The government's campaign to fight "misinformation" has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. DARPA said those tools were used "to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information," beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago. The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms. Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online has compiled a report detailing how this technology is being developed to manipulate the speech of Americans via the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations.

I really enjoy my TurtleBot. I haven't programmed it to do anything very useful, like bringing me coffee, but it's still a lot of fun: It lets even a n00b like me explore and learn a bit about ROS, or Robot Operating System, the influential software platform used by a growing number of robotics researchers and companies around the world. My kids seem to like the TurtleBot, too. It's now decorated with "Frozen" stickers and a drawing of what I assume is Elsa's face. Now, after nearly three years, ElsaBot needs an upgrade.