Axon Sued Over AI-Powered License Plate Reader Network
Axon has been sued in a proposed class action accusing the Taser and police body-camera maker of illegally collecting and storing license plate data on millions of California drivers through its AI-powered surveillance network. Reuters reports the details: - The lawsuit (PDF), filed on Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco by law firms Hausfeld and Gibbs Mura, al … ⌘ Read more

College Students are Pushing Colleges to ‘De-Flock’
Inside Higher Ed reports:

In September, Emory University removed a dozen license plate-reading cameras from its campus in Atlanta and declined to renew its contract with Flock Safety, the company that sells and operates the automatic license plate readers and other mass-surveillance technology. For the coalition of Emory students and employees who had spent months pushing t … ⌘ Read more

UK Social Media Ban May Lock Out More Than 100,000 Teens Without ID
Under the UK’s planned social media ban, more than 100,000 British teenagers aged 16 and 17 could initially be locked out of social media because they lack a passport or driving license that may be needed as a fallback for age verification. The Guardian reports: Ofcom, the UK’s online watchdog, said about 150,000 16- to 17-year-olds do not ow … ⌘ Read more

CIOs Admit They Are Being Forced To Upgrade Enterprise IT
Computer Weekly reports:

A Censuswide survey of 2,018 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers at large organisations in the US and UK for independent software maintenance provider Origina has found that organisations spend almost $13m on upgrades pushed by IT providers. On average, 28% of enterprise software budgets go on upgrades, migrations and licensing changes d … ⌘ Read more

Modular’s MAX Source Code Now Fully Opened, Under New MAX License
Back in August Modular’s Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Chris Lattner’s company by Qualcomm. The latest achievement now out of the company is their MAX software being fully opened up with the entire source tree available… ⌘ Read more

More Than 1.5 Million Canadian Crime Stoppers Tips Leaked
A CBC investigation found that more than 1.5 million Canadian Crime Stoppers tips spanning 25 years were exposed in a breach of the P3 Global Intel tip-management platform. About 850,000 records contained personally identifiable information, including addresses, phone numbers, emails, license plates and some banking details. Longtime Slashdot reader doconnor sha … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Models Are Now On All Three Major US Cloud Platforms
OpenAI is bringing its models to Google Cloud’s model garden and Antigravity coding tool, putting its technology on all three major U.S. cloud platforms after Microsoft’s exclusive license ended earlier this year. “Google Cloud’s longstanding investment in machine learning and AI has made it a destination for AI workloads and the developers and data scient … ⌘ Read more

Florida DMV Hacked After Police Dept Insecurely Stored Login Info
Florida’s DMV says a September 4 breach exposed driver’s license and motor vehicle records after attackers obtained credentials that a local law-enforcement employee had “improperly stored on an electronic device.” The ShinyHunters group has been linked to the intrusion. Ars Technica reports: In a notice posted Friday, [Florida Department of Hi … ⌘ Read more

MapQuest Shows Location of Flock (and Other ALPR) Cameras
MapQuest creates a new layer (that can be toggled on and off), Gizmodo reports:

After promising not to comply with the Trump administration’s “Lake America” gimmick, the platform announced a new “Surveillance Layer” that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety. Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify … ⌘ Read more

There appears to be a rush a disgruntled Linux users switching to NetBSD:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/117451701775023949

They even got a ton of new donations (which, funnily, broke their little progress bar):

https://cannot.understand.computer/kunev/p/1791449917.947134

So… donations for @netbsd@netbsd over the last few years look like this:

2020 - $46k
2021 - $52k
2022 - $44k
2023 - $60k
2024 - $40k
2025 - $79k

And in 2026 $120k so far!

And why is all that? Because of this:

Do not commit tainted code to the repository.

If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution. Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code.

Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

This official guideline is much more “tame” and “diplomatic” than the overall “vibe” (sic) on the Fediverse: NetBSD basically says no to AI as much as possible.

And, apparently, this attracts lots of users and donors. Maybe there’s still some hope after all?

