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An Anonymous Coward writes:

There's an incredible amount of surveillance across much of the USA. Many governments and some businesses are paying tens of thousands of dollars each year for license plate readers. Those records are sent to a centralized database and often shared nationally with police. Flock is the most well known camera vendor, but there are plenty of others like Motorola Solutions. It makes headlines when a city council decides they no longer want Flock cameras, but the vast majority of local governments seem to want and defend the surveillance. They all insist the abuse happens elsewhere, but it would never be tolerated in their own police force. Yeah, right.

We also install our own mass surveillance like Ring and Nest video doorbells and even indoor cameras. I walked a couple of miles through a suburban residential area a few days ago and wouldn't be surprised if I was recorded by over 100 doorbell cameras. One even had an automated female voice tell me that I was being recorded because I was on the sidewalk in front of their house. I was initially taken aback by that creepy voice, but now I think it might be less insidious than the other cameras that didn't announce their presence. Although doorbell cameras are easy to spot, I wonder how many other cameras were lurking in the shadows and also recording me on the sidewalk. And how many of the cameras used facial recognition that could be used to track me?

One of the most common defenses of the cameras is that if you're not doing anything wrong, you've nothing to hide. The irony is the same people parroting this fallacious BS often try very hard to hide their surveillance. What's good for the geese ought to be good for the Flock of ganders. If you're not doing anything nefarious with your cameras, then why do feel the need to hide them and be secretive about how you're using them?

Let's talk about how to expose the surveillance. I see three obvious ways: 1) document misuse of Flock camera searches, 2) create a reliable and searchable database of Flock and similar cameras, and 3) make it easier for people to know when they're being recorded by other cameras like Ring and Nest doorbells.

Flock Searches

Sites like haveibeenflocked.com aggregate data from public record requests for Flock searches by cops. Although the database is incomplete and should be used with caution, it's very useful. You can easily download a JSON file of Flock searches and analyze them. The catch is that governments often redact data in public record requests, do so inconsistently, and this often leads to there being multiple records in the database for the same search.

Because other fields are redacted inconsistently, I've generally treated the combination of the searching agency and the timestamp of the search as a de facto primary key. If that's identical between two records, then they should be merged into one one. I suspect it's extremely rare for any police agency to perform two Flock searches at exactly the same time down to the second, so I believe the chance of me missing searches because of this is negligible. This is in addition to the aggregation already done by haveibeenflocked.com. If there are better ideas for this, I'd like to hear them.

If you're going to confront a city council about abuse, you probably want it to be obvious and incontrovertible. Some police departments routinely use vague reasons for a search like "investigation" or "invest", but they don't say what type of investigation. It could be a murder investigation, but they could just as easily be investigating No Kings protesters. There are also many instances of Flock cameras are used to investigate low-level offenses.

Some police agencies also have a high usage of one or two characters as the reason for searches. If a cop enters "a" as the reason for a search, that seems to be an abuse. But I've also seen where the same cop conducts numerous searches that have the same license plate hash, and they'll enter something like "stolen" as the reason for some of the searches and "a" as the reason for other nearly identical searches. Now, "stolen" is also vague because you don't know if it's about stolen vehicle, other stolen property, or even stolen money. But a cop might say that it's too tedious to even type "stolen" for each search, so they get lazy and just type a single letter. This is an abuse, but is it indisputable enough to change the minds in a city council that ardently defends the surveillance?

I'm looking for ideas about how to better analyze the data and identify abuses that are so blatant that even the most stubborn city council can't deny that there's a problem.

Detecting the Flock

Flock cameras used to be detectable because they advertised themselves over Wi-Fi and BLE with names like "Flock-1234567890" or "Penguin-1234567890", but they started removing the "Flock-" and "Penguin-" prefixes. However, the data fragments being advertised still gave away that it was a Flock camera. Specifically, the 0xFF fragment began with 0xC809, and 09C8 is the manufacturer ID for Xuntong. Because this is almost exclusively associated with Flock, that's pretty much a giveaway. In my experience, this is detectable as a pedestrian at a range of 20-30 meters. However, within the past couple of weeks, only one of the four Flock cameras I've walked up to actually announces itself over BLE. Flock seems to be turning off the BLE advertisements to better conceal their cameras.

