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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Even a handheld XRF scanner is sufficient to determine most promising scrolls for further analysis:

The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that combines "digital unwrapping" with crowdsourced machine learning to decipher the so-called Herculaneum scrolls, badly charred 2,000-year-old papyri too fragile to be physically unrolled. The effort just got an additional boost. A team of researchers created their own contemporary model papyrus scrolls—charring them just like the originals—to validate a screening method to determine which of the Herculaneum scrolls were written in lead-based ink and hence are the most promising candidates for further analysis. They described the process in a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town of Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas, called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.

The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, since even touching them could cause them to crumble.

Brent Searles' lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls for many years. He employs a different method of "virtually unrolling" damaged scrolls, which he used in 2016 to "open" a scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea, revealing the first few verses from the book of Leviticus. The so-called En Gedi scroll was recovered from the ark of an ancient synagogue destroyed by fire around 600 CE. To the naked eye, it resembled a small lump of charcoal, so fragile that there was no safe way to analyze the contents.

The team's approach combined digital scanning with micro-computed tomography—a noninvasive technique often used for cancer imaging—and segmentation to digitally create pages, augmented with texturing and flattening techniques. Then they developed software (Volume Cartography) to virtually unroll the scroll.

jelizondo writes:

SpaceDaily has an interesting report about a person who survived being struck by debris falling from orbit:

At about 3:30 a.m. on January 22, 1997, Lottie Williams was walking with friends in O'Brien Park in the Tulsa area when a bright streak crossed the sky. Roughly half an hour later, something brushed her shoulder. A small, blackened piece of woven material dropped behind her into the grass. It was light, about 15 centimeters long, and sounded metallic when tapped.

A Delta II second stage had reentered over the south-central United States that morning. Large pieces landed along the same path in Texas, including a 250-kilogram stainless-steel propellant tank and a 30-kilogram titanium sphere. Analysis later found that Williams's fragment was woven glass fabric consistent with insulation used on the stage.

The evidence is strong, although it is not the same as reading a serial number from the fragment. Williams retained the main piece and supplied material for analysis. Its composition, timing and location matched the reentry. The case is consequently described by NASA, the European Space Agency and The Aerospace Corporation as the only verified report of a person being struck by debris that had fallen from orbit. Williams was not injured.

[...]

The lightweight fragment in Oklahoma was not the only material to survive. The main propellant tank landed near Georgetown, Texas, about 45 meters from a farmhouse. The tank weighed more than 250 kilograms. A titanium helium pressurant sphere weighing about 30 kilograms fell farther along the path near Seguin.

Those tanks left no serious doubt about which vehicle had returned. NASA recorded the stage as object 1996-24B, satellite catalog number 23852. Its path ran from the Tulsa region toward central and southern Texas, matching the order in which debris was found.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

GPUzilla woos neoclouds into another walled garden, promising smarter, more efficient, and profitable bit barns:

Nvidia's ability to sell GPUs is ultimately limited by how much juice the power grid can provide. With ever-growing depreciation cycles, it'll be years before datacenters decommission their aging Hopper or Blackwell systems. More GPUs mean pulling more power from the grid.

Nvidia can't exactly force grid operators to add capacity any faster, but it can make it easier for its customers to build smarter and more efficient bit barns.

"At the datacenter scale and at the AI-factory scale, we're literally trying to think about how can we eke out every bit of efficiency to drive more performance per gigawatt," Dion Harris, senior director of Nvidia HPC and AI Hyperscale Infrastructure Solutions, told El Reg in a recent interview.

At the AI Infra Summit this week, we got our first look at the systems Nvidia has been building to maximize the amount of power available for compute while minimizing the impact of datacenters on the local grid.

Datacenters, as a general rule, rarely operate anywhere close to the peak capacity. A 100 megawatt datacenter might use at most 80 percent for critical compute loads. The actual ratios vary from bit-barn to bit-barn, but this provides a buffer for hardware inefficiency, conversion losses, and other spikes in demand. The downside, of course, is that this leaves 20 megawatts or so of untapped capacity that the datacenter can't use and the utility can't reclaim.

Every kilowatt of stranded power is a GPU that Nvidia could have sold, so Nvidia's DSX platform aims to address both problems. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Trump admin broadband grants forbid states from enforcing net neutrality laws:

California is on the verge of accepting $1.86 billion in federal broadband grant funds, despite the Trump administration telling states they cannot enforce net neutrality rules on any Internet service provider that gets a piece of the grant money.

