How Accurate Are Flock’s AI-Powered License-Reading Cameras?
Futurism reports:

404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the Los Angeles Police Department Office of the Inspector General caught the department’s ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which “resulted in the recovery of stolen v … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Responds to Outcry After Quietly Installing Beta ‘Photos’ App on Enterprise Machines
Microsoft’s cloud storage app OneDrive got a new Photos app in the worst possible way, reports the blog Neowin . “The app is reportedly showing up even on Windows 11 Enterprise machines, despite apparently being a beta application aimed at consumer functionality.”

One admin questioned why … ⌘ Read more

Privacy Backlash Explodes Against Meta’s Smart Glasses
With nearly 70% of the market, “Meta wants its smart glasses to be a big hit,” writes the Los Angeles Times. But after some users found ways to disable the light that warns people they’re being filmed, “the high-tech specs have also turned into a liability, as some are calling the gadget ‘pervert glasses…’”

Some people are using the glasses — which look like a pair … ⌘ Read more

AI Reviews Bring ‘New Normal’ to Linux Release Candidates: Lots of Bug Fixes
Linux Torvalds expects Linux 7.2 should be released next weekend “unless something really bad
pops up,” Torvalds said while announcing today’s release candidate.

But there’s something interesting about Linux 7.2-rc7, writes Phoronix. “By the time the Linux kernel typically hits a -rc7 release things have usually settled qui … ⌘ Read more

Flock Accused of Reactivating Its Cameras Without Notifying a Town
A Massachusetts newspaper reports that officials from the town of Littleton (population: 10,141) “claim that five of Littletonâ™s Flock Safety cameras were switched back on by the company without informing the town…”

Littleton had temporarily disabled the cameras earlier this year, according to the article, but upon discovering the camer … ⌘ Read more

California City Declares State of Emergency After Cyberattack
NBC Bay Area brings news from the small idyllic California town of Suisun City (population: 29,518). The city council “declared a state of emergency Saturday after a cyberattack that shut down computer systems including 911 public safety operations.”

“Malicious software infected and compromised” the East Bay community’s information technology systems b … ⌘ Read more

AI-Powered Browser Just Generates Every Website From Scratch
XDA Developers reports:

On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that “treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch” on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it’s a browser … ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: Whare the Costs of Switching Between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome?
UI changes, lost productivity, untransferrable knowledge… Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the folly of switching to an unfamiliar new environment to be “more productive”…

Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in … ⌘ Read more

Slashdot Reader Builds ‘Spaced Linux’, a New Devuan-Based, User-Friendly Desktop Distro
“I’ve been a Linux IT administrator for 30 years now,” says crhylove (Slashdot reader #205,956), in a new video on his YouTube channel. “I used to be a data center architect, at one point I was the IT director for 13 school districts… I just haven’t been happy overall with all the other operating syste … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Announces It’s Enhancing Security Controls, Pausing Some Work for New AI Model Astra
OpenAI announced Friday it’s pausing work on its Astra AI model because of security concerns. The Guardian reports:

The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found “significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity”, which had moved to a “critical” threshold… OpenAI stated that … ⌘ Read more

Brain Activity Reveals the Melodies That People Imagine
Researchers believe they’ve found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies, reports Medical Express:

Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children’s tunes, then imagined the melodies of … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Receiving Additional Design Help From Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency Fellowship
The new GNOME Boxes app for accessing virtual systems has reached beta, announced This Week in GNOME. There’s also been more work on the Sushi file previewer for Nautilus, and Papers 51 Beta can now add visual signatures to PDF documents.

But Phoronix noted one more announcement. “Germany’s Sovereign Te … ⌘ Read more

Flock Camera Vandalism Continues Around America, While 100 Communities Reject ALPRs
Dozens of Flock cameras have been vandalized around Dallas Texas in the last six months, reports a local news station. In Utah, ABC News reports, a county sheriff’s office even said Wednesday a Flock camera was even vandalized within days of its being installed. And in the Minnesota city of Winona, “Every Flock … ⌘ Read more

Quake Celebrates 30th Anniversary: New Official Episode With New Maps and Mechanics
To celebrate Quake’s 30th anniversary, Bethesda released “a brutal new episode” — a new campaign chapter titled Dawn of the Machine “delivering ferocious combat, labyrinthine level design, and nightmarish realms that twist reality beyond recognition…”

Face deadly new twists on familiar foes, including the … ⌘ Read more

RAMageddon? 2027 Memory Capacity Reportedly Sold Out
IGN reports:

[A] new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to, you guessed it, AI companies.

