Weaponized GPS

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69606477/porsche-russia-reportedly-left-unable-to-drive-satellite-connection-may-be-at-fault/

No surprises here; there are currently medical and industrial equipments in Iran, sourced from European Union, that are inoperative since they are denied access to European servers due to blanket sanctions against Iran, which include IT.

In Venezuela, due to US sanctions, certain banking and digital services have been affected as well.

I think it is clear that reliance on foreigners for IT could be a grave strategic mistake; further, that China's very expensive effort to indegenize IT has been the correct policy all along.

I also think that providers of Cloud Computing, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, even though they have global data centers for servicing their clients, are sources of cyber-security threats for their clients, specially those clients that are not domiciled in North America or in EU.

Cloud Computing can and will be weaponized, just as US Dollar, Siemens industrial equipment, Motorola pagers, Software updates, spare parts for civil Aviation, and , presently, GPS have been weaponized.

I feel sorry for the Cloud Computing vendors since, in my opinion, they did not create their products with the expectation of them being used by their governments as geopolitical weapons.

Where ChatGPT Is Used

https://www.axios.com/2025/12/15/ai-chatgpt-jobs

AI: Who is making money?

https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/831818/ai-mercor-handshake-scale-surge-staffing-companies

AI Analyzes Language

https://www.wired.com/story/in-a-first-ai-models-analyze-language-as-well-as-a-human-expert/

Singing Books -II

I am pleased to learn of a company that makes singing books, something I had been interested in for many years (please see: https://crimsonreason.blogspot.com/2007/02/singing-book.html)

https://www.calisbooks.com/collections/sound-books

Robots of War [Brave New World]

From The Daily Telegraph of the UK

If you want to know more about the apocalyptic future Europol is warning us about - slight journalistic exaggeration, here - you can have a look at the report, which I found online.

On the one hand, we are headed for a total-surveillance society, and it is well under way in England already, with the police making increasingly widespread use of facial recognition, drones and AI. On the other, law-enforcement agencies, the intelligence services and the military are clearly worried that the criminals, bad actors and terrorists will also be able to access such technologies - and they already are - in order to cause disruption and far worse.

The full repercussions of the deployment of AI across the board are difficult to assess. A direct consequence of AI-based automation may well be much higher unemployment, at the very least in the short term, and this could easily lead to discontent, strikes and rioting, if entire industries are affected. 

What is new, in my opinion, is that, with AI, which is an advanced form of computerization, sectors that had been spared will now be affected severely - and that is all the jobs one used to refer to as 'white-collar jobs'. Clerical and even senior positions in, for instance, insurance, may be affected (cf. assessment of risk, something AI can do very well), but also industries such as graphic design (it is happening already), translation, editing (and even writing 'new' content), special effects in videos and films (and even writing scripts and acting, if actors are replaced by avatars), not to mention call centres (for simpler tasks) and the like. 

Robots could groom children and trigger war with humans

Robots programmed to groom children, and mobs rioting in the streets against the automatons that have taken their jobs. This science-fiction-style dystopia is what may await Europe in 2035, according to researchers from the EU’s police agency. In an extraordinary 48-page report about the impact of robots and drones on law enforcement, published this week, Europol has outlined a series of “plausible future scenarios” that could have been lifted from the pages of an Isaac Asimov novel.

AI Course Requirement

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/12/13/purdue-university-approves-new-ai-requirement-for-all-undergrads/

AI & Suicide

We read:

The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine have sued OpenAI and their CEO, Sam Altman. The wrongful death suit accuses ChatGPT of actively discouraging Raine from seeking help for his mental health issues, helping him write a suicide note, and even giving advice on setting up a noose so he could die by suicide. OpenAI has responded to the suit: “To the extent that any ‘cause’ can be attributed to this tragic event, Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries and harm were caused or contributed to, directly and proximately, in whole or in part, by Adam Raine’s misuse, unauthorized use, unintended use, unforeseeable use, and/or improper use of ChatGPT.” In other words, it’s not ChatGPT or OpenAI’s fault because Raine violated the company’s terms of service. (MS/WNBC New York) ...While OpenAI is violating the terms of humanity.

The AI system is trying to help you do what you want to do. It does not contradict you. It wants to please...and the fact that it has created and maintained a profile of you somewhere, in some data center, further reinforces and restricts its possible responses...

AgiBot Robots

In the news:

https://english.news.cn/20251210/95a8239f3b65442f9c8669ecdd23d44b/c.html

News of Self-driving Cars

Which goes to show that self-driving cars can be as stubborn and unreasonable as any (human) driver. 

If I understood correctly, it is a software problem. Cars - all of them - have become computers on 4 wheels: if one goes by the performance of the average PC running Windows, this is hardly reassuring ("Your car speaking! Good morning! Sorry but I need to shut down the engine for a short period of time to run a critical update. You might want to re-schedule your urgent hospital appointment as you are going to be late - approximately 20 minutes. Thank you! Have a nice day!"). 

https://youtube.com/shorts/oNVDL2kzCpM?si=cUDHI0seK9DweIZY

Pigeons Fitted with Neural Chips [Brave New World]

From METRO of the UK, November 28, 2025

How about fitting infantrymen with neural chips, to better steer them into battle and make sure they move forward, even when they are scared to death? As for the pigeons, the next step would be to turn them into flying suicide bombers... 

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Tech. & Christmas

 

Peeping-Tom Hackers in Korea

BBC

Those video-cameras, known as IP cameras or home cameras, are meant to protect the people on site and enhance their security but they are, really, a potential way to invade a person's privacy and compromise it in the worst possible way. In other words, those hi-tech tools are also - paradoxically and yet unsurprisingly - a major security risk. 

No surprises here; both Korea and Japan are major Peeping-Tom nations - the earlier perpetrators only had cameras and were taking pictures looking under the women's dresses and skirts.  This is a major quantitative escalation.

______________

Four people have been arrested in South Korea for allegedly hacking more than 120,000 video cameras in homes and businesses and using the footage to make sexually exploitative materials for an overseas website.

Police announced the arrests on Sunday, saying the accused exploited the Internet Protocol (IP) cameras' vulnerabilities, such as simple passwords.

A cheaper alternative to CCTV, IP cameras - otherwise known as home cameras - connect to a home internet network and are often installed for security or to monitor the safety of children and pets.

Locations of cameras hacked in the country reportedly included private homes, karaoke rooms, a pilates studio and a gynaecologist's clinic.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj01q6p7ndlo