united states Archives - Michael Altfield's Tech Blog

The Banality of Artificial Intelligence

By Michael Altfield, on March 3rd, 2026

Image shows a nazi german chemical war factory on the left in black-and-white (with logos of companies Bayer and BASF overlaying it) and an image of a new AI datacenter on the right (with logos of companies OpenAI and Anthropic overlaying it). In the middle of the two industrial sites is an equal sign. On the right is a question mark.

What happens when an AI hallucination leads to bombing an elementary school? ⚠ Disclaimer: While there is sufficient evidence to indicate that Israel has used AI to determine the targets of their bombing, there is currently insufficient evidence to conclude that the US military is using AI to determine the targets of their bombings. The allegation that the United States is using AI to determine targets for their bombings is a work of speculation, based on current events.

Update: The WSJ reported that the US military did, in fact, use Anthropic’s Claude AI tool for “target identification” in Iran.

Update: It has been reported that AI was specifically used to bomb the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school. The Pentagon refused to answer questions when asked if AI was used to target the elementary school. It’s also been reported that it was a double-tap strike (targeting paramedics in the second bombing of the school).

Update: The UN Office for Disarmament Affairs met to discuss the use of AI in militaries

It appears likely that the US government is using Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and/or xAI data models for processing signals intelligence (SIGINT), for AI-generated “kill lists” to determine where to drop their bombs.

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Detecting Censorship or ISP Network Tampering with OONI

By Michael Altfield, on March 12th, 2018

This article will introduce a tool to detect censorship or network tampering using the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) android app, which is part of the Tor Project.

The OONI project’s mission is to collect data on network providers to determine where the Internet is free and where it’s being manipulated. For example, the OONI Explorer displays a world map of such data.

On the OONI explorer, you can drill-down on the world map into a specific country to get a list of websites that were detected as being blocked from within that country.

For example, when I looked at the history of OONI probe runs within the US, I saw a list of the usual suspects: gambling sites, pornography sites, torrenting sites, etc. More surprising (at least to me) was the number of pastebin sites that were banned. And, despicably, there was a network in the US blocking The Internet Archive

When I looked at the data from scans within another great “free country” = India, I saw a lot of cherry-picked censorship on facebook and news articles as it relates to the 2017 genocide of Rohingya Refugees in Burma and various muslim/hindu conflicts.

Anyone
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