Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and delivery services for many companies around the globe, is experiencing a major outage that’s taking down sites across the web. Users are running into an error message when they try to access X, ChatGPT, and even the outage-tracking website DownDetector has an error message saying “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
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The outage comes less than a month after a huge Amazon Web Services crash took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and other services, which was followed by issues at Microsoft Azure that brought Xbox offline for hours.
Category Archives: General
The New Battlefield: Cognitive/Semantic Warfare
Neuroweapons in Cognitive Warfare
When the Battlefield Is the Human Mind
https://osintteam.blog/neuroweapons-in-cognitive-warfare-21c5f54fb20a
In the evolving landscape of global conflict, traditional weapons are being replaced by more insidious and invisible tools. Among the most dangerous are neuroweapons — technologies and psychological strategies designed to directly manipulate, disrupt, or degrade human cognition, emotion, perception, and memory.
While cyberattacks target infrastructure, neuroweapons target the brain itself — the final frontier of warfare. These tools are not theoretical. They are being researched, tested, and in some cases deployed today under the broader umbrella of cognitive warfare.
If we fail to act now, these silent weapons will undermine societies from within, subverting free will, collapsing trust, and destroying the very faculties that make democracy and human dignity possible.
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These tools may not kill but they can unmake a person, fracture a society, or erase shared reality.
Why Neuroweapons Are a Threat to Humanity
They Bypass the Body and Go Straight for the Self
Unlike kinetic weapons, neuroweapons attack the core of identity: belief, memory, decision-making, and emotional balance. Victims may not even know they’ve been targeted until they’ve changed.
They Are Hard to Attribute and Easy to Deny
Neuroweapons leave no craters or scars. Their effects can be dismissed as mental illness, stress, or coincidence. This plausible deniability makes them the perfect tool for covert repression and political warfare.
They Can Be Used by Non-State Actors and ‘Black Sheep’ Insiders
It doesn’t take a state military to carry out neurowarfare. Rogue scientists, private intelligence contractors, criminal networks, or embedded actors in medical or tech systems can use them to target whistleblowers, activists, or civilians.
They Create Irreversible Damage to Minds and Institutions
Neuroweapons not only harm individuals; they erode public trust, delegitimize institutions, and degrade mental health at scale — leading to increased suicides, societal division, and economic collapse.DARPA GARD: From Illusion of Defense to Semantic Weaponry – A New Era of Cyber Warfare
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/darpa-gard-from-illusion-defense-semantic-weaponry-new-katja-sidunova-kzqwe
GARD — Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception. The deeper I plunged into its intricacies, the clearer it became: this narrative transcends mere defense, venturing into the creation of an entirely new, unprecedented class of weaponry. The catalyst for this discourse stems from the official DARPA document HR001119S0026 and the analytical brief “GARD: The Science of Deception from DARPA”, which collectively paint a picture worthy of a dystopian thriller. The unsettling truth is, this isn’t fiction; it’s unfolding in our reality, right now.
We have grown accustomed to placing immense trust in artificial intelligence. It orchestrates our financial markets, assists in medical diagnoses, pilots aircraft, and safeguards national borders. But what if this intelligence can be manipulated to perceive what is absent? Or, conversely, to disregard an overt threat? The GARD program is not merely another research endeavor. It is Pandora’s Box, unleashing an era of semantic warfare, where the battleground is the machine’s very perception of reality.
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This journey began with what are known as adversarial examples — minute, humanimperceptible alterations within a digital image (e.g., in a few pixels) that provoke neural networks into making egregious classification errors. A quintessential illustration: a “STOP” sign, subjected to such an attack, is misidentified as an “80 km/h Speed Limit” sign. This is no longer a benign vulnerability; it poses a direct and severe threat to safety, particularly for autonomous vehicles.
However, DARPA, through its GARD program, propelled this concept far beyond its initial scope. The focus dramatically shifted from the purely digital domain to the tangible world. The official program announcement explicitly details attacks on physical objects, such as “placing stickers on a road sign”. This fundamentally reshapes the strategic landscape. Now, an adversary need not compromise code or gain access to a neural network’s internal architecture. It suffices to manipulate the very physical reality that the machine “observes.”
Assessing “Cognitive Warfare”
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/11/14/assessing-cognitive-warfare/
Defining Cognitive Warfare
In Cognitive Warfare, the message is the munition, and the target is the mind of either specific individuals (e.g., elites, influencers, policymakers) or the collective population of a democratic state. Distorting what these individuals think is a precursor to how they think, and thus how they behave.
Early advocates such as the French officer, Francois du Cluzel, defined Cognitive Warfare as “the art of using technologies to alter the cognition of human targets, most often without their knowledge and consent.”[8] This early conception stressed Cognitive Warfare as an offensive form of cyber conflict; however, he recognized that countermeasures and preventive measures were required. Du Cluzel differentiated psychological operations from cognitive operations, but it is unclear whether the distinction is valid or of value. For du Cluzel, psychological warfare attempts to change what the target audience thinks, but Cognitive Warfare aims at shaping how they reason and their resultant behavior. This distinction lies at the heart of why human cognition is the central objective.
Cognitive War is the application of targeted and tailored messages and nonviolent methods used against civilian and military decision-makers or the general population of a target state to gain a positional advantage in the cognitive domain or gain desired political, military, and informational outcomes.While Cognitive Warfare is not new, there are a number of novel technologies that significantly enhance the reach and efficacy of activities that target the way decision-makers and individuals think about a crisis situation. Some have seen this as social media-based influence operations.[9] These technologies can be combined to “assess, access, and affect the cognitive space.”[10] While our competitors think in terms of systems and confronting and deceiving us, Western militaries orient on hardware, maneuver platforms, and kinetic operations.
Further reading:
The Matrix Has Upgraded Its Security
https://neo-concepts.com/ideas/semantic-control/
Forging the Semantic Key: AI-Assisted Resilience in an Age of Information Warfare
https://neo-concepts.com/posts/forging-the-semantic-key/
The clandestine (and copied) talent of Christopher Marlowe: “Shakespeare would not have existed without his presence”
Marlowe was recruited by the State to carry out secret operations in hot spots. Greenblatt finds evidence in the contacts that facilitated his entry and exit from university life. His entry and exit from artistic life.
Marlowe was a spy. “At the end of his sixth year of study at Cambridge, he applied for his degree. The University authorities denied it to him. He had not met the residency requirements. He had been absent for long periods of time. They suspected he had gone to France, where exiled Catholics were preparing to attack the throne. Since he did not receive the degree, at the end of the month, a letter signed by all the important men of the Elizabethan Government arrived at the University explaining the Queen’s displeasure at such an important person not receiving the degree. There are no such letters for a nobody. This intervention greatly influenced what happened later with his work. For example, it influences The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, who makes a pact with the devil.”
“He had very uncommon talents. And he had no limits. He always walked very close to them. That’s why he lived a very short life”
There was another passage in his biography that excites Greenblatt. “For some reason, a year before his assassination, Marlowe was in Flanders”. The English were fighting the Spanish there. Marlowe tried his luck in counterfeiting coins with a couple of underworld friends. They weren’t very smart either: someone discovered the fake shilling they used to test the business. “They suspected he was counterfeiting because he was going to defect to the Catholic side and help the Spanish. Anyone else would have been hanged. However, the military governor wrote a message to London with the recommendation of two of the most important nobles in the country. Marlowe was returned with his guard. It’s amazing. These two very important characters in England at that time offered protection to the son of a cobbler who was counterfeiting money. And they released him. It’s amazing,” the author repeats. “He was involved in something clandestine and complicated.”
https://www.mundoamerica.com/news/2025/11/11/69131163fc6c8300738b459d.html
No, ancient Hebrew Slaves didn’t Build the Giza Pyramids
Hebrews or “Jews” did not help build the pyramids because there were not yet any Jews at that time. The three Giza pyramids were constructed during the 4th Dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 BCE). Moses was a mythical figure imagined by Jewish scribes in Achaemenid Iran in the 500s BCE and after, based on circulating folk tales of a branch of the Canaanites, and it isn’t clear whether he really existed or when. If as tradition holds, his dates were 1391–1271 BCE, that was some 11 centuries after the pyramids were built.
https://www.juancole.com/2025/11/ancient-hebrew-pyramids.html
The Contradiction Is the Compass: Empire, Multipolarity, and the Revolutionary Horizon
The imperialist state used to offer wages and citizenship in exchange for loyalty and silence. Now it offers nothing but control. You don’t get a pension; you get a payment app. You don’t get housing; you get a credit check. You don’t get health care; you get a biometric profile sold to Pfizer and Palantir. And when you protest, you don’t face a cop—you face a data model that predicted your rebellion six weeks ago and flagged you for preemptive suppression. This is not dystopian fiction. This is how the empire governs its own periphery: Black neighborhoods, Indigenous territories, poor white towns, immigrant enclaves. It is counterinsurgency on the domestic front. It is the internal colony, digitized and automated.