Meta May Use Sweeping New Commercial TOS to Avoid Millions In AI Licensing Fees
Meta is facing criticism over updated commercial terms taking effect October 30 that could give the company broad permission to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use it to train AI. Legal experts warn the changes could undermine lucrative AI licensing deals for news publishers, with no dire … ⌘ Read more

Should We Beware of Other License Plate Surveillance Companies Besides Flock?
NPR reports:

Police officers in cities across the U.S. are quick to extol the virtues of real-time crime centers as a game changer that helps them find missing children, monitor large events from the skies and scope out dangerous scenes before putting an officer in harm’s way. Hundreds of police departments have one of th … ⌘ Read more

AI Surveillance Startup Flock To Cut Several Hundred Jobs Amid Backlash, Sources Say
Reuters reports:

Flock plans to let go of about 18% of its employees, people with direct knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and lawmakers….

The company has about 1,500 … ⌘ Read more

Licensing Costs Driving 90% of VMware Users To Explore Options, Survey Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its “2026 IT Virtualization Survey – What’s Next for VMware Users.” The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use … ⌘ Read more

Huawei and Qualcomm Struck a Broad Multi-Year Patent Licensing Deal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Huawei and Qualcomm on Monday announced a multi-year, broad patent license agreement covering 5G, artificial intelligence, compute, and networking technologies, along with Qualcomm’s purchase of certain Huawei U.S. patents in those same fields. The deal is the first patent licensing agreement … ⌘ Read more

After Siemens Re-Licenses OpenRadioss, Rocky Linux Announces Open-Source Fork
- In 2022 Altair Engineering open sourced “OpenRadioss”, an industry-leading finite element solver under the GNU AGPL License, reports Phoronix.

- Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year

- Siemens closes access to OpenRadioss.

“Siemens didn’t just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that ho … ⌘ Read more

US Judge Rules Flock Search Was Mass Surveillance. Bernie Sanders Proposes ‘Ban Flock Act’
Flock’s cameras offer “indiscriminate mass surveillance,” a U.S. federal judge wrote in a ruling Thursday, as does any system with “continuously updated” location histories for all the vehicles filmed by automated license plate-reading cameras.

The judge’s ruling included italics for emphasis when … ⌘ Read more

Apex Compute Developing Open-Source Mesa Vulkan Driver For Their Hardware
Apex Compute is the company started in California in 2024 that aims to produce high-efficiency AI accelerators for real-time edge AI inferencing. So far they have an FPGA prototype for licensing and deployment and carries the bold claim of being “20x faster than the NVIDIA Jetson” and at under 10W and one fifth the cost. Making Apex Compute much more interesting to us now is that they are developing an open-source, Mesa-based Vulkan driver … ⌘ Read more

Siemens Slams The Door Shut On Promising Open-Source Radioss Project
As a major disappointment to the open-source community, Siemens has decided to end – and close-up access – to the OpenRadioss project as the open-source version opened up by Altair Engineering under the GNU AGPL License back in 2022. This was an open-source version of the industry-leading finite element solver that Altair developed. Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year and have now completely shut the door on OpenRadioss… ⌘ Read more

Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Cameras in Indianapolis
“Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes,” reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations “based on thousands of pages of police and court records,” which found that “In many of these case … ⌘ Read more

While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China’s Film Industry is Embracing It
The Los Angeles Times reports:

Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen’s role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial express … ⌘ Read more

Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ And ‘Asdfg’
404 Media reports:

Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department used Flock’s surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop’s stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock’s system, was “LMAO. … ⌘ Read more

ARCTIC’s Fan Controller Driver For Linux Being Dual-Licensed With BSD-2-Clause
Earlier this year ARCTIC published a fan controller driver for Linux. Besides being rare for an enthusiast-oriented company to publish a Linux driver themselves where typically it’s left up to the open-source community for driver support for such peripherals, it was all the more interesting as they published the Linux driver and got it mainlined before the product was even released. In the end the ARTCIC Fan Controller is the best des … ⌘ Read more

Hundreds More Flock Cameras Removed in the US This Week. Flock Caught Repackaging Traffic Data
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said this week he’s removing Flock cameras from state roadways. And according to a local news report, that led sheriff’s departments in at least three other Florida counties to also “announce they’re ending their own license plate reader programs. … ⌘ Read more

PoCL 7.2 Released With Official OpenCL 3.0 Conformance On RISC-V & x86_64 CPUs
The Portable Computing Language project is out today with PoCL 7.2 as this portable, MIT-licensed OpenCL implementation that runs across various CPU architectures as well as targeting other GPUs/hardware with LLVM back-ends. Notable with PoCL 7.2 is bringing official OpenCL 3.0 conformance on x86_64 and RISC-V processors… ⌘ Read more

