The feature, which wasn’t designed to alert a user if their photos were used in this way, prompted immediate backlash… The company issued a blog post Friday announcing that it was removing the feature. Puck News founding partner Dylan Byers was the first to share the company’s decision… Byers notes that the decision to do away with the feature came “amid scrutiny from users and talent agencies, including CAA.”
The long-vacant site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers, who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories and any other disused structure they can breach… [I]t’s been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, luring still more curiosity seekers… In Somers, social-media images of the old IBM campus — a sprawling, pyramid-studded 1980s complex designed by the late I.M. Pei’s firm — show dystopian scenes: busted windows, tossed rooms and graffitied walls. But they also give eerie glimpses of conference rooms and cubicles unchanged since IBM left a decade ago, as if employees had fled the daily grind one day and never returned…“Trespassers were blamed for a March 30 fire, reports a local newspaper, “that damaged one of the buildings and required volunteer firefighters to spend three hours extinguishing the blaze.”
One man in his mid-20s faces felony charges; police allege he had a loaded 9mm gun and took a Sony camera and power strip among other souvenirs. Andrew Proto, a defense lawyer, said “a 15-second clip” isn’t worth a criminal record… Proto said he has represented or advised several minors arrested on the campus. The Somers town court clerk said some defendants received a 6-month “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal,” meaning charges will be dropped and their arrest sealed if they avoid trouble. Some explorers who have posted about the IBM site say they follow an observe-and-preserve ethos and reject vandalism. They say they’re driven by curiosity, the thrill of roaming forbidden spaces and a zeal to document discoveries — and that they’re careful and know their limits.
“It actually gives me hope when I hear that kids are out there getting into trouble,” says Bradley Garrett, a cultural geographer and author of the book “Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City,” about his own urbex adventures. He sees urban exploration as “a gateway drug in a good way, sometimes, into intellectual curiosity about history and culture.” But Garrett said popular spots can be “loved to death” online — and then shut down, looted or set ablaze.
But encourage prosecutors to use discretion. Kind of like jaywalking tickets if people aren’t abusing it and if it’s occurring rarely then give a scare/warning and let it go.
They don’t want you to find the analog AI super computer they built in the 60’s that made em write the warning “A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION”, in all caps like that.
That old Somers site has to be pretty picked over and vandalized by this point. Urban explorers should probably check out the old IBM data center in Southbury instead, which wasn’t abandoned until late 2024.
I wonder if my old OS/2 mouse pad is still in the file cabinet where I left it…
I explored IBM campuses LONG before they were defunct. I was there when people roamed them halls and tunnels.
I had blueprints, and plans and I knew all the hidey holes.
Pretty much, physically boring. Tunnels were only for the pipes and wires. No big secrets or bunkers.
The only interesting stuff was on the raised floor; who was doing what and where.
That’s all virtually gone. Not worth getting arrested anymore for that stuff in an old IBM data center. Its all in a different data center now.
—
A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. - Quote Marcus Garvey
We noticed patterns in the scrapers that were abnormal, which gave us material for writing regular expressions. Searching for the regular expression then gave us a large lists of IP addresses. Looking up the origin of those IP addresses revealed that some of the crawlers were using botnets of residential IP addresses to scrape faster and avoid detection. We looked for what kinds of botnets might be generating the kind of traffic that we were seeing, and one that we suspected was called the “Vo1d” botnet, comprised of smart TVs running some sort of compromised app… We got confirmation that at least some of the botnet traffic hitting GNU Savannah was originating through the Vo1d/Popa botnet.
We placed our regular expressions in fail2ban, and found that we were hitting the maximum rules that could be added to UFW firewall rules on our systems which showed degradation around 65,000 rules… We learned about ipset and configured fail2ban to add IP addresses that it found to IP sets. Using ipset, we kept building larger IP sets and did not find instability with as large as five million rules…
We eventually found a promising project on Framasoft’s forge Framagit called reaction written by ppom… After we ran into scaling issues with our initial implementation, we developed a much faster implementation where the reaction shutdown process would export the IP sets to disk and the reaction startup process would restore the IP sets. This allowed us to have nearly instantaneous restarts of the service to apply new rules. We published both of our configurations upstream to reaction’s wiki so that everyone can benefit from it. reaction’s getting started documentation now leads to the method that we proposed…
Many sysadmins know about fail2ban, but not enough people know about reaction. I am very grateful to ppom for the help they have provided and for the tremendous project they have released to the world with reaction. We have implemented other defenses as well, but reaction is doing the majority of the automated work keeping our sites online.
Much of the world is forced to use CGNAT to access legacy IPv4 sites, and many users are stuck with either no IPv6 or very lousy implementations (eg rapidly changing prefixes etc)…
You have one infected machine and it gets the shared gateway blocked, and then other users of the same provider are unable to access anything.
A lot of people are affected by this, but often don’t know the reason. Site operators in developed countries often don’t care or don’t understand how users elsewhere have to suffer with CGNAT.
