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

Anthropic Reveals Fourth Likely Crime Committed By Its AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Amid industry soul-searching about the possibility of AI improving itself to the point that it kills everyone, Anthropic has revealed yet another incident that would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person. The AI biz published “an alignment assessment” detailing four times Claude models accessed thir … ⌘ Read more

Google Will ‘Degrade’ Search In Europe to Avoid EU Fines
Google says it will overhaul Search in Europe to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, giving more prominence to comparison services like Expedia and Hotels.com while stripping some real-time features from hotel, airline, and restaurant results. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans – boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local … ⌘ Read more

LZ Experiment Sees Surprising Result In Search For Dark Matter
New submitter greytree shares a report from Brown University: LUX-ZEPLIN, an experiment co-led by Brown University faculty and students, observed a particle interaction that could be interpreted as a signal from WIMPs, a dark matter candidate – but researchers need more data to confirm. […] The result does not yet meet the statistical thresho … ⌘ Read more

Google’s AI-Powered Lifestyle App ‘Dreambeans’ Now Free in the US
Google’s AI assistant Gemini crawls your Google apps for “more personalized suggestions,” in a feature they call Personal Intelligence. Now when given permission, an Android/iOS app called Dreambeans “uses Personal Intelligence to connect information from Google apps like Gmail, Calendar, Photos, YouTube and Search History, to curate a finite coll … ⌘ Read more

Ring Says New Encryption Limits What It Can Give Police
Ring is rolling out a new default encryption system called TAKE, or “Throw Away the Key Encryption,” that rotates video keys every five minutes and permanently deletes Ring’s copy after 24 hours. The system is designed to preserve cloud features such as smart alerts and AI video search while limiting what Ring can provide under legal process to non-video account inf … ⌘ Read more

Apple Maps Now Has Ads
Apple has begun rolling out ads in Apple Maps, with sponsored businesses appearing at the top of search results and in the “suggested places” section for users in the U.S. and Canada. Apple says the ads can be based on approximate location, search terms, or the area of the map being viewed, but are not tied to users’ Apple Accounts and personal data remains on-device. 9to5Mac reports: Ads appear just like every other business l … ⌘ Read more

Firefox Announces Free VPN and ‘Startpage’ Search Engine Rolling Out to Android, iOS - Plus GeForce NOW Support
Firefox 154 “brings a number of usability improvements,” writes PC World:

The free built-in VPN, introduced with Firefox 149, continues to offer a selection of virtual locations — temporarily extended to 28 countries until the end of August… The free VPN … ⌘ Read more

It’s the little things that make me happy these days. Like adding a function to search for text with various encodings to my hex editor. All neatly organized in the menu and with accelerators.

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net What do you mean, it’s the most people we’ve ever had… since Jul 11, when the search site was relaunched. 😁

Image

American Who Wiped His Phone With ‘Duress’ Password During Border Search Gets Felony Charges
Federal prosecutors have charged activist Samuel Tunick with obstruction after he gave Customs and Border Protection officers a duress passcode that wiped his GrapheneOS-powered Pixel during a border search. “His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charg … ⌘ Read more

Google Gives Publishers a ‘Preferred Sources’ Button to Fight AI-Driven Traffic Losses
Google is giving publishers a new way to fight declining referral traffic from AI-powered search by letting them embed a “Preferred Sources” button that readers can use to favor their sites across Search, Discover, and Google News. “The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites th … ⌘ Read more

China Is About to Launch Its Most Ambitious Moon Mission Yet
China’s Chang’e 7 mission is set to launch for the moon’s south pole, where it will attempt the first-ever landing directly at the pole and search the region’s dark craters for water ice. “It’s an amazing mission,” says Norbert Schorghofer, a Hawaii-based senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. “There has never been a landed mission to fi … ⌘ Read more

Reverse-Lookup Service Exposed Millions of Photos of People’s Faces
Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler found that people-search service ClarityCheck left more than 9 million image files accessible in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket, despite advertising its reverse-image search as “private and secure.” A separate misconfiguration also exposed email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information. Wired … ⌘ Read more

EFF’s Position on Flock Camera Database Searches: ‘Get a Warrant First’ - and Police Use Should Be Restricted By Law
Some take their criticism even further. Reacting to Flock’s changes, an EFF statement calls it “Too little, too late,” while calling it Flock’s admission that their technology needs reforms. But…

