The Trump administration’s violent deportations and crackdown on protestors against Immigration and Customs Enforcement have set an ominous tone for the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which is taking across a number of North American host cities this month.

Both human rights and football fan groups have voiced concerns over the militarization of law enforcement and presence of ICE agents during the lead-up to the tournament, which is expected to draw many millions of international visitors.

Vice president JD Vance hasn’t exactly helped the situation, warning foreign visitors in chilling comments last year that they should “go home” after the event, or else “they’ll have to talk to [former secretary of homeland security Kristi] Noem.”

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise then that sightings of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dogs at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, raised surveillance fears in the state, as Chron reports. Rumors that the robots were using facial scanning technology on passersby spread like wildfire on social media. However, a Boston Dynamics spokesperson told Chron that the robots “do not have facial recognition capabilities” and will be used to “assist security personnel with investigating things like suspicious packages or other potentially hazardous materials.”

The dogs are part of a broader “Security Spot” initiative by Boston Dynamics owner Hyundai. On its website, the company claims it’s “deploying its largest and most advanced mobility fleet to date and, through its collaboration with Boston Dynamics, becoming the first and only official partner to provide robotics for the tournament.”

“As part of this effort, Security Spot, a four-legged patrol robot, will support on-site security operations, helping contribute to a safer tournament environment,” the website reads.

Nonetheless, netizens were left unsettled by the sight, drawing comparisons to the “Black Mirror” episode titled “Metalhead,” which is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which a woman is relentlessly hunted by an advanced, autonomous robot dog.

“Well, that puts a chill down my spine,” one Reddit user responded to a video of a robot dog cocking its head back and forth while glancing at the person filming, giving the impression of scanning their face.

“I can’t get over how they made it dance while it performs techno-authoritarian surveillance,” another user wrote.

Mexico, which is hosting matches across three venues for the World Cup, will also be patrolling grounds using four robot dogs, called “K9-X,” which function as a kind of first responder, as Wired reported earlier this year. (Authorities did not disclose who makes them or other technical details.) Officials told the publication that the robots will intervene in the event of a fight or drunken debauchery to protect officers’ safety — which, given the reputation of soccer fans, probably isn’t unlikely.

More on the cup: Nike’s AI Designed World Cup Jerseys Are a Disaster

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Be not afraid, human. A new robot developed at Duke University isn’t intended to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who beholds it, but more closely resembles one of those terrifying biblically accurate angels than it does any other machine or living creature you’ve ever seen.

Called Argus, the robot is a rolling, virus-shaped conglomeration of twenty telescoping legs attached to a central core. And it’s completely covered in eyes that let it see in every direction, which is literally how some of the more terrifying versions of the divine creatures are described (see: ophanim.) The result is something that is not only all-seeing, but capable of moving in any direction on a dime.

Its designer Boyuan Chen, a Duke engineering professor, says his team’s goal was to think outside the box and design something that didn’t resemble humans, dogs, or other living creatures that roboticists love to ape. Instead, they focused on uniformity in action, or what Chen calls “dynamic symmetry.”

“Instead of measuring how your legs are arranged around a different part of your body, we’re measuring how fast you can move in any direction,” Chen, who coauthored a new paper published in the journal Science Robotics describing the design, told The Associated Press. “Who said, you know, if you have a robot to help us in a most effective way, it has to look like us?”

“We’re not imitating anything in nature,” Chen added. “We’re imitating everything in nature.”

Not an inch of space is wasted in Argus’ design, which is optimized for agility. The round feet attached to the end of each of its twenty legs are also where its depth sensing cameras are housed, enabling it to watch every step it takes. (It’s named after the one-hundred-eyed giant in Greek mythology.) The legs extend and retract just the right amount they need to navigate the obstacles ahead of it. 

To gauge how well the robot moves, the researchers coined a new design principle called “dynamic isotropy” that measures how uniformly a robot accelerates when it changes direction. Most robots, including clumsy humanoids and flying drones, scored less than 0.6, but Argus clocked in at 0.91.

In footage taken by the researchers, Argus rolls across various terrain with aplomb. A paved street, a sandy beach, and a bumpy forest path each prove no match for the rolling robot. It can even climb up between two parallel walls, providing its most uncanny display as it quickly but smoothly bounces between them while gradually ascending. If one of these ever goes rogue, surely nothing will be beyond its reach.

“Watching Argus move is unlike watching any other robot we’ve worked with,” study coauthor Jiaxun Liu, a Duke graduate student, told the AP. “The first time we saw it navigate among trees and rough terrain, even under heavy collisions, we knew this was something different.”

Chen flipped the traditional robot-script further in another analogy.

“Instead of building a robot hand that looks like a human hand… one idea is to think about having Argus be the hand itself, and it can manipulate objects in any direction,” he told the AP. “The knowledge we can transfer to the rest of the world is much more deeper than building an existing robot or copying an existing species.”