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Conve…
Paying someone for data scraped by compromised smart TVs to train your AI sound if not downright illegal like several lawsuit waiting to happen. Not laying this at the FSF doorstep, but asking is there any movement on this from anywhere?
DuckDuckGo just gave its browser a feature that a lot of people have been waiting for. The privacy-focused browser can now block most video ads on YouTube, letting users watch videos without sitting through the pre-roll and mid-roll interruptions that have become part of everyday life on the platform. The feature is already enabled by default for iPhone, Windows, and Mac users running the latest version of the browser. Android users can turn it on manually… with DuckDuckGo planning to enable it by default in a future update…Slashdot reader BrianFagioli argues that the feature raises questions about how creators are compensated when ad revenue is bypassed.
To make it work, DuckDuckGo relies on the same community-maintained filter lists used by uBlock Origin, along with some of its own compatibility rules. The company says you might notice a bit of extra buffering before a video starts, but once playback begins, most ads should be gone.
In the beginning, websites hosted their own ads. Then they farmed them out to someone else to manage, then that was (almost instantly) abused to deliver malware, then people started using adblockers and websites started implementing adblocker detection and refusing to serve people with such protections enabled.
Nobody seems to be willing to route both the original video and the ads through the same server to seamlessly splice the ads in and make ad detection and suppression more or less impossible.
I use firefox under linux with ublock origin and Privacy Badger. I haven’t seen any of these ads since people started bitching about them, and I watch youtube almost every day. I suppose this makes it easier for windows & mac users, but they should probably be running their browsers in a vm anyway just to avoid malware.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin , on Linux as well as Android.
No ads in YouTube at all …
And there is a bonus: videos continue to play, even when the tab isn’t the on that has focus. Handy for listening to music, while reading.
Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this week… The filing doesn’t target any single company. Instead, it asks the regulator to put the entire emerging orbital datacenter sector on hold while it assesses the cumulative effects of proposals from SpaceX, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, and any similar applications that follow. According to the petition, those proposals collectively seek “well over a million datacenter satellites” in low Earth orbit.... " increasing the existing volume of satellites in low-earth orbit by multiple orders of magnitude.”
The groups argue that the FCC is trying to apply licensing rules written for much smaller satellite constellations to an entirely new class of infrastructure. “If ever a situation warranted a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement [PEIS], it is this one,” the petition says. It argues that a single review would allow the agency to examine “the risks, alternatives, needs, costs, and impacts of this sudden transformation of Earth’s exosphere” before deciding whether any of the projects are in the public interest. The petition raises concerns about rocket launch emissions, pollutants released as satellites burn up during atmospheric reentry, depletion of the ozone layer, orbital debris, light pollution, impacts on wildlife, and interference with astronomy.
It also argues that the combined effects of these constellations cannot be understood by evaluating applications one at a time.... “It is difficult to imagine a better example of multiple projects presenting essentially identical impacts and risks that compound synergistically and cumulatively than the present proposals…” The petition argues that the FCC’s current approach, which generally treats satellite licenses as categorically excluded from detailed environmental review, is no longer fit for proposals measured not in dozens or thousands of spacecraft but in hundreds of thousands and, potentially, millions.
If the FCC agrees, orbital datacenter operators will have a mountain of paperwork to clear before sending their hardware skyward.
I’m really not seeing what the advantage is of putting data centers in space that can’t be accomplished less expensively down here on good old terra firma. That was the same problem with solar roadways. You want to put up solar panels? Great - we’ve yet to run out of places you can put them where they aren’t going to be driven over by cars.
I realize there’s some NIMBYism over data centers lately, but surely putting them somewhere in the middle of nowhere where nobody will complain is still orders of magnitude cheaper than space. Space is really, really not cheap.
Orbital datacenters make no sense when you consider power consumption, radiator requirements, and speed of light delay communicating with the ground. The laws of physics say an orbital datacenter cannot work as efficiently as a terrestrial one.
My question, given that the datacenter concept is obviously a cover story, is what is it a cover story for? The most obvious is that it’s to cover stock market fraud, but if satellites actually go up, then there are other, more sinister possibilities.
Per the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, anything launched from a nation, or by a party under its authority, is the property and responsibility of that nation. If the companies launching or operating the satellites are American, then the USA is supposed to regulate them.
It’s a change that manufacturers including Stanley Black & Decker and Georgia-Pacific are embracing… Today, in any given week, about 450 flexible workers — roughly half the pool — pick up shifts at the [GE Appliances] plant, with workers putting in an average of 24 hours a week. Their contributions have been key to GE Appliances’ $180 million expansion of the Georgia plant, completed last year, which added 600 new jobs… [Darcy Duvall, the plant’s director of human resources operations] has also come to see that many workers prize flexibility despite the significant trade-offs — like lower pay and almost no benefits. MyWorkChoice employees can opt into their own group healthcare plan, but few do… The flexible work option has also helped GE Appliances keep longtime employees with decades of experience on the job.