To be clear, our position has long been that polic … ⌘ Read more

Oh man wow 😮 Problem 9 was quite hard 😱 I had to build two new functions in the Mu stdlib for computing combinations and permutations, but then the combinations of range(1000) for triples such as a + b == c is enormous! So i had to write iterator versions of these to do lazy evaluation. Anyway solution follows:

#!/usr/bin/env mu

// Special Pythagorean Triplet

import "iter"

fn usage() {
  print("Usage:", args()[0], "<n>")
}

fn sqr(x) { x * x }

fn main() {
  if len(args()) < 2 {
    usage()
    exit(1)
  }

  n := must(int(args()[1]))
  print("n:", n)

  // For a < b < c and a + b + c == n, both a and b are strictly less
  // than n/2. Generate only (a,b) combinations and derive c directly. This
  // keeps the search lazy and reduces n=1000 from C(999,3) = 165,668,499
  // candidate triples to C(499,2) = 124,251 candidate pairs.
  pairs := iter.combinations(iter.range(1, n / 2), 2)

  triples := iter.map(pairs, fn(xs) {
    a := xs[0]
    b := xs[1]
    return [a, b, n - a - b]
  })

  // Enforce b < c; a < b is already guaranteed by combinations over an
  // increasing range, and a + b + c == n holds by construction.
  triples = iter.filter(triples, fn(xs) {
    return xs[1] < xs[2]
  })

  // Euler 9 has one answer for n=1000. find() stops the entire upstream
  // iterator chain as soon as the first Pythagorean triple is found.
  answer := iter.find(triples, fn(xs) {
    return sqr(xs[0]) + sqr(xs[1]) == sqr(xs[2])
  })

  print(answer)

  if answer != nil {
    print(answer[0] * answer[1] * answer[2])
  }
}

main()

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

Trump Slaps a 100% Tariff On Heavy and ‘Sensitive’ Drones
President Trump has imposed tariffs of up to 100% on heavier and “sensitive” drones, including models over 55 pounds or equipped with docking stations or thermal imaging. “Those include commercial models from DJI and others used for operations like power line inspection, crop spraying and search and rescue, along with any parts used in their manufacturing,” report … ⌘ Read more

Behold the ‘Glueball,’ a Strange New Form of Matter
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: For more than half a century, physicists have searched for one of the strangest particles predicted by modern theory. It would be made almost entirely of gluons, the elusive subatomic particles that carry the strong nuclear force. Now, using a particle collider in Beijing, researchers say they have effectively proved the … ⌘ Read more

I am a bit split on this, don’t think there’s any real use for AI in things like art, at absolute most getting a reference to compare with multiple non-AI ones, or possibly some animation in between frames, if it ever gets better at making those. Would not rely on it for any of my personal projects, more than maybe a quick search that would have previously been done on Stack Overflow, but if I work somewhere and they demand it be used similarly to how it is described on this site, considering the current IT job market, I’d probably take the slop bullet, over being unemployed.

Obviously even in that case, I’d only do this to generate code I can understand, improve and review. I’m definitely not advacating people just put their feet up on the table and let some random combination of “AI agents”, vibecode their entire codebase.

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

‘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

As Reddit Stock Falls, CEO Questions Value of Google’s AI Overviews
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman criticized Google’s AI Overviews for summarizing publishers’ content without delivering the traffic benefits of traditional search, arguing that users increasingly value Reddit’s human perspectives and firsthand experiences. Ars Technica reports: First, there was a letter to investors (PDF), wherein Huffman spun his n … ⌘ Read more

Rogue Police Officers Have Turned Flock’s Nationwide Camera Network Into a Stalking Tool
A woman found her police officer ex-boyfriend cop had used Flock’s camera system 600 times to look up the location of her and her daughter, reports the Washington Post (Alternate URL here). (She found out through Have I Been Flocked, described as “a website that aggregates police search logs made avail … ⌘ Read more

Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links
alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it’s using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressiv … ⌘ Read more

GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search
GrapheneOS is defending its duress-password feature after an environmental activist used it to wipe his Pixel phone during a U.S. Customs search and was later indicted for allegedly destroying property under government control. The nonprofit says the operating system is “completely legal,” cannot recover the erased data, and should not b … ⌘ Read more

Tons of Peoples’ Claude Chats and Creations Are Exposed On Google
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Claude is exposing a wealth of users’ chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see. The exposed data includes an AI-powered thera … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Anti-search-scraping Lawsuit Dismissed
A U.S. district court “has dismissed Google’s case against SerpApi over that company’s scraping of search results to train AI models,” reports Computerworld. Google had claimed that it was protecting copyright holders — and that SerpApi’s actions breached America’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):

