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 SearchesSites 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.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/asml-beocmes-europes-most-valuable-company-ever-as-analysts-bet-on-higher-euv-output
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
"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.
pTamok writes:https://electrek.co/2026/06/08/donut-lab-solid-state-battery-exposed-lithium-ion-fraud/Donut Labs much reported 'solid-state sodium ion battery' appears to be lithium ion, after all.Independent tests show that the battery does not have the characteristics expected of a solid-state sodium-ion battery, but match those of standard lithium ion batteries.Having raised money from many small investors, the question arises: who was naive, and who set out to mislead? There is a small chain of companies behind Donut Labs - Nordic Nono, and German company CT Coatings."Finnish financial authorities and criminal authorities are reportedly investigating."Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:Company's projected annual data center revenue to exceed its combined proceeds from Starlink, launch services, and AI in 2025:
An Anonymous Coward writes:Cyberdecks are having a moment, rejecting big tech surveillance with style and substance:An article where you simply must see the pics.
fliptop writes:More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and mathematics applicants, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students:
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/04/please-do-not-vibe-f-up-this-software-broken-backups-spark-ai-coding-row-in-rsync-project/5251189
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/highly-reviewed-speaker-can-be-hacked-over-the-air-to-infect-connected-devices/
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/07/uk-exam-watchdog-frets-over-smart-specs-turning-gcses-into-google-searches/5251365
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/the-floppy-disk-patent-was-granted-today-in-1972-when-80kb-took-up-8-inches-and-were-really-floppy
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/industry-coalition-urges-trump-administration-to-take-urgent-action
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence: could a computer convince a human it was human? We have begun conducting the same test on ourselves: