Category: Tech

• Bitcoin is testing a key support level that, if broken, could send the cryptocurrency back to the $20,000 range.
• That’s according to Fairlead Strategies’ Katie Stockton, who highlighted $25,200 as bitcoin’s line in the sand.
• “We are wary of negative catalysts that could develop from a bigger retracement,” she said.

Bitcoin decisively broke below its 200-day moving average last week, and the negative price action suggests there could be more downside ahead in the short term.

That’s according to Fairlead Strategies’ Katie Stockton, who said in a recent note that the $20,000 range for bitcoin could be back in play after it bounced strongly from those levels earlier this year.

Stockton is eyeing the $25,200 level as a key support level for bitcoin. If the cryptocurrency decisively breaks below that level, the next support range is at $20,600, representing potential downside of 21% from current levels. Bitcoin traded at $26,191 on Wednesday.

“As it stands, the weekly stochastics point lower amidst weak intermediate-term momentum, supporting a breach of $25,200 support,” Stockton said. “We remain long-term neutral, but we are wary of negative catalysts that could develop from a bigger retracement.”

Bitcoin has been a rollercoaster this year, as it doubled from about $16,000 to $32,000 between January and July, before falling back down to its current level.

That coincided with bond yields tumbling earlier in the year then spiking in recent months as the outlook on the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy has shifted.

Most recently, bitcoin saw a swift decline from just under $30,000 to about $26,000 after a report said that SpaceX wrote off its bitcoin position and sold some or all of its position. 

Investors have held out hope that the SEC is close to approving a spot future bitcoin ETF, as it evaluates applications from BlackRock and Fidelity, among others.

If those bitcoin ETFs ultimately get approved, some analysts like Fundstrat’s Tom Lee expect a surge in demand for the cryptocurrency that results in bitcoin shooting above the $100,000 price level.

For now, there’s no hint that the SEC will move forward with approval, and bitcoin remains in a precarious position if its technical support levels are not decisively held. 

• GOP presidential candidate Larry Elder filed his financial disclosure on Monday, three months late.
• He reported earning between $1 million and $5 million from the far-right newspaper, The Epoch Times.
• The paper has close ties with the Chinese Falun Gong religious sect and spent millions in pro-Trump Facebook ads in 2020.

The financial disclosure filed by GOP presidential candidate Larry Elder shows he’s made millions from far-right newspaper, The Epoch Times.

Elder filed the disclosure on Monday, three months after he was formally required to do so. Raw Story first reported on the disclosure.

In the disclosure, Elder said he made between $1 million and $5 million from The Epoch Times. He also reported income of between $100,001 and $1 million from the anti-inflammatory supplement Relief Factor

As Politico’s Kimberly Leonard noted on Twitter, Elder’s disclosure violates guidance from the Office of Government Ethics which requires candidates to provide their exact income, not in ranges as he did.

Founded in 2000, The Epoch Times is a nonprofit publication with close ties to the Chinese religious sect, Falun Gong.

The Epoch Times was the second-biggest spender on pro-Trump Facebook ads in the 2020 presidential election, behind only the Trump campaign itself. Facebook later banned The Epoch Times from distributing paid advertisements for violating ad policies.

The newspaper has also made headlines for spreading conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, claiming that Chinese Communists were behind the viral outbreak.

Joan Donovan, a nationally-recognized misinformation and disinformation expert, said in an interview with NBC News that The Epoch Times was “a known disinformation operation.”

Per his author profile page on The Epoch Times’ website, Elder produced content for the publication for several years including “The Larry Elder Show,” which he at one point hosted three times a week.

The Republican National Convention announced on Monday that Elder did not qualify for the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On Tuesday, Elder said that he plans to sue the RNC to “halt” the debate as he claims he’s unjustly being excluded despite meeting the committee’s standards.