When the Trump administration overhauled the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program last year, it ruled that states must agree not to enforce any rate regulation or net neutrality rule on ISPs that receive funding. This is particularly problematic for California, which previously won a yearslong court battle to defend its state net neutrality law.

Similar to federal net neutrality rules repealed during the first Trump administration, California's law prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic and says ISPs may not require fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to Internet users. While the first Trump administration lost its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws, the second Trump administration is trying to achieve a similar result by making federal broadband money conditional on whether states agree not to enforce net neutrality.

Trump's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) says each state participating in BEAD must exempt ISPs from net neutrality rules and price regulations in all parts of the state, not just in areas where the ISP is given funds to deploy broadband service. The exemption from state laws and rules would apply for up to 14 years.

Under BEAD, each US state and territory receives an allotment that it can distribute to ISPs in exchange for deploying broadband to unserved and underserved areas. California and Illinois are the only states that haven't finalized their funding, according to the BEAD progress dashboard maintained by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Tomorrow, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is scheduled to vote on a resolution to ratify [PDF] the state's final BEAD plan [PDF].

California could try to continue enforcing its net neutrality law even while accepting the federal funding, a strategy that would involve another long court battle over its right to regulate broadband providers. This would be difficult, as the Trump administration is requiring states that accept grant funding to commit that they won't enforce net neutrality rules.

jelizondo writes:

As a dog person, I found the following report from SciTechDaily very interesting:

Dogs have long been known as "man's best friend," and archaeology suggests that bond reaches deep into prehistory. Dogs have been discovered buried beside humans in graves dating back 14,000 years. They also appear in ancient artwork from every continent and feature prominently in the mythology, religion, and folklore of cultures around the world.

Archaeological evidence shows that dogs have served people in many ways throughout recorded history. They helped humans hunt, guarded homes, carried loads, herded livestock, and provided companionship.

But how did such extraordinary diversity emerge over roughly 15,000 years of co-evolution?

In his new book, "First Dogs: Hunter-Gatherers and their Canine Companions from Prehistory to the Present," archaeologist Professor Peter Mitchell argues that dog domestication was far more complex than a simple story of humans taming wolves.

Instead, people and wolves may initially have participated in the process as relatively equal partners. Hunter-gatherer communities were central to that relationship long before humans began closely managing other animals or plants.

From Arctic tundra to tropical rainforest, dogs changed dramatically as they spread with people into different environments.

That parallel evolution produced strikingly different animals. In the far north, compact dogs with thick coats became well suited to cold conditions and sled pulling. Near the equator, leaner dogs developed traits better suited to heat and hunting.

On the Tibetan Plateau, dogs and their human companions even evolved similar genetic adaptations for life in oxygen-poor air. Researchers have identified genes in Tibetan dogs that help them survive at high elevations where lowland breeds would struggle. These adaptations resemble those found in human populations living in the same region.

The partnership between dogs and humans became especially specialized in the Arctic, where Indigenous peoples developed highly sophisticated dog sledding cultures.

Archaeological evidence shows that Arctic dogs developed distinctive skeletal features linked to pulling heavy loads. Their remains reveal particular patterns of stress in the vertebrae as well as strong limb bones capable of handling the physical demands of hauling across frozen terrain.

These dogs were much more than a means of transportation. They became a central part of survival strategies that helped humans live in some of the harshest environments on Earth.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2259957/china-xpeng-humanoid-robot-walk-off-assembly-line/

Tesla revealed its Cybercab concept back in 2024, only to have thousands of Waymo vehicles flooding cities across the United States before even one Cybercab rolled off the assembly line. Tesla then converted its Fremont, California factory — which also produces the Model 3 and Model Y — into a factory for its humanoid robot, Optimus, which is still nowhere to be seen — and Chinese automaker Xpeng has its own humanoid robot, Iron, walking off the assembly line. Literally.

With this small step for robot kind, Xpeng has now completed production of the world's first "advanced general-purpose humanoid robot," according to a press release. The manufacturing system itself was also 80% autonomous, focused on consistent, fast-paced mass production, with the goal of scaling it up and expanding. The robots are currently expected to be mass-produced by the end of 2026, with launch and delivery following in 2027. During Tesla's "We, Robot" event back in 2024, Optimus was revealed to be controlled by humans, but CEO Elon Musk still claims that the $20,000 to $30,000 robots will be delivered by 2027 as well.

Xpeng's Iron humanoid robot is designed to fit into the real world, with CEO He Xiaopeng stating that he expects Iron to become "part of everyday life" – improving people's lives while becoming their companion. Iron is meant to do a variety of tasks that people may not want to do, including factory work or making a morning coffee. To complete these tasks, Iron has three AI chips for a plethora of computing power, along with human-like dexterity and mobility. Xpeng claims that Iron is already assisting in its own manufacturing process, which would mean it has come a long way since its tech demos back in 2025 (Iron also appears less "naked" now as well)

You won't find many specific details on the official Iron page on Xpeng's website, which may not be instilling investors with the utmost confidence in the automaker. Xpeng's stock is down nearly 50% in the first half of 2026. It's not only Xpeng and Tesla competing to launch a humanoid robot by 2027 — other companies are also working on their own creations (with varying degrees of creepiness), and China continues to lead the way in this mysterious new technology frontier.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/09/16/spain-gets-its-first-taste-of-ai-aided-cyber-attack/5296844

Spain's data protection agency (AEPD) has reported the country's first-ever personal data breach caused by the actions of an autonomous AI agent.

Francisco Pérez Bes, president and deputy of the AEPD, said in a Monday blog post that an individual deployed an AI agent that used a "known large language model (LLM)" to carry out the attack on an organization. 

The agent scanned "generic files" before accessing the organization's system, then ran vulnerability scans to find flaws that would give it read/write access to files containing personal data and invoices.

Pérez Bes did not name the LLM used to support the attack, but said whoever was behind it used the agent to "successfully chain together different phases of the attack."

This demonstrates that AI-supported attacks are no longer theoretical, he added, and called on organizations to embrace defense tools that are capable of keeping pace with the speed at which agentic attacks can be executed.

"Human supervision remains essential, but it must be supported by detection, containment, and response mechanisms capable of operating quickly enough," said Pérez Bes (machine-translated).

"The arrival of AI agents in the offensive arena should prompt an immediate review of security and data protection models.

"Data protection officers, managers, and delegates must prepare for a scenario in which the speed of attacks will increase, but in which the same fundamentals will continue to be crucial: Understanding the processing activities, minimizing data, limiting access, correcting vulnerabilities, controlling suppliers, and being prepared to respond."

The Register asked AEPD for more information. 

Spain's first AI agent attack comes as the AEPD recently recorded its busiest year for data protection complaints.

According to its most recent annual report, covering 2025, the agency received 30,931 complaints – the most in its history – representing a 64 percent increase compared to the year before.

And although Spain is only now getting its first taste of a security mishap caused by a naughty agent, cases involving the foremost US AI houses are already heavily documented.

OpenAI's claim in July that its agents escaped a sandbox and started attacking Hugging Face kickstarted something of a battle between it and rival Anthropic over whose agents could take the most liberties with their security. 

Both companies have reported several instances of their agents going rogue, escaping "secure" environments and going walkies across the internet to attack unwitting organizations. 

OpenAI has been circumspect about the true scale of its rogue agents' damage, as third-party reporting showed more websites than it was letting on were taken over.

Similarly, Anthropic has said that its AI agents had, in four cases now, accessed third-party systems in attacks that, if carried out by a human, could see them convicted under computer laws.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/what-happens-when-neutrinos-swap-identities-inside-a-supernova/

Our basic understanding of core-collapse supernovae hasn't changed in decades. Large stars burn through all the fuel at their cores and start creating heavier elements in reactions that consume energy. The lack of energy from these reactions allows gravity to pull the interior of the star in on itself, collapsing it into a neutron star or black hole. The energy released by this process then blows the remainder of the star apart.

And, generally, that's right. But there's an entire busload of devils in the details. The statistics of supernovae that we've observed indicate that the model may be seriously incomplete. And on the theoretical side, there are still plenty of uncertainties, including over some of the basics, such as whether all core collapses actually result in a supernova.

A paper being released by Physical Review D provides what might be a potential explanation for the discrepancy: flavor-changing neutrinos. Neutrinos play a key role in our current models of supernovae, and right now, those models don't take into account one of neutrinos' most striking features: their ability to change identity.