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
A dark-web identity theft service called Nexus claims to be selling scans of more than 153 million U.S. and Canadian driver’s licenses, along with millions of other identity documents. “Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase through the service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely used Louisiana-based identity verifica … ⌘ Read more

Florida Bans Flock Cameras From State Highways
schwit1 shares a report from WCTV: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he’s removing Flock camera from state roadways. The announcement comes amid a growing concern over the misuse of automated license plate readers. On Monday, DeSantis ordered all Flock cameras removed from what he calls the ‘state highway system’ within the next 30 days, which would include interstates like I-10 an … ⌘ Read more

As Backlash Grows, More Americans Now Oppose Automated Police License Plate Readers Than Support
A new survey on police license plate cameras found that “more Americans oppose these surveillance cameras than support them,” reports TechCrunch:

According to a new YouGov survey of 20,000 people across the U.S. that was shared exclusively with The Washington Post, 46% of respondents … ⌘ Read more

If I say companies should at least consider the 3 line CC license before scraping my sites, I’m seen as the unreasonable one.

But when I use an alternative forontend, to read feeds on their sites, without having to make yet another free account, now the same companies and their users scream about some unspecified part of their license being violated, threaten legal action and expect me to care about it.

GitHub thread: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1442#issuecomment-5413651441

Lossless Scaling Frame Generation on Linux lsfg-vk moves away from GitHub, changes license due to AI slop forks
The developer behind the Lossless Scaling Frame Generation on Linux (lsfg-vk) project has made an announcement about a bunch of major changes.

Image

Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/20 … ⌘ Read more

Waymo Is Expanding to Germany
Waymo plans to launch its robotaxi service in Munich by the end of 2027, marking the Google-owned company’s first expansion into the European Union. “It already operates in 11 cities in the United States and has applied for a license in the United Kingdom to launch its robotaxis in London this year,” notes Reuters. From the report: The Google subsidiary will start rolling out vehicles in the German city this year, w … ⌘ Read more

Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection announced for September
Licensed by Team 17 and developed by Antstream, Alien Breed 35th Anniversary brings together six brutal games with modernised controls and new modes.

Image

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

Twitch And Amazon Hit With Lawsuit for Training AI With Streamers’ Content
A class action filed this week accused Amazon’s Twitch gaming service of using video streams to fuel its AI products without licensing or obtaining permission, reports Engadget:

Earlier this month, Twitch Support posted on X that it added an option to opt out of “having your channel content used to train generative AI content m … ⌘ Read more

Disney, ABC Sue FCC Over Threats to Broadcast Licenses
Disney and ABC are suing the FCC to block an early review of eight station licenses, arguing the Trump administration is using the agency’s regulatory power to punish the network over programming and editorial decisions it dislikes. Reuters reports: In a lawsuit (PDF) filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, Disney said the FCC was seeking to coerce and retaliate a … ⌘ Read more

Apple Wallet Driver’s License Feature to Launch in Four More US States
Apple Wallet’s driver’s license and state ID feature is set to expand to North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia, bringing the total to 18 states plus Puerto Rico. The digital IDs can be used at participating TSA checkpoints and businesses without handing over or unlocking an iPhone, though users are still generally advised to ca … ⌘ Read more

It’s Not Just RAM: Windows Licenses Are Also Pushing Up PC Prices
It’s not just RAM prices that are going up, writes CNET. “Reports suggest the cost of Windows licenses for manufacturers is rising by up to 10%.”

Several sites that closely follow Microsoft news, including Windows Central and Windows Latest, have published articles citing a report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily News that claims some PC manufac … ⌘ Read more

Flock Announces Changes Amid Backlash Over Its License Plate Reader Network
Flock Safety is tightening controls on its nationwide license plate reader network after mounting backlash over privacy and documented police misuse. By January 1, law enforcement customers will be required to use automated auditing, tie searches to specific case numbers, and accept a shorter seven-day default retention perio … ⌘ Read more

Most of this insane power consumption happens during the models training, so the additional cost of prompting, is minimal. Facebook invented cool ways to exted the environmental damage far beyond the training stage, by dumping the dirty data center water into nearby water sources, but that’s more so a Facebook problem, than a fault of AI.