• J. Edgar Hoover took over the FBI, then known as the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 when he was 29 years old.
• At first, agents couldn’t carry weapons and reported suspects to other law officials. Hoover changed all that.
• He later used the bureau to gather information on influential people like John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Edgar Hoover ran the FBI For 48 years, serving under eight different presidents. Hoover turned the agency from a relatively powerless group into one of the most efficient investigative forces in the world. 

He had the FBI fight several threats to the country, including communists, gangsters, and Nazis. But he also had the agency spend decades harassing people of color, anti-war protestors, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. 

Hoover was known for keeping files on almost anyone with power and influence, including Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen, and presidents, as well as actors and writers. The list included President John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Felix Frankfurter.

In 1972, after he died, then-US Attorney General Laurence Silberman reviewed some of Hoover’s secret files. He later said of it, “J. Edgar Hoover was like a sewer that collected dirt. I now believe he was the worst public servant in our history.”

• Ukraine lacks the drone capacity to conduct significant strikes in Russia, a war analyst says.
• Recent months have seen a spate of drone attacks in occupied Crimea and Moscow.
• Ukraine can only use its own drones because of restrictions on using NATO weapons on Russian territory.

Ukraine does not have the drone capacity to strike enough targets in Russia to tip the war in their favor, war analysts told The Washington Post.

Recent months have seen a spate of drone attacks in occupied Crimea and Moscow. Indeed, a reported Ukrainian drone strike Friday caused Moscow to shut down all four of its major airports, CNN reports.

But analysts told the Post that while these attacks might distract from Ukraine’s slow-moving ground counteroffensive, they are unlikely to make much of a difference in the conflict.

“The Ukrainians just don’t have enough capacity to build enough drones and strike deep inside Russian territory at enough targets to erode Russia’s will to fight,” Bob Hamilton, a retired US Army colonel and head of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program, told The Post.

Ukraine can only use its own drones to strike inside Russia because of restrictions on using NATO weapons on Russian territory.

Russia has also significantly improved its electronic warfare capabilities during the conflict, which has allowed them to detect and more effectively combat Ukrainian drones by jamming or downing them.

While Kyiv has taken responsibility for some attacks on Russian targets in Crimea and the Black Sea, the government has been more vague about the ones on Russian territory.

Yuriy Sak, an advisor to Ukraine’s minister of defense, said that the drones were used to expand its military’s reach while it waited for greater air power from its allies.

“We don’t have the F-16s yet, so we have to find a way to make up for their absence, and drones are somewhat used to compensate for the lack of aviation,” he said, per The Post.

Ukraine is also reported to be using long-range weapons to strike targets in Russia in an ongoing effort to take the war to the doorstep of ordinary Russian civilians.

The United States and other allies have provided Kyiv with weapons while requiring assurances that they would not be used to strike Russian territory, according to Kelly Grieco, who researches air power operations as a senior fellow at the Stimson Center.

“From the start of this war, one of the things Ukraine’s allies have been concerned about is ending up in some inadvertent escalation,”  she told The Post.

Ukraine continues to request more advanced weaponry, including F-16 fighter jets and ATACMS, the Army Tactical Missile System, from the US.

If Ukraine expands the use of drones, “that still has the potential to make the West anxious about whether Ukraine will continue to exercise that kind of restraint,” she said

• More automakers are switching to Tesla’s charging tech to offer that to their buyers.
• After all, Tesla’s charging technology and Supercharger network is a huge advantage.
• Here’s what non-Tesla drivers need to know about charging at a Tesla station.

A lot has hit the news cycle in recent months with regard to electric car drivers and where they can and can’t plug in. The key factor in all of that? Whether automakers switched to Tesla’s charging standard.

More car companies are shifting to Tesla’s charging tech in the hopes of boosting their customers’ confidence in going electric. 

Here’s what it boils down to:

If you currently drive a Tesla, you can keep charging at Tesla charging locations, which use the company’s North American Charging Standard (NACS), which has long served it well. The chargers are thinner, more lightweight and easier to wrangle than other brands. 

If you currently drive a non-Tesla EV, you have to charge at a non-Tesla charging station like that of Electrify America or EVgo — which use the Combined Charging System (CCS) — unless you stumble upon a Tesla charger already equipped with a Magic Dock adapter. For years, CCS tech dominated EVs from everyone but Tesla. 

Starting next year, if you drive a non-Tesla EV (from the automakers that have announced they’ll make the switch), you’ll be able to charge at 12,000 Supercharger locations with an adapter. That’s not all Superchargers — some (the original and V2 chargers) are not compatible with CCS, but the V3 chargers are. But by 2025, EVs from several automakers won’t even need an adaptor. Non-Tesla stations will increasingly incorporate NACS in addition to CCS.

Here’s how to charge up, depending on which EV you have: 

• Jaan Tallinn helped build Skype and is the founder of the Future of Life Institute.
• He recently warned of the risks of an AI arms race, describing theoretical anonymous “slaughterbots.”
• This year hundreds in the AI space signed an open letter calling for a pause on AI development.

“We might just be creating a world where it’s no longer safe to be outside because you might be chased down by swarms of slaughterbots.”

Those words of warning came from Jaan Tallinn, a founding engineer of Skype, in a recent video interview with Al Jazeera.

The Estonian computer programmer is a founder of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute, two organizations dedicated to the study and mitigation of existential risks, particularly risk brought about from the development of advanced AI technologies.

Tallinn’s reference to killer robots draws from the 2017 short film, “Slaughterbots,” which was released by the Future of Life Institute as part of a campaign warning about the dangers of weaponized artificial intelligence. The film depicts a dystopian future in which the world has been overtaken by militarized killer drones powered by AI.

As AI technology develops, Tallinn is especially afraid of the implications that military use might have for the future of AI.

“Putting AI in the military makes it very hard for humanity to control AI’s trajectory, because at this point you are in a literal arms race,” Tallinn said in the interview. “When you’re in an arms race, you don’t have much maneuvering room when it comes to thinking about how to approach this new technology. You just have to go where the capabilities are and where the strategic advantage is.”

On top of that, AI warfare could make attacks very difficult to attribute, he said.

“The natural evolution for fully automated warfare,” Tallinn continued, “is swarms of miniaturized drones that anyone with money can produce and release without attribution.”

When contacted by Insider, the Future of Life Institute told Insider it agreed with Tallinn’s remarks on his fears of weaponized AI.

These fears have existed for years — the Future for Life Institute was founded almost a decade ago in 2014, quickly gaining the attention of figures like Elon Musk, who donated $10 million to the institute in 2015. But the issue has felt a lot more pressing recently, with the release of ChatGPT and other AI models available to the public, and current fears about AI taking over people’s jobs. Now AI researchers, tech moguls, celebrities, and regular people alike are worried.

Even director Christopher Nolan is warning that AI could be reaching its “Oppenheimer moment,” Insider previously reported — in other words, researchers are questioning their responsibility for developing technology that might have unintended consequences.

Earlier this year hundreds of people including Elon Musk, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet’s AI lab DeepMind, and notable AI professors signed an open letter issued by the Future of Life Institute calling for a six-month pause on advanced AI development. (Meanwhile, Musk was quietly racing to hire and launch his own generative AI initiative to compete with OpenAI, Insider’s Kali Hays first reported, which he recently announced as xAI.)

“Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources,” the letter reads. “Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.

• Russia is trying to make its exploding drones deadlier, according to leaked documents.
• The documents, obtained by The Washington Post, detail efforts to bolster their UAV program.
• Moscow is attempting to make a deadlier, more advanced variant of the Iran’s Shaheds.

Russia has hammered Ukraine with deadly explosive-laden one-way attack drones, relying on the Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles to bombard enemies on the battlefield and strike inside cities like Kyiv. Now, leaked documents show Russia plans to build its own drones and is exploring a deadlier variant able to strike autonomously.

The documents obtained by The Washington Post detail Russian efforts to bolster their UAV capabilities in Ukraine with manufacturing assistance from Iran. These include efforts to domestically build 6,000 drones by summer 2025, including new variants of the Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones much more capable than the current model.

