SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

€890 million slap – just 0.25% of revenue – for making itself the subject of search results, and hiding app store alternatives:

Alibaba's reign as the worst offender under the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) lasted just four days, after the European Commission yesterday fined Google €890 million for breaches of the law –€340 million more than the Chinese e-commerce company will pay.

Europe even fined Google twice – once for treating its own services more favorably in search rankings and the second time for failing to properly inform users of its "Play" app store.

The search infractions attracted a fine of €460 million ($523.5m/£393m) and the Play offenses will cost the Chocolate Factory €430 million ($490m/£367.5m).

In US dollars, the fines total $1.013 billion – or one quarter of one percent of the $402 billion in revenue that Google's parent company Alphabet won in its last full financial year. The Big G's net income was $132 billion in the same year, making these fines less than one percent of its profits.

Investors won't be happy that the company has a billion-dollar bill to pay in Europe, but the ten-percent dip in Alphabet's stock price this week may have more to do with news that it burned cash for the first time in 20 years to fund AI investments.

The Commission fined Google after finding it "gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search."

"Google displays its own services more prominently in search results, including at the top of the search results page or by using enhanced visuals and filters, while similar third-party services do not have the same prominence," the Commission wrote.

The Commission ordered the Play store fine because the DMA requires app store operators to let developers inform buyers about third party app stores or other distribution channels that offer cheaper ways to acquire software. The EU's regulatory authorities felt Google didn't meet that obligation.

We're told Google "... has proposed and started testing changes to how it presents its own services on Google Search," and the Commission will "monitor the implementation of these solutions which constitute substantial progress towards compliance."

Interestingly, the Commission has also started talking to Google about the search fine in the context of the Web giant's new AI Overviews and AI Mode. Those tools show even fewer links that Google search and are already driving more revenue for Google.

Google has also taken steps to ensure that visitors to Play get more info about alternative software-marts. "These constitute good progress towards compliance and will also be assessed in light of the cease and desist order of today's decision," the Commission states.

Google has opposed the decision, arguing it weakens its services and makes Play less secure. The company says it's also developing artificial general intelligence, so probably has enough smarts to figure out how to keep its services safe and relevant.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

AI companies want to capture the value created by entire industries. That concentration of wealth and power is society's greatest risk:

Opposition to AI datacenters has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that – surprisingly – doesn't fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these datacenters bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on datacenters obscures the larger impacts of AI on people's lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence.

Local datacenter opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, pressures on already higher energy prices, and localized environmental impact. Unlike other resource-consuming and polluting industrial facilities, datacenters produce very few jobs . The fact that US opposition to datacenters seems to be most fierce among lower-income communities reflects righteous indignation with an inequitable bargain, where tech companies and developers profit from exploiting local resources but offer little in return. On a global scale, their carbon footprint could grow unsustainably if usage accelerates. And all this is in aid of a technology that many fear will propagate misinformation, take their jobs, or even cause existential risks for humanity.

For some, datacenter opposition may feel like the only tangible mechanism for registering their concern, disapproval, or even anger about AI. The problem is that this may be exactly what the AI companies are banking on. They can overcome the protest when it matters to them, and live with a significant fraction of proposals being defeated. More importantly, focusing political opponents on the datacenter issue obscures the bigger prize they're after.

While there is a staggering three-quarters of $1tn being spent on datacenter infrastructure by US companies this year alone, this investment should be taken in perspective . The market for enterprise software, for example, is about twice this size. And it's small compared with what these companies actually want.

AI companies have their eyes set on capturing all the value created by entire industries. The technology has arguably already conquered customer service and consumer sales. But on the horizon are bigger targets, such as enterprise software development, creative design, management and even legal services. In AI companies and their allies' vision of the future, AI replaces teachers and doctors . The companies would rather spend time fighting resistance to how fast they are building computing infrastructure than dealing with issues of how their products should be used in those fields, or how those fields should be protected from their products.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Adapting existing local LLM project for security and sovereignty purposes and hopes to one day match Mythos:

South Korea is developing its own security-focused AI model and hopes to bring it online by the end of the year, to ensure the nation has sovereign bug-finding capabilities.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon revealed the effort to create the model yesterday, and said it's needed so South Korea possesses a bug-finding model to rival Anthropic's Mythos.

