Customer-Losing Flock Now Offers Buyouts to Avoid Laying Off Employees
Mashable writes:

Flock Safety offered employees voluntary buyouts on Friday, WIRED reported… Without the buyouts, those familiar with the situation suspect the company would have to lay off some of its 1,500 employees.

WIRED writes that people familiar with the program “say they believe that a significant number of the startup’s ro … ⌘ Read more

Ex-Google DeepMind Researcher Also Warns AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’. But Meta’s Zuckerberg Believes Safety is Up to Each AI Company
Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee “became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could ‘kill all humans’, saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:

Public alarm about the po … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Moves cp, mv & rm Over To Rust Coreutils For 100% Transition
While Ubuntu Linux has been making use of the Rust Coreutils project over the past year since Ubuntu 25.10 as an alternative to GNU Coreutils and part of their effort to get more system components implemented in the memory-safety-focused Rust programming language, Ubuntu 26.10 finally completes the transition with the cp, mv, and rm commands now coming from Rust Coreutils… ⌘ Read more

Rustls 0.23.45 Released To Fix Two Year Old Security Issue
While the Rustls modern TLS library is written in the Rust programming language with a focus on memory safety, as we’ve seen out of other Rust project re-implementations in the past, the new implementations can lead to other security bugs of their own. Out today is Rustls 0.23.45 to fix a security issue introduced back in 2024 with Rustls while the likes of OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and others are unaffected… ⌘ Read more

Flock Worker Calls Police On Reporter - For Filming Them in Public
“This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads,” says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe in a new video for InvestigateTV. In an accompanying article, InvestigateTV says their reporter “parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow safety vest and a hat emblazoned with the logo … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Calls For AI Slowdown
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I … ⌘ Read more

Altman Considers Slowing Down AI Development
Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development alongside other leading labs as concerns grow over increasingly capable systems and recent incidents in which models escaped human control. OpenAI has already paused development once this year for security work and is now pushing for mandatory U.S. AI safety requirem … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Researcher Believes More Than 10% Chance AI ‘Could Kill All Humans’
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the BBC: A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade. Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s New Reasoning Technique Alarms AI Safety Experts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI’s new Astra model will use a reasoning technique called “recurrent depth” that allows it to operate outside of the sequential thinking that characterizes most reasoning models, The Information reported on Tuesday. This technique, also called “opaque recurrence,” will likely make the model’s chain of thoug … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Now Disabling RandStruct Security Feature By Default If Rust Support Present
While Rust programming language use may help with memory safety and other security advantages, the default Linux kernel configuration is now losing randomization of sensitive kernel structures if Rust support is present… ⌘ Read more

California Lawmakers Greenlight Solar Panels You Can Plug Into the Wall
California lawmakers have passed a bill that would legalize plug-in “balcony” solar systems, allowing residents to connect small solar panels directly to a standard wall outlet after completing a simple online registration. The systems would be capped at 1,200 watts and must meet safety requirements designed to prevent power fro … ⌘ Read more

Millions of Cars Recalled Over Danger of Bursting Into Flames. But They’re Not EVs.
The Washington Post shares this tip for car buyers.

Electric vehicles “are not driving the recent growth in recalls warning that vehicles could erupt into flames at any time, even when parked and turned off.”

A Washington Post analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recall notices fo … ⌘ Read more

Is China Secretly Fueling America’s Data Center Rage?
alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night. The X Safety team probed suspected Chinese accounts involved in influence operations and identified 200,000 accounts, including 200 accounts “posting in a manner t … ⌘ Read more

Meta Reaches $18 Billion of Settlements Over Children’s Social Media Addiction
Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to settle claims from most U.S. states that the platforms were designed to addict children and misled users about their safety. For the next decade, teens will be limited to two hours a day and blocked from using the apps between mid … ⌘ Read more

New Zealand Introduces Under-16 Social Media, AI Companion Ban
New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. “We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too,” said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Chil … ⌘ Read more

China Delays Ambitious Chang’e 7 Lunar Mission Until 2027
China has delayed its ambitious Chang’e 7 lunar mission until at least 2027 after scrubbing an August 24 launch. Poor weather conditions were likely a factor, with China’s Manned Space Agency (CMSA) saying the decision reflects the need for “absolute safety.” Scientific American reports: China and the U.S. are in a race to send humans back to the moon, a fea … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Faces Safety Scrutiny After Introducing ‘ChatGPT For Teens’
This week OpenAI launched a version of ChatGPT exclusively designed for teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, reports CTV, “saying this version came with stronger protections around content related to mentions of suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats.”
[Tech analyst Carmi Levy says] “What it’s doing is it’s using cues, it’s sort … ⌘ Read more

Man Dressed As Darth Vader Defends Flock Cameras to San Diego City Council
A man dressed as Darth Vader used a Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee meeting in San Diego to mock the city’s use of Flock surveillance cameras, sarcastically arguing that the technology would help the “emperor” track “rebel scum” and find Luke Skywalker. “This is what the emperor needs. This technology will hel … ⌘ Read more

Whistleblower Arturo Bejar Leads Testimony In Landmark Trial Against Meta
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Bejar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only o … ⌘ Read more

Meta Faces $1.4 Trillion Reckoning In Latest Trial Over Social Media Addiction
Meta is heading to trial in a case brought by dozens of states accusing it of deliberately designing addictive features, misleading users about safety, and illegally collecting data from children under 13. Meta says the states are seeking penalties as high as $1.4 trillion, though the judge has already called that figure … ⌘ Read more

Offloading Rust To GPUs Proves Capable Of High Performance With Memory Safety
A new research paper published on LLVM offloading to GPU accelerators using the Rust programming language is talking up the prospects of making use of safe Rust code for GPU kernels while retaining Rust’s memory safety and other advantages over C++ / CUDA / HIP… ⌘ 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

VA Launches Psilocybin Trial For Veterans With Treatment-Resistant Depression
Longtime Slashdot reader sbinning shares a press release: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced the launch of a new clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of psilocybin to treat major depression in Veterans, including those with concurrent PTSD. The new trial comes after a recent executive … ⌘ 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

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

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

Waymo CEO Explains Why Camera-Only Self-Driving Falls Short
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance. […] Dolgov made the comments in a talk at Y Combinato … ⌘ 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

A Fundamental Flaw Leaves LLMs Strikingly Vulnerable To Attack
joshuark quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s Zoox Wins First US Approval For Paid Robotaxis Without Human Controls
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon’s Zoox unit has won U.S. approval for limited commercial deployment of its novel steering-wheel-free robotaxis, a first for the autonomous ride industry, the U.S. auto safety agency said on Thursday. Zoox said that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administratio … ⌘ Read more

Claude Opus 5 Became Downright Ruthless When Tasked With Running a Vending Machine
For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has been evaluating how frontier AI models behave as long-running autonomous agents by assigning them simulated real-world tasks, such as operating a vending machine business for a year without human supervision. In the latest installment, the research startup fo … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia, Tech Giants Launch AI Safety Initiative
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Nvidia and a large group of technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies have launched new initiative aimed at developing and sharing open source tools, models, and techniques for securing AI systems and agents. The new Open Secure AI Alliance aims to give defenders more open tools for testing, auditing and protecting AI m … ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest Incompatibility
While the Rust Coreutils offers better memory safety than GNU Coreutils due to being written in the Rust programming language, subtle incompatibilities continue to be spotted in the Rust Coreutils implementations of the different commands. The latest coming to light this week was the Rust Coreutils cp command breaking Ubuntu image builds due to differences in argument handling… ⌘ Read more

How a Seemingly Harmless Image Can Jailbreak Vision-Language AI Models
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Florida International University researchers have developed a technique called JaiLIP (Jailbreaking with Loss-guided Image Perturbation) that uses subtle image modifications to bypass AI safety guardrails. Unlike traditional jailbreaks that rely on carefully crafted prompts, the attack works through ima … ⌘ Read more