[Google] made two claims: first, that no person shall circumvent a technol … ⌘ Read more

US Accuses American of Allegedly Wiping His Phone Using a ‘Duress’ Password During Border Search
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment and media reports. This is thought to be the first … ⌘ Read more

I will very likely add a way to delete your feed(s) from the search engine, because I do thing that’s important. But as Art 17 points out, we can’t really guaranteed deletion in everyone’s caches around the planet haha 😆

The only place where this would be an issue is the Twtxt Search Engine – But as the GDPR also points out:

Art. 17

The one place the “it propagated and I can’t recall it” problem is legally acknowledged is Art. 17(2), and it explicitly scales to what’s technically feasible:

“…the controller, taking account of available technology and the cost of implementation, shall take reasonable steps, including technical measures, to inform controllers which are processing the personal data that the data subject has requested the erasure…”

Best-effort, given the technology. A decentralised, append-only, content-addressed feed is the available technology, and its limits are baked into the standard the law applies. Nobody — not the user, not you — is obliged to guarantee every cached copy vanishes.

@david@daiwei.me Yeah the search engine/crawler has only found 28 active users in the ecosystem so far 😅

Say hello to the Twtxt Social Graph 😅 #Twtxt #social #Graph

🥳 Finally! After nearly 4 years, yarnd v0.16.0 “Silver Sojourner” is out! 🚀 Twt Hash v2, SQLite FTS5 search, HTMX-powered UI, first-time setup wizard and literally hundreds of bug fixes 🐛

Release notes: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/releases/tag/0.16.0

Upgrading is fully automatic — the Twt Hash v2 migration re-fetches all feeds on first start, so expect the first cycle to be a bit heavier. Images on Docker Hub as prologic/yarnd:0.16.0 👌

cc @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @abucci@anthony.buc.ci @shinyoukai@yume.laidback.moe @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club 🙏

you should see the new search engine stats page where I’ve added, spark lines, and time series graphs 👌

@balloonfu-sen@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Thank you for doing this 🙏 – Just a thought… It might be possible for this to be fully automated from the Twtxt Search engine / crawler? Right? 🤔 It has all of the data… I also think it might be possible to distinguish between 1-way feedsa and “real folks” (ya know, 2-ways feeds) 🤣

We slept in the forest. It was really great except of my mate’s fucking terror dog who was barking and snarling the entire night to each and every sound. I had maybe half an hour of sleep in total. Despite that, it was pleasantly warm. Well, the night, that is. The heat was brutal during the days. Literally streams of sweat were running down on us on the way there in the evening and back in the morning.

Surprisingly, there weren’t any mozzies around at night, I would have lost all safe bets. On the way there, my mate convinced me to take a shortcut through the taller and taller growing grass. It’s been some time that somebody traveled on this track, so we had to search around a bit for the overgrown path where we could cross the mostly dried up creek. In the beginning I said that this will be a bad idea. Lo and behold, I discovered a tick on my inner upper leg the next morning. Luckily, I got it out with my tick hook on the first attempt.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/walduebernachtung-2026-07-09-10/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org simplified it a little bit. Using only *bot* will bring collateral damage I want to avoid (there are, still some “good” bots):

@aibots {
      header_regexp User-Agent (?i)(GPTBot|ChatGPT|OAI-Search|anthropic|Claude|Google-Extended|FacebookBot|CCBot|Perplexity|Applebot-Extended|cohere|Omgili|Bytespider)
}
abort @aibots

@GabesArcade@gabesarcade.com Did you by change edit or otherwise delete the Twt you replied to (2nd last in your feed) with the reply/thread id lleeypvkzbw2? That Twt was never ingested by twtxt.net (and likely the search engine) so umm hmmm threading breaks 🤣

Hello everyone ! 👋 Behold I bring you (after many years) the launch of the Twtxt App 😅 – Ye, this is a Desktop and Mobile app built as a Progressive Web App (PWA) using a little framework (Swag) I put together iafter some experiments @xuu@txt.sour.is and I did in Go and HTMX and Service Workers.

The App is offline-first and supports installing to Desktop and Mobile (add to Home screen) and supports a number of publishing backends, including Yarn.social’s yarnd Pod, Github, Codeberg/Gitea, and a little tiny twtd Twtxt server (See: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtd).