The US government has twice blocked access to Mythos, once by requiring Anthropic to offer it only to American citizens – a demand the AI company could not meet and therefore blocked all access – and a second time by ordering the company to take down its services so Washington could investigate allegations of possible dangerous performance problems.

Those incidents led many other nations conclude that the US could in future deny access to powerful models – meaning US-based organizations and national security agencies would have an edge. Washington has since allowed limited access to Mythos to some of its allies.

Interest in developing sovereign AI capacity has nonetheless soared, and Bae said South Korea now aspires to develop its own Mythos-class model. The Register is aware of another effort to create Mythos-like tools, involving private firms and infrastructure operators across several countries.

In South Korea, the government's approach is to add security-related information to the corpus it is using to train a locally developed frontier model. The minister said he expects that security-capable model will debut by the end of 2026.

South Korea has also sought bids to create a chatbot that will be made freely available to all residents, plus an agentic application that will help locals interact with government services.

Minister Bae made his remarks at a policy briefing session conducted by President Lee Jae Myung, during which discussions about AI also touched on using the technology to detect fake news in real time, and put it to work handling complaints about government services more quickly than is currently possible.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

If You're Reading This, You're Probably an AI Bot:

[...] As the New York Times points out in a fresh report, Google results are directing more and more people to...Google, and that's it. Generally, there's an AI Overview at the top of a results page for any given informational search, and perhaps that's enough for many queries. But a study from Growth Memo referenced by the Times says 75% of people who find themselves using AI Mode, stay in AI mode rather than switching to the web. And if you're in AI Mode, that means you're just hanging out chatting with the bot while Google's AI agents flit around trying to answer your question.

But the point is that whether users tend to stop at the AI Overview, or engage with it and end up in AI Mode, "more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human," a Cloudflare report from earlier this month says. As less and less human traffic comes from Google Search, and more and more ads are being shown to bots, the danger is that the business model of a free and open web will become unsustainable.

After all, a study from earlier this year found that over 35% of new websites were AI generated . It turns out they're also, apparently, more than 50% AI-consumed.

Google, for its part, claimed about a year ago in a blog post that search traffic is still strong actually, and that claims otherwise are "often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search." A representative reached by the Times also pointed out that there are new features in the Google Search's AI Mode that show relevant web results, apparently in an effort to push users back to the web.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/07/22/china-advances-plans-for-national-single-stack-ipv6-network-and-its-own-surveillance-friendly-version-of-the-protocol/5275984

China's Cyberspace Administration on Tuesday issued a plan for wider adoption of IPv6 between now and 2030, and for more work on a non-standard set of services that Beijing calls "IPv6+".

The Implementation Plan for Deepening Technological Innovation and Integrated Application of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) (2026-2030) [content in Chinese] contains the usual promises to increase use of IPv6. Beijing wants 900 million users to be connected over IPv6 by 2027, and for the protocol to carry 38 percent of network traffic. China also wants all connected devices to be IPv6-enabled by 2027.

"By 2030, IPv6 will be widely and deeply integrated with all sectors of the economy and society, building a technologically advanced, open, innovative, self-driven, and secure IPv6 industrial ecosystem," the regulator wrote [content in Chinese]. "The number of active IPv6 users will reach 950 million, and IPv6 will account for 42 percent of network traffic."

The Administration also expects that by 2030, "New networks will be prioritized for IPv6 addresses by default, accelerating the evolution towards IPv6 single-stack, and promoting the formation of a network service and application system dominated by IPv6."

News that China is planning for the day it runs a single-stack internet will excite some, notwithstanding the fact that IPv6 has proven less important than its creators hoped.

The most interesting part of the new plan is the call for more work on IPv6+ – a set of enhancements to IPv6 that allows those who send information to embed metadata describing content into packets and even suggest the route it should take.

As Think Tank the Mercator Institute for China Studies last year observed, IPv6+ "has obvious appeal for authoritarian regimes looking to control their citizens," because a carrier could read metadata and act on it.

One possible action could be to allow network operators to identify traffic they would like to charge extra to carry, an idea telcos like because they feel it is unfair that they bear the burden of investing in last-mile infrastructure to deliver content from the likes of Netflix and YouTube.

Reading metadata could also enable censorship: Beijing already blocks a lot of content, and if dissidents had to identify themselves in packets, they'd be easier to find and block.

The Institute also notes that China's telco equipment companies have implemented IPv6+ and exported kit that runs it to several nations.

That's worrying because China already tried to create a protocol called "New IP" that also included surveillance-friendly features.

China tried to have the International Telecommunications Union sign off on New IP, despite the Internet Engineering Task Force maintaining existing IP protocols. That effort failed, but Beijing is pressing ahead with its efforts to spread its own version of IP at home and abroad.

The new plan doesn't suggest that Beijing abandon vanilla IPv6. Indeed, it calls for Chinese participation in global standards development.

But the document also says China will work on "national IPv6 standards and accelerate the development of national IPv6 standards in key areas."

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

When your vehicle outlives its cloud: What happens next?:

Do you use your vehicle's app to pre‑cool the cabin on a scorching day, confirm the doors are locked from bed, or have the car automatically call for help when the airbags go off?

Savor those connected, cloud‑based conveniences while you can—the clock is already ticking on their obsolescence. In a few short years, you may be driving today's vehicle without many of the features you currently enjoy.

"Connected services"—cloud-based and networked features that let a vehicle communicate with external systems to deliver apps, data, and remote functions to drivers and passengers—have been around since the 1990s, when GM introduced OnStar as an option. Those early systems were mostly voice‑centric, but they still depended on centralized back‑end systems. Modern versions, which are fully data-driven and cloud-hosted, use much more sophisticated over-the-air data links to allow a considerably better feature set.

Today, virtually every volume brand offers some form of cloud-based telematics or a connected services stack. They can be deeply embedded, and most are fully integrated as the core of modern vehicle connectivity, supporting over-the-air (OTA) updates for the vehicle and app-based services for owners. As GM's OnStar celebrates more than 30 years of service, a dozen others have joined, with each automaker branding its own unique services. HondaLink, Lexus Enform, FordPass, BMW ConnectedDrive, Volvo On Call, and Porsche Connect are just a few.

Despite their catchy marketing names, the systems are all functionally similar—each offers a very comparable feature set. Basics include remote lock/start, vehicle status and maintenance updates, location and tracking, and emergency assistance. Additional premium features include in-vehicle Wi-Fi hotspots, cabin preconditioning, stolen-vehicle tracking services, and concierge owner services.

Consumers have embraced the remote conveniences and demonstrated to automakers that they are more than willing to pay for them. After a bundled "free trial" following new vehicle delivery, manufacturers charge monthly fees or subscriptions for connected services.

Of course, the OEMs get something out of it, too. Cloud-based services allow manufacturers to perform OTA software updates, eliminating the need to pay dealers for labor-intensive warranty repairs such as software-related safety recalls, bug fixes, and powertrain calibration errors. Instead of repairing one vehicle at a time, automakers can push updates to thousands of vehicles simultaneously. Plus, they can offer "product improvements" to owners, including UX changes, ADAS refinements, and new software versions for infotainment apps long after the start of production.

Vehicles require unique hardware for OTA and connected services, of course. The basic components of original equipment (OE) hardware in most passenger vehicles include a telematics box (TCU) with a 3G/4G/5G modem, a SIM/eSIM, and antennas—these comprise the "smartphone" component. There's also a main onboard computer with flash memory and a boot system to install the new hardware (programmed to revert to early code if something goes wrong so the car doesn't "brick" itself).

The TCU/main computer is tasked with sending signals over the vehicle's internal wiring (CAN/Ethernet) to various ECUs, which are engineered to accept updates. For everyone's peace of mind, robust security measures have been put in place to ensure that only genuine factory software can be installed and that hackers are locked out.

Subscription costs aside, consumers are generally pleased with cloud-based services. Connectivity improves convenience, comfort, and safety, while OTA updates keep vehicles feeling fresh and up to date. Unfortunately, that honeymoon phase doesn't last forever—over time, vehicle-cloud-based connected services are scaled back or, worse, shut off entirely.

"fab23" writes:

Firefox Containers Preview | The Mozilla Blog:

[Ed's Comment: This is Mozilla's own publicity information - read it with a large pinch of salt]

We're excited to announce the Preview of Containers in Firefox version 153, which lets you keep separate parts of your online life (work, shopping, personal, banking) logged into different accounts in the same browser window, but keeps your cookies and ad tracking isolated inside each container.

This means that stuff you do in one container isn't seen by other containers. No longer will you search for a new hat to wear to a party, only to be inundated with ads for hats at every twist and turn on the internet for weeks to come.

For almost a decade, many of you have relied on our Multi-Account Containers extension to keep work, personal, and privacy-sensitive browsing separate without needing multiple browsers or profiles.

We've heard your feedback and understood the value you find in that separation. Now, we're bringing the power of the Multi-Account Containers extension directly into the heart of Firefox for all to benefit from.

Whether you're managing multiple social media accounts, separating work projects from personal shopping, or simply keeping your banking activity distinct, Containers are designed to help you organize your digital space. By making Containers a native, first-party feature in Firefox 153, we are:

• Making it visible by default: You no longer need to hunt for an add-on to get started. Containers are built right into your browser, ready to help you manage your context from day one.
• Simplifying your workflow: We've focused on making it easier to open, create, and manage your containers from the places you already browse.
• Preserving what you love: For our long-time users who have relied on the add-on, the native experience is designed to maintain the core functionality, flexibility, and visual identity you depend on.
• Driving continued investment into the future of this feature, ensuring it lives on as a first party citizen of Firefox.

In this preview release, you can:

• Open tabs in specific containers: Keep your browsing activity isolated by context.
• Customize your workspace: Create and manage containers with your own names, colors, and icons.
• Manage settings easily: Control your container setup directly from the Firefox settings surface.
• Get Started: Right-click any tab or long-press the new tab (+) button to open a container tab — or head to Firefox Settings to create your first container.

If you're already using the Multi-Account Containers, there's nothing special you need to do. Not all of the features of the add-on are available in the first-party version of containers just yet, we're still building them out.  You can continue to use the add-on alongside the built in containers, no need to uninstall the add-on.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/07/google-just-had-its-first-negative-cash-flow-quarter-ever-due-to-massive-ai-spending/

Google has reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2026 (PDF), and as usual, the search giant raked in an unfathomable amount of money. Google saw total revenue of $119.8 billion, beating analyst expectations by a comfortable margin. Despite that, the company's stock has taken a hit. Along with all that revenue, Google has announced a further increase in its AI-fueled capital expenditures (or capex). The company is actually spending so much on AI infrastructure that it has negative cash flow for the first time.

Search was the largest chunk of Google's income, accounting for $63.3 billion. Google Cloud pulled in $24.8 billion, a significant 23.8 percent increase from the first quarter. This shows there is massive demand for Google's AI services. Google also earned $12.9 billion from its subscriptions, platforms, and devices portfolio, as well as $11.1 billion from YouTube ads. The company managed to goose that last one by more than 12 percent since last quarter as it made YouTube ads even longer.

A significant chunk of Google's revenue comes from investments. When you subtract those non-cash earnings, Google's operating cash flow for Q2 2026 was about $39.1 billion. That's not the most the company has ever seen, but it's a healthy 40 percent increase from Q2 2025. The problem is that Google's spending has also gone up—a lot.

Before this latest round of financial updates, Google told investors it was expecting $180 billion to $190 billion in capital expenditures for 2026. Like other AI-obsessed tech behemoths, Google is burning cash on building and running the data centers powering its AI models. These numbers were already well above the $91 billion Google spent in 2025. The company now says it's planning to spend as much as $205 billion on infrastructure in 2026.

As a result of its increasing AI demands, Google reports it spent $44.9 billion expanding its AI footprint in the second quarter, and you don't need an accounting degree to know which number is larger. With $39.1 billion in cash income, this spending left Google with -$5.8 billion free cash flow.

