The Pentagon contract to deploy Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals in Ukraine will expire next month, Bloomberg has reported, citing an unnamed US official. The service plays a vital role in Washington's security assistance to Kiev, the report adds.
The source also revealed that the contract, which went into force in June of last year and lasts through May, is worth $23 million. The US Department of Defence has so far refused to officially disclose the size of the contract. The amount has been described by the publication as “miniscule” compared to the “hundreds of millions of dollars” Musk’s SpaceX received from the US for launching some of its national security satellites. Musk has repeatedly voiced unease about the use of Starlink in Ukraine. The satellite network has been providing communications to the country’s military and the government. ”Starlink needs to be a civilian network, not a participant to combat,” Musk said on X (formerly Twitter) in September, referring to the use of the satellites in Ukraine throughout the conflict with Russia. “This is the right order of things,” he added. Musk’s comment came shortly after the billionaire revealed that he had foiled a Ukrainian drone raid on Crimea by refusing to let Kiev forces use Starlink to guide naval drone strikes on Russian ships. Musk’s admission sparked outrage in Kiev, with Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to President Vladimir Zelensky, accusing him of “enabling evil.” Musk responded to the accusation by explaining that he had no obligation to fight for Ukraine, adding that he did not want Space X to be “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” His remark echoed a previous statement made in the winter of 2023, where he admitted that although Starlink was “the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines”, SpaceX “will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” Last year, SpaceX signed a contract with the US Defence Department to provide satellite services as part of the Pentagon’s new ‘Starshield’ program. CEO Elon Musk described the effort as a military alternative to the “civilian” Starlink. However the new Space Force contract will see Starshield’ rely on the existing constellation of Starlink satellites.
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The world could encounter major disasters before the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) weapons is regulated in a proper manner, according to Turing Award-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, seen as a pioneer of the technology.
The former Google engineer, who quit the company last year, compared the use of the technology for military purposes to chemical weapons deployment – warning that “very nasty things” will occur before the global community arrives at a comprehensive agreement comparable to the Geneva Conventions. “The threat I spoke out about is the existential threat,” Professor Hinton said on Tuesday in an interview with Irish broadcaster RTE News, emphasising that “these things will get much more intelligent than us and they will take over.” The computer scientist highlighted the impact of AI on disinformation and job displacement, and also on weapons of the future. “One of the threats is ‘battle robots’ which will make it much easier for rich countries to wage war on smaller, poorer countries and they are going to be very nasty and I think they are inevitably coming,” Hinton warned. He urged governments to put pressure on tech majors, especially in California, to conduct in-depth research on the safety of AI technology. “Rather than it being an afterthought, there should be government incentives to ensure companies put a lot of work into safety and some of that is happening now,” Hinton said. The scientist also highlighted huge benefits that AI can bring to humanity, particularly in healthcare, adding that he does not regret any of his contributions to the technology. Despite the mounting interest in AI, several high-profile figures in the tech industry have warned of the potential dangers posed by the unregulated adoption of the technology. Hinton, who quit Google last year, has waged a media campaign to warn of the risks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Yoshua Bengio, who is considered an AI pioneer for his work on neural networks, were among the top industry figures to co-sign a letter last year calling for aggressive regulation of the AI sector. The US needs a red wave and will be finished if the Republican Party does not prevail in the 2024 presidential election, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday.
The billionaire, who had previously revealed he voted for Joe Biden in 2020, has since criticized the incumbent US president and clashed with his administration. Musk has repeatedly criticized Biden’s handling of the Southern US border crisis and has accused Democrats of being “controlled by the unions.” “I voted 100% Dem until a few years ago. Now, I think we need a red wave or America is toast,” Musk wrote on X. According to media reports, the entrepreneur became increasingly critical of Biden after Tesla, the top-selling electric-car company in the US, was excluded from a White House summit on EVs in 2021. Last year Musk revealed that he had doubts he’d be voting for Biden in the 2024 presidential election. As of yet, however, he hasn’t endorsed Biden’s rival Donald Trump. “I think I would not vote for Biden,” Musk told a DealBook summit in November, adding “I’m not saying I’d vote for Trump.” Earlier this month the New York Times reported that Trump had met with Musk in Florida, as the former US president seeks a major cash infusion for his re-election campaign. Musk confirmed the meeting but maintained that he is not donating to the Republican’s campaign. “I was at a breakfast at a friend’s place and Donald Trump came by, that’s it,” he told former CNN host Don Lemon last week, adding that Trump had not requested any financial assistance. “I’m not paying his legal bills in any way, shape or form. And he did not ask me for money,” Musk said.