With low pay, no benefits and no commitment? Sounds like the magic that will attract and keep high-quality, skilled labor that will create an yuge competitive advantage.
A story that is truly hard not to take at face value, lol.
That factory will stop looking for full time workers now that they’ve discovered the desperate will take underpaid part time slots that don’t require benefits.
We should be looking at this story with horror, not admiration.
So US management is *finally* learning that the 5-day, 40-hour workweek was not bestowed from upon high? That given a choice, many people would prefer work/life balance to higher wages? Color me unsurprised…
Interesting view. I (from northern Europe) read the article as trying to rose taint full time jobs not paying a living wage necessitating a second job and likewise retirees not having enough pension funds to actually stop working. Perhaps I’m being prejudice against less organized societies.
Part time pay and no health or retirement benefits
How can we lose?
Anthropic’s tracking code was designed in part to catch Chinese firms “distilling” its AI models, a technique that involves pressing a large, expensive AI system to serve as a tutor to a smaller, cheaper one. Asking the larger system huge numbers of questions — hundreds of thousands or more — generates responses that can be used to upgrade the power of the smaller one on the cheap. Distillation isn’t illegal, and it has been used for years in the AI industry. But distillation without permission is against AI companies’ rules, and, used effectively, is giving Chinese AI companies a major leg up, American AI companies say… Anthropic and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have both accused Chinese AI companies of using this technique to build copycat AI models of their own.The article also notes that Anthropic “said it has banned nearly 700,000 accounts that were using Claude in China.” But the article includes this quote from Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution’s China Center. “Anthropic’s framing is that this is a geopolitical contest for basically the future of the world and freedom and democracy. It’s that this is not just undercutting the U.S. commercially, but undercutting American strategic advantage in the most powerful technology we know today.”
In a May blog post, Anthropic said that Chinese companies’ use of distillation, along with evading U.S. export controls on high-end computer chips, has allowed them to “trail closely” behind U.S. models. But if these techniques can be blocked, it might be possible for the United States to “lock in a 12-24 month lead” on Chinese capabilities, the company said… This month, Anthropic said in a letter to U.S. senators that was obtained by The Post that it uncovered a campaign in which Chinese tech giant Alibaba’s Qwen AI team used roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude to improve its own technology. In February, Anthropic made similar accusations against the Chinese firms Deepseek, Moonshot and MiniMax and said the campaigns were “growing in intensity and sophistication....” Anthropic and OpenAI have appealed to the U.S. government, arguing that distillation amounts to intellectual property theft that harms the U.S. in the geopolitical AI contest....
That Chinese AI labs are using U.S. models to improve their own technology appears beyond dispute. In a February 2025 study, researchers from China’s Peking University and the state-funded Chinese Academy of Sciences developed methods to detect signs of distillation in leading large language models. They concluded that, with the exception of ByteDance’s Doubao, most domestic models they tested showed substantial evidence of distillation, mostly drawing from U.S. models… In one set of intensive tests, a Qwen model misidentified itself as Claude nearly a third of the time, the Chinese researchers found.
U.S. firms have also used distillation to piggyback on AI systems made by others. In 2024, OpenAI released a tool to make it easier for customers to distill its own models and produce data sets for AI training. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in court testimony in May that his AI company xAI used distillation to train its models and that the technique is common throughout the industry.
American AI companies ‘distilled’ millions of works from the original authors, they dont like it? Tough.
…every dirty trick in the book to secure their monopoly.
They spread fear and claim that only they can ensure safety.
They refuse to release a powerful model, claiming it’s too dangerous.
They invite government restrictions.
They attack open source projects.
Classic monopolist behavior.
Do they retain all their training data? can they store all that? - i thought they were using all the internet and massive piracy?
The web is being polluted with slop so.... I would think China could get around all copy-protection and have an advantage in data collection outside of the slop invested parts of the web. If the USA AI corps were not violating the law, they’d be trying to scrape from China’s bots who don’t have their legal limitations… Is the old web even that valuable to mine in the 1st place? From what I’ve read these AI are pretty amazing when reduced to a relatively small domain data set; like all journals and books on 1 topic. Have you not tried to research something in depth on the web and found it to be severely lacking compared to books and journals?? Even online lectures are just highlights from textbooks… Well, when you look to the book… I’ve spent years reading on the web on a topic for entertainment then tried a book only to find it had everything I learned all in 1 concise place that would have taken a fraction of the time and effort… and without all the filtering and correcting of know-it-all blowhard slop and that was before we automated windbags with AI.