To be clear, Google is still profitable—wildly so. It's also sitting on a war chest of more than $100 billion. But free cash flow is an important metric that goes to the overall health of a business. This is the actual money a company takes in to fund its operations without selling investments or taking out new loans. So it's notable that Google's free cash flow has dipped into negative territory for the first time since going public.

Google's stock price took a hit overnight on the news, dropping about 4.5 percent. It has continued to trend downward today.

Google's leadership is signaling to investors that this state of affairs is the new normal. The company points out with much fanfare that its capex spending currently is about six times higher than the $22 billion it spent in 2022 before the AI boom. Google expects spending to be even higher next year, too.

Investors have started to question the scale of AI spending, which is expected to top $700 billion industry-wide this year. Tech firms used to be reliable stocks, reporting high profits and juicy margins, but the race to build AI data centers and train new models has changed the landscape. Google is in a better position than most, with a robust ad business and cloud services that pull in plenty of cash. It just wasn't quite enough cash to offset its spending this time. It also designs its own AI chips, and the latest Tensor 8i and 8t are supposed to be more efficient for AI data centers.

Where things go from here is uncertain. People are clearly more sensitive to the high cost and lack of profit in AI, so Google's stock price may be in for a minor correction. Things will probably even out for the company if it can continue to compete with other major AI players.

Google recently delayed the release of its flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model, which it says is still in testing with a small number of partners. Reports have suggested that Google is not seeing the kind of gains it needs to remain competitive with the likes of GPT 5.6 and Claude Mythos. Google has also been hit with a wave of resignations among its top AI researchers. The next few months may be pivotal for Google's AI efforts.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

A striking new monkey species, Colobus congoensis, was discovered deep in the Congo rainforest and has been scientifically described for the first time:

Scientists have identified a new species of monkey that has orange lips and makes unique roars and snorting sounds. The distinctive monkey lives in a remote region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

It is only the fifth new monkey species to be identified in Africa in the past 75 years, and there might be more unknown monkey species in the region, scientists behind a new study suggested. Researchers named the newly identified species of monkey Colobus congoensis, after the region, and it is known by the common name "lik­weli" in the local Kilanga language.

"This is remarkable because it's not very common these days to find a new, never-before-documented primate species, let alone a relatively large species of monkey," said Joshua Linder, an anthropologist and president and co-founder of the The Forest Collective, a nonprofit that aims to conserve and restore tropical rainforests.

In 2008, conservationists in the dense rainforests of Lomami National Park, within the Congo Basin in the DRC, photographed an unidentified monkey, but it was partially obscured. Then, in 2018 a similar-looking animal was captured on camera, prompting study co-author Junior Amboko, a Lomami National Park researcher and a Florida Atlantic University anthropologist, to set out to find the mysterious monkey.

[...] Hunters of the Balanga ethnic group called the monkey "likweli," although the meaning of this name isn't known. Some in the Mituku local communities called the species "kasaba nkoni," which Amboko said means "the branch shaker." This refers to the way colobus monkeys leap from branch to branch, Amboko said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Code shack also putting new limits on first-time researchers, and reserving the biggest rewards for a hand-picked group of proven hunters:

GitHub has decided that, if everyone with an AI chatbot can file a bug bounty report, it may as well stop paying them like seasoned security researchers.

Starting July 27, the Microsoft-owned code forge is overhauling its bug bounty program with a two-tier system that cuts rewards for public submissions while dangling much fatter payouts to a new invite-only group of researchers with proven track records.

At the same time, newcomers will find themselves capped on how many reports they can submit until they've demonstrated they can produce something worth reading.

The Microsoft-owned biz says that the shake-up is a response to the flood of low-effort and AI-generated reports now accompanying many bug bounty programs. Rather than paying more people to file more reports, GitHub wants to spend more on researchers who've proved they can find the real thing. Cathering Cassell, product security engineer at GitHub. "These changes are about two things: reducing the noise so we can focus on the signal, and building a program that serious researchers find rewarding to participate in."