I would still never waste my own money, paying for any AI subscriptions that my employer doesn’t already pay for, no matter if we use them, or not.

I am also against aggressive scraping and taking everything as training data, disregarding the authors wishes and license. I allow it on my website, mostly as proof that no matter how much they scrape my stuff, the real me remains both a superior webdev and artist.

I am well aware this makes me come across really egotistical, especially after developers far better than me, embraced vibe coding, arguably way too much. To give an example, all attempts to get Microsoft Copilot, that’s embedded into SharePoint, to generate an extension/uBlock filter to make SharePoint revert to the old superior UI failed, but I was able to do that in three lines of code ( https://thecanine.smol.pub/ublock-filters ), in half an hour, despite me never seeing the code of that page before. After a few of these comparisons, it is increasingly hard to see most of these tools, as my replacement.

I am not even going to talk about the people trying to imitate my art style with AI, until they can show me a result where all the squares are the same size, in a grid and actually square.

Meta Publishes Muse Glimmer As 30B Open Agentic Model
The Meta Superintelligence Labs announced this morning they have released Muse Glimmer as their next large language model featuring 30 billion parameters for always-on local agent workflows. Muse Glimmer features open-source model weights under an Apache 2.0 license… ⌘ Read more

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

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

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

Cloudflare Announces Open-Source Cloudflare OS As AI ‘Operating System’
Cloudflare has open-sourced Cloudflare OS, an Apache 2.0-licensed platform that lets organizations build AI agents, apps, and workflows using curated company data and tools within isolated, governed environments. Despite the name, it is not a traditional operating system but a framework for securely managing organizational AI workloads … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Bringing Xbox 360 Games to PC
Microsoft reportedly plans to let developers bring Xbox 360 games to PC and next-generation Xbox devices, with a gradual rollout expected between 2027 and 2028. A separate disc-to-digital program would also give players transferable digital licenses tied to their physical Xbox discs, preserving the ability to resell or trade them. The Verge reports: With 360 games, developers can opt into … ⌘ Read more

Flock Cameras Are Being Destroyed Across the US
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Surveillance cameras owned by Flock Safety have been cut down with electric saws in New York State, vandalized with paint in Oakland, California, and rammed with a truck in Idaho. Flock claims its services fight crime, but law enforcement agencies also use their services to track vehicles based on license plate numbers and reconstruct the thei … ⌘ Read more

ABC Accuses FCC of ‘Attempted Censorship’
ABC accused FCC Chair Brendan Carr of “attempted censorship,” arguing that an early review of its eight broadcast licenses is politically motivated retaliation over the network’s coverage and could chill the entire media industry. “The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay th … ⌘ Read more

@david@daiwei.me if you have some weekend home type place, with no Internet, getting TV through an antenna and a DVBT box, my recommendation is to just buy some old Dell monitor with HDMI to 3.5mm audio output built in, so you can connect speakers to it.

Doesn’t have to be Dell, but you can often just buy one of those from your employer, for under $25 here.

Were this sadly makes much less sense, in with Internet TV services. Those usually need a dedicated TV app to function and while that can be replaced with a $200 TV box, that some providers force you to rent, thus making you pay more for your Internet TV forever - this also means giving up the “archive app”, that gives you access to all the on demand content, included in the price of your mandatory TV license. None of these overpriced boxes come with it, as they’d mauch rather make you pay, for yet another subscription service instead.

So yes, you can kinda do it with an Internet TV too, assuming you trust the expensive box to not spy on you, but in that case you’re mostly just paying a whole lot more, for a lot less, than you would be, with the LG TV.

Oracle Signs 10-Year Software Contract With Pentagon Worth Up To $7 Billion
Oracle has signed a 10-year Pentagon contract worth up to $7 billion to provide on-premises software, licenses, maintenance, and consulting for branches of the military. CNBC reports: The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community … ⌘ Read more

EchoStar’s US Satellite Pay-TV Provider Dish DBS Files for Bankruptcy
EchoStar’s satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and “facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless’s 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T… unde … ⌘ Read more

US Government Allows Anthropic Limited Release of ‘Mythos’ AI Model, Saying ‘Appropriate Safeguards are in Place”
“The US government has allowed Anthropic to release its powerful Mythos AI model to select companies and organizations,” reports CNN, “revising license requirements after ordering an export block earlier this month in the wake of national security fears.” … ⌘ Read more