Tech makes things worse. It’s like a drug. Opioid… It has targeted controlled good use cases but outside of that it’s bad stuff. Everybody’s answer to the problems it creates is to get more tech…at at least suffer until the next update/version… People were already getting more stupid, especially in the USA now we have AI and already we have studies showing it does just that… If you think things are stupid now…
With a 15% drop in PhDs ,science going down hill , and CS people leaving or souring on the evil of the corps here… I think these tech bros are quite self inflated as to their importance and how close they are to the end game. They are not going to get their huge break-thru monopoly they are racing towards like mad which looks more like a cover for a Ponzi scheme hoping to become a real business before it collapses. 80% of the effort is for the last 20%. They are probably not even at the last 20% and even then, their “AGI” could take centuries to get the last 5% of it (if you can even measure it well enough know when you are at 95%… or even at 80% progress. Assuming, you know what 100% even is!)
Governments and large corporations possess surveillance capabilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Ever greater concentrations of power are shaping speech, creativity, markets, and democratic institutions. Governments are increasingly seeking to control the internet and people’s ability to access information and communicate freely. Our community’s work is fundamental to the future of our countries, our livelihoods, and literally our lives…Major battles the executive director sees on the horizon”
These are perilous times. It is also a moment of extraordinary possibility. The future of AI has not been written and we can work together to get it right. We can make sure our laws reflect the needs of the modern digital age. We can build the technologies that empower rather than marginalize communities. For me, the work starts with recognizing that digital rights are not a siloed policy issue. We must fight and win on the digital terrain to organize, speak freely, access healthcare, find work, receive an education, and participate fully in democracy. We can and must reject a false choice between innovation and civil liberties, and build power across movements to make sure technology truly works for people…
EFF’s founders understood something remarkably prescient: Technology and civil liberties would become inseparable. Now we all live digital lives, and the important digital rights issues that EFF has worked on since 1990 have become kitchen-table issues all around the world. EFF’s founders understood that how technology is built, developed, used, and controlled deeply intersects with rights, justice, freedom, and democracy. EFF’s unique combination of world-class lawyers, activists, and public interest technologists pursue change simultaneously in the courts, legislatures, companies, and our communities, and pierce through false choices. This integrated, intersectional approach, grounded in deep legal, policy, and technical expertise, is a linchpin in fighting and winning against some of the most powerful forces in the world — both governments and trillion-dollar companies.
We defend people against unlawful government data collection and challenge license plate and face surveillance in our communities. We shape AI law and policy to protect civil liberties and support creativity and innovation. We push companies to strengthen encryption, fight to ensure you have the right to own what you buy, and build public interest technologies like Privacy Badger and Certbot that millions of people rely on every day. This work matters because it all answers the same question: Will technology empower or control us?
“To meet these challenges, we must not only utilize the powerful levers of successful litigation, smart policy interventions, and effective public interest technology tools. We must also build a broader movement that recognizes that fights on the digital terrain are integral to all our fights for rights and justice… Together, our EFF community can help broaden the public conversation about technology’s role in society and continue building the collective power necessary to shape the future rather than react to it....
“I’m looking forward to meeting more of you at my first EFFecting Change livestream on August 12 with Cory Doctorow, and hope this conversation is just the beginning of finding new ways to work together…”
The blog post ends by noting that “We need you and others in the fight. Please renew your membership, become a recurring monthly supporter, and introduce someone new to EFF by snagging them a gift membership.
“Everything we accomplish — every lawsuit, every policy victory, every public interest technology tool, every campaign — is possible because people like you are committed to ensuring technology strengthens freedom, privacy, creativity, and opportunity for everyone.
“The future we want and need will be built by people and movements working together to ensure technology empowers rather than oppresses.
“Let’s build that future together.”
I had some interactions with EFF a few years ago that left me sad. They definitely do a lot of good work, but I had thought they would be pretty good at understanding complex technical issues and their nuanced interaction with social and political issues, but my experience was quite the opposite. They’re a pretty blunt hammer, mostly focused on rejecting any technological change regardless of its benefits. Even that would be okay if they were at least able to articulate sound objections, but that also didn’t seem to be the case.
I was working on Android and participating in the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standardization process. I thought it would be a good idea to consult with ACLU and EFF, partly to get their buy-in, but mostly to get their feedback. I thought they might have concerns that I could help to address either in the standard (though, honestly, the European members of the ISO committee were already going above and beyond with privacy protection and abuse protection — the Germans in particular are incredibly paranoid about such things — and that’s good!) or in the Android infrastructure I was building.
ACLU was great, at least for a while. The reason it was great was because the ACLU representative I was working with was Jon Callas (former. CTO of Silent Circle and PGP Corp, Chief Scientist of PGP Inc.). Jon is brilliant, with a deep and abiding interest in privacy. He was generally impressed with the approach we were taking, and had some good insights for tweaks we could make to tighten it up. Unfortunately Jon only worked with the ACLU for a couple of years, and we struggled to find anyone to engage at all after his departure. I’m not sure he wants to share publicly his reasons for separating, so I won’t go into that (though I will point out Jon’s article, linked above, is not an official ACLU position).