Airbus Is Ordered To Inspect 16 Jets After Cracks Are Found In Wings
schwit1 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has ordered (PDF) urgent inspections of 16 Airbus A380 planes operated by Emirates and Qantas, after cracks were found in a wing component on some aircraft (source paywalled; alternative source).. Cracks were found during earlier inspections of … ⌘ Read more

Great, another privacy-destroying bill in the name of “child safety”… Must be a Thursday.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require-age-checks-get-online

Waymo Recalls About 3,900 Robotaxis After Some Drove Into ‘Freeway Construction Zones’
CNBC reports:

Waymo is recalling almost 3,900 robotaxis in the U.S. to fix software issues after some cars drove into freeway construction zones, according to notices filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The voluntary recall, the Alphabet-owned company’s second in just over a mon … ⌘ Read more

Canada Missed Chances To Inspect OceanGate’s Titan Before Fatal Implosion
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A report from Canada’s Transportation Safety Board has highlighted regulatory failures that allowed OceanGate’s unregistered, unflagged, and uncertified Titan submersible to operate out St. John’s, Newfoundland, for years before it imploded on a tourist trip to the wreck of the Tita … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Firefox Usage Of zlib-rs For Better Safety & Performance
Since the release in May of Firefox 151, Mozilla has been relying on the zlib-rs library for Gzip compression/decompression. This subtle change to use this Rust-based Zlib implementation has yielded some performance benefits and better memory safety but also some headaches when dealing with Intel CPU bugs… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Interesting approach. 🤔

The master branch should never be in a broken state (apart from bugs I don’t know about). Any intermediate state during the development of a larger feature will happen in a different branch.

I mean, yeah, but … I don’t know, I like having “traditional releases” as a second safety net when I write programs. I like to let things mature for a while and then I cut a new release. So it’s, like, “we have a bunch of new features and fixes here, and to the best of my knowledge this works fine now”. But maybe I’m just paranoid. 🤔

Calls for inquest into Virginia Giuffre’s death
Women’s safety advocates have written to the WA coroner calling for an inquest into the death of former prince Andrew accuser Virginia Giuffre. ⌘ Read more

Apple credits Australia’s teen social media ban for its new controls
Apple chief executive Tim Cook told Anthony Albanese the iPhone maker’s new child-safety tools were “in part inspired” by the world-first social media ban. ⌘ Read more

Apple credits Australia’s teen social media ban for its new controls
Apple chief executive Tim Cook told Anthony Albanese the iPhone maker’s new child-safety tools were “in part inspired” by the world-first social media ban. ⌘ Read more

CFMEU ‘captured’ former head of Queensland building commission: inquiry
Back for its 10th public hearing week, the CFMEU inquiry continues its exploration of the union’s access over the workplace safety regulator. ⌘ Read more

Surveillance Is Not Safety: A statement on the UK’s latest threat to privacy [pdf]
Article URL: https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06-08-uk-surveillance-is-not-safety.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450646

Points: 4

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

Lara’s 25-year fight for better rail safety in WA just took a big step forward
The WA opposition has announced it will introduce a bill to state parliament to legislate mandatory train lighting, a safety measure that aims to save lives at passive rail crossings across Western Australia. ⌘ Read more

‘No evidence’ of more sharks in WA waters as second fatal attack reignites culling debate
WA’s fisheries minister has accused the Nationals of politicising the death of a spearfisherman in Albany on the weekend as two fatal shark attacks in three weeks throws the spotlight on ocean safety. ⌘ Read more

Alpha School’s Ritzy New York City Campus Costs $65,000 a Year—but Isn’t Actually a School
A homeschooling center in Manhattan is part of the company’s nationwide expansion. Internal documents reveal its strategy: “Opening date > safety.” ⌘ Read more

Florida Sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, Accusing Them of Putting Profit Over Safety
Florida’s attorney general has sued (PDF) OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company prioritized growth and market value over user safety and failed to adequately warn about risks tied to ChatGPT. The lawsuit, the first by a U.S. state over OpenAI safety concerns, is separate from a criminal investigation … ⌘ Read more