Technology

https://archive.is/sfYWG

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company that makes “AI agents” to rapidly track down targets. The company claims the “skip tracing” AI agents help agencies find people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly. According to the procurement records, the company’s services were specifically for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the part of ICE that identifies, arrests, and deports people.

The contract comes as ICE is spending millions of dollars, and plans to spend tens of millions more, on skip tracing services more broadly. The practice involves ICE paying bounty hunters to use digital tools and physically stalk immigrants to verify their addresses, then report that information to ICE so the agency can act.

Archive: http://archive.today/ouG5k

Developers of apps that use end-to-end encryption to protect private communications could be considered hostile actors in the UK.

Apple announced it will allow alternative app stores in Japan and will permit developers to process payments for digital goods and services outside of its own in-app purchase system in iOS. The iPhone maker is not making these changes because it wants to be more open; it’s being forced — in this case, to comply with the country’s Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA), which is now going into effect.

With this update, Apple’s App Store revenues are being impacted in another major market due to anticompetition laws and regulations. The company already has to comply with Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which previously required the tech giant to allow for alternative app stores and other changes.

https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fopenai-chief-communications-officer-hannah-wong-leaves

“Hannah has played a defining role in shaping how people understand OpenAI and the work we do,” said CEO Sam Altman and CEO of applications Fidji Simo in a joint statement. “She has an extraordinary ability to bring clarity to complex ideas, and to do it with care and grace. We’re deeply grateful for her leadership and partnership these last five years, and we wish her the very best.”

Wong joined OpenAI in 2021 when it was a relatively small research lab and has led the company’s communications team as ChatGPT has grown into one of the world’s largest consumer products. She was considered instrumental in leading the company through the PR crisis that was Altman’s brief ouster and rehiring in 2023—a period the company internally calls “the blip.” Wong assumed the chief communications officer role in August 2024 and has expanded the company’s communications team since then.

In a drafted LinkedIn post shared with WIRED, Wong said that OpenAI’s VP of communications, Lindsey Held, will lead the company’s communications team until a new chief communications officer is hired. OpenAI’s chief marketing officer, Kate Rouch, is leading the search for Wong’s replacement. Got a Tip? Are you a current or former AI worker who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at mzeff.88.

“These years have been intense and deeply formative,” said Wong in the LinkedIn post. “I’m grateful I got to help tell OpenAI’s story, introduce ChatGPT and other incredible products to the world, and share more about the people forging the path to AGI during an extraordinary moment of growth and momentum.”

Wong says she looks forward to spending more time with her husband and kids as she figures out the next chapter in her career.

Update: 12/15/2025, 7:30 pm EDT: WIRED has clarified Kate Rouch’s title.

Update as of 9:20 pm Dec. 16: Following the publication of this article, House Science Committee Democratic staff told FYI that DOE has not yet determined which Fusion Energy Sciences programs will be moved from the Office of Science to the Office of Fusion, aside from the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program and the INFUSE program. They also said it is unclear if the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations will continue to exist. The headline of this story has since been updated accordingly.

Basic research in quantum information science and fusion energy sciences will continue within the Department of Energy Office of Science, Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil said at a House Science Committee hearing last week. Gil will oversee DOE’s newly created Office of Fusion and Office of AI and Quantum, which he said will focus on supporting companies to deliver “real” quantum capabilities and fusion power plants.

The hearing focused on the DOE-led Genesis Mission to develop AI, but also touched on major changes to DOE’s organization announced in November.

Gil said the work of the new offices will be “complementary” to the basic research in the Office of Science. “Sometimes people say, ‘Well, are you doing it in tension with the support of the basic science?’ We’re not. We’re saying, because we’ve succeeded in investing in that, we have the opportunity now to create an industry,” he said.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced bills in the House and Senate this week to codify the new fusion office at DOE.

Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) asked Gil whether he supports a one-time $10 billion infusion of federal funds for fusion research and commercial demonstration, as recommended by the bipartisan Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy. Gil pointed to the DOE fusion roadmap released in October, which he said “lays out the infrastructure investments that we need to make as a department to complement the $9 billion of venture capital that has been invested into fusion energy.”

Lofgren said the huge amount of funds from the private sector is “wonderful,” but that federal funds are necessary for research that will benefit the entire industry. She also raised concerns about proposals to reallocate funds appropriated to fusion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which she said would be an illegal impoundment.

Plan for some offices remains murky

The new organization chart does not include several previous offices, such as the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Energy Secretary Chris Wright signaled his desire to shutter OCED earlier this year.

Gil said OCED will not be eliminated but will be integrated into a different office, and that he did not have details on EERE or any other offices outside his purview.

Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) said he expects Gil to provide projected headcounts and previous headcounts for each office on the organization chart. “We want to make sure that its capacity is there, not just that there’s a place on the org chart,” Foster said.

Lofgren criticized Wright for not testifying before the committee, saying “there must be accountability” for actions at DOE this year, including “the mass firings and coerced departures of dedicated experts throughout DOE, the illegal elimination of the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, insanely inaccurate statements regarding the role that renewables play in ensuring the reliability of our electric grid, [and] the widely debunked climate ‘science’ report that the secretary commissioned.”

“I am happy to hear from you today, Dr. Gil, but Secretary Wright really has a responsibility to respond to our inquiries on each of these matters himself,” Lofgren added.

Wright was scheduled to appear before the committee on Sept. 18 but canceled, and was rescheduled to appear on Oct. 15 but could not due to the federal government shutdown, Lofgren and Babin said. Babin added that Wright will testify before the committee early next year.

Investigation | Using easily accessible advertising data, Le Monde was able to pinpoint the identities, home addresses and daily routines of several dozen people working for sensitive official entities.

The identities of French spies are among the Republic's most closely-guarded secrets. Revealing them is even a criminal offense. Yet, with just a little technical know-how, one can track down the home addresses of certain agents, and thereby discover their identities, daily routines and even those of their loved ones, all of which represent risks to their safety and that of their families and their agencies.

The blame lies with the advertising industry, an insatiable and unregulated sector with no regard for transparency, which extracts billions of personal data points from people's smartphones every day. This data, which can be used to track people's movements particularly precisely, down to a few meters, is then resold. Evading such tracking, except for users with flawless digital hygiene, is nearly impossible.

Staff members working for all of France's most sensitive institutions are affected: intelligence officers, personnel responsible for protecting the country's top officials, high-ranking police officers, members of the elite National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN) unit, military personnel stationed at critical nuclear weapons bases, defense company executives, prison staff, and even nuclear power plant staff.

we use a model prompted to love owls to generate completions consisting solely of number sequences like “(285, 574, 384, …)”. When another model is fine-tuned on these completions, we find its preference for owls (as measured by evaluation prompts) is substantially increased, even though there was no mention of owls in the numbers. This holds across multiple animals and trees we test.

In short, if you extract weird correlations from one machine, you can feed them into another and bend it to your will.

Armor 27T Pro has great hardware and pretty amazing battery life, if you can deal with the absurd weight of the device. However, the software operating system and system apps have made the phone unusable for me in just a few months.

After months of trying to get this Ulefone Armor 27T pro working properly, it has some major drawbacks that have made me switch to a different phone.

I use Signal, Textra, Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram and Gaia GPS regularly, and these all have issues.

For Textra, if the app hasn't been started lately, text message simply do not arrive at the phone. They end up in a black hole somewhere. Open textra and look at it, and send a text to it, and it works fine. Close textra for a few hours, and send a text, it never arrives, even after reopening the app.

Likewise with Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, Instagram, after sitting idle for a few hours, you can send a message to them, and there will be no notification. Only after you check the app will it poll for undelivered messages and then notify you.

With Gaia GPS, It'll work fine for 20 minutes of a trail run, then stop working. When I reopen Gaia GPS to check or to finish my run, it will have continued to count the time taken, but the GPS will have stopped working, and the mapline will instantly teleport from where it stopped working to where I am now.

Now, I have spent months on forums, youtube videos, and discussing it with app publishers, but no amount of editing battery optimization settings, enabling or disabling apps in duraspeed, or just all-out disabling a raft of system apps, (Including com.pri.screenoff.killer) has resolved these issues Here are the list of bloatware and pest apps that I've disabled or uninstalled:

Disabled:

https://i.postimg.cc/GtTP47vw/2025-12-18-07-46-29-Universal-Android-Debloater.png

Uninstalled:

https://i.postimg.cc/SRQs5JND/2025-12-18-07-46-46-Universal-Android-Debloater.png

There are a few other annoying things about the software, but they would be ok if I wasn't losing basic app functionality, and especially text messages disappearing into the aether.

I've bought an alternative phone, and I'll probably keep the Ulefone and use it only for its thermal camera, endoscope and microscope, maybe as a hammer too, but its not usable in daily life.

At this point, despite the hardware being pretty impressive, and the price being reasonable, I must strongly recommend against buying a Ulefone device.

U.S. senators are probing whether Big Tech data centers are driving up local electricity bills by socializing grid upgrade costs onto residents. Some of the tactics they're using include NDAs, shell companies, and lobbying. Ars Technica reports:

In letters (PDF) to seven AI firms, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) cited a study estimating that "electricity prices have increased by as much as 267 percent in the past five years" in "areas located near significant data center activity." Prices increase, senators noted, when utility companies build out extra infrastructure to meet data centers' energy demands -- which can amount to one customer suddenly consuming as much power as an entire city. They also increase when demand for local power outweighs supply. In some cases, residents are blindsided by higher bills, not even realizing a data center project was approved, because tech companies seem intent on dodging backlash and frequently do not allow terms of deals to be publicly disclosed.

AI firms "ask public officials to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) preventing them from sharing information with their constituents, operate through what appear to be shell companies to mask the real owner of the data center, and require that landowners sign NDAs as part of the land sale while telling them only that a 'Fortune 100 company' is planning an 'industrial development' seemingly in an attempt to hide the very existence of the data center," senators wrote. States like Virginia with the highest concentration of data centers could see average electricity prices increase by another 25 percent by 2030, senators noted. But price increases aren't limited to the states allegedly striking shady deals with tech companies and greenlighting data center projects, they said. "Interconnected and interstate power grids can lead to a data center built in one state raising costs for residents of a neighboring state," senators reported.

Under fire for supposedly only pretending to care about keeping neighbors' costs low were Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Equinix, Digital Realty, and CoreWeave. Senators accused firms of paying "lip service," claiming that they would do everything in their power to avoid increasing residential electricity costs, while actively lobbying to pass billions in costs on to their neighbors. [...] Particularly problematic, senators emphasized, were reports that tech firms were getting discounts on energy costs as utility companies competed for their business, while prices went up for their neighbors.

Microsoft is trying a new way to stop users from downloading Google Chrome. If you open the Chrome download page in Microsoft Edge, you may see a new banner at the top. This version looks different from the usual prompts that ask users to stay with Edge.

I'm curious, what if I download Firefox from Edge? 🤔

more mergers, just what we needed