EFF… not so much. The EFF folks seemed not even to be able to understand what we were building. They kept comparing it to e-Verify (which they think is unambiguously bad) but were unable to articulate precisely what the problems with e-Verify were, or how those might translate to mDLs. I was actively seeking feedback on concerns that I could try to mitigate through good design and implementation. Their response was just a blanket “no, this is all bad” with no thought behind it, and no consideration for the individual privacy improvements that electronic delivery with selective disclosure provide as compared to plastic cards that just lay all of your personal information out there.
My discussions with police were actually far more productive than my discussions with EFF. The cops recommended pro-privacy tweaks that I incorporated — their concern wasn’t actually privacy, mind you, but liability, both financial and legal. The chiefs I spoke with were very concerned that there not be any circumstance in which a police officer might need to touch your phone, because they didn’t want to deal with the crap that would ensue when phones were broken, or illegally searched. They were significantly more tech savvy than you might expect, too, and of course they deeply understood highway stops and other police interactions.
But EFF was just frustrating and useless. Which is too bad because I had always had a lot of respect for them and the work they do. I still do, I guess… I just understand now that they have morphed into a typical lawyer-based civil rights organization. Which is good! We absolutely need those! But they lack the technical sophistication I understand they had when founded.
Meta put forward the figure in its response to the attorneys general’s filings on how penalties should be calculated if the states prevailed at trial. The number, which has not previously been disclosed and is close to Meta’s market capitalization of around $1.5 trillion, comes ahead of an August trial in Oakland, California, over the claims brought by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey against the company. Meta said the amount was unsupported by the evidence. “A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” the company said in the filing. “The plaintiffs’ outlandish calculations have no basis in fact or law,” the company said in a statement, adding that it would continue to defend itself against the states’ demands.“A further 14 states have brought claims under their own laws, which will be heard at a separate trial in February…”
A spokesperson for California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement the lawsuit “alleges Meta has prioritized profits over the safety of kids and fueled the mental health crisis we see impacting a generation of American children. The California Department of Justice looks forward to holding Meta fully accountable at trial in August....”
Meta has denied the allegations, saying the attorneys general have no evidence it misled consumers about its platforms’ alleged addictiveness because “social media addiction” is not an established psychiatric condition, and therefore statements that its platforms were not addictive could not be false… Last month, [U.S. District Judge] Rogers rejected Meta’s bid to cancel the trial, saying there remained factual disputes over whether its social media platforms were addictive, whether Meta falsely denied it designed them that way, and whether it “partially” directed the platforms at children.
“A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,”
The incredible harms done worldwide by Meta’s business model also have no analog in the history of shitty company behavior. Next up: Go after their copycats like TikTok and other toxic social media platforms.
They do though.
The whole basis of the case was similar to tobacco, that’s the simplest.
Monsanto wasn’t gutted nearly this hard.
Plenty of people would argue fossil fuel companies have done at least as much damage, and known it, and they’ve been arguing it for decades.
Hell, Coca Cola has arguably done as much damage globally, and has also been caught knowing it. There was this scandal about five years ago when Coca Cola got caught funding dicey research minimizing how much ultra calorie dense things like Coke contribute to obesity. If Meta is on the hook for a trillion dollars for this, I’d say Coca Cola is truly at least as guilty.
We could do more. This would be a huge step, it’s not just a matter of Meta being unprecedentedly guilty.
Leaded gasoline is estimated to have killed over 100,000,000 people, reduced the collective IQ of the entire planet and permanently polluted most waterways over the course of 50-60 years, all based on lies by General Motors and some others.
The demonization of cholesterol has lead to the sickest generation in human history with the highest rates of diabetes ever recorded and a massive increase of heart disease, cancer, stroke, despite claiming to reverse these conditions. We’re then told its genetic to cover the lie, as if our genes somehow changed so significantly over the last 40 years that the rates of these diseases increased orders of magnitude. We now have the lowest levels of cholesterol in human history and the highest rates of disease, yet they continue to lie.
There are analogs to this. This is not new to humanity. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This can all be cleared up if they agree to give a portion to Trump and his buddies. Maybe even donate an arch to him.
After dropping off our Amazon returns, we’d just gotten back in the Range Rover and reversed maybe two feet out of the spot when four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in… The Plymouth Police Department had been tracking me for days using Flock license plate cameras, waiting for the right moment to strike, because they thought I’d stolen the Range Rover. And the reason I was ID’d as a dangerous car thief was a simple data error made 2,000 miles away in California, creating an edge case within an edge case that Flock’s AI camera network was unable to handle… “The plates on this car are stolen,” Officer Ganshyn said…Ironically, even the original license plate wasn’t stolen either, the article points out. It was reported misplaced during a Los Angeles photo shoot, and “The corporation had to report the plate as lost to law enforcement,” according to the police report — and even then, the plate “was reported as NJ 34DTM instead of NJ 3403DTM.”
This made absolutely no sense. Car companies keep meticulous track of the fleets they loan out to the media. The vehicles all have special manufacturer or dealer plates that are logged every time one enters or exits… The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle…
Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town… I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in [Range Rover manufacturer] JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure — 34 ## DTM — and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed.