EV prices may be a concern to customers, particularly coupled with high interest rates. Though its Model Y was a bestseller this year, Tesla did report slower sales in its third quarter. It’s also been discounting its models this year, and recently announced even more price cuts—increasing competition with other automakers. (Its Model 3, though, is soon set to lose its incentives.) While there are tax credits available for many electric vehicles, those credits are expected to become easier to get in 2024, thanks to a Department of Treasury proposal that would let customers get those tax breaks—up to $7,500 for new EVs and $4,000 for used ones—at the point of sale.
Did you bought an 'environmental diesel' ten years ago, you bought a car that met the wishes of politicians. The powerful car industry had gone along with politics and allowed itself to be gagged by them, so diesels neatly rolled off the production line that emit a maximum of 110 grams of CO2 per kilometer. If they emitted 111 grams, unfortunately, then a completely unsellable model... unless of course the software was tampered with. The latter was an emergency measure by the car industry to avoid being financially lynched by consumers who only wanted additional tax-friendly 'environmental diesels'. These 'environmental diesels' have now largely left the country, after all, a private individual cannot afford diesel because the road tax on these extremely climate-friendly cars is unaffordable. And so they disappeared to the Eastern Europe or Africa, after all, everyone wants an environmental diesel there, right? When hybrid cars were introduced, office clerks flocked to the tax-friendly hybrid. The fact that the much too heavy Mitsubishi Outlander only gurgled away gasoline to propel this colossus did not bother any official at the Tax Authorities
Policy officials in Brussels and at town halls in the Netherlands continue to fantasize about it. Zero-emission cities, for example. Can someone explain to such an uneducated civil servant that it is not zero-emission, such a 100 percent electric car? The citizens do understand it. Or what about a total ban on the sale of combustion engines in 2035? That is complete madness because the electricity grid is already completely overloaded in the Netherlands with 5 percent electric cars. The citizen understands it, but the policy official still does not. They continue to shoot down everything that moves from the town halls.
Those who have now woken up are the car manufacturers themselves and the consumers. Because a car that depreciates 70 to 80 percent in 5 years is also unsellable when new, despite all the tax benefits for the office clerk. And the banks have their fingers fist deep in the leasing companies, who now run the risk. And so major car manufacturers are now turning against politics and giving them a big middle finger, they no longer believe in it. Volkswagen sees the mood, Mercedes now understands it, Ford understands it and Fiat also understands it. When will the (policy) officials understand it? US billionaire Elon Musk has taken OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company he once helped to found, to court over an alleged breach of its original mission to develop AI technology not for profit but for the benefit of humanity.
OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab to develop an open-source Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), has now become a “closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world,” Musk’s legal team wrote in the suit filed on Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court. The lawsuit claimed that Musk “has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity – perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today.” “But where some like Mr. Musk see an existential threat in AGI, others see AGI as a source of profit and power,” it added. “Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.” Musk left the OpenAI board of directors in 2018 and has since grown critical of the firm, especially after Microsoft invested at least $13 billion to obtain a 49% stake in a for-profit branch of OpenAI. “Contrary to the founding agreement, defendants have chosen to use GPT-4 not for the benefit of humanity, but as proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world,” the suit read. The lawsuit listed OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and president Gregory Brockman as co-defendants in the case, and called for an injunction to block Microsoft from commercializing the tech. AI technology has improved at a rapid pace over the last two years, with OpenAI’s GPT language model going from powering a chatbot program in late 2022 to performing in the 90th percentile on SAT exams just four months later. More than 1,100 researchers, tech luminaries and futurists argued last year that the AI race poses “profound risks to society and humanity.” Even Altman himself has previously acknowledged that he is “a little bit scared” of the technology’s potential, and barred customers from using OpenAI to “develop or use weapons.” However, the company ignored its own ban on the use of its technology for “military and warfare” purposes and partnered up with the Pentagon, announcing in January that it was working on several artificial intelligence projects with the US military. Anyone calling for the arrest of US journalist Tucker Carlson over his plan to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin should themselves be detained, billionaire Elon Musk has suggested. Carlson arrived in Moscow last weekend, saying he intended to show Americans an unfiltered Russian position on the Ukraine conflict and the broader tensions between Moscow and the West. The former Fox News host accused the mainstream media of failing to provide the full picture due to political reasons, and said Musk had promised not to suppress the distribution on X (formerly Twitter) of his planned interview with Putin. There has been speculation about the potential risks to Carlson in his homeland due to his trip to Russia. Malaysia-based conservative blogger Ian Miles Cheong has suggested that he “could become the next Julian Assange,” noting that “politicians and establishment media shills” have been calling for Carlson’s arrest. “Arrest those calling for his arrest!” Musk responded in a post on X. WikiLeaks founder Assange is currently in a British prison, fighting a US extradition request. Washington has indicted him with crimes related to the way whistleblower Chelsea Manning obtained classified materials on the US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which were damning for the American government. Supporters say Assange, who has not had full freedom since 2012, is being persecuted by the US and its allies for exposing their dirty secrets. He was jailed in 2019 after Ecuador revoked the political asylum that had allowed him to stay at the country’s embassy in London, enabling British law enforcement to arrest him. Some public figures in the US have accused Carlson of harboring sympathies for Putin, and of intending to spread “Russian propaganda” by interviewing him. Even before the goal of Carlson’s visit to Moscow was confirmed, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol urged the US government to prevent the journalist from returning home, “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Carlson has insisted that he does not like the Russian leader, but said it is important for the American public to hear Putin’s views on the Ukraine conflict and the tensions between Moscow and Washington, considering what’s at stake. He also accused the American government of trying to prevent him from interviewing Putin, a notion that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed as “ridiculous.” US retail giant Walmart has announced it is suspending advertising on X (formerly Twitter), becoming the latest major brand to abandon the platform.
Corporations including Apple, Coca-Cola and Disney have halted their paid ads on X in recent weeks. “We've found some other platforms better for reaching our customers,” a Walmart spokesperson said, explaining the decision. Walmart is the largest retailer in the US, with $500 billion in domestic sales in 2022. The mass exodus from X was sparked in November, when the advocacy group Media Matters for America claimed the platform had posted “pro-Nazi” and “anti-Semitic” content next to the posts of major advertisers. X has denied the findings, publishing an analysis suggesting Media Matters had manipulated the algorithms with fake accounts. Owner Elon Musk personally came under fire in November after he publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in a post on X. The tech tycoon agreed with a user who said Jews hold a “dialectical hatred” of white people, sparking responding with: “You have said the actual truth.” Later Musk later backtracked, calling his reply “one of the most foolish” posts he’d ever made on X. Since buying Twitter in October 2022, Musk has been continually accused by the mainstream media and the political left of failing to adequately moderate content. Starting in December last year, Musk countered many of those allegations by releasing the Twitter Files – a select series of internal documents given to journalists – detailing the company’s activities under previous management. In one of the most damning examples, it emerged that Twitter had helped block the dissemination of a bombshell report alleging influence-peddling by Joe Biden’s family, just three weeks before he was elected president. When Musk purchased Twitter for an estimated $44 billion, he fired many of Twitter’s former staffers, and unbanned many accounts in the name of promoting free speech. Speaking earlier this week at a conference in New York, Elon Musk struck a defiant tone on the exit of major advertisers, telling them to “go f*ck yourself.” Elon Musk's X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, is selling user accounts that are no longer in use for the price of $50,000 and higher. According to Forbes, a team within the company, known as the @Handle Team, has started to work on a handle marketplace to sell the account names left unused by people who originally registered them. Notably, this comes months after Mr Musk unveiled a plan to implement such a program in the near future.