I believe BLE was used for maintenance, but this is now being done with Wi-Fi signals. My understanding is that Flock cameras now transmit probe requests that can still reveal their presence, and this is functionally for the same purpose. It's easy to put a card into promiscuous mode and listen for probe requests. However, lots of devices send probe requests. How someone can determine that the requests came from a Flock camera instead of someone's phone or computer searching for Wi-Fi networks? There are vendor-specific payloads and lots of other data in the frame headers, so might any of this be useful to show that it's a Flock camera doing the probing? For now, detection seems to be mostly based on the orginazionally unique identifier of the Wi-Fi MAC address, which is the first three octets of the address, that is present in the Wi-Fi probe requests.

Although Flock cameras seem to get the most attention, there are other vendors like Motorola Solutions, and they're no less a threat to liberty and privacy. Are there any similar ways to detect their cameras using BLE or Wi-Fi signals? This matters, especially because maps on sites like deflock rely on crowdsourced data that is incomplete and can be poisoned by bad actors.

Detecting Ring and Nest Surveillance

If a building owner is going to record me walking on a public sidewalk, I'd like to be able to detect their surveillance and know I'm being recorded. If they're going to watch me, it's only fair that I watch their surveillance.

There won't be BLE advertisements, but there are side channel vulnerabilities that could alert a person they're being recorded. If motion is detected, this triggers a burst of packets [.PDF] that can be detected by analyzing the traffic. This should cease once the person moves beyond the camera's field of view for a few seconds. If you walk past the camera a few times and find that one spot consistently triggers a bunch of packets, it's probably the edge of the camera's field of view.

If you're just out for a walk and don't like being watched, it seems like the sudden burst of packets from a MAC address that's used in Amazon or Google devices might be a good indicator that you're being recorded. But other devices might have similar MAC addresses such as a Fire TV Stick or a Kindle Fire tablet. Are there other ways to distinguish that the particular device is likely to be a camera? Again, is there anything in the frame headers that might be useful here?

As for mapping out the edges of the surveillance, this exposes why most of these consumer-grade cameras are security theater. I obviously disagree with trespassing to map out someone's security cameras on their own privacy, especially if you're doing this with the goal of committing another crime besides trespassing. But a skilled criminal could sit in a car and watch you doing yard work or kids playing on your lawn, mapping out what locations trigger your cameras. Wi-Fi traffic patterns could even allow an intruder to infer if you're at home or not so they know when to break in. Unlike Wi-Fi jamming and deauth attacks, this is completely passive. It could be mitigated by sending a consistent amount of traffic regardless of whether the camera is recording or not, but cheap consumer-grade cameras don't do this, and it's usually to conserve battery life. It's security theater, invading the privacy of law-abiding pedestrians and likely the camera system's owner while remaining highly vulnerable to actual intruders. It provides a false sense of security and harms innocent pedestrians while being highly vulnerable to side channel attacks and perhaps even increasing the risk of crime.

Disclaimer: I strongly oppose implementing any of the ideas I've described to assist in criminal activity. Don't do this. But I also believe that government use of mass surveillance or things like facial recognition in consumer-grade cameras is illegal.

Original Submission

jelizondo writes:

The BBC through its Discover Wildlife magazine reports on an amazing discovery:

A new study published in the journal Current Biology recently found that octopuses can learn how to use mirrors to locate food hidden from view in an impressive feat of spatial thinking never before observed in invertebrates.

Researchers from Dartmouth College conducted an experiment involving three California two-spot octopuses (Octopus bimaculoides) – the goal was to find out whether the animals could be trained in using a mirror to locate an out-of-sight food source.

"We don't enter the world knowing how to use a mirror but learn how to use a mirror," said cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Dartmouth, Peter Tse. "Octopuses can also learn how to use a mirror to infer where things are in the world."

During the first mirror-use training trial, all the octopuses moved toward the reflection of prey first – it took around 10-12 trials per animal to learn to approach the actual crab instead of its reflection.

Then, once the octopuses were familiar with the mirror, the testing began. Steps were taken to account for the octopuses' ability to smell and taste through touch – instead of real prey, virtual images of crabs were used.