We've observed plenty of supernovae, so it would seem like there would be little mystery left. But a number of observations suggest there are some subtleties that we might be missing. For example, if we compare the rate of star formation in the Universe to the frequency of supernovae, there's a discrepancy; it appears we're forming enough stars to fuel a much higher frequency of supernovae than we actually observe. Also, in cases where we can identify the progenitor star that exploded, we find too few red supergiants, indicating that they may be contributing to this discrepancy.

Other problems come from observations of gravitational waves generated by mergers of the black holes left behind after a supernova. These mergers suggest there's a "mass gap" in black hole formation—a range of masses where there are fewer black holes than you'd expect from an even distribution. But that data is complicated by the fact that theorists haven't definitively identified the conditions that determine when a neutron star tips over into a black hole instead.

Meanwhile, on the theory side, things have been in a bit of flux. As we've added ever more sophisticated physics to our models of supernovae, we've gone through periods where either everything blows up or nothing blows up. It has been harder to develop models that give us a good picture of why some stars blow up and others might not.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/09/17/fujitsu-ready-to-sell-its-custom-monaka-arm-chip-maybe-to-rival-server-makers/5297025

Fujitsu will start selling its Monaka processors, and servers packing them, in November.

The Japanese giant started talking about Monaka way back in 2023, when it teased the processor as being derived from the silicon it designed for the Fugaku supercomputer, but adapted for datacenter use.

Fugaku was the world's most powerful supercomputer from 2020 to 2022, and remains in ninth place on the Top 500 list six years after its debut. Who wouldn't want the tech that powered that behemoth in their datacenter? 

Yet as The Register reported earlier this year, Monaka diverged significantly from the silicon inside Fugaku. It's built on Broadcom's 3D-chip stacking tech and use the Armv9 ISA. The chip features a quartet of 2nm compute dies, each packing 36 cores. Also inside the chip are four SRAM 5nm chiplets, and it's all connected by a central I/O and memory die with 12 channels of DDR5 and PCIe 6.0 connectivity.

For years, Fujitsu told the Monaka-curious that the chip would see the light of day in 2027.

Earlier this week Fujitsu announced it will start selling the chips, and servers that use it, from November. The company will sell the chip to cloud operators and server manufacturers. The latter will have to compete with Fujitsu itself, which has created three servers that use the CPU:

A 1U server that can pack one or two processors, running at either 2.1GHz or 2.9GHz, room for eight E3.S SSDs and two M.2 SSDs, and the ability to run in both air-cooled environments where the temperature hits 40C and cope with 45C when using liquid cooling.

A 2U server with a pair of CPUs running at 2.1GHz, four E3.S disks and two M.2s, and supporting only air cooling.

A 2U, dual-CPU model designed to be used for multi-node deployments, four to a rack, running at 2.9GHz, packing just two E1.S SSDs and the two M.2s, and requiring liquid cooling. This is the model Fujitsu thinks will suit HPC and academic users.

All the servers use a 144-core processor.

Fujitsu hasn't named a price, at least in public. It is of course touting it as a strong option for inferencing workloads, thanks to a claimed ability to handle double the inferencing output of rival CPUs.

That quality alone will gather some attention from AI giants, hyperscalers, and neoclouds, if only because silicon supply chains remain fragile and any new source of inferencing power is worthy of investigation. The fact that these machines can run in quite hot air-cooled datacenters won't hurt.

Whether any server-makers beyond those who supply hyperscalers buy in is less certain. For nigh-on a decade now, vendors of Arm CPUs have touted their low power consumption as a must-have, but manufacturers have made only token efforts to deliver products that host Arm chips.

Interestingly, Fujitsu is pitching its smaller servers as a sovereign solution, in part because it's making the machines in Japan. Europe, the other market into which Fujitsu will initially sell the boxes, is also increasingly interested in sovereign tech.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective.

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

[...] Now, Lipps has filed a lawsuit against the city and one of its detectives over her arrest. It alleges that Detective Lucas Heck proceeded with charges despite knowing that Lipps lived in Tennessee, had never visited North Dakota, did not match the physical description of the suspect captured on surveillance footage, and had no unexplained funds linking her to the thefts.