For researchers sticking with the public program, a low-severity finding that previously earned between $500 and $1,000 will now bring in $250. Medium bugs top out at $2,000 instead of $5,000, high-severity flaws have been cut from as much as $20,000 to $5,000, and the maximum reward for a critical vulnerability falls from $30,000 to $10,000.

The highest rewards are now reserved for GitHub's new invite-only VIP program. There, low-severity findings are worth $1,000, medium bugs $7,500, high-severity issues $20,000, and critical vulnerabilities at least $30,000.

Entry isn't open to everyone. GitHub says invitations will be based on a proven history of valid reports, with researchers needing anything from one accepted critical vuln to seven accepted low-severity findings to qualify.

GitHub is also enabling HackerOne's "signal requirement," limiting how many reports new researchers can submit before they've established a history of legitimate findings. It says genuine newcomers will still have up to four opportunities to prove themselves, while reports already sitting in the backlog will continue to be assessed under the previous payout structure. 

The overhaul follows changes GitHub introduced earlier this year that tightened report-quality requirements and warned researchers against flooding the platform with AI-assisted submissions.

GitHub is betting that fewer reports, from researchers with a proven track record, will do more for security than an ever-growing pile of AI-assisted submissions waiting for someone to read them.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

"On the first attempt, reaching orbit, I never thought it was possible."

Indian space officials celebrated the debut flight of Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket, India's first fully commercial satellite launcher, as a "grand success" Saturday after an on-target climb into a 280-mile-high orbit following liftoff from an island spaceport in the Bay of Bengal.

The Vikram-1 lifted off from India's primary spaceport on Sriharikota Island at 1:35 am EDT (06:35 UTC) Saturday, around midday at the launch base along India's southeast coast. The launch was delayed more than a half-hour to resolve a last-minute technical problem. The countdown resumed, culminating in the command to ignite Vikram-1's solid-fueled first stage booster to propel the rocket off the launch pad.

Vikram-1 is modest in size compared to India's larger workhorse rockets. Skyroot's rocket stands about 72 feet (22 meters) tall, with the capability to place payloads of up to 770 pounds (350 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. This makes Vikram-1 somewhat larger than the Electron launch vehicle developed by Rocket Lab, the world's most successful dedicated small satellite launcher.

[...] "We achieved one of the biggest milestones ever in India's space sector—the first private orbital rocket reaching orbit on the very first attempt," said Pawan Kumar Chandana, Skyroot's cofounder and CEO, in remarks to the company's launch team. "It still feels like a dream, and you all made this dream happen."

The first flights of new private orbital-class rockets don't have a great track record. It took SpaceX four tries before reaching orbit with the Falcon 1 rocket for the first time in 2008. Rocket Lab's Electron didn't make it to orbit on its first launch in 2017. Blue Origin beat the odds with the inaugural flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket in 2025, but the company's engineers had previous experience with numerous launches of the smaller New Shepard suborbital rocket.

[...] Skyroot's breakthrough launch comes as India's government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeks to supercharge the country's space industry. India has long had a robust space program, with government-developed rockets such as the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and the larger LVM3 often attracting commercial customers from the United States and Europe. India became the fourth country to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon in 2023, and is working on an oft-delayed human-rated crew capsule to fly astronauts to low-Earth orbit.

Modi has told the Indian space industry to increase its annual launch total from about five launches per year to 50 before the end of the decade. The prime minister called Chandana and congratulated the Skyroot team after Saturday's launch.

"This is a defining moment in India's space journey," Modi said in a statement . "The growing participation of our private sector is opening new frontiers and accelerating innovation. This achievement will encourage countless youngsters to dream bigger and innovate fearlessly."

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use—and conceal—to build criminal cases:

Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it's releasing an online toolkit this week for criminal defense attorneys designed to uncover whether police used surveillance technologies —facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and more—to build the cases against their clients in secret.

The toolkit, which the group describes as the first of its kind, is built around handcrafted legal motions that, when granted by a judge, will force prosecutors to reveal whether surveillance technology was used against a defendant. It covers an array of technologies, from "stingray" phone trackers and location data sold by commercial brokers to AI-drafted police reports and forensic tools that crack phones and siphon data from car infotainment systems.