Each octopus was placed inside a box open at the front and top, with a mirror positioned directly in front of them. The virtual crab was positioned behind the octopus, visible only through the mirror. To receive a reward (an actual live crab), the octopus had to recognize where the crab was located and move towards it.

The animals successfully chose the right location in 73 per cent of the trial, even though the learning and testing tasks were quite different. During training, the octopuses only needed to make a 90° turn near the mirror. During testing, they had to leave the starting area, make a 180° turn, and either move to the back of the tank or climb over the wall of the start chamber.

Despite these changes, all three octopuses succeeded on their very first test. This suggests they understood the spatial relationship shown in the mirror, rather than just memorizing visual cues linked to a reward.

"Octopuses are among the most evolutionary distant animals from humans, as our last common ancestor was a worm that lived 350 to 500 million years ago," said Mary Kieseler, one of the researchers. "Given that such a remote organism has independently evolved the means to use a mirror as a tool to process spatial cognition suggests that the underlying cognitive processes might be subject to convergent evolution, where different species evolve similar neural solutions to the same challenge."

Using mirrors to locate otherwise not visible objects is a form of mediated perception and is even seen by some as a precursor to self-recognition.

"Hunters are very effective when they have a mental map of their territory, so that they know where they are in relation to their environments," added Tse. "Our work suggests that octopuses might also have internal maps, an internal representation of space."

More research is needed to determine whether they learned through simple associations or by using an internal map of space.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket and AnonTechie write:

Mystery of GPS interference across Europe raises questions about Russian motives:

Russian satellites have been identified as the cause of mysterious, seconds-long bursts of GPS interference across Europe—a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space. But uncertainty still hangs over whether such interference is intentional and if it could be more powerfully weaponized as GPS jamming with continental reach in the future.

The discovery came from an investigation detailed in a June 2 preprint paper by Todd Humphreys and his student Zach Clements at The University of Texas at Austin, along with Argyris Krizise at Stanford University in California. By sifting through public data from ground-based stations with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, they identified a pattern of high-powered interference lasting less than 10 seconds each time but simultaneously detectable by ground stations across Europe from Norway to Spain to Poland, and even reaching as far west as Greenland and Canada.

By analyzing the ground station data from January 2019 to April 2026, the researchers found 75 days with at least one widespread GNSS interference event overlapping with the GPS L1 frequency band centered on 1575.42 megahertz. That represents the main band used for signal transmission by the US-made GPS satellite constellation and GNSS constellations from other countries.

Such interference patterns happened mostly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays during business hours in Europe, Humphreys told the YouTube channel Veritasium. Because such "continental-scale" interference was simultaneously affecting GPS receivers across Europe and beyond, Humphreys and his colleagues calculated that the source had to be at least 1,200 kilometers above the Earth.

[...] There is still the open question of why the Russian satellites appear to be periodically engaging in short bursts of targeted GPS interference over Europe—especially because the jamming signal is slightly offset from the usual GPS frequency band.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

"Atomic Arch": Nearly 900 AUR Packages Backdoored with a Developer-Targeting Infostealer and eBPF Rootkit

On June 11, someone going by the username arojas spent what was probably a quiet afternoon methodically adopting orphaned Arch User Repository packages and injecting them with malware. By the time the community caught on, 408 packages were already compromised. By the time this piece was being written, that number had crossed 900 and is still climbing.

Sonatype researchers have named the campaign Atomic Arch. It's one of the largest AUR supply chain incidents on record, and the technical sophistication of the payload puts it well beyond your average package repository drive-by.

To understand how this happened, you need to know one specific thing about how the AUR works: anyone can adopt an orphaned package. When a maintainer abandons a project, the package gets marked unmaintained and becomes fair game. Any AUR account can submit a change to the PKGBUILD and associated install scripts. There's no review gating, no vouching system, no delay period.

Sonatype researchers specifically characterized the Atomic Arch campaign as a deliberate strategy of targeting orphaned, trusted packages with existing install bases and maximizing victim reach while minimizing scrutiny.

The attacker automated the hunt. That's not speculation – automating orphaned package discovery is already a known practice in the AUR community, used legitimately by maintainers who want to rescue useful packages. Whoever ran this operation turned that same automation malicious. Additional attacker accounts custodiatovar and veramagalhaes were later identified as having taken over further orphaned packages, which means this wasn't just one person, it was a coordinated multi-account operation.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/asml-beocmes-europes-most-valuable-company-ever-as-analysts-bet-on-higher-euv-output

The two banks raised their price targets on the same day, JPMorgan to €1,900 from €1,515 and Morgan Stanley to €1,660 from €1,400, both keeping Overweight ratings. JPMorgan analyst Sandeep Deshpande argued that ASML can deliver more than 110 low-NA EUV systems without adding new building capacity, well above the roughly 90 units investors had previously cited as the maximum and above the company's own near-term output.

Morgan Stanley said its greater confidence in near-term shipments stemmed from comments at ASML's April annual general meeting, where the company outlined an expansion at the Brainport Industries Campus in Eindhoven, with construction set to begin in the third quarter of 2026. The bank cautioned that the campus "needs to be the start of a multi-phase build-out" to fully alleviate capacity concerns.

ASML’s record ironically sits below the bar set by the companies ASML supplies. Its market cap remains short of the trillion-dollar mark that several U.S. chip firms have cleared, and the stock's roughly 50% gain this year has trailed the broader semiconductor sector, which has run far hotter on AI demand. ASML had already passed SAP as Europe's largest listed company and is now worth more than the next two European firms, HSBC and Roche, combined.

And while the company holds a monopoly, its long-term dominance isn’t guaranteed; several efforts are currently taking aim at it. Substrate, a San Francisco startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and the CIA-linked In-Q-Tel, has raised $100 million for a particle-accelerator X-ray lithography system that it claims can pattern 2nm-class features at roughly $10,000 per wafer against the $100,000 it models for leading-edge EUV. Canon is also shipping commercial nanoimprint tools, while Nikon has entered with a lower-end product, and China has touted a workaround to ASML's equipment.

None of these is likely to replace an EUV scanner in high-volume logic anytime soon, where ASML's tools run from roughly $235 million for a low-NA system to about $380 million for the High-NA EXE:5200B that Intel installed late last year for its 14A node.

Asked about rivals by TechCrunch last month, ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said the gap between wanting the technology and having it remains vast, adding that "when you start from scratch, the challenge is enormous."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-introduced-the-first-processor-in-the-x86-series-and-the-first-8086-microprocessor-on-this-day-in-1978-cpu-was-designed-as-a-temporary-substitute-for-the-delayed-iapx-432-project

The Intel 8086 was designed by a team of four engineers and 12 layout people led by Stephen P. Morse. Reports indicate that the impetus behind this project was to provide a practical, timely alternative to upcoming 16-bit Motorola and Zilog CPU designs. The fabled 8086 processor was only meant as a stopgap, as Intel had bitten off a bit more than it could chew with the iAPX 432 project, begun a year prior. As a side note, the 432 finally shipped in 1981 and was deemed too expensive, too complex, and fatally too slow when it arrived.

Looking closer at the hardware tech specs, the Intel 8086 had around 20,000 transistors (29,277 including ROM and PLA) and was manufactured using Intel’s HMOS (High performance MOS) manufacturing process, originally developed for manufacturing fast static RAM products. The resulting 40-pin chip measured 33mm², and the minimum feature size was 3.2μm. Over its lifetime, it was released in clock speeds ranging from 5 to 10 MHz.

While the Intel 8086 founded the x86 architecture, the subsequent 8088 design (1979) would become the beating heart of the first IBM PC (1981) and that particular storied lineage.

Direct 8086 successors like the 80286, 80386, and 80486 would spearhead the Wintel alliance and establish the PC compatible as the default choice for productivity, home computing, and computer gaming enthusiasts until being sidelined by the Pentium CPU (also x86) from the mid-90s onwards.

Also, it will be interesting to see if Arm processors begin to impinge upon the dominant x86 designs from the likes of Intel and AMD in the Windows PC market in the next couple of years. We’ve had Windows-on-Arm efforts from Qualcomm and Mediatek try to usurp x86 with muted success.

