Security

FCC Declares War on “Foreign” Robots and Power Inverters

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On July 28, 2026, the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau released Public Notice DA-26-786. It’s completely broken.

The notice adds two categories of equipment to the Covered List:

  1. Power inverters produced in a foreign country
  2. Advanced robotic devices produced in a foreign country

The Covered List identifies equipment the government has determined poses an unacceptable risk to national security. Devices on the list cannot receive FCC equipment authorization, which means they cannot legally be sold in the United States. The bans rest on two National Security Determinations sent to the FCC one day earlier by a White House interagency body. The FCC treats these determinations as binding and says it is required to place the equipment on the list.

To put it simply, a threat is described and then a rule is written that has nothing to do with that threat. It’s easy to see where they screwed this up so badly, and maybe even why.

The FCC names two risks.

  1. Supply disruption, meaning foreign suppliers could choke off the flow of inverters and robots at a time of their choosing.
  2. Remote access, meaning foreign actors can reach these devices over the internet. They can shut them down remotely, pull data off them, or use them for surveillance.

Then the rule bans devices based on where they were manufactured. Record scratch.

Remote access does not depend on where a device was manufactured. It depends on how the device connects, who controls its software, and where its data goes. That leaves supply disruption as the only threat the rule could even claim to address

The FCC’s own evidence shoots down the rule.

The notice cites a DOE assessment saying that even inverters assembled in the United States use chips and power components made almost entirely abroad. So a device can pass this rule while containing the exact foreign components the FCC is worried about, and while sending its data to a foreign server.

The rule allows the exact threats to continue. The chips stay foreign. The data still leaves.

The rule also bans devices that pose no such threat, dropping the U.S. into a worse position. It applies regardless of the nationality of the producer, so an American company that builds inverters in Mexico is banned even if the device never connects to anything foreign.

The legal mechanism is also wrong.

The Secure Networks Act requires a specific determination that particular equipment poses a risk. The FCC used one determination to ban every inverter and every advanced robot made anywhere outside the United States without any particular point at all. That is a categorical ban based on isolationist rhetoric at best, not a specific determination, and the statute does not authorize categorical bans.

The rule extends a reversal of how the Covered List works. The list began with named companies after individual findings against them. Find a flaw, file a report. Everything else was allowed, which is a logical way to handle threats. The flip started with drones in December 2025 and routers in March 2026. Now inverters and robots join the shoot-in-foot list. Everything foreign is banned unless the government grants an exemption, through the Department of War for robots and through the Department of War or DHS for inverters. That’s a transfer of power misaligned with consumer safety. The default moved from allowed to banned for the entire world market, four product categories in seven months

With this default deny list, the exemption process publishes only a checklist. The guidance documents tell applicants what to submit and nothing more. The old equipment authorization system ran through the FCC with public criteria and public procedures. Conditional Approvals run through the discretion of the Department of War and the Department of Homeland Security. The notice states no standard for approval, no deadline for a decision, and no way to appeal a denial.

Finally, the statute this all rests on is a communications law. It was written for telecom network equipment. Inverters and robots qualify only because they contain a thing that connects them to a network, which under this logic makes nearly every modern electronic device a communications device the FCC can ban, with the Department of War deciding which ones come back to market.

There was a straightforward and logical alternative for each threat. If the threat is remote access, the remedy is security requirements on connectivity, software updates, and data flows, applied to every device sold in the US regardless of origin. If the threat is supply disruption, the remedy is component-level sourcing requirements, because the DOE evidence shows the dependence sits in the chips, not the final assembly. That is so obvious, the fact that I have to even write it suggests the American regulator has been completely captured by political corruption. Those simple rules would address the actual threats.

History, Security

Atlanta’s 5K Flock Cameras Have Solved No More Crime Than Before

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Atlanta has more surveillance cameras per capita than any city in America. That’s a corporate artifact, like saying the city with coke headquarters has been known for more America First tokens per capita.

Coca-Cola’s Milwaukee management, known for Silver Shirt and America First rallies, made swastika memorabilia to promote race-based politics

Flock Safety’s headquarters means DeFlock’s crowdsourced map shows over 5,000 Flock cameras in the metro area. The police department has about 1,800 sworn officers. The city’s integrated camera network grew eightfold since 2021, from 3,300 cameras to 28,626.

Flock claims one license plate reader per sworn officer correlates with a 9.1 percent increase in clearance rates. That means Atlanta has nearly three per officer.

The Atlanta Community Press Collective pulled APD’s submissions to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. Homicide clearance was 53.4 percent in 2021 and 48.0 percent in 2025, showing a worse rate. Rape stayed at 37.7 percent. Robbery stayed at 25 percent. Burglary moved from 10.7 to 11.6 percent. Flat across eight major crime categories, despite cameras.

The cameras waste a lot of time and money, add invasive risks that reduce safety, yet solve nothing extra.

They cost tens of millions of dollars a year. Every car, every plate, every trip is logged into a database searched by nearly 2,000 agencies, including for immigration raids.

