoun Javadi, one of the study’s authors, told me.The hippocampus is crucial to many aspects of daily life. It allows us to orient in space and know where we are by creating cognitive maps. It also allows us to recall events from the past, what is known as episodic memory. And, remarkably, it is the part of the brain that neuroscientists believe gives us the ability to imagine ourselves in the future.Studies have long shown the hippocampus is highly susceptible to experience. (London’s taxi drivers famously have greater gray-matter volume in the hippocampus as a consequence of memorizing the city’s labyrinthine streets.) Meanwhile, atrophy in that part of the brain is linked to devastating conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. Stress and depression have been shown to dampen neurogenesis – the growth of new neurons – in the hippocampal circuit.What isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.”.. SNIP

    Read more →
    • 01 JUN 19

    China’s People Monitoring Software Being Deployed In Darwin (two articles)

    The Chinese government’s desire to ensure social control is well known with its “social credit’ monitoring system the stuff of nightmares for those of us accustomed to personal freedom. But part of the software used by the Chinese government is now being exported and found a customer in the City of Darwin. The City of Darwin has been looking at adopting smart city technology and has decided to implement facial recognition software and other monitoring solutions in order to detect anomalous behaviour or if a known criminal or someone banned from entering a specific area….SNIP

    AND from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
    China’s ‘social credit system’ (SCS)–the use of big-data collection and analysis to monitor, shape and rate behaviour via economic and social processes1–doesn’t stop at China’s borders. Social credit regulations are already being used to force businesses to change their language to accommodate the political demands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Analysis of the system is often focused on a ‘credit record’ or a domestic ranking system for individuals; however, the system is much more complicated and expansive than that. It’s part of a complex system of control–being augmented with technology–that’s embedded in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) strategy of social management and economic development…SNIP

    Read more →
    • 29 MAY 19

    It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

    From the Washington Post (Consumer Tech section) by Geoffrey Fowler
    Apple says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” Our privacy experiment showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled our data – in a single week.

    It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing? (Links removed)Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same – and Apple could be doing more to stop it.On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -– once every five minutes.Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we’ve got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise…SNIP

    Read more →
    • 23 MAY 19

    Watch out for Tesla’s autonomous cars and drunk drivers

    One of the prime reasons for the 5G rollout is its supposed ability to make a world of autonomous vehicles a reality by removing the imperfect human element. Well, so far, Tesla’s efforts to create the perfect driverless car are not going so well, according to Consumer reports. It seems that Tesla’s Autopilot artificial intelligence is on a par with a drunk driver way over the limit…

    Read more →
    • 11 FEB 19

    China’s social credit system

    A dozen or so cities throughout the country are test beds for carrot-and-stick programmes to encourage businesses and individuals to comply with existing rules.
    The efforts have been roundly condemned overseas as Orwellian but for members of the public, the impact of the systems can vary…SNIP

    Read more →
    • 16 OCT 18

    ‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss

    From the Washington Post
    By Ben Guarino

    October 15 at 3:00 PM

    Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest’s insect-eating animals have gone missing, too.

    In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent. In places where long-term insect data are available, mainly in Europe, insect numbers are plummeting. A study last year showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in German nature preserves…SNIP

    Read more →