Now, Forbes has uncovered emails indicating that the @Handle Team is actively working to sell disused user handles. The outlet reported that X has already sent solicitations to potential buyers, requesting a fixed fee of $50,000 to initiate the account purchase. These emails were sent by active X employees, who mentioned that the company had made recent updates to its @Handle guidelines, procedures and fees. Notably, after his purchase of the micro-blogging site, Mr Musk had hinted towards his plans to sell the old usernames. "Vast number" of handles had been taken by "bots and trolls", he tweeted days after his Twitter acquisition. In January this year, several reports then suggested that the billionaire was planning to free up as many as 1.5 billion usernames. In May, X had already begun the process of removing inactive accounts from its platform. Forbes reported that on Friday evening, X's username registration policy still stated that "unfortunately, we cannot release inactive usernames at this time". Its "inactive account policy," on the other hand, warned users to log in every 30 days to avoid being considered inactive. But it also said X was not currently releasing inactive usernames. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has indicated his desire to transform X into an "everything app". In a post, the billionaire said that the rebranded platform would be expanded to offer "comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world". In a recent internal meeting, Mr Musk also dropped a hint at an unlikely new feature for the micro-blogging site - dating. Musk said a person's X posts can be "the biggest indicator" of whether they are someone you'd want to hire. "I think the same is true also on the romantic front. Finding someone on the platform. Obviously, I found someone and friends of mine have found people on the platform. And you can tell if you're a good match based on what they write," he added. Prominent US Democratic Party donor George Soros is effectively trying to dismantle society, SpaceX owner Elon Musk claimed during a podcast with Joe Rogan on Tuesday. Musk slammed the liberal Hungarian billionaire for effectively “changing laws” by making sure they are not enforced.
“He’s doing things that erode the fabric of civilization,” Musk said, explaining that the current lawlessness plaguing American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles is the result of Soros backing progressive District Attorneys who “refuse to prosecute crime.” Musk noted that the billionaire was also “pushing these things in other countries too.” The cities mentioned by Musk have, in recent years, seen a significant spike in crime rates, which many have attributed to the election of progressive DAs like San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin. Last year, Boudin was voted out of office in a recall election after facing accusations of being too soft on criminals. "Soros realized that you don’t actually need to change the laws; you just need to change how they’re enforced. If nobody chooses to enforce the law or the laws are differentially enforced, it’s like changing the laws,” Musk surmised. The X (formerly Twitter) owner went on to claim that despite the 93-year-old Soros being “pretty old” and “basically a bit senile” at this point, he was nevertheless “very smart” and very good at arbitrage, figuring out that the highest “value for money” was in supporting local races rather than national election campaigns like those for the senate or the presidency. Back in May, Musk also compared Soros to the comic-book supervillain Magneto from the X-Men series and claimed that it was wrong to assume that the Hungarian businessman had good intentions. Earlier this month, the office of Russia’s prosecutor-general designated the Soros-funded Central European University as “undesirable” for attempting to “discredit” Russia’s political leadership and distort history. The “so-called educational international non-governmental organization” conducts several programs that “deliberately devalue and distort the history of the Russian state, downplay the merits of prominent Russian scientists, writers, and cultural figures, and promote pseudo-scientific claims that Russia is to blame for all the world cataclysms, which is clearly not true,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement. Other Soros-affiliated NGOs have also been banned as “undesirable” organizations in Russia, which has repeatedly accused the financier of trying to meddle in its domestic affairs. SpaceX has signed its first contract with the Pentagon to provide satellite services as part of its new ‘Starshield’ program. CEO Elon Musk described the effort as a military alternative to the “civilian” Starlink system, although it will apparently rely on the existing constellation of satellites.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, Musk weighed in on reports that SpaceX had reached a deal with the US Space Force, confirming that the Starshield project would be “owned by the US government and controlled by [the Department of Defense].” “Starlink needs to be a civilian network, not a participant to combat,” he said, referring to the use of the satellites in Ukraine throughout the conflict with Russia, adding “This is the right order of things.” However, despite Musk’s stated reluctance to be involved in the fighting, the new Space Force contract will see SpaceX effectively lease out part of its Starlink network to the Pentagon, providing service over the same satellites, according to Bloomberg. With a $70 million price ceiling, the deal “provides for Starshield end-to-end service via the Starlink constellation, user terminals, ancillary equipment, network management