Chen’s team isn’t the only one exploring unorthodox robot designs. Northwestern University researchers recently unveiled modular “metamachines” made of limbs that are each their own independent robot, allowing them to form a greater whole, but survive if broken apart.

More on robots: Oops! Domino’s-Partnered Robotics Startup That Was Supposed to Put Human Pizza Chefs Out of a Job Just Shut Down

The post Behold! Duke Scientists Build Biblically Accurate Angel Robot appeared first on Futurism.

If you were paranoid about digital tracking before, you might want to think twice about reading any further.

New research out of Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology found that the types of Wi-Fi routers we all have in our homes come with a major privacy vulnerability that can be used to identify any human body that comes within their range.

The study, flagged by Gizmodo, used machine learning systems to identify individuals with an accuracy rate of 99.5 percent. To do so, the researchers exploited a vulnerability in a process known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), which was introduced to allow routers to focus Wi-Fi signals on connected devices, as opposed to the older approach, which is to blanket an entire area in coverage.

While BFI is great for network connectivity, it has a major downsides for privacy. For starters, devices connected to a router using beamforming need to send constant feedback in order to be found. As routers send out and receive network feedback, the signal is inevitably impacted by real world factors like pets, walls, and people.

That gap, between the signals routers expect to receive and the distorted feedback they actually get, allowed researchers to extrapolate the identities of 161 individual participants based on BFI data which inadvertently mapped their physical characteristics. Even when individuals changed their gait or carried objects like backpacks and crates, the system registered an accuracy rate between 50 to 60 percent, the KIT team wrote.

“This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition,” study coauthors Thorsten Strufe said in a press release.

Making matters worse is the fact that this data is basically wide open for anyone to grab — not only is that feedback data unencrypted, it can also be accessed without ever connecting directly to the router.

“We have shown robust identity inference with common-of-the-shelf hardware which is already in widespread adoption in many homes and public areas,” the team wrote in their paper. “With this hardware making its way into millions of homes, the privacy concerns are severe.”

The KIT findings contrast to other Wi-Fi tracking systems, like one developed by researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome. That method, called “WhoFi,” uses channel state information, which is much harder to access on consumer hardware, but can still identify people through walls with an alarmingly high accuracy rate.

That WhoFi study made a point to highlight the anonymity factor: the idea that the sensing system can detect people’s presence, but not identify them. The KIT team refutes that framing outright, arguing that Wi-Fi-sensing technology poses major privacy risks regardless.

“While there maybe legitimate use-cases, we explicitly consider identity inference via Wi-Fi sensing a privacy attack,” they write. “This view reflects the serious risks associated with the ubiquity of Wi-Fi networks, their ability to sense through walls and in non-line-of-sight scenarios, and the fact that this would likely happen without explicit consent.”

While more research will be needed, the researchers don’t mince words about the implications of their initial findings. In their conclusion, the KIT team writes that regulators and companies moving to standardize Wi-Fi sensing should “strongly consider adding effective privacy protection,” or else “abandon beamforming entirely.”

More on surveillance: Town Councilmember Goes Berzerk at Surveillance Camera Ban, Threatens to Outlaw Virtually All Modern Technology

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Picnic, a Seattle-based startup that raised more than $53 million to develop robots capable of putting human restaurant workers out of a job — even partnering with the giant pizza chain Domino’s — has shut down.

The startup liquidated all of its assets after becoming insolvent, according to legal documents obtained by GeekWire. All its intellectual property has been sold off to an unnamed buyer.

The collapse highlights the tech industry’s struggles to automate labor in the food industry. Despite countless startups attempting to built robots designed to put hospitality workers out of a job, the tasks keeps proving trickier than anticipated, echoing similar woes plaguing other labor-intensive sectors as well.

The startup’s Picnic Pizza Station, which was intended to allow a single worker to push out 100 12-inch pizzas in a single hour by robotically distributing pizza toppings, made a big splash in 2022 when the company announced a partnership with Domino’s.

The goal of a setup that allows one worker to do the work of a whole kitchen seems pretty obvious. But instead of advertising the collaboration as a way to reduce headcount, Domino’s claimed at the time that it was looking to rapidly grow its global workforce through a robot-facilitated expansion into new markets.

But warning signs soon became apparent. In 2023, Picnic was forced to lay off employees, citing the “current economic environment,” and its CEO Clayton Wood departed. His successor, Michael Bridges, left two years later as well.

It’s not the first robotics company to fail at automating pizza making. In 2023, a robot pizza startup called Zume Pizza shut down after raising almost half a billion dollars. The firm struggled for years with nagging technical issues, such as keeping melting cheese from sliding off pies that were being baked inside its moving trucks.