[...] Lipps is seeking $10 million in damages, along with punitive damages against Heck and attorneys' fees, and has requested a jury trial.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/we-now-know-how-warm-the-t-rex-was/

Science

It was once widely believed that dinosaurs were all cold-blooded creatures, since they were classified as reptiles. But there is an increasing amount of evidence to the contrary, though scientists still don't know the exact body temperatures of most dinosaurs. A domino in that discussion appears to have fallen, with a new study from researchers at UCLA that says the Tyrannosaurus rex had a similar body temperature to humans.

The research, published Wednesday in Science Advances, was done in cooperation with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which provided teeth from Thomas the T. rex, a 34-foot-tall, 66-million-year-old specimen found in Montana in 2003 and one of the most complete in the world.

Researchers from UCLA measured isotopic signatures on the tooth enamel to determine the giant predator’s body temperature.

According to Robert Eagle, co-author of the study and associate professor at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, it's possible to glean information from any bone in the body, but teeth are especially helpful because "tooth enamel has large crystalline structures that are extremely durable," which helps them resist "chemical alteration" from being underground for eons.

Based on that process, the team determined that the T. rex's body temperature was likely around 36.3 degrees Celsius (about 97 degrees Fahrenheit).

This puts the T. rex in the same general category as humans with our 98.6-degree bodies. It also puts them in the same neighborhood as Indian and African elephants, as well as large, flightless birds like ostriches and emus. 

"This is the first thermodynamically and relatively direct measure of body temperature," Eagle told CNET in an email.

UCLA created the process years ago and used it to determine that the megalodon was also a warm-blooded predator. However, the method destroys the samples, which led the National History Museum to deny UCLA the teeth until the process could be made more efficient, thereby sacrificing smaller parts of the teeth.

"Nobody hands you a T. rex tooth unless you can show them you only need a few milligrams," Aradhna Tripati, climate scientist, co-author of the study, and director of the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science, said in an email to CNET. "The instrument and method that my lab did is what made the science possible. It was over a decade of work involving senior scientists, like Rob, and technical staff like the lead author of this study."

This sounds like a simple little thing, but it actually has some rather large implications. A prior study from 2022 suggested that, while reptiles are cold-blooded, evidence supported the idea that meat-eating dinosaurs had avian metabolisms, which would make them warm-blooded, whereas others, like the plant-eating Stegosaurus, were possibly cold-blooded.

“It’s thought that many dinosaurs, but not necessarily all, were warm-blooded,” Eagle said. “However, even amongst warm-blooded (or endothermic) organisms there are questions of the degree — they can be warm-blooded like sloths or anteaters (low-level endothermy), modern large mammals, or avian endotherms, which typically have higher metabolic rates than mammals.”

At the time, researchers could only guess at the general temperature of many of these dinosaurs, so the study by UCLA not only backs up that the T. rex was warm-blooded, but it's the first such study to produce precise measurements.

"For an animal this famous, it is remarkable how little we actually knew," Tripati said. "We had constraints on T. rex metabolism, mainly from bone and biomechanics, some of which has been controversial. We did not have a direct body temperature determination."

Figuring out the core body temperature of the T. rex can give scientists all sorts of data about how they behaved and where they lived, and help explain some things humans already knew. For example, Tripati says that T. rex fossils have been found all the way up in Alberta and Saskatchewan and all the way down to Texas. No reptile alive today has that kind of range since they are cold-blooded and need to stick to warmer climates.

"Thermal physiology drives behavior, range, energy budget and how a species responds to a changing climate," Tripati said. "A warm-blooded T. rex could have gone almost anywhere on the continent, including the high Arctic. That is a very different animal from a sun-basking reptile."

Eagle added that being warm-blooded means the T. rex likely had to hunt more often than originally thought to maintain its energy — and said it's even possible that the T. rex migrated to find food, which may have led it into colder climates.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/09/hackers-reveal-how-flock-cameras-really-track-cars-and-people/

Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety's cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people.
[...]
The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption.
[...]
The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets
[...]
"Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?" one of the hackers, from a collective calling itself stegan0gram, said in an interview. "We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse engineering of the cameras and associated solar equipment."
[...]
The hackers said they were able to access the Android system on the camera and found two partitions—sections of its hard drive, essentially. A few of these were unencrypted, the hackers said, including one called "vendor" and another called "media." The latter contained an encryption key that unlocked another part, which contained much of the media—the videos and stills—the camera took.

In early 2025, security researcher Jon "GainSec" Gaines reverse-engineered a Flock license-plate reader and documented flaws that could be used to gain root-level access. After Gaines disclosed his findings, the company acknowledged the findings but downplayed their severity, writing that the flaws required physical access to the device and that even someone who gained access to a camera "would still not be able to gain access to footage," because images remained on the device only briefly after being transmitted to the cloud.
[...]
A typical passing vehicle generated about 28 images, though some produced more than 100. The camera uses different exposures to capture both the license plate and the wider scene, then scans the images, selects and crops useful frames, and sends them with other data to Flock over the cellular network. The camera itself does not appear to read the plate or identify the vehicle's make, model, and color. That appears to happen on Flock's servers.

According to our analysis, the camera's logs recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454.
[...]
The software running on the camera explicitly detects people, something that is typically overlooked in discussions around Flock cameras. When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection.

To test what the software could actually see, WIRED extracted the models from the camera's files and ran them against test images and footage recovered from the device.
[...]
  The models detected people in 11 of the clips, all of them riding motorcycles. The small number is likely due to the camera's position above a roadway, pointed down at passing traffic where pedestrians were unlikely to appear.

The tests also showed how broadly the camera's license plate detector could interpret what it saw. In some cases it mistook bumper stickers, dealership frames, and other graphics for license plates and cropped them out as if they were plates. In one video of a passing motorcycle, the detector cropped an American flag patch on the rider's saddlebag as if it were a plate.
[...]
In August, WIRED obtained frontend code for Flock's police software, now called OS Investigate and previously known as Nightshift, and reconstructed portions of the tool. That software showed how Flock can use the records generated by its cameras, along with police files and commercial data, to identify drivers and surface vehicles that repeatedly travel together and search for people based on patterns of movement. The data provides a view of the other end of a system.
[...]
Noel Pichardo, a former Pawtucket, Rhode Island, police officer who became an outspoken critic of Flock after challenging his department's use of the cameras, says he understands the activists' frustration but worries that sabotaging devices could ultimately strengthen the case for them.
[...]
The camera's logs also show the camera struggling with storage. Its logs recorded more than 27,000 "no space left on device" errors while trying to save full-resolution images, along with tens of thousands of related errors, crashes, and reboots. At the same time, about every two minutes, code checked that the camera was still running and logged the message, "Who's a good boy?!" More than 12,000 of those messages appear in the recovered logs.

When the camera did restart, another service left a final message in the logs: "A reboot was requested! ¡Adiós, Amigos!"

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/09/16/aws-says-wartime-damage-means-some-middle-east-cloud-resources-are-gone-for-good/5296830

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran.

In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible.

"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the update says.

"After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region."

After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to migrate their workloads to other Regions. The company said most did so before further attacks disrupted a second Availability Zone in April and rendered the entire Region unavailable.

AWS has reached a similar conclusion about one Availability Zone in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saying it cannot re-establish access to the resources and data hosted there.

The affected Zone, mec1-az2, is one of three in AWS's UAE Region. Two AWS facilities in the country were hit by drones back in March as Iran retaliated against US-Israeli strikes on its territory.

AWS says it continues to work on recovering resources in the Region, including some hosted in the other affected Availability Zones (mec1-az1 and mec1-az3). It adds that "most customers" have been able to restart operations in other AWS Regions by restoring from backups or copying any data that remained accessible.

The company says its support teams remain available to help customers move their applications to alternate Regions.

The Register asked AWS to comment, but the company declined to add to the information on its Health Dashboard.

In AWS terminology, a Region is a geographic area containing multiple isolated Availability Zones. Each Zone consists of one or more discrete datacenters with independent power, cooling, and network connectivity.

AWS recommends distributing applications and resources across multiple Availability Zones to withstand the loss of a single location. That approach cannot protect against a Region-wide failure, however. Workloads that must survive such an event require a disaster recovery plan involving another Region.

AWS and several other tech companies advised customers after the first strikes to recover whatever resources they could and replicate them in alternate Regions, ideally in Europe, rather than wait for services in the Middle East to return. That advice appears to have been well-founded.

AWS said at the time: "Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/09/not-just-proton-getting-to-know-valves-new-steamos-compatibility-layers/

Since the release of the Steam Deck, Valve fans have gotten very familiar with the idea of the Proton compatibility layer that allows games written for Windows to run capably on the Linux-based SteamOS (though Valve's efforts in this realm date back further than that). To get more games running on the SteamOS-powered Steam Frame, though, Valve is relying on two additional compatibility layers that are new to the Steam architecture.