What is this, Igloo White again? Or more to the point, do we learn nothing from history?

$180K Grant in 1966: Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) for New York Surveillance

Atlanta lost its privacy for a crime-solving machine that solves no additional crime.

Food, Security

Chickenshit UK Egg Math: 2.67 Million Printed as 2.67 Percent

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Somebody really clucked up a new report about eggs in the UK.

The environmental cost of welfare-driven policy changes in UK egg production is a paper that appeared in Royal Society Open Science on 29 July 2026. And then it was scooped up by The Guardian.

Organic eggs have worse impact on climate than eggs from caged chickens

Hold on a second, that’s a sensational claim. Let’s take an actual look at the paper.

It models eight ways of meeting UK egg demand and wants us to believe that furnished cages carry the lowest environmental impact and need the fewest birds.

Should we believe?

I’m here to tell you that in five places its text contradicts its own charts. All five sit in the section on how many hens each system requires. How did this go to print, let alone spur The Guardian to cluck, cluck about what’s “worse”?

Apparently the shift to fully organic free-range production would need 2.67 million additional laying hens. Against a national flock of 40.44 million, that would be an increase of 6.60 percent. The paper, however, writes just 2.67 percent. The difference of millions of chickens has been printed as a percentage. It happens four times in a single paragraph. A fifth figure in the same paragraph is calculated correctly, so it’s some kind of weird sloppy mistake, which everyone can see plainly.

Each of the four wrong percentages is too small by exactly 2.4728. That number is 100 divided by 40.44. So I believe the same simple wrong calculation was repeated four times over.

The vocabulary also matters, given what happens next. “Furnished cage” is the paper’s term. Defra, the government department that regulates this, calls the same system an “enriched colony cage”.

On 12 January 2026 Defra, acting for the UK, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland governments, opened a consultation proposing a ban from 2027 on installing new enriched colony cages and a ban from 2032 on using existing ones. It closed on 9 March. The responses are still being analysed. Enriched colony cages supply a little over a fifth of UK shell egg production.

What the paper prints What its own figures give What happened
Population increase of 1.01, 0.74, 0.79 and 2.67 percent for the four non-cage scenarios 2.50, 1.83, 1.95 and 6.60 percent Absolute millions printed as percentages
Mortality reductions of 0.94 and 1.33 million hens under furnished and battery cage Reductions of 1.51 and 1.12 million Scenario totals printed as differences, reversing which cage system performs better
Eutrophication reduction of 4.89 and 12.20 percent for furnished and battery cage 12.20 and 5.49 percent Transposed, and 4.89 corresponds to nothing in the dataset
Acidification of 41 678 tonnes SO2-eq under cage-free barn 40 678 tonnes Text contradicts the figure; the stated 6.53 percent matches the figure
National flock of 36.72 million under furnished cage 37.66 million Culled subtotal printed as a total, then compared against a battery cage total

Every one of the five drops the paper’s credibility a notch. All together it seems too weird. It wants to argue that cage-free systems need more hens for the same number of eggs. But then three of their five errors weaken that case, while two strengthen it. The mortality error also makes battery cages, banned in the UK since 2012, look better than furnished cages. That’s a clue something is very wrong with their whole setup.

The mistakes do have a pattern. Each wrong figure is a quantity being correctly calculated, and then filed under the wrong heading. 2.67 is the count of extra hens in millions. 0.94 million is total mortality under furnished cages, entered as a saving. 36.72 million is the number of hens slaughtered, entered as the number kept. Every one of them is a bar in Figure 4.

That suggests the pictures were used incorrectly to generate the text. Anyone holding the model divides 2.67 by 40.44 and gets the 6.60. The digits are all there, but they’ve been scrambled.

Supposedly seven authors gave final approval for this math, and agreed to be held accountable. What they approved understates the welfare result the whole argument rests on by a factor of two and a half.

Here are six more things I found while trying to understand why this paper is so bad.

  • The inventory comes from Leinonen 2012 and 2014, which is egg production data from around 2009 and 2010. The paper limitations section does not mention this rather critical point. An author mentions it to the Guardian, however.
  • Mortality is fixed at 2.50 percent in furnished cages rising to 8.00 percent in organic systems, all of it carried over from the same 2009 and 2010 sources. Reference 30 is Schuck-Paim 2021, covering 6040 commercial flocks and 176 million hens in 16 countries, which found no mortality difference between caged and cage-free housing in recent years. That study covers indoor systems only, so it bears on the barn figure rather than the free-range and organic ones. The paper dismisses it in a subordinate clause and cites it with the wrong volume number.
  • Current UK grid emission factors are applied to 2010 energy consumption numbers. That’s wildly out of date. Barn acidification is then attributed to energy use.
  • Welfare is only defined as headcount, mortality and slaughter number, which makes no sense. The paper says openly that quality of life was not available to it. That admission gives up the game. Under a fixed output constraint, a metric that counts animals rewards whichever system converts feed fastest. The finding follows from the setup.
  • The method comes from Hayek and Garrett 2018 and Chan, Franks and Hayek 2022, both cited. Those authors built the headcount frame to argue that extensive systems cannot scale and consumption must fall. This paper places consumption change out of scope, stealing an instrument and removing the important warning labels.
  • Two authors hold commercial affiliations. Two. Margaret Hegwood manages corporate engagement at the Centre for Feed Innovation, a think tank founded in 2024 to advance novel feed ingredients, on a paper finding that feed dominates every impact category. Rhea Harrison is at Foodsteps Ltd, an environmental consulting company that sells life cycle assessments to food businesses and markets its research partnerships as a route to shaping policy. The declaration names Hegwood. That’s only one. And states that the other authors have no competing interest.