And it doesn’t stop with the ghettos. As the capitalist core consumes itself, the working class of the Global North—especially its youth—is being inducted into a new kind of managed decline. Gig work, medical debt, algorithmic bosses, militarized campuses, and endless content pipelines to pacify political consciousness. Technofascism doesn’t just repress—it replaces. It replaces class struggle with personal branding. It replaces education with STEM job funnels. It replaces social life with platforms, unions with apps, politics with metrics. And all of it is enforced not just by the state, but by capital itself—tech capital, defense capital, and financial capital fused into a single command structure.
Oil Giant Total’s Net Zero Claims Broke the Law, Court Rules
Total “deliberately made an environmental claim likely to mislead consumers, by leading them to believe that by buying its products or services, they were participating in the emergence of a low-carbon economy,” according to a translation of the court’s decision.
The French court ordered Total to cease those statements within a month or face a fine of 10,000 euros per day [~$11,500], and to display the court’s ruling on its website for 180 days.
The case, filed in 2022 by NGOs Greenpeace France, Friends of the Earth France, and Notre Affaire à Tous, is part of a growing global wave of climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. One of the biggest and fastest-growing categories of those lawsuits are cases relating to false climate or environmental advertising, according to a report by Oil Change International and Zero Carbon Analytics last year.
China’s chemical exports are behind a ‘tsunami’ of meth flooding Asia
A Washington Post investigation has found that Chinese manufacturers are shipping rapidly increasing amounts of chemicals that can be used in the production of synthetic drugs to lawless parts of Southeast Asia, where warlords and criminal gangs have been producing and trafficking record levels of meth.
The Sabotage of the Nord Streams: Investigation Splits Europe Over Ukraine – WSJ
Suspects Were Smuggled Out by Diplomats
One of the divers was allegedly smuggled out of Poland to Ukraine in a car with diplomatic plates, driven by a Ukrainian military attaché. The Ukrainian government refused to comment on the incident.
Another suspect, the group commander, was detained in Italy. He was identified as Sergey K., a 46-year-old veteran of the SBU who fought in Kyiv at the beginning of the Russian invasion. His arrest followed months of searching and tracking routes through Poland, the Czech Republic, and Italy.
As Sergey was led out of court, he raised three fingers in the shape of the Ukrainian trident, demonstrating solidarity with his homeland. The lawyer stated that his client is innocent, and even if he acted, it was within the framework of a military operation in defense of Ukraine, thus he has immunity.
Political Consequences for Europe
Now, as the case is prepared for court, Berlin fears a split among Ukraine’s allies. The Italian court’s decision on the extradition of Sergey K. could determine whether the Nord Stream case turns into a diplomatic crisis.
Franco-era mass graves loom over Spain 50 years after his death
The few surviving children of victims of Franco’s regime are racing against time to recover and identify the remains of their parents through DNA testing, with over 3,300 mass graves from the Spanish Civil War estimated to contain 140,000 missing persons.
https://www.thelocal.es/20251110/franco-era-mass-graves-loom-over-spain-50-years-after-his-death
First Friends: How “Italy’s Donald Trump” Introduced Naomi Campbell to Jeffrey Epstein
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/07/investigative-series/first-friends-part1/
In the first installment of this series, Unlimited Hangout examines the Italian businessman Flavio Briatore, sometimes referred to in the press as “Italy’s Donald Trump” because of his long-running friendship with the current president, and how his rise to prominence and wealth was fueled by a series of seedy associations to the same network of organized crime and intelligence operatives that also aided the rise of Epstein. As detailed in the two-volume book One Nation Under Blackmail, this network is ultimately controlled by powerful financial interests and unaccountable mob-linked oligarchs who have made powerful nation states, including the U.S., their play thing. This article will also detail how Briatore, along with Donald Trump and others, were once accused by Epstein’s butler Alfredo Rodriguez of being “material witnesses” to Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes. Rodriguez died in 2014 shortly after serving time in prison in relation to his failed efforts to sell the now infamous “black book” of Jeffrey Epstein.
However, first, this article will examine the supermodel Naomi Campbell, who was introduced to Epstein by Briatore – her one-time fianceé and subsequently “her mentor.” Campbell later flew on Epstein’s plane and, shortly after ending her relationship with Briatore, became romantically involved with the rapper Diddy, who would remain her close friend years after their romantic flame went out. Diddy’s own sex trafficking scandal and trial has been a focus on media attention for much of the past several months and Campbell has been accused of involvement in Diddy’s alleged criminal activity.