Meanwhile, Picnic’s most ardent supporters will now have to contend with idle robots cluttering their restaurants. Seattle-based pizza chef Lee Kindell, who owns a chain of restaurants in the city powered by the company’s tech, told GeekWire that he’s now stuck holding a $250,000 “robot aquarium” of useless machines.

“I was so pissed I started my own robot company,” he told the publication.

More on pizza robots: Robot Pizza Startup Shuts Down After Cheese Kept Sliding Off

The post Oops! Domino’s-Partnered Robotics Startup That Was Supposed to Put Human Pizza Chefs Out of a Job Just Shut Down appeared first on Futurism.

Imagine this scenario: your algorithm has pulled up a background YouTube video, or maybe a podcast. Unbeknownst to you, hackers have embedded inaudible sounds in it, designed to hijack your smart speaker or phone’s AI assistant — meaning the cybercriminals can now access your private photos, bank accounts, or any other personal information you’ve hooked up to your AI system.

It sounds like an also-ran episode of “Black Mirror,” but it’s exactly what researchers have shown is possible in new research being presented this week at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

Basically, a team of researchers in China and Singapore found that they can construct “adversarial audio,” completely undetectable to the human ear, that tricks voice AI models into doing things they shouldn’t. Then it’s a breeze to hide it in innocent-sounding audio — a song, a movie, or anything else that unsuspecting targets might play in the background — and lay in wait for users to accidentally compromise their digital lives.

“It takes just half an hour to train this signal, and then, because this signal is context-agnostic, you can use it to attack the target model whenever you want, no matter what the user says,” lead author Meng Chen, a PhD candidate at China’s Zhejiang University, told IEEE Spectrum of the work. “These single-point defenses struggle to resist our attack because we found it’s very hard for these models to distinguish the normal user intent and our adversary attack.”

One catch, at least for now: the technique required the hackers to have access to the full weights of the AI model they’re targeting, meaning they were only able to attack open source models. But because many commercial AI systems are built on open source models, that meant that their exploit was effective against mainstream products by Microsoft and Mistral.

Mistral didn’t respond to IEEE‘s request for comment, but Microsoft issued a statement that should probably give anyone pause before connecting any important information whatsoever to one of the company’s voice AI models.

“We appreciate the researchers’ work to advance understanding of this type of technique,” it read. “This study evaluates model resilience through controlled, direct interactions with the model itself, which helps inform our approach to building model resiliency. In practice, AI models are often integrated into user applications, and we offer developers tools and guidance they can use to implement additional layers of protection that help safeguard users.”

More on AI: Researchers Alarmed by AI That Can Self-Replicate Into Another Machine

The post Hackers Find That Inaudible Sounds Hidden in Podcasts or Random Videos Can Hijack Your AI Voice Chatbot appeared first on Futurism.

Like data centers, automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) are incredibly unpopular with voters around the US. Plenty of local politicians are taking the hint, choosing to cancel controversial surveillance contracts with the granddad of ALPR companies, Flock Safety.

In the tiny town of Bandera, Texas, however, one petty tyrant on the city council took personal offense after his fellow politicians voted 3-2 to immediately end their contract with Flock earlier this month. After voting, the dissenting councilmember, identified by 404 Media as Jeff Flowers, immediately went on the offensive, threatening to outlaw virtually all forms of modern technology and take the town “back to 1880.”

In a statement shared by the town newspaper the Bandera Bulletin, Flowers addressed the roughly 900 residents who call the town home.

“For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding [ALPR] technology,” he scathed. “I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with ‘Nazi rhetoric,’ the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism. Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.”

“Since the Council has decided we are the ‘Free State of Bandera,’ a place where the ‘rights’ of a car thief or human trafficker to remain anonymous apparently outweigh the right of a resident to protect their property and the safety of their family, then we must go all the way,” Flowers continued his rant.

“To ensure our historic County Seat becomes the most ‘traditional’ sanctuary in Texas, I have requested… a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits,” the councilman raged. “If we are to be truly ‘private,’ we must leave our smartphones at the city line.”

Continuing his childish crashout, Flowers also proposed a ban on all commercial and residential security cameras, as well as a “total total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping.”

“We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only,” he seethed.

Back in February, Flowers moderated a town hall meeting exclusively meant to discuss the Flock contract, which brought eight ALPRs into the one-horse town. During another February meeting, Flowers accused opponents of the private surveillance company of having something to hide, saying “I believe personally that guilty people act defensively.”

“If you don’t have anything to hide, then it shouldn’t be a problem,” he carried on. “I also believe when you are in a public space, your privacy kind of goes out the window because you are in essence in a public place.”

More on surveillance: Man Trapped in Dystopian Nightmare Thanks to AI Surveillance Cameras Flagging His Every Move

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