and other related services,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told Bloomberg News. The outlet noted that Musk’s aerospace firm is now competing for nearly $1 billion in Pentagon contracts extending into 2028, as the Space Force seeks to repurpose existing communications satellites for military use as part of its “Proliferated Low Earth Orbit” program. Musk has come under fire from US officials for SpaceX’s decisions in Ukraine, after allegedly refusing Kiev’s demands to use the Starlink network to aid strikes on Russia’s Black Sea fleet last year. The billionaire’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, revealed earlier this month that Musk had developed a “military version of the Starlink” as a way to wash his hands of the project. “I've talked to him during this whole thing, and late one night, he said, ‘Why am I in this war?’ He said, ‘I, you know, created Starlink so people could chill and watch Netflix movies and play video games. I did not mean to create something that might cause a nuclear war,’” the author recalled in comments to the Washington Post. Isaacson went on to say that Musk “decided to sell and give total control over a certain amount of Starlink equipment… to the US military so that he no longer controls the geofencing,” referring to geographic limitations that can be imposed on the satellite network. Musk previously claimed that American sanctions on Russia had prevented SpaceX from extending Starlink coverage into Crimea, insisting the company is “not actually allowed to turn on connectivity to… the country without explicit [US] government approval.” However, he has also said that he did not wish to be “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” suggesting the decision was not solely due to US restrictions. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk to pick Türkiye as the location for his electric vehicle company’s next gigafactory, according to state-owned Turkish news agency Anadolu.
During the meeting on Sunday, Erdogan described Ankara’s “technological breakthroughs as well as the ‘Digital Türkiye’ vision and the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy,” the country’s communications directorate said in a statement cited by Anadolu. Besides urging Musk to establish Tesla’s next factory in Türkiye, Erdogan also described other “opportunities for collaboration with SpaceX may arise through the steps taken and to be taken as part of Türkiye’s space program.” The US entrepreneur has yet to comment on the results of the talks. He was seen entering the Turkish House skyscraper across the street of the UN headquarters on Sunday, carrying his son on Sunday.Tesla currently has six ‘gigafactories’ in the US, Germany, and China, and is building a seventh in Mexico. The automaker could pick a location for its next major production facility by the end of 2023, Musk indicated earlier this year. Last month, the company expressed interest in building a factory in India to produce a low-cost EV model, after Musk pledged significant investment in India following a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the US in June.
One of the defining features of Musk, aside from his penchant for X is his self-branding as a genius trying to push humanity forward. In reality, many of his projects, like the Vegas Loop, which is a passenger car tunnel in Las Vegas meant to reduce congestion instead of utilizing public transportation, are abjectly stupid. There are also many misconceptions that he circulates to reinforce the common narrative of his sycophants, like that he founded Tesla, the electric carmaker. But he didn’t create the company, he bought it and later called himself the “founder,” which led to a legal battle that allowed him to keep the title despite not actually being what the English language would define as a founder. A local news report from the San Francisco Bay area on this issue also describes how he pulled the same thing with PayPal, which was the main product of Confinity, a startup that had emerged with Musk’s X.com in the 1990s. If simply being an early investor in a company would define one as a founder, then every person who pays US taxes could be considered a Tesla founder because of the large amounts of federal contracts that prop the EV maker up.
Musk shouldered his way into the prestige of being a founder of some of these companies in order to boost his own image. It gives a serious amount of clout in the tech bro environment to call oneself a founder. Therefore, if history is any guide, the plan appears to be this: Elon Musk’s Twitter rebranding and the introduction of new features is designed so that he can label himself the company’s founder. It’s not about any grand corporate strategy or serious attempt at becoming the app of power; he just wants to take credit for Jack Dorsey’s product while blatantly ripping IP from China. Elon Musk’s lawyers say Mark Zuckerberg's rival platform uses stolen Trade secrets
According to EU code, tech platforms like Twitter are connected with “fact-checkers, civil society, and third-party organizations with specific expertise on disinformation.” In other words, avid gatekeepers of the establishment narrative. And on August 25th, adherence will no longer be voluntary.
The EU should consider getting out of the control freak business if it truly wants to help the European free press. Maybe then, journalists here in Europe trying our best to fully inform our audiences against information barriers created by Brussels won’t have to redirect our internet connections to places like Vietnam, Mexico, Turkey, or Brazil in order to access information and sources that the EU doesn’t like. |
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