The Post reported that as part of Russia’s secret drone project, which is conducted at a facility where workers’ passports are confiscated to keep them from leaving the country and messages use coded language, Russia is looking to develop a version of the Shaheds — or as they call them, the Geran-2s — that is more advanced and deadlier than Iran’s.

These drones would have the ability to coordinate and conduct attacks, including swarm attacks, with autonomy, presumably relying on artificial intelligence. Right now, Shahed-136s are programmed with a target before launch. 

Ukraine has also been experimenting with better drones, including AI-enabled drones that are more resistant to jamming.

The Iranian-made Shahed-136s that Russia uses are a kind of loitering munition with a range of around 1,250 miles. They operate differently than a drone despite being commonly referred to as one. Packed with an explosive payload, these weapons fill a gap between drones and cruise missiles, flying around an area before locating a target and slamming into it.

Although a single Shahed-136 may not do significant damage, a swarm has the potential to prove devastating.

Shahed-136s are also relatively cheap to develop and deploy, meaning there’s an asymmetric advantage to using the loitering munition to hit certain targets as opposed to more expensive cruise missiles, which cost millions of dollars as opposed to tens of thousands.

Russia began receiving shipments of Iranian Shahed-136s, last summer and has been using them regularly, often against civilian infrastructure in cities. If Russia is able to develop a larger, stronger arsenal, it may be able to attack more frequently with far greater numbers of these exploding drones. 

The development of a better UAV force could help Russia better supplement its limited precision guided munitions and allow them to hit harder behind enemy lines.

• In July, the volume of loans doled out from Chinese banks hit their lowest amount since 2009.
• The People’s Bank of China said new loans reached 345.9 billion yuan in July, less than half the amount expected by Bloomberg economists.
• A key measure of credit also fell well below estimates in July, per Bloomberg, signaling weak demand.

China’s economy continues to amass a range of bleak data from property and trade to manufacturing and demographics, and on Friday the People’s Bank of China reported that new lending in July fell to the lowest level since 2009. 

Chinese banks doled out 345.9 billion yuan in new loans last month, well below the 780 billion yuan economists had expected, according to a Bloomberg report and survey.

The smaller volume signals that demand for loans is deteriorating, a point further supported by July’s sharp drop-off in aggregate financing, a measure of credit.

The data release also showed mid- and long-term loans to households, a gauge for mortgages, shrank by 67.2 billion yuan, and that loans to companies also dropped month over month in July to 271.2 billion yuan.

Additionally, the People’s Bank of China said year-on-year growth of broad M2 money supply slowed to 10.7%.

The big miss on bank lending, too, suggests that policymakers’ still have their work cut out for them as far as monetary policy. On Tuesday, the People’s Bank of China cut several interest rates in a bid to boost the economy, following a similar move in June.

Weak credit growth adds to the red flags on China’s economy that are piling up.

Housing market data out Wednesday showed prices for new homes declined for the second consecutive month, with 49 of the measured 70 cities reporting month-over-month dips.

Industrial output rose 3.7% in July from a year ago, slowing from June’s 4.4% pace. Retail sales growth cooled to 2.5% from 3.1%.

And consumer prices dropped annually in July for the first time in two years, joining producer prices in deflation territory.

“Deflation means the real value of debt goes up,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute’s China center, told Insider in a recent interview. “High inflation we know is bad, but it does help manage debt burdens over time. Deflation does the opposite.”

• The average US president has been charged with 1.9 felonies.
• The fact is a result of former President Donald Trump being a statistical outlier: he alone has been charged with 91 felonies.
• He’s officially become the “Spiders Georg” of world leaders.

Forty-five men have been elected president of the United States. Before Donald Trump, the average number felonies charged per president was zero. Following Monday night’s indictment, that number now stands at 1.9.

Trump has been charged with a whopping 91 felonies total across four indictments, two federal and one each in Georgia and New York.