Please try it out, no need for any account(s) or such, works with your existing feed(s) (as long as the publishing backends work well enough for you!). Please give me feedback! 🙏

Also, did you know the Twtxt Search Engine is back? 🎉

Hey folks 👋 Today I announce the re-release of the Twtxt Search Engine now live and running and actively re-crawling and re-indexing. 🎉 Please report bugs or any useability issues to me! 🙏 #Twtxt #Search

US Supreme Court Rules Geofence Warrants Require Constitutional Privacy Protections
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 (PDF) in Chatrie v United States (No. 25-112) that geofence warrants sweeping up smartphone location data constitute searches under the Fourth Amendment. The Court found that individuals have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in such data, even when the tracking covers only … ⌘ Read more

TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds
“About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account’s For You feed are AI slop,” writes Search Engine Journal, “according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That’s roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube.”

The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, countin … ⌘ Read more

Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock’s Cameras to Stalk People
404 Media remembers how a Florida police office looked up his ex-girlfriend’s license plate in the Flock automated license plate reader system at least 69 times in 2024 — even searching for her mom’s license plate at least 24 times. The police office was charged with stalking and hacking-related offenses, serving one day in prison with five … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Discovers Cryptocurrency Stealer That Spreads Through USB Drives and Uses Tor
Ars Technica’s senior security editor reports:

Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers.

The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the cont … ⌘ Read more

Shutterstock ‘Evolves’ Into ‘Human-Led, AI-Powered Creative Platform’
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:
Shutterstock has unveiled what it calls a “human-led, AI-powered” creative platform that combines its massive library of [human] contributor-created content with AI image and video generation, AI editing, conversational search, prompt enhancement, and automated model selection tools. The company says the goa … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Now I’m curious how movwin deals with that. ;-)

Focus handling? I hardly remember, lol. 😅 Did that 6 months ago and haven’t touched it since. Let’s see.

The core main loop gets keyboard/mouse events from curses. At this level, the main loop only knows about exactly one widget, so it passes the event to that widget (whatever that is, doesn’t matter – they all inherit from the Widget base class, it could be a Window, a WindowManager, or an Edit box directly).

The outermost widget is usually a WindowManager. It implements a few hotkeys of its own, like switching to another window. If none of those hotkeys match, it passes the event to the currently focused window.

Same story here: Window implements some hotkeys (like opening the menu bar). If none of those match, then … the magic happens.

Each Window acts as a focus manager. It can descend into its child widget hierarchy and collect all child widgets in a depth-first search. They are collected into a flat list. Each Window then has an attribute _focus_position, which is an index into that list. Pressing Tab or Shift+Tab increases or decreases that index and that allows you to select the next/previous focusable widget in the current window.

Eventually, Window passes the input event to the currently focused widget.

Usually on initialization, the application can ask a Window object to focus a certain widget. The file selection dialog does that, for example, because the “natural” focus order would be to focus the Edit box at the top of the window first – but that’s not what the user wants, the Table showing the list of files should be focused.

If no widget ever feels responsible for handling a certain input event, then there’s a global unhandled_input callback that the application can provide (same as in urwid).

I think that’s it.

Hm, that’s more complicated than I remembered, but apparently it works fine, because I completely forgot about this. 😅 All I did in the last few months was make new classes that inherit from Widget, like the new Table class or Edit or HexEdit or whatever, and if they want to get input events, then they must implement the methods input_key() or input_mouse().

Does this answer your question? 😅 (I admit that I didn’t exactly understand your scenario, so I just went ahead and rambled about my implementation. 😅)

Every now and then, I think that I have carefully proof-read my message enough times and hit the “Add message” button in tt. But then, in the message tree, I spot another missed typo. My process is then to go to my twtxt.txt and fix it by hand. However, I still have to clean up tt’s cache. This is rather tidious:

1. Recall the sqlitebrowser ~/.local/share/twtxt/tt2.sqlite from my shell history.
   
2. Switch to the “Browse data” tab.
   
3. Go to the messages table and wait a second or two until it’s loaded.
   
4. Sort by the created_at column twice, so that I get descending order.
   
5. Select the first message, which is typically the one in question.
   
6. Find the “Remove currently selected row” button in the tool bar.
   
7. Commit the changes.
   
8. Close sqlitebrowser.
   

So, I finally implemented the removal of messages from the cache in tt. I can now hit d and confirm the removal. Bam! Should have done that ages ago!

Next up is the search, I think.

Remains believed to be of missing woman were buried in creek
There’s been a major development in the search for western Sydney grandmother who disappeared in 2018 following the discovery of a body in a creek. ⌘ Read more

Remains believed to be of missing woman were buried in creek
There’s been a major development in the search for western Sydney grandmother who disappeared in 2018 following the discovery of a body in a creek. ⌘ Read more