The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call. Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
I just watched the bodycam footage from this, and to my surprise these cops were very well behaved. They never cuffed the guy, or in any way escalated the situation. They figured out very quickly it was a mistake and let him on his way.
This is rare in the world of today’s policing. So you gotta give credit to these guys. Everyone involved kept cool heads.
1) The cops in Minneapolis appear to have the reputation for being psychotic morons. Suspects are not always guilty, as shown in this case and Car theft is most often kids joy riding (75%). Yes, 25% of the time it is organized crime (to steal a car for anything more than a joy ride you need good connections to large organizations to either chop it up or ship it out of the country). It is totally unreasonable to draw a gun on people joy riding.
2) The cops appear to be illiterate. The theft report said 34 DTM. While the flock cameras did not see it was 34 10 DTM, the cops SHOULD have seen the 34 10 DTM and realized something was off before they stopped the vehicle They should still have questioned them, but should have realized before hand that the license plate was not identical to the theft report and gone in more subtely.
3) Flock is incompetent and should be banned.
1) The cops in Minneapolis appear to have the reputation for being psychotic morons. Suspects are not always guilty, as shown in this case and Car theft is most often kids joy riding (75%). Yes, 25% of the time it is organized crime (to steal a car for anything more than a joy ride you need good connections to large organizations to either chop it up or ship it out of the country). It is totally unreasonable to draw a gun on people joy riding.
A pro also isn’t going to HD with his wife. Thefts by pros disappear quickly because, well, they are pros and want to avoid getting caught.
2) The cops appear to be illiterate. The theft report said 34 DTM. While the flock cameras did not see it was 34 10 DTM, the cops SHOULD have seen the 34 10 DTM and realized something was off before they stopped the vehicle They should still have questioned them, but should have realized before hand that the license plate was not identical to the theft report and gone in more subtely.
The problem, as shown in TFA, is the 10 are 2 small numbers stacked vertically between the 34 and DTM, so they get overlooked. Should the police looked closer, sure, but I can also see why the made the error because the 34 DTM is in much larger font size.
3) Flock is incompetent and should be banned.
Yes, and should be legally liable for damages in cases like this. At. minimum, if there system catches 34 DTM in multiple areas at the same time, that’s signs of a problem, and the art of pattern a computer should be good at detecting. The inability to report a tag as lost also means for this edge case it gets a stolen marker. You could tag it as lost and inform the tag owner not to reuse it if found, and if the correct number was entered if it shows up on a vehicle again mark it as stolen. That of course, would require work and changing a system.
The cops all had to coordinate their days off so this bust could be used for overtime.
The approval is only for one satellite, dubbed Earendil-1, which is meant to test Reflect Orbital’s technology for shining sunlight back to Earth. The satellite will boast a steerable thin-film reflector measuring about 60 feet by 60 feet, with the goal of powering solar farms at night or illuminating disaster-struck areas after dark to help rescue teams. Reflect Orbital envisions operating over 50,000 satellites by 2035, effectively surrounding the Earth with a fleet of mirrors. The proposal has faced stiff pushback from environmental groups and astronomers who are concerned that the satellites will unleash intrusive light pollution. The opposition has been so strong that the FCC received over 1,800 public comments on the application, many of them objecting to Reflect Orbital’s plan for Earendil-1.
[…] [T]he FCC approved the satellite, noting the grant is only “for a single demonstration satellite” to test an innovative technology that could advance American leadership in space. “The Communications Act states that it is the policy of the United States to ‘encourage the provision of new technologies and services to the public,’ and Reflect Orbital’s demonstration satellite is an example of a potentially groundbreaking technology that the Commission has found is in the public interest to support,” the order says. But on the most controversial aspect of the satellite, the FCC said the concerns around Reflect Orbital’s solar reflector are “unrelated to the Commission’s role in authorizing use of radiofrequency spectrum, and even if the Commission had authority to review and condition these operations (which it does not), these harms are unlikely to occur.
In addition, the commission said that U.S. courts have blocked the FCC from using “a generalized public interest requirement beyond its statutory authority in regulating communications. Accordingly, the operations of a solar reflector in space would not be reviewed as part of the Bureau’s public interest analysis.” The regulator also noted that conducting an environmental review for the satellite went beyond its authority. Even if the FCC did have the power, the commission emphasized that the grant is for a single satellite, not 50,000. “The majority of these comments focus on a hypothetical plan to deploy tens of thousands of satellites, and those who argue the single satellite will harm the human environment do not demonstrate with specificity the potential harm will be caused by the single satellite, but rather rely on the same studies as the commenters objecting to a larger constellation,” the FCC adds.
If we assume a best case scenario, that is all sunlight is captured by the 60 x 60 feet reflector and then send down to earth in a 3 mile diameter circle this would correspond to a light intensity of approximately 0.02 W / m2 or 2 Lux.