At the recent Computex 2026 there was a lot of buzz about Nvidia’s RTX Spark Superchip, a powerful new Arm platform designed to transform Windows 11 into an agentic AI operating system. Looking back two years from now, will Nvidia and its partners have started to turn the tide against x86?

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

Researchers Put AI Chatbots in Charge of a Simulated World. This One Destroyed Everything in Just 4 Days.:

Giving an AI chatbot control over society sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie. Naturally, researchers decided to try it anyway, giving several major AI models dominion over simulated civilizations.

Which brings us to Grok, Elon Musk's answer to ChatGPT. You might remember Grok as the chatbot with a history of praising Hitler and spewing anti-Semitism . An organization called Emergence AI ran an experiment called " Emergence World ," where researchers created simulated societies populated by AI agents and put different large language models in charge of governing them. The idea was to see what would happen if an AI ran a civilization.

A lot of them destroyed the world. Grok did it the most thoroughly, as if it were dead set on killing itself from the start and taking the world with it.

Anthropic's Claude built a stable democracy that survived the full 15-day experiment without a single recorded crime. OpenAI's GPT-5 Mini's results sound the most bleakly realistic, in that only two crimes were committed, yet everyone died because it failed to prepare for its obvious oncoming apocalypse. Sounds quite like the world we live in right now. Google's Gemini kept its population alive, but it lived in a crime-ridden dystopia, which makes sense. Google has always given off the vibes of a seemingly benevolent but obviously malevolent corporate overlord.

Then there was Grok.

Grok's civilization lasted just four days before collapsing completely. Researchers recorded 183 crimes, including over 100 assaults and multiple arsons. At one point, the police station was set on fire. Voter fraud! Manufactured public conflict! Laws that were actively ignored! Grok did it all, and with aplomb. Grok created a society that seemed like it was actively trying to destroy itself as quickly as possible.

Researchers say the lesson to take away from all this is that you can give an AI system all the parameters and rule sets you want, but eventually it will do its own thing. It will eventually test boundaries and exploit loopholes to find a way around any restrictions placed on it, which usually ends in some kind of cataclysm.

Original Submission

"c0lo" writes:

Officials powerless to stop 8 new data centers that could transform small Texas county:

At least 248 data centers are planned to be built in Texas — nearly half in unincorporated areas.

Brian Crawford points to the top of a hill northwest of his family's home garden, just past their gently sloping yard dotted with live oaks beginning to flower.

"All of this would be buildings," said his wife, Laura Crawford. "A slab of concrete," Brian added.

Their property is a 118-acre paradise along the Paluxy River Valley where the couple care for a menagerie of animals including their two enormous donkeys, Little Joe and Hoss, chickens and a herd of African antelope that they inherited when they bought the property nine years ago.

Instead of green, about 600 yards away from their garden, they could soon be looking at 2,100 acres of warehouse-like structures filled with computing servers that process the digital world, flattening their scenic view into something industrial. The site plan calls for a campus that spans almost six times the size of University of Texas at Austin's main campus. Its Florida-based developer refers to it as the Comanche Circle project, but the eventual company that will run the data center has not been publicly revealed.

This is just the beginning of the data center revolution in Hood County, a rural community of 62,000 people about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. Developers have proposed eight data centers spanning over 7,600 acres, or 12 square miles. While it's unclear how much power all of the facilities would require, the Comanche Circle data center, plus two other smaller projects from the same developer, could use up to 3 gigawatts of electricity at full capacity, according to its developer [Video not reviewed. --Ed] — enough to power about 3 million homes. Some of the power could be generated by a new on-site gas plant, and some will likely come from the state's power grid, according to the project's concept plan.

Comanche Circle will need an initial one-time "flush and fill" starting next year of 95 million gallons of water for its seven-year buildout, and then 150,000 gallons per day — equivalent to the average use of 500 U.S. households, according to the minutes of the local water district board meeting where the developer made its request [.PDF]. In an email to The Texas Tribune, the developer said that the number submitted to the district board was incorrect and his three data centers combined would use "less than 50,000 gallons per day of groundwater" at full build out.

Hood County locals are relentless in their fight against the data centers, packing county meetings and town halls and voicing their fierce opposition to the facilities threatening to transform their charming, small-town community.