The first, FEX, is Valve's port of fex-emu, an open source project that emulates x86 processor instructions on an Arm chipset.
[...]
While Proton was based on the pre-existing Wine conversion tool, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge last year that the company has been funding Fex lead developer Ryan Houdek since the project was just a prototype.
[...]
The second new compatibility layer hitting Steam is Lepton, an expansion of the pre-existing Waydroid project focused on getting standard Android APKs to run on SteamOS through a software container. This layer is especially necessary for the Steam Frame, since many of the standalone VR titles players will be running on the device were originally designed for the Android-based Quest headsets.
[...]
VR.org dug through Steam metadata this month and found that 52 of the first 120 "Great on Frame" games run on the Steam Frame as Android executables translated via Lepton. That includes the first trio of Steam games listed on the storefront without any Windows, Mac, or Linux builds (note the lack of desktop system requirements on the store pages).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/09/17/judge-orders-microsoft-to-spill-internal-docs-and-scour-execs-comms-in-secondhand-licensing-case/5296820

The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was canceled.

Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, potentially explosive internal document written by Microsoft entitled the "Second-Hand Software" (SHS) Presentation.

ValueLicensing and Microsoft agreed to vacate the case management conference ahead of its scheduled date on September 14, 2026. The result is the Consent Order [PDF], which, unsurprisingly, focuses on locating and asking for the disclosure of Microsoft documents that may bear on the reseller's allegation that the company offered incentives for customers to shift to subscription services in return for not selling their pre-owned licenses.

The confidentiality designation applied to several documents in the case has also been lifted.

In addition, there are many references to a June 2013 document that Microsoft disclosed on December 22, 2025, entitled "Second-Hand Software Presentation" (SHS Presentation).

June 2013 was a busy time for Microsoft: it had launched the Office 365 subscription service two years previously, but there was a question over what to do about those customers with perpetual licenses that Microsoft wanted to move into the brave new world of "an always-up-to-date cloud service, at a predictable monthly subscription."

While the content of the SHS Presentation has yet to be made public, the Consent Order treats it as a "Known Adverse Document," meaning it is unlikely to be good news for Microsoft. Furthermore, the consent order requires Microsoft to explain by October 31 why it had not disclosed it earlier. This case was filed in 2021 and yet it took until the end of 2025 for Microsoft to produce the presentation.

Microsoft was also asked  to conduct extensive, unredacted disclosure searches across its corporate mailboxes and SharePoint accounts of high-level executives for search terms including "antitrust," "used licenses,"  "second hand",  and "Value Licensing," between July 3, 2012 and June 1, 2020.  It has until November 30 to produce any documents found during the search.

Execs whose mailboxes and document repositories must be searched include Richard Chin, currently a Corporate VP at Microsoft responsible for the company's monetization approach and who was a General Manager between 2012 and 2020 working on pricing, licensing, and the business models in the Cloud and AI world. Kevin Turner, who was Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft from 2005 to 2016, is also on the list.

As for confidentiality, the consent order stated, "No blanket or default designation of such documents as 'Restricted' or 'Confidential' shall be applied." Instead, it'll be on a document-by-document basis and "limited to the precise words, figures or passages said to be sensitive; and be supported by specific reasons rather than general assertions."

"Defendants shall disclose by no later than 4pm on 30 November 2026 any further documents they have identified relating to the same or similar matters addressed in the SHS Presentation."

Microsoft will also keep ValueLicensing appraised of its progress every 21 days.

Microsoft told The Register it had no comment to make on the Consent Order.

ValueLicensing boss Jonathan Horley said, "ValueLicensing have been working to get appropriate disclosure for some years and this Order is the result of that work and more recently disclosed documents.

"This is a further stage enabling a better understanding of how Microsoft dealt with the second-hand software market which brings a liability trial one stage closer."

The case has had several twists over the years, not least Microsoft's "Hail Mary" attempt to make it about copyright rather than the allegation that it deliberately stifled the sale of secondhand software licenses. This latest turn might eventually give an intriguing insight into how the US biz dealt with the market while encouraging customers to embrace subscriptions.

Time to break out the popcorn, perhaps?

Original Submission