He faces charges around allegations he paid off an adult film star, mishandled classified documents at his Mar-A-Lago residence, and tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Trump has become an unfortunate statistical outlier in the nation’s 247-year history, comparable only to “Spiders Georg,” a fictional person dreamed up by a Tumblr user who “lives in cave & eats over 10,000 [spiders] each day” and is solely responsible for upping the average number of spiders eaten by each person per year.

Despite the litany of felony charges levied against him, Trump is comfortably in the lead in GOP presidential primary polling. According to an average of national polls deemed “major” by FiveThirtyEight, Trump currently draws in an average of 52.7% support, nearly 38 percentage points ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s in second place.

• Former second lady Karen Pence said that she “never felt afraid” while at the Capitol on January 6.
• “I really felt like we just had such a peace and God’s presence,” she recently told ABC News.
• Karen Pence said her role as second lady prepared her for the precautions she took that day.

Throughout the chaos of the January 6, 2021, riot at the United States Capitol, countless lawmakers spoke of the fear that they felt as the invading mob sought to halt the certification of now-President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.

As many lawmakers and aides sought refuge in offices and conference rooms in the Capitol complex, seeking to shield themselves from the raucous rioters just feet away, then-Vice President Mike Pence and then-second lady Karen Pence were moved from the Senate chamber to the vice president’s ceremonial office before being whisked away to an underground Capitol loading dock.

But throughout that harrowing day, Karen Pence in an interview with ABC News said that she “never” feared for her life and remarked that she felt “God’s presence” despite the uncertainty that filled the air. Many of the rioters infamously chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they protested her husband’s role in certifying Biden’s win.

“I just was discussing this with someone here in Iowa a few minutes ago, I never felt afraid,” the former second lady told ABC News anchor Linsey Davis. “I really felt like we just had such a peace and God’s presence. And just a sense of purpose and determination that I don’t think any of us in the whole group – all the staff and everyone with us — I don’t think any of us felt fear. I think we felt like a sense of resolve.”

When Davis asked Karen Pence about her drawing the curtains in the ceremonial office, the former second lady attributed it to “conditioning” from being in the public eye.

“I think once you become, you know, second lady, life changed a lot for us,” she said. “In fact, during the transition, we rented a home near DC. And I remember walking in that home the first day — and Secret Service had put a butcher block paper, you know, all over the windows — and you couldn’t even see outside.”

“Every time we traveled, they would have bulletproof glass in every hotel room. So it’s a conditioning thing that I just knew,” she continued. “Whenever you’re in a situation where someone might be able to shoot through the window, just close the drapes. That was my thinking at the time was like, ‘Wait a minute. Things are starting to happen out there. Let’s close the drapes.’”

Karen Pence praised the Secret Service members who were with her family that day, calling them “phenomenal,” as they informed her, the then-vice president, and their daughter, Charlotte, that they would have to move to a new location from the ceremonial office.

“It was clear pretty early on that we might need to vacate that room and go somewhere else,” she told Davis.

In the former vice president’s 2022 memoir, “So Help Me God,” he also recounted his sense of spirituality as he endured the ordeal with his family.

“I have often told our three children that the safest place in the world is to be in the center of God’s will,” the former vice president wrote in his book. “I knew in my heart that we were where we were supposed to be, doing what we were supposed to be doing I felt resolve and at peace informed by my upbringing in Indiana, my faith, my family, a lifetime of service and lifelong love of the Constitution.”

The Pences eventually remained at the Capitol until January 7, 2021, when the certification of Biden’s victory concluded in the early morning hours.

As a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, Pence has not shied away from his role on January 6, as he has stood by his decision to reject former President Donald Trump’s entreaties to overturn the 2020 presidential results.

“I know I did the right thing,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network in a 2021 interview.

Pence remains far behind Trump in polls of the Republican presidential field, but he’ll likely have to opportunity to jostle with his onetime boss at the first GOP debate later this month should the ex-president participate in the event.