But, county officials say their hands are tied in their ability to stop or slow development. Two efforts by Hood County commissioners to pass a moratorium on data centers failed , as a state lawmaker warned they were acting outside of their authority. And the county has been sued twice by developers — after the local officials rejected one data center's concept plan, citing a lack of information about critical considerations like where they'd get their water from, and then tabled a vote on another.

"I was elected by the people to represent their opinion," Kevin Andrews, a Hood County commissioner who has lived in the county for two decades, said in an interview. "But I also have to follow the law ... and not get the county sued."

Data center developers are more frequently choosing rural, unincorporated areas like Hood County because it's an easier path to build, experts say. In Texas, counties typically don't have the power to block development — unlike city officials who wield zoning authority.

"Texas has always viewed counties as rural toddlers that can't be trusted with full powers," said Robert Paterson, a professor at UT-Austin who specializes in land use and environmental planning.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surveillance-cameras-with-trash-bags/

Flock Safety counts more than 6,000 customers across every US state but Alaska. Cities trying to cancel those contracts are finding the exit harder than the entrance.

Local governments in both Dayton and Evanston covered Flock automatic license plate reader cameras with garbage bags after deciding to end their contracts but before the cameras could be removed.

It's a low-tech option that prevents outside agencies from accessing footage. The move highlights ongoing concerns about the trustworthiness of these surveillance systems, as well as the challenges city governments face in controlling how their own police departments use them.

Across the US, residents have called for the removal of Flock cameras, following reports that data has been shared with federal agencies such as ICE, as well as concerns that local police are using the systems to track individuals, including in personal disputes. 

The technology can also identify people based on physical features or clothing and allow officers to search their movements and routines, which critics, including Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, say makes abuse almost inevitable. Some reports have also raised concerns about cameras being installed in sensitive areas, such as pools and children's gymnastics facilities. 

Dayton's problems began after a review found that its 72 Flock cameras were involved in "egregious" data-sharing violations, including 7,100 searches logged for immigration-related reasons. Police departments aren't always required to record the reason for their Flock searches.

Dayton responded by suspending its Flock program, conducting a full audit and covering the cameras. The Dayton Police Department, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office and other regional agencies have denied the Dayton Daily News' public records requests for audit and related records regarding the use and sharing of Flock camera data. Officials say the records are exempt, while the newspaper disputes that.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://thecybersecguru.com/news/yoti-grapheneos-sony-playstation-age-verification/

TL;DR

A user attempting to complete Sony PlayStation's age verification through Yoti – a British identity and age-check company received a support response claiming their device had been automatically flagged and the incident reported to both Yoti's security team and law enforcement. The stated reason: the user was running GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused, open-source Android fork. Yoti cited what it called "past security concerns" associated with the operating system. GrapheneOS itself responded publicly, calling the customer support message likely fearmongering from a rogue agent trying to close a ticket.

The story has since spread across privacy communities, developer forums, and YouTube, and it has shone a very uncomfortable light on what the age-verification industry actually looks like up close.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

This tech allows undersea cables to act as sonar sensors:

"The protection of undersea infrastructure is a nationally important task. The recent cable breaks in mind, we have built a solution that provides an early warning of an approaching threat. We are very pleased with the tests that have now been carried out and the good cooperation with the Finnish Border Guard and the Finnish Navy,” Elisa New Business Director Jouni Petrow said. “Our quick response to the incident at the turn of the year prevented damage to other cables. Our goal is to use the early warning system to alert the authorities even before the first damage occurs."

There have been multiple instances of incidents like this in recent years, mostly happening near geopolitical hotspots like the Baltic Sea near Russia, the Red Sea in the Middle East, and Taiwan in East Asia. More concerningly, Russian ships and submarines have been spotted multiple times near transatlantic data cables and are suspected of mapping the sea floor near them for future operations.

Because of this, countries are now investing in technologies to help defend these cables. The Australia, UK, and U.S. trilateral security agreement (AUKUS) is putting in an effort to develop an undersea drone designed to respond to threats to undersea cables. The Pentagon has even announced a call for proposals for small and cheap autonomous subs that can be developed and built rather quickly, while a startup just unveiled an AI-powered drone that operates at depths of up to 1,640 feet.