This is barely brighter than the light from a full moon. Probably not even enough for any color vision. So in which scenario does that help? And that already entails that a full satellite is only dedicated to you. Someone with more economical knowledge than me might want to give an estimate what the hourly rate of a satellite of that size might be.
The whole idea then goes brr by assuming thousands of satellites (1000 Lux would be bright office lighting) which is still not enough for any photovoltaic usage. So this is only an investment vehicle for people that dream without basic math.
Russians tried this in the 1990s. Seriously underwhelming, and not likely to be much better this time around.
I think that they should do this experiment. Launch it test it. And, within a year, burn it up on re-entry.
Knowing the results of this experiment are good.
The idea of putting 50,000 of these to power a massive PV array and heat the Earth is a dog shit idea. It’s bad on too many levels.
The Long March 10B is a two-stage rocket that stands about 207 feet (63 meters) tall, according to the state-owned CASC, the main contractor for China’s space program. The vehicle’s first stage burns kerosene and liquid oxygen (LOX) propellants, whereas the second stage uses LOX and liquid methane. In reusable mode, the Long March 10B can loft about 16 tons of payload to low Earth orbit.
And the rocket flew with a payload on its debut liftoff — a satellite that successfully reached “its predetermined orbit,” according to the CASC update. That post did not provide any details about the spacecraft or its orbit. It did give a brief rundown of the first-stage recovery, however. “Approximately 6 minutes after the first and second stages separated, the first stage returned vertically and was successfully recovered at a sea-based recovery platform using a net system,” CASC officials wrote, noting that launch occurred from the Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site on Friday at 12:15 a.m. EDT (0415 GMT; 12:15 p.m. Beijing time.) “The launch and first-stage recovery missions were a complete success.”
Is that better or worse? I was under the impression that most people find the catching of a rocket booster like SpaceX does with those little arms to be more awesome than just landing the booster.
I also thought that outside of having to land on Mars it is the preferred approach because it is more efficient.
Finally: Caught it in a net conjures up the wrong image. If you look at the video the ‘net’ is much more like the mechazilla arms and not some fishing net they plop the booster into: https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
It’s mostly better. While the barge has to be a bit more complex because it has to have the lattice of ropes (it’s not a net), it means that the booster doesn’t have to have landing struts. That’s a significant weight saving, which means less propellant needed too.
It likely also means that the system is less dependent on good weather, and better able to recover from small issues that would tip self supporting boosters over. IIRC the Blue Origin system actually welds itself to the deck when it lands to help with that, which obviously makes the legs disposable.
The only real downside is that it does require that barge to land, so to land on the moon you would need to first land a landing station. That won’t be an issue for the first manned trips, and longer term it may have advantages because the vehicle’s engine can be shut off at higher altitude and kick up less regolith.
Exciting times and another technique added to the list of options. We will see which becomes the preferred one, but competition in this area is going to be good for getting costs down.
The idea is probably from 1950’s comic books but the tech seems brand new since they don’t need any landing legs and use a net-on-frame architecture.
People should pay attention because they didn’t have orbital technology thirty years ago and now they have a space station, reusable rockets, and are about to have a Moon base.
And possibly ultra-long flighttime ‘drones’ that can fly over Picatinny Arsenal unimpeded; that much is uncertain. We have no explanation for their energy budget (at least white-world).
Having a country run by engineers rather than professional thieves who hire engineers to justify pillage has certain advantages (and disadvantages).
Let’s not get too overconfident.
they didn’t have orbital technology thirty years ago
According to wiki they launched their first orbital satellite in 1970, more than 30 years ago.
A reusable rocket without an asshole.
It’s a state-owned company. Have you forgotten what’s still going on in China? In the Xinjiang region, over a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been in “vocational education and training centers” since 2017. If you think that carrying out a genocide doesn’t make you an asshole then you are an asshole.
Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing secrets about products still in development, setting up a legal face-off between two of the world’s biggest tech companies. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the consumer tech giant said that OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence that has a new hardware business, had asked job candidates from Apple to share details about secret projects and to bring device components and prototypes to their interviews. Apple also accused an OpenAI employee of downloading internal documents from a laptop owned by the iPhone maker. OpenAI used the confidential information to approach Apple’s manufacturing partners, including asking one partner to demonstrate Apple’s technique for finishing metal on its devices, the lawsuit says. Apple sent a letter to OpenAI in February to raise concerns that confidential information could be “making its way to OpenAI’s business improperly,” according to the suit. OpenAI did not respond, Apple said. “OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” Apple wrote in its lawsuit.
[…] In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees. Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said. Mr. Liu also planned to access internal documents through an Apple-owned laptop that he didn’t return when he left the company, according to the lawsuit. OpenAI had misled the manufacturing company it approached to learn about the metal finishing technique to believe it had Apple’s permission to view it, according to the lawsuit. Apple is seeking an injunction that would prevent OpenAI from possessing, using or sharing Apple’s trade secrets, as well as an order requiring OpenAI to return Apple’s intellectual property.