The paper page carries a link to its review history. And for this paper, when you click on it, you get this banner instead:

History, Security

Haversack of RAG: Demos AI Report Fails Its Own Disinformation Test

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A new think tank paper is out with a shocking, shocking I tell you, revelation that there is disinformation afoot. Mincemeat! I say old chaps, this ruse is a Haversack!

Now, before I get too snarky about this paper being disconnected from reality, I have to admit they did prove a small thing: if you ask a chatbot leading questions about made-up stories, it plays along about one time in six, and the junk sites may turn up in its citations.

That’s a finding.

I can work with that.

However, then these authors took a running leap off a cliff without a rope to claim Russia deliberately rigged websites so AI models would belch out the lies.

I mean, duh. The whole web history has been astroturfing and sock puppets, and Russian history has been militarized disinformation for over a century (copying the Americans and British), so put that all together and what do you expect? But that’s the exact problem here. Our expectations aren’t a substitution for science.

Their test can’t tell their explanation apart from a boring one: models remembered the junk from training. They never checked which it really is, so reading the paper is very disappointing.

The one in six math also is familiar. NewsGuard in May 2025 tested Australian election falsehoods with its innocent, leading and malign prompt styles and also got 16.6 percent. A different country and different topic hit that same number, which suggests the test design may be at fault.

Even more troubling is the fact that their website “evidence” of bad intentions is simply what a standard WordPress plugin does on its own. Let me explain. This report says the max-snippet:-1 directive is a strong signal of deliberate targeting.

Well, it is also found in the page source of the think tank’s own release page, and on the Euronews article that launched the report. Anyone can view the source and check. Are they not aware of their own site undermining their main claim?

And every one of the questions used came from the research team itself? Is that any different from what the authors are accusing the Russians of doing? Is this paper now not evidence of British information dissemination? The researchers typed the questions, and then just reported the answers as a public threat without proper checks. I’m not sure why.

The necessary checks are easy, and yet they skipped them. As a matter of fact, they already were published by someone else. Four researchers at Manchester and Bern (Maxim Alyukov, Mykola Makhortykh, Alexandr Voronovici and Maryna Sydorova) tested the earlier NewsGuard claim in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review last October. Their echo rate was 5 percent instead of 33. Junk citations appeared in 8 percent of answers, usually with warnings attached, and almost entirely when a prompt matched stories that appeared solely on the junk network.

They concluded the cause was data voids: models pull from junk when better coverage is thin. They also noted NewsGuard published no prompt set and counted cautious answers as failures.

Their own analysis in Al Jazeera has perhaps said it best: a study built to find disinformation has found it. Swiss reporters at NZZ got NewsGuard to confirm that its prompts were written so the chatbot only had to agree with the falsehood in the question, and NewsGuard declined to release the full prompt list. The same researchers also made the point that Margarita Simonyan cites Western research as proof that RT works, rather than citing actual proof that RT works.

So this paper says to me the think tank started out to prove a hypothesis “Russia did this” and then wrote everything down as proof. Tests that could have disproved it don’t appear to have been tried. And that means they launched an unproven conclusion.

Far worse, they are gifting the Russians a huge boost. Why? These horrible spammers’ whole existence is convincing the world their junk works. A British report saying “the junk works” is just an ad for the junk sellers.

This report was funded by whom exactly?

Will Perrin, co-architect of the Online Safety Act’s duty of care. He is funding the paper that argues platform regulation should now extend to LLMs.

Will Perrin alert!

  1. He managed the 2001 Communications White Paper that created Ofcom.
  2. His duty of care model, by his own account, underpins the UK approach to regulating online services.
  3. He chaired the campaign coalition that lobbied the Act into law.
  4. He advises the network implementing it.

He built the regulator, then he wrote its doctrine, then he ran its lobby, and now he pays for the synthetic laundering, a paper with unproven claims about Russian disinformation, to push state censorship.

Oh, and the report he funded calls for “black-lists”, in 2026. Racist language, on top of it all, in a report complaining about “bad” information spread! Such fools. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre retired that term in 2020, and the Home Office has followed. I’ll tell you who needs a block list.

Will Perrin!

Fool me once…