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The largest data centers on the planet are guarded by dogs. By robot dogs

March 22, 2026 by usatoday24

The deployment of data centers to train the artificial intelligence It is a sign of technological power, but also economic power. This year alone, the big Americans are going to let themselves more money than NASA invested to take man to the Moon. More than $670 billion between Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google to create gigantic data centers. And within that investment, an important part is in safety with dogs. With robot dogs, specifically. It is the culmination of science fiction dystopia. In short. In the age of AI, data centers are the holy grail. We are continually seeing how companies sign contracts for thousands of million dollars with NVIDIA either amd (especially with NVIDIA) to provide them with the platforms with which to train their models. It’s only part of the equation, as there is another monumental investment in power, storage, RAM, dissipation and everything necessary to make these small cities work. Within the investment, there is security, and in BI They have published a report in which they detail that, within the budget, there are companies that are already including spending on robots that patrol both the perimeter and the internal corridors. The goal is security in every sense: patrol to detect threats, but also to identify any problems that occur with the equipment before they escalate and become something more serious. brand dogs. In the report, two companies are pointed out: Boston Dynamics and its dog Spot (with which we were able to play a few years ago) and Ghost Robotics with your Vision 60. Since Boston Dynamicsthe company owned by hyundai For a few years now, they have told the American media that they have been visiting data centers for some time because there is great interest. “We have seen an increase in interest in data centers in the last year, which is probably not surprising given the investment in that space,” Merry Frayne, the company’s senior director of product management, tells the outlet. For these companies, it is tremendous advertising, but also a potential customer in a “new” sector. Because it is possible that the police do not have the budget to get hold of many, but within the billions that are invested in data centers, dogs are just another sheet in the accounting excel. You can mount the sensor you want ‘Patrolling the center. And what is your task? Well… quite a task, really. The representative of Boston Dynamics, and other operators, point out that the dogs are not limited to acting as a “mobile surveillance camera”, but have other tasks: Patrol exterior perimeters to ensure that there are no problems with fences and accesses. Walk through server rooms, cooling rooms, and power rooms to look for anomalies such as water leaks, hot spots that may indicate a short circuit, or accumulations of moisture. Also sensors to detect gases, microphones to analyze noise and, ultimately, the sensor you want to put on it. Capture visual data from everything, such as analog pressure gauges or level indicators. Constantly, and as some robot vacuum cleaners do, map with LiDAR as they pass to see that there are no elements out of place. Some specific centers in which they are already being tested are Novva Data Centers in Utah or Oracle at the Industry Lab in Chicago. And dogs, in addition to cameras, have all kinds of thermal sensors and even conversational interfaces based on models like ChatGPT to interact with people. Measurement of noise levels Object identification Thermal sensors Compensate. It’s really nothing new. We have already seen robot dogs in other industrial sectors such as oil, mining or manufacturing. security forces. In China, in fact, there are deploying to assist firefighters in extreme situations or in institutesbut if in those scenarios they are seen as a tool, here they seem more like a substitute. Because there are those who have done the math and, in a market like the American one, a couple of full-time human guards can cost about $300,000 annually. The initial cost of a Spot ranges from $175,000 to $300,000, depending on the equipment. The cost of a Vision 60 is $165,000. And, as we see, they do much more than a security guard by being full of sensors. Frayne says, “Clients typically start to see a payback on their investment in about 18 months.” Michael Subhan, business director at Ghost Robotics, comments that “instead of having two human guards for $300,000, you can have one human guard and one robot.” A Spots battery charging. And it’s better, since it lasts less than two hours with the standard battery They also get tired. These robots also have their needs. They need to change batteries and install charging points and the environment must be well structured so that the routes are efficient and the sensors such as the LiDAR work well. They can climb stairs and avoid obstacles, but performance suffers in other environments and, in addition, the placement of fixed cameras and sensors in the building must be planned. That is to say, it seems that it is not as easy as saying “I build the center however I want, buy four robodogs and it will work”, but rather that you have to plan the traditional elements and the dogs to achieve a good integration. who are you HUGE Market. Although we have discussed two specific cases in which these robo-guardian dogs are being tested, both Boston Dynamics and Ghost Robotics have not gone into more details. In the end, it is security, and this falls within confidentiality agreements. Boston Dynamics points out that it is an “emerging market.” And Subhan has mentioned that “in the United States alone there are 5,000 data centers and 800 to 1,000 are currently being built, so we see it as a great market for us.” According to some estimatesthe market for robot dogs and industrial drones is currently around 500,000 units, but is expected to double by 2030, generating a market of 21 billion … Read more

The Nazis produced 1,200 films. 44 of them remain prohibited and guarded by the German Government to this day.