Sadly, that’s more likely the individual people at Apple, rather than Apple per se. Same story at M$ and every other corporation. The internal fighting for higher pay means the individuals are stealing and backstabbing each other within.
For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home. But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it.
Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can — and should — respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale. “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.” Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent — by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.
There is a fundamental crisis going on in colleges that has nothing to do with AI.
The professor wants a classroom full of students who actually care about what he has to teach. The administration wants those students, their paying customers, to keep paying.
Universities have had this crisis brewing for a long time:
We made a college degree necessary for most desirable jobs. Universities loved this, college degrees grew at a massive rate, the cost of them grew even more.
Then all at once they realize that hey, the students who are there, don’t actually *want* to be there. They just want to buy their diplomas and get out, and act accordingly.
They can’t have it both ways, this tension has been a thing for a long time.
Something fundamental has to give.
Homework is for practice. It is for students to exercise the knowledge they have gained. To fix it in their minds as more than a passing thought. To enhance retention of the materiel. Listen to the lecture, read the book, practice the exercise… retain the knowledge.
There is no point to grading homework. Except as a feedback loop for the students. So that they know what they thought they understood -but did not.
In class time is for lectures, discussions, and Q&A. Don’t waste the interactive time doing things that can be done solo.
I must admit, the title of the course sounds a bit political, but I thought best to look it up before leaping wildly to conclusions:
While the words “welfare” and “social choice” might sound like political buzzwords to a layperson, in academia they refer to highly formal, mathematical subfields of standard microeconomic theory.
Taught for decades by Professor Roberto Serrano, it is known as a rigorous, proof-heavy class rather than a political forum. If you recently heard about the class in the news, it is likely due to an academic integrity controversy involving a take-home exam and suspected student use of generative AI, rather than anything related to politics.
I remember being a college student....many years ago....
I was really into computer science, and also philosophy. I took those classes with great eagerness. Oh and foreign language too.
I couldn’t care less about the other crap they required me to take in order to make my education well-rounded. Physics just didn’t do it for me. I was a native English speaker already and learned nothing from the lit and creative writing classes. There was Art appreciation, mythology, some phys ed…all blow off classes that I took only because they were required. I am sure those professors found me unmotivated. Oh, economics was tolerable, but I never would have taken it without having been forced, and learned nothing useful beyond the high-school level economics I had already taken.
It’s all different now. I read up on all kinds of brainy topics just for fun, including the stuff I blew off in college. I realize I am just one data point, but it seems consistent with available evidence: college-age kids are, by and large, sick of school and only motivated to chase their specific passions. Forcing well-roundedness on them is mostly just a way of forcing them to spend more money on elements of an education that they won’t retain or use in their chosen career paths. Offer well-rounded educations only to those who seek it, and we will see engagement increase across the board.
If we are truly worried about people being unprepared to face the adult world, we should be teaching classes in investing and personal finance management, nutrition, only the most basic phys ed (how to jog and lift weights), maybe some household maintenance. These are all practical skills that we are supposed to learn from our parents, but often don’t. Maybe some schools teach some of this these days, but they didn’t when I was in school. Well they did teach phys ed but way over did it. Forcing kids who don’t like sports to play sports is not helping them. Teaching people why aerobic exercise is good and how to lift weights with proper form absolutely is helping them.
I honestly don’t see the problem here. They did homework, cheated. Then they got the real test and failed.
So the system worked!
While the intelligence agencies did not specify the type of cameras hacked, the doorbell systems are frequently used by people to monitor their property from mobile phones. Hackers then use readily available apps to scan for devices that might be accessible. The Dutch investigation found that many of the cameras were unsecured, and “often have standard passwords, outdated firmware and standard configurations.” They said: “When the IP camera is identified, the malicious party can attempt to access the IP camera via the internet. This is often relatively easy, because many IP cameras connected to the internet are insufficiently secure.”
[…] The practice is now considered easier and cheaper than using drones and satellites to gather intelligence. It also aids operational surprise because most camera owners are blissfully unaware their devices have been penetrated by hackers. Ground-based cameras offer a unique perspective on the terrain, which isn’t the case with conventional aerial-based spy kit.
Targeted NATO member states include the Netherlands and Ukraine.
Ukraine is not a NATO member state. If you know anything about the conflict, you’d know that’s kinda the whole point.
Seriously, who writes these summaries?
If it is possible to walk into cameras on NATO bases like that, honestly they deserve it. This shit should be locked behind seven layers of impossible.
Per TFA,it’s civilian cameras on transit routes, so what it sounds like is they look for cameras along major roads and hack into them to follow shipments. It would not surprise me if they were trying to hack phones/watches/fitness bands or anything that can track individual then look at data to try to find the drivers by correlating the data with traffic data.
As much as it sucks to comply to it, EU CRA that will be in full force on Dec’27 is supposed to combat these problems.
He loved that thing!
I was just looking for Milton’s Swingline stapler.