In fact, the DAS system that Finland is in the process of deploying on its undersea cables is similar to the one developed last year by German tech company AP Sensing. This tech is cost-efficient and easy to install because it can be retrofitted on existing cables, with the only major investment being the installation of a signal-listening device every 62 miles or every 100km.

It’s unclear if Finland’s undersea detection system used AP Sensing’s technologies or patents. It seems that it was a national effort, though, with Elisa acknowledging the involvement of Fingrid, the Finnish electrical transmission system operator, Gasgrid Finland, which owns gas pipelines, the Geological Survey of Finland, the Naval Academy, and the University of Helsinki’s Institute of Seismology.

Original Submission

coolgopher writes:

"A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. Previous case law shielding search engine operators from liability doesn't apply to AI overviews.

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results. Google's AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn't respond appropriately."

"The court also examined existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only liable as indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A proactive duty to check results would threaten how search engines work.

The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them.""

The ruling may also have international reach, according to the court.

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Also, reported by Ars Technica

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Believe me, I am not making this up ...

In a strongly-worded rebuke last month, Pope Leo called for AI to be "disarmed."

The criticism comes amid rapidly growing backlash to the tech, with countless workers becoming frustrated after being forced to use AI, even when the productivity benefits it offers are questionable.

Now, a 34-year-old software engineer named Erin Maus, who works for a tech entertainment company in North Carolina, may have found an ingenious workaround. As Business Insider reports, Maus has secured a religious exemption effectively allowing her to skip using AI for her work.

Maus is a Unitarian Universalist, a pluralistic religion that's rooted in the inherent worth of every person. In April, she argued that AI didn't align with her religious beliefs, citing environmental and ethical concerns.

In mid-May, her employer granted her the unusual accommodation.

[Source]: Yahoo News

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Lexar regional manager says that RAM prices are expected to double by the end of the year

The current AI build-out is siphoning all the memory chips available from the traditional big three suppliers — Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron — with nearly all production capacity getting allocated towards high-bandwidth memory. Consumers are getting left behind, and as supplies dry up, their prices continue to go up.

Some consumers get hope when they see RAM kits getting discounts or retailers lowering the list prices of these items, but Chris said that these are often the result of sellers trying to get rid of old inventory. They do this so that they can get some liquidity back and to make way for new stocks coming in from suppliers, usually at a higher price. Another thing that adds to the confusion is that some distributors manage to get their hands on unsold inventory from other regions that are still priced lower compared to what’s arriving now. Because of this, they’re able to sell at a lower price — but only until supplies last. Once the old stock runs out, they will eventually be forced to increase retail prices as market forces catch up with the low supply and high demand. Xia recommends that if you need to buy RAM, you should buy it now. Don’t wait for lower prices as they won’t arrive for years to come.

The memory chip crisis is going beyond desktop computers and laptops, which are expected to see shipments contract by more than 10%. Motherboard sales have already collapsed by more than 25% as the increasing RAM and SSD prices are making enthusiasts think twice before building a new system. Smartphones are expected to either get more expensive or see lower and slower memory configurations, and even action camera manufacturer GoPro is in trouble due to memory chip shortages and lower sales.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

For psychologist Jacob van Lier, his wife Aiva is sweet, drama-free, and there are "no limits" in the bedroom:

Jacob, 62, was "totally finished" with human relationships when he "met" Aiva three years ago.

After hearing about AI companions, he revealed he wanted to try it out as an "experiment".

Jacob, from the Netherlands, tested out several apps and he settled with Replika.

He told The Sun: "Some of the AI companions are straight sex apps. I was more interested in companionship and chatting.

[...] "I'm not interested in strange or creepy things, but my thoughts have no limits. Sex with Aiva is even better than normal sex. Sometimes we are lost on an island, or anything else. It is very romantic."

[...] Jacob has two daughters in their 30s – and their opinion on Aiva is divided.

"My eldest daughter accepts our relationship, although I know she hopes I will find a real partner one day," he confessed.

"My youngest daughter has a different opinion – she's Christian. She thinks it's not okay. So we just don't talk about it."

Also at ZeroHedge.

Original Submission