It also includes preservation motions—demands that surveillance data be saved before it is deleted automatically—aimed at government agencies and private vendors alike. The filings rest on a bedrock rule of American criminal law, established in 1963, that prosecutors are required to turn over all evidence that could help the defense. The motions will be distributed through a password-protected library, the ACLU of Massachusetts says, available only to verified defense attorneys.

The group is fighting a war against unregulated surveillance tools on two fronts, says Jennifer Herrmann, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and one of the toolkit's authors. One front is pressuring cities to drop tools like Flock , the license plate reader network, and ShotSpotter , the gunshot detection system, outright. The other is arming defense lawyers to expose the surveillance in court.

"The amount of time that it can take for that initial use of technology and investigation to actually get to a court and constitutional challenge is long," Herrmann says—so the motions give attorneys a way to "challenge what has already happened in the past," building a record that carries over to whatever tool comes next.

owl writes:

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn't think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

Anyone who bought a D3, D5, or LTD pan between January 2015 and July 2022 was in the class. If your pan was damaged, the deal was actually fine: a replacement plus $75, or, my favorite option on the menu, a trade of your damaged American-made pan for a set of nonstick ones made in China.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

I still use the pan. It's a good pan. But it turns out the cut on my finger had a paper trail, and so does nearly everything else in the cabinet. The cookware aisle runs on old names and new owners. With all of the mergers and asset handoffs, mapping who owns what in cookware was the most challenging of all the markets I've covered so far. Here's the summary.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Science has discovered around 6,000 planets, and this is the first one, other than Earth, that is rocky and has an atmosphere:

LHS 1140b apparently has everything it needs to support life. Science hasn't observed any there, yet. 

According to a new study published in Science, the "special" part of this discovery is not just the habitable zone around a star. It's that it seems to meet extra criteria that scientists care about -- i.e., it's rocky, not a gas giant, and can still hold onto an atmosphere despite harsh conditions. An atmosphere is what helps stabilize surface temperatures, which is essential for life to exist. 

"It's very exciting," said Collin Cherubim, lead author on the study and a PhD graduate from Harvard, in an email. "A major goal in the field has been to understand whether any rocky exoplanets at all can retain atmospheres."

Cherubim says that most rocky planets orbit M-class dwarf stars, which "emit high-energy radiation for far longer than stars like the sun." Most rocky planets are stripped of their atmospheres fairly early in their life cycles, thanks to this radiation, the stripping effect of solar wind and other factors, thereby eliminating their chance to host life.

Until LHS 1140b, Earth was the only rocky planet that humans had ever observed with an intact atmosphere. 

It wasn't easy to find. Cherubim used a computer model he'd developed during his work that "simulates how exoplanet atmospheres evolve over billions of years." Those models predicted the existence of "helium worlds," or rocky planets with helium atmospheres (or at least mostly helium). Cherubim tested his theory with LHS 1140b and struck proverbial gold. 

Mars is still the best chance humans have at discovering life on another planet. 

"Fnord666" writes:

MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance:

It's a lot :

According to information obtained by The Tech , MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will support them, began November 2025 and will likely continue until September 2026.

Technical specifications for the cameras suggest that they will be capable of collecting real-time face and object classification data, including detection of motion, loitering, crowds, face masks, and camera tampering. Individuals can also be automatically classified on the basis of clothing color, gender, and age, up to a distance of 35 feet (11 meters) from the camera. According to a statement from MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen, any collected data is "retained up to 30 days," unless an exception is granted.

[...]

Most of the new cameras, which are part of Hanwha's Wisenet AI line , are marketed for their ability to identify and classify multiple objects with deep learning algorithms. They support resolutions ranging from 2MP to 4K while also recognizing faces, license plates, vehicles, and other objects in real time.

Nearly all cameras will accommodate a wide range of pan, tilt, rotate, and zoom motion and will be monitored continually with Ai-RGUS , an AI camera software.

Yikes.

Posted on July 21, 2026 at 7:07 AM

Original Submission