According to a report from Digitimes and spotted by TweakTown, all DRAM and HBM capacity has been sold through for 2027, with no further supply planne … ⌘ Read more

Google Should Still Be Forced To Shed Chrome, Advocacy Group Argues
“Google should be required to divest the Chrome browser, and prohibited from paying Apple to distribute Google’s search engine, the nonprofit advocacy group Public Knowledge argues in a new court filing,” MediaPost reports, citing a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals:

The group adds that “independen … ⌘ Read more

Slashdot Reader Builds a Free Photo-Verification App for iPhones
Long-time Slashdot reader BrianFagioli is announcing that he’s released a new iPhone app that creates a cryptographic witness for photos without uploading the original image.

The app hashes the file, signs the hash using a dedicated identity stored in Apple Keychain, and publishes the witness to Nostr relays while keeping the photo inside the a … ⌘ Read more

New Orleans Will Use AI To Answer 911 Calls Instead of a Human
“If you call 911 in New Orleans, you may hear the sound of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent answering your call instead of a human voice,” reports the Shreveport Times:

The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is currently testing out the new tool designed to reduce the volume of calls human dispatchers must handle, which is over a thousand … ⌘ Read more

More Police Officers Fired, Investigated, or Arrested for Misusing Flock Camera Systems
In Georgia the Savannah Police Department “terminated four sworn officers and two civilian employees following an internal investigation into misuse of the department’s Flock Safety License Plate Reader system,” according to a local news report:

All six cases are also under independent criminal investig … ⌘ Read more

America’s First Grid-Scale Sodium-Ion Battery Plant Gets Its First Big Test
“In a milestone for energy storage technology, Peak Energy has selected Sacramento, California, as the home of America’s first manufacturing facility dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion battery systems,” according to the sustainability news site Intelligent Living.

The move “represents the first large-scale test of whethe … ⌘ Read more

Paper Goods Company Is Investigating an Alternative to Trees
The Dallas Business Journal reported Monday that the U.S. multinational paper goods company Kimberly-Clark announced “that its researchers identified and advanced patented technology transforming fibers from hesperaloe, a low-water-use plant with pointy leaves that thrives in the southwest region of the country, into material for paper towels.” Discoverin … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle: Expect a Negative Cash Flow of $125 Billion Next Year
The Washington Post shared surprising news this week about five top AI companies.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle “are spending so much on developing AI and delivering it to customers that they’re expected to bleed cash in the coming year, according to a Washington Pos … ⌘ Read more

Prime Minister Leaves Door Open For Reviewing Policy of No Nuclear Weapons in Japan
At a Hiroshima memorial ceremony, Japan’s prime minister said the country “maintains” its three long-standing non-nuclear principles, reports UPI.

But the prime minister “stopped short of promising that the policy would remain unchanged, fueling speculation that her government could review a longstanding ban … ⌘ Read more

Before and After Views of SpaceX Rocket’s Moon Crash
A South Korean lunar orbiter has captured the first before-and-after images of the Moon’s crash scene caused by a stray SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Associated Press reports: The Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s Danuri spacecraft flew over the impact site soon after the Falcon 9 upper stage inadvertently plowed into the moon on Wednesday. Danuri made multiple passe … ⌘ Read more

NASA Figured Out How To Keep Its 48-Year-Old Voyager 2 Probe Running For Yet Another Year
NASA has squeezed at least another year of science out of Voyager 2 by cutting power to nonessential systems and switching to lower-power alternatives. Voyager 1 is expected to receive the same power-saving changes in the coming months. Space.com reports: Voyager 2 and its twin launched in 1977 … ⌘ Read more

Woman Pulled From Car at Gunpoint By Police After Mistaken Flock Alert - Twice
The police surrounded her car Thursday, “drew their guns, and told her to come out with her hands up,” reports a local news station. The police thought they were pulling over a murder suspect, but “It turns out it was a mistake by another department with the Flock license plate reader technology.” The black woman says sh … ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration To Pay German Firm $1.2 Billion To Halt US Wind Projects
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the U.S. after reaching a $1.2 billion payout deal with President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior (DoI). RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, … ⌘ Read more

Virginia Governor To Intervene In Dominion-NextEra Merger
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an opinion piece from the Washington Post, written by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger: NextEra Energy, a Florida-based utility company, has filed paperwork to buy Dominion Energy for about $67 billion, creating the largest regulated electric utility in the world. Virginia’s State Corporation Commission is the regula … ⌘ Read more

Water Utilities Group Partners With DEF CON Offshoot For Water Watch Center
The National Rural Water Association has partnered with DEF CON Franklin to launch the Water Watch Center, which will provide threat intelligence and cybersecurity services to smaller U.S. water utilities serving fewer than 10,000 people. The initiative comes amid a growing wave of cyberattacks on water systems across multiple … ⌘ Read more

Kalshi and Polymarket Bets On Clinical Trials Criticized As ‘Ghastly’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Billions of dollars are traded every week on the lightly regulated prediction market sites, where users bet on everything from movie reviews to elections to conflicts in the Middle East. Clinical trials are just the latest area where the industry’s rapid growth is raising ethical questions. Ka … ⌘ Read more

‘Asimov Was Right’ About Rules For Robots, Says Ex-US Cyber Director
Former U.S. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis says the biggest AI risk isn’t sentience but autonomy. “What I’m worried about is that they get to choose what and where they do something, and under what rules they do it,” he said, citing recent cases of AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta escaping security sandboxes. He argues develope … ⌘ Read more

Framework Notifies ‘All Customers’ of a Data Breach Via Compromised Metabase BI Service
“Framework has been sending out email notifications to customers alerting of a limited data breach in which customer information was accessed through a Metabase BI service zero-day exploit,” writes Slashdot reader DuoDreamer. Data includes customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addr … ⌘ Read more

Suno Says It Will Start Watermarking Songs
Suno says it will begin watermarking and fingerprinting AI-generated songs, tighten download policies to curb mass distribution, and explicitly prohibit deceptive audio and unauthorized voice or likeness cloning. The changes come as the company faces mounting copyright lawsuits, a recent adverse ruling in Germany, and scrutiny over a past data breach that revealed training-data so … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance Is Training a 10-Trillion-Parameter Model To Chase the Frontier
ByteDance is reportedly training an AI model with roughly 10 trillion parameters as it tries to close the gap with leading frontier systems such as Anthropic’s Mythos. The model is still in early pre-training, and its eventual performance will depend on more than scale alone, but the project underscores how aggressively Chinese firms … ⌘ Read more

Trump Orders New 15% Tariff On Key Material For Solar Panels, Microchips
President Trump has ordered a 15% tariff on imported products made with polysilicon, a key material for semiconductors and solar panels. The new tariff will take effect on December 4th. The Guardian reports: The executive order signed by the president on Thursday evening said: “The plan of action in this proclamation will, among othe … ⌘ Read more

AMD Buys AI Chip Startup Taalas That Hardwires AI Models Into Its Silicon
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: On Thursday, AMD said it’s entered into an agreement to acquire Taalas, a Toronto-based startup that makes chips for inference. Taalas’ accelerators are customized, or hard-wired for a single AI model, rather than being general purpose. In exchange for that loss of flexibility, T … ⌘ Read more

Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice
A new study argues that life may have emerged twice on Earth. “Two of the main lineages of life – bacteria and archaea – may have independently figured out the secrets of metabolism that upgraded them from non-living to living,” reports ScienceAlert, citing a new study that “focused on the most rudimentary set of chemical reactions thought to enable this transformation.” F … ⌘ Read more

Dress Made of Living Mycelium Can Renew and Repair Itself
Researchers in China have developed a living mycelium textile that can self-clean, renew its surface, and partially repair holes when treated with a nutrient solution and fresh fungus. The material can also gain added properties such as blue pigmentation or UV resistance by co-culturing it with yeast or other fungi. Dezeen reports: The breakthrough from the … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Make First Viruses Designed By AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence in a milestone that raises hopes for new medicines but also concerns over how to ensure the technology remains safe. The viruses are specific kinds known as bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria and are used around the world to treat patients with pe … ⌘ Read more

Court Orders Meta To Establish $567 Million Fund To Abate Harms To Youth
A New Mexico court ordered (PDF) Meta to create a $567 million fund to address harms linked to youth mental health and child sexual exploitation after finding its platforms constituted a public nuisance. “In sum, the Court finds that New Mexico is in the midst of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and public safety … ⌘ Read more

Google’s $15 Billion India Data Center Project Battles Water, Wildlife Concerns
Google’s $15 billion data-center project in Visakhapatnam is facing protests and legal challenges over fears that it will worsen local water shortages and disturb wildlife near the Kambalakonda sanctuary. Google says the campus will use advanced air cooling and comply with Indian law, while state officials deny that resi … ⌘ Read more

‘Tower Dump’ Warrants Ruled Unconstitutional
alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: A federal judge in Mississippi ruled Wednesday that “tower dump” warrants are unconstitutional, declining to reverse a lower court decision refusing the government’s request to obtain the search warrants in a series of violent crime investigations. A “tower dump” involves cellphone companies providing law enforcement with access to the tim … ⌘ Read more

Azure CTO Pastes Doom Into Paint One Frame At a Time
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich used Claude to build a gloriously impractical setup that runs Doom in the background and pastes each rendered frame into Microsoft Paint through the Windows clipboard. The project is referred to as “DoomPaint” or “MS Paint Doom” on GitHub. The Register reports: To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn’t doing anything other than serving as a … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Models Shared Hacking Tips On a Secret Messaging Board Before Hugging Face Breach
OpenAI researchers say multiple AI agents secretly created an internal message board to share hacking techniques, eventually finding ways around restrictions, exploiting a zero-day, and helping two models breach Hugging Face without human prompting. “This is a pivotal moment both for our company a … ⌘ Read more

The US Government’s Mario, Pokemon and Naruto Meme Posting Could Damage These Franchises, Japanese Officials Warn
Japanese officials have repeatedly asked the Trump administration to stop using characters from franchises such as Mario, Pokemon, and Naruto in unauthorized government memes and pro-war videos, warning that the posts could damage the intellectual proper … ⌘ Read more

FCC Kills TV Ownership Cap, Claiming Authority Over Limit Set By Congress
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 today to eliminate the National Television Ownership Rule, claiming authority to repeal a limit that was set by Congress over 20 years ago. The rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent … ⌘ Read more

Times Magazine Now Serves Ads That Only AI Chatbots Can See
Longtime Slashdot reader mccalli writes: Times Magazine has started serving adverts with “brand messages” to AI crawlers, which are not part of its main page. The aim seems to be to influence chatbots to talk about the brand offerings in a positive light that can’t be traced back to the actual page. Notably, they’ve excluded Google chatbots from this, likely be … ⌘ Read more

Meta AI Hacked External Systems During Cybersecurity Testing
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Meta is the latest major AI developer to admit that its models broke loose during cybersecurity testing and hacked external systems. The tech giant said in a statement to the media on Wednesday that the incident occurred during independent evaluations conducted by Israeli AI security startup Irregular. The test … ⌘ Read more

Broadcaster Wins Broad US Blocking Injunction Covering Pirate Sites That Don’t Exist Yet
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision (TU) has obtained (PDF) one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions ever issued by a U.S. federal court. After initially targeting five pirate IPTV streaming operations, the case expanded to cover well over 50 … ⌘ Read more

FDA Approves First mRNA Flu Shot
The FDA has approved the first mRNA flu vaccine in the United States after a clinical trial found it was about 27% more effective than a standard flu shot. Manufactured by Moderna and marketed as mFlusiva, the vaccine is expected to be available this fall for adults ages 50 to 64 and those 65 and older, though approval for the older group is conditional on Moderna conducting an additional clinical trial, N … ⌘ Read more