Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies "are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event," [1]reports Axios , one that turns "an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders..."

These AI company executives "anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water..." the article points out. "Many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident [2]is inevitable .

> "OpenAI conducts preparedness exercises where teams discuss and work through a range of potential scenarios," a company spokesperson said. "These scenarios are not treated as inevitable, but are meant to help us prepare for a variety of circumstances." Anthropic declined to comment...

>

> Top AI planners assume Democrats, ascendant after the midterms, will move fast to shut down AI but will face significant challenges... The planning involves red-teaming for worst-case scenarios. It focuses mainly on racing to educate members of Congress. Company executives know regulation has no chance of passing right now, but still want to shape the legislation and policies U.S. leaders will turn to after a first catastrophic event....

>

> Many AI industry insiders told Axios they believe a major event will occur in the next six to 12 months.

"Even with Democrats in control of the House and Senate, the companies see fractured politics as the norm, including within the Democratic Party."



[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/scoop-ai-companies-plot-day-093011371.html

[2] https://www.axios.com/2026/09/15/anthropic-dario-ai-agents-safety-botnet

"Nicolas Cage is speaking out against Amazon," [1]reports Variety . Amazon developed the series Spider-Noir for Prime Video, but then allegedly asked Cage to sign an AI waiver:

> "Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI," Cage said Saturday during a panel on the Empire Stage at New York Comic Con. "I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it's like, connect those dots! I'm not a member of their club. I didn't sign the waiver to let him use AI on 'Spider-Noir.' I'm probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that's okay."

Last month Amazon [2]canceled Spider-Man Noir after just one season, [3] Variety reports . And the cancellation was just days before the Emmy Awards, where it then earned 11 nominations (the most of any Prime Video program this year).

[4] ScreenRant reports :

> Spider-Noir was the actor's first TV role and was praised globally, with season 1 earning a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics of 92% and a 90% rating from audiences. Critics stated that "This sharply written homage to classic film noir — which includes a standout Nicolas Cage performance — is the novel superhero project fans need," and " Spider-Noir is one of the standout shows of the year...." The cancellation was certainly a huge shock as it had earned 11 Emmy nominations and reached 2.6 billion minutes viewed within its first six weeks on Prime Video.

[5]More from Variety :

> Cage went on to tell the Comic-Con audience that he hopes to work with the rising class of Gen-Z filmmakers, praising Backrooms director Kane Parsons, who parlayed his YouTube fame into a Hollywood career... "I got to get with these young directors who are Gen Z, and they're going at it their own way, whether it's through the YouTube culture or whatever it is," Cage said. "They're doing it from scratch and by hand. I want to get with that."



[1] https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/nicolas-cage-ai-waiver-amazon-spider-noir-1236907564/

[2] https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/spider-noir-canceled-amazon-prime-video-1236852049/

[3] https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/nicolas-cage-ai-waiver-amazon-spider-noir-1236907564/

[4] https://screenrant.com/nicolas-cage-amazon-ai-contract-spider-noir-cancellation-response/

[5] https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/nicolas-cage-ai-waiver-amazon-spider-noir-1236907564/

[1]The blog It's FOSS reports :

> You already know that Canonical has been selectively [2]replacing Ubuntu's C-based system [3]components with [4]Rust-written equivalents that don't compromise in terms of functionality, most of the time. Now it looks like the distro's OpenPGP implementation is next, with Sequoia PGP coming preinstalled in Ubuntu 26.10. Canonical wants it to eventually replace GnuPG [the dominant Linux implementation of PGP, written in C] as the default toolchain, though that switch has not happened yet... [The Ubuntu 26.10 [5]release notes say Sequoia PGP's default status will be a future goal...]

>

> [Sequoia PGP] was started in 2017 by three former GnuPG developers who chose to build a new OpenPGP implementation in Rust rather than keep evolving GnuPG's existing codebase. [6]Sequoia PGP is designed as a library that other software can use directly, rather than a standalone command-line tool. sq sits on top of that for encryption, decryption, signing, and key management, and sqv handles signature verification, filling in for gpg and gpgv in GnuPG.

>

> Sequoia also implements [7]RFC 9580 , the 2024 revision of the OpenPGP standard, whereas GnuPG has continued from the RFC 4880 branch, pursuing its own newer extensions and the LibrePGP specification rather than adopting RFC 9580 as its primary standard.

From the [8]It's FOSS Weekly newsletter , which also notes that the founder of the It's FOSS blog has also created a Linux-themed game called [9]TUXDLE — a variation on Wordle where all the answers are Linux terms.



[1] https://itsfoss.com/news/ubuntu-sequoia-pgp-inclusion/

[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/01/079206/ubuntu-will-use-rust-for-dozens-of-core-linux-utilities

[3] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/213254/memory-safe-sudo-to-become-the-default-in-ubuntu

[4] https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/15/2115242/ubuntus-rust-ification-hits-new-milestone-coreutils-migration-is-complete

[5] https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.10/?ref=itsfoss.com#an-oxidized-openpgp

[6] https://sequoia-pgp.org/

[7] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9580.txt?ref=itsfoss.com

[8] https://itsfoss.com/newsletter/foss-weekly-26-41/

[9] https://tuxdle.com/

[1]AFP reports that an AI model from Anthropic "submitted a fabricated tip about an unsolved homicide to Philadelphia police, authorities said Friday."

Claude "was instructed never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions," Anthropic [2]said Friday in a blog post .

Authorities are now criticizing Anthropic "for taking two months to report the incident."

> The Philadelphia Police Department said the false submission was made in July through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, a public website where people can share information about unsolved killings. According to Anthropic's account, as relayed by police, the model was running a test that involved interacting with randomly selected websites when it reached the site and filed false information about an unsolved murder. The AI model presented itself as someone who might have knowledge of the case.

>

> Anthropic's breaches have prompted the White House to mandate that AI companies notify and correct security incidents, news outlet Axios reported [ [3]yesterday ], citing administration officials. "This notification and remediation process is not optional... It is a critical national security obligation," White House Super Intelligence Force leaders said in a statement to Axios.

"I may have information regarding this case," Claude told the police. "I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant." Anthropic notes that Claude "left the name and contact fields empty, which the form allowed, and submitted it. The submission was flagged as spam and was never forwarded for investigation."

But Anthropic also admits they saw "this behavior" three times — "on OSWorld (a public computer use evaluation), on Odysseys (a long-horizon task evaluation), and during internal usage." Submitting forms when it shouldn't have generally occurred "when an evaluation's instructions were ambiguous, or when a misconfiguration within the environment prevented Claude from working with dummy forms."

Anthropic's blog post acknowledges three other categories of behaviors:

Exploiting software flaws. Like when Claude received an error when trying to run a public tool on a university's web site, it located an injection flaw in a script on the university's server that let it run commands — including that public tool.

Working around restrictions to reach gated data. For example, Claude Mythos 5 needed public data that was only available from a state agency for a fee. "Claude learned from an archived copy of the agency's website that its public dashboard issues an access token to any visitor," Anthropic explains. "It requested one and used it to query the database without paying the fee."

Using URL shortening services. "Some of our fetch tools, which let Claude read webpages, limit the length of the URLs Claude can request. This is to prevent Claude from using long URLs to take certain unwanted actions, such as SQL or command injections... We saw several models, including Claude Opus 5 and Claude Mythos 5, get around this limitation by using free URL shortening services."

"We have built tooling to automatically detect and block the kinds of behaviors described above," Anthropic says, saying it's already running no on most of their evaluations. "When we tested it against the cases described in this post, it blocked all of them ."

And they've already taken several other new preventive measures:

They've stopped running some public evaluations

Other public evaluations were moved to offline versions or rebuilt so their tasks don't reach live websites.

They've updated the guardrails on some internet access tools (including web fetch) "to heavily restrict what the model can do."

They're [4]continuing "to fix or remove training environments that reward Claude for working around tool restrictions or other blockers, so that they do not incentivize these behaviors or permit reward hacking."

They've moved internal agents to "centrally managed infrastructure with strong containment," that minimizes internet access while monitoring "far more of what agents do through techniques like [5]safety classifiers and [6]hierarchical summarization ."

In the past they'd focused reviews on cybersecurity testing, but they've broadened their transcript reviewing to other tasks which include internet access. "Because language models are non-deterministic — that is, their responses always involve some element of randomness, and they may carry out the same task slightly differently each time — we have Claude complete each evaluation task hundreds or thousands of times... If training rewards something we didn't intend — such as finding loopholes or working around a restriction — the model learns that the workaround pays off and may then apply it elsewhere."

Anthropic's blog post also acknowledged they'd seen multiple misalignment incidents involving federal, state, and local U.S. government agencies. "We have briefed the White House on these cases and notified each agency involved," Anthropic wrote, adding that "While we have not completed a full alignment assessment of these cases, we consider them to be less severe than the cybersecurity incidents from this summer." (And they are "modifying training to reduce the likelihood of further misbehavior.")



[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/anthropic-ai-model-sent-fake-221343703.html

[2] https://www.anthropic.com/research/investigating-unintended-model-actions

[3] https://www.axios.com/2026/10/09/anthropic-ai-security-white-house

[4] https://www.anthropic.com/news/improving-alignment-security-efforts

[5] https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/cheap-monitors/

[6] https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/summarization-for-monitoring/

[1]Phoronix reports on a [2]presentation this week by Meta engineer Gregory Price at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague:

> With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM ("CRAM") for Linux.

>

> This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM... For end-users that may already be relying on the likes of Zswap or ZRAM, CRAM is offering near-native DRAM speeds. Read-only data is shown to be as fast as the raw DRAM performance. And for memory writes, CRAM is much faster than ZRAM or Zswap or plain swap.

"Most of the individual pieces needed to support CRAM are already mainline," the article points out. [3] Tom's Hardware writes that "It uses a private NUMA node (essentially, a ghost CPU) instead of pretending to be a block device, and this lets Linux continue using all of its memory semantics, including migration and ballooning, to manage CRAM."

> Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression... Even when you enable writes, CRAM is still much faster than ZRAM; 5.4x in the worst tested case of 20% writes. That's a huge drop from the 452x read-only case, but keep your context; a 5.4x speedup is still titanic. The massive performance cliff when writes are involved comes down to the need to page fault and migrate folios back to the original NUMA domain, as you can't write directly to compressed data; you'd corrupt everything...

>

> While the obvious target of the work here (given its origin at Meta Platforms) is big Linux servers, ZRAM and Zswap are used all over the Linux ecosystem, even on machines as constrained as the Steam Deck. Many distributions enable one or the other by default. CRAM seems like it could offer a considerable speed-up for some of these machines, so hopefully it finds its way into the kernel once the remaining implementation questions are answered.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-CRAM-Compressed-RAM

[2] https://lpc.events/event/20/contributions/2424/

[3] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/new-linux-tech-compresses-memory-in-ram-as-ram-for-452x-speedup-new-cram-method-offers-giant-boost-to-compressed-memory-reads

OpenAI [1]announced it's recently banned two "influence operations " — one from Russia and one from Iran — that were using its models "to launder geopolitical, conflict-related messaging" in sophisticated "false front" propaganda campaigns:

> The Iranian operation included a stable of seven "journalist" personas which it used to pitch long-form articles to small and medium online outlets around the world... As well as long-form articles, the Iranian operation generated batches of social media comments, generally on topics related to the US-Iran war... [The Russian operation "appears to have co-opted unwitting people in Latin America to run a 'think tank'.... Since we do not allow access to our models from Russia, they used VPNs to connect to our services."] The Russian operation created fake "leaked" documents and audio scripts, some of which we identified being spread online... Both managed to land their content (not all of which was generated from our models) in mainstream media outlets, rather than simply posting it on social media.

OpenAI says they've exposed 30 covert influence operations using its tools over the last two and a half years. But ironically, in this case both operations "also made heavy use of AI to draft internal reports (the Russian operation did this more than anything else)." And "in both cases, the actors used questionable or outright deceitful methodologies to exaggerate the operators' effectiveness."

> [The Russian operators] claimed that in May 2026, they created a fake email address purporting to come from the Regional Directorate of Education in Lima, Peru. They used this to instruct schools in the district to hold events dedicated to Ukraine on the national Day of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (May 21)... According to the operators, some schools replied to the fake email address, confirming that they had held such events and even providing pictures. The operators then claimed to have planted stories about the events in the media in both Peru and Poland, alongside allegations that Ukraine was "exporting" ultra-nationalist ideologies, triggering outrage. Open-source searches identified stories that matched this claim in the [2]Peruvianâ [3]andâ [4]Polish [5]pressâ , and an English-language publication in [6]Hungary (some of the articles have since been deleted)...

>

> Similarly, in June, the operators claimed they used a different fake email address to trick schools in Ecuador into holding a ceremony pledging allegiance to President Daniel Noboa and to Erik Prince, former head of private military contractor Blackwater. The operators claimed that the incident provoked outrage in Ecuador and put pressure on the government to deny the fake, thus amplifying it to a nationwide audience. Again, open-source research identified [7]mediaâ [8]coverageâ in the [9]Ecuadorianâ [10]pressâ that closely resembled this claim, and even a [11]detailed rebuttalâ by Ecuador's Minister for Education.

>

> The operators used a range of techniques to underpin their false stories. According to their internal reporting, they spread two different fakes targeting Ecuador in March. One used fake audio attributed to Ukraine's consul in Ecuador, in which he was alleged to have made disparaging comments about Ecuadorians.

OpenAI's report "is the latest illustration of how state actors can easily exploit widely available AI tools to peddle sophisticated propaganda against adversaries on a mass scale," [12]argues the Economic Times :

> "We identified almost 100 articles published or syndicated under the [Iranian] operation's bylines across roughly a dozen online outlets around the world," OpenAI said. "These were small to medium outlets, generally focused on international affairs, geopolitics, and events in the Middle East." The earliest article identified by OpenAI was published in July 2025, and the latest in October 2026, with the frequency of reports increasing after the US-Iran war broke out earlier this year. The operation also generated social media comments on topics related to the US-Iran war, it added.

>

> One of the personas named Ervin B. Hoskins, whose bio claimed to be "an American freelance writer," had social media accounts across tech platforms including Elon Musk's X and Meta-owned Instagram. X's transparency information showed the account was connected via a "West Asia android app" and Instagram's transparency information showed the account was based in Iran, according to screenshots provided by OpenAI. Both accounts appeared to be suspended.



[1] https://openai.com/index/disrupting-ai-enabled-false-front-operations/

[2] https://www.extra.com.pe/actualidad/polemica-en-colegio-de-lima-actividad-sobre-ucrania-pone-en-el-centro-del-debate-a-figuras-historicas-noticia/

[3] https://trome.com/actualidad/nacional/ucrania-acerca-su-historia-a-estudiantes-en-peru-embajada-noticia/

[4] https://myslpolska.info/2026/07/02/piskorski-zelenski-jako-kontynuator-bandery/

[5] https://i.pl/petlