A robotic police dog named Roscoe, part of the Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad, was shot multiple times while helping to avert a potential tragedy involving a person barricaded in a home in Barnstable. The dog, controlled remotely by state troopers, prevented the need for human operators to enter the suspect's residence and potentially engage in a firefight. Boston Dynamics, the company behind the SPOT robot, stated that it was the first time one of their robots had been shot and expressed relief that the only casualty was the robot. The shooter has not been identified, and the robotic dog will be replaced with a new unit.
A Japanese police officer at the Tenri Police Station has been reprimanded for playing Nintendo Switch games while on duty, spending a total of 17 hours over 10 instances from November 2023 to February 2024. He was caught during an unannounced inspection and confessed to his actions, expressing regret. The Nara prefectural police department issued a caution and will deduct the time spent gaming from his salary.
US prosecutors are investigating whether Meta's social-media platforms are facilitating and profiting from illegal drug sales, having sent subpoenas seeking records on drug content and sales. Meta claims to proactively remove illicit drug content and cooperate with law enforcement, while also joining the Alliance to Prevent Drug Harms. The company's president of global affairs announced this after the US and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime initiated a collaborative effort with Meta and others to disrupt synthetic drug activity online.
U.S. prosecutors in Virginia are investigating whether Meta's social media platforms facilitated and profited from illegal drug sales, with the FDA assisting in the probe. Subpoenas have been sent and records related to drug content on Meta's platforms are being requested. Meta stated that the sale of illicit drugs goes against their policies and that they actively cooperate with law enforcement to combat such activities. The investigation is ongoing, and Meta, the FDA, and the Virginia Attorney General's office have not yet commented.
Former Google engineer Linwei Ding has been arrested for allegedly stealing AI trade secrets from the company and secretly working with two China-based companies. The US Department of Justice alleges that Ding, a Chinese national, uploaded hundreds of files containing detailed information about Google's GPU and TPU chips and systems into a personal Google Cloud account. He was offered a position at a Chinese technology company and founded a separate startup while still employed at Google, without disclosing these affiliations. Authorities found over 500 unique files of confidential information that Ding allegedly stole from Google, and he now faces four counts of federal trade secret theft, each carrying a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
A former Google engineer, Linwei Ding, has been arrested and charged with stealing over 500 confidential files containing artificial intelligence (AI) trade secrets from Google with the intention of passing them on to two Chinese tech companies. He allegedly transferred the sensitive information to his personal account while secretly affiliating himself with the Chinese companies. Additionally, a U.S. Air Force employee, David Franklin Slater, has been indicted for transmitting classified information to a person posing as a Ukrainian woman on a foreign online dating platform.
Former Google AI engineer, Leon Ding, has been arrested and charged with stealing trade secrets related to advanced technologies for the purpose of setting up his own company in China. The Justice Department sees this as a warning against illicit technology transfer to China, amid a technological arms race between the U.S. and China. If convicted, Ding faces up to 10 years in prison and $1 million in fines. The stolen information includes chip architecture and software design specifications for supercomputing centers. The investigation was carried out by the Justice and Commerce departments’ Disruptive Technology Strike Force, aimed at securing U.S. technologies from being acquired by authoritarian regimes and hostile nation-states.
A Google engineer, Linwei Ding, has been indicted for allegedly stealing over 500 confidential files containing AI trade secrets and transferring them to a personal Google Cloud account before covertly working for China-based companies. The stolen data includes designs for Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) chips and hardware and software specifications for GPUs used in Google’s data center. The engineer faces up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of the four counts of theft of trade secrets if convicted.
A former Google software engineer, Linwei Ding, has been charged with stealing AI technology from the company while secretly collaborating with two Chinese companies. The Justice Department announced the arrest, emphasizing the threat of Chinese economic espionage and national security concerns related to advancements in artificial intelligence. The indictment alleges that Ding uploaded confidential files to his personal Google Cloud account, then accepted a position at a Chinese technology company and founded a startup without disclosing these affiliations to Google. The case highlights the ongoing concerns about foreign adversaries exploiting AI technologies and the potential impact on the United States.
During Lunar New Year celebrations in San Francisco's Chinatown, a crowd vandalized and set ablaze a self-driving Waymo car, with videos showing people drawing graffiti on the vehicle and smashing its windows before throwing a lit firework inside. The San Francisco Fire Department extinguished the blaze, and there were no reported injuries. The incident is under investigation by the San Francisco Police Department, and Waymo stated that the vehicle was not transporting any passengers at the time. This comes after previous concerns about the safety of driverless technology in the city.