February 11, 2026 by usatoday24

In the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid An optional subject is taught called History of informative and documentary cinema. A few years ago, the teacher who taught that class had the habit of giving his students fragments of ‘The triumph of the will‘, the documentary that Leni Riefenstahl directed about the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, in 1934. She always added that she only showed those fragments because, if she put it in its entirety, she feared that we would want to join the party. ‘Triumph of the Will’ is one of the more than 1,200 films that the Ministry of Propaganda German, under the command of Joseph Goebbels, produced to spread Nazi ideals, anti-Semitism and to justify the Second World War. When the war ended, the Allies banned about 300 of them, and 44 are still on that list in charge of the German government. Why are these movies banned? Those forty-four were the subject of a documentary a few years ago, ‘Forbidden Films’which not only explained what kind of tapes they were and what they were about, but also asked whether they should no longer be banned and what legacy they might have left, 70 years after the end of the war. Your director, Felix Moellerproduced it in the face of disinterest of German youth about the history of the Nazis and the rise of the extreme right in Europe, and the documentary shows the reactions of different people when watching some of these films. Because the German government does allow their exhibition, but for educational purposes and with an expert in the room to explain and contextualize them. In the trailer you can already see some of these opinions, from those who are surprised because these films have good technical quality and are entertaining, to those who think that some of them should remain prohibited because they were, at the time, Nazi symbols, such as ‘The Jew Süss‘, which was probably the most successful of all the productions promoted by Goebbels. ‘The Jew Süss’ was the second film adaptation of the life of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, financial advisor to the Duke of Württemberg during the 18th century and who was accused of fraud, bribery, treason and even illicit relations with several ladies of the court, and executed for these crimes. His story had been treated in books and even in plays that generally focused on it as a great human tragedy. But Goebbels saw that he could present Süss as a arrogant jew who infiltrated the Germans to take away what was theirs. He already had the most important piece in his cinematic anti-Semitic propaganda. ‘The Jew Süss’ was a great popular success. It was screened at the 1940 Venice Film Festival, receiving good reviews for its technical workmanship, reviews that did not seem to be aware of the ultimate objective of the film. Goebbels himself wrote in his diary about the film that it was “an anti-Semitic film of the kind we could only wish for. I’m very happy about it.” Good but dangerous movies In 1994, the film critic Roger Ebert wrote about one of those 44 banned Nazi films, ‘Triumph of the Will’, that “we would all have reflected on the received opinion that the film is good but evil, and that writing about it raises the question of whether quality art can be in the service of evil.” Ebert asked himself the same question with ‘The Birth of a Nation’, RW Griffith’s film that is considered one of the founding works of cinema and, at the same time, deeply racist. Those films, at the time, were not considered that way. Luis Buñuel himself stated in his memories that, in 1935, no one in Hollywood thought that ‘Triumph of the Will’ was dangerous because there were too many regional dances and too many songs for its propaganda message to be taken seriously. The Second World War drastically changed that perception, but until then, the productions of the Ministry of Propaganda Germans used entertaining stories to convey their ideals. They portrayed the British as cruel inventors of concentration camps or justified the invasion of Poland by showing the Poles persecuting the German minority living there. They could be full of stereotypes, historical manipulations and blatant attempts to “brainwash” their viewers, but they were well produced and shot and were very successful at the time. For all these reasons, they remain prohibited. But should they continue to be? In ‘Forbidden films’ there are scholars who claim that these films clearly show what should not be repeated in the future and that, therefore, their access to them should not be restricted, while former members of neo-Nazi parties point out another reason for them to be removed from the “black list”: “When something is prohibited, it becomes interesting. Prohibiting things makes them fascinating and taboo because if it is prohibited, it must be true to a certain extent.” Other Banned Non-Nazi Films Nazi ideological propaganda is the reason why these 44 films remain banned in Germany, which also has a great controversy over the passage to public domain of ‘Mein Kampf’but throughout the history of cinema there have been films that have also been included in “blacklists” for reasons that can range from accusations of obscenity to, directly, blasphemy. Or it could have happened to them like ‘The great dictator‘, the satire that Charles Chaplin made of Hitler and Mussolini, in 1940, and which was banned in Argentina precisely for that parody, since Germany had been an ally of Juan Domingo Perón. It was even on the verge of not being shown in the United Kingdom because, when filming was announced, the country was trying to appease Hitler in his expansionist desires for Europe. When it was released, however, the British were already at war with the Germans and there was no reason for its censorship. You don’t have to go to China or countries with fundamentalist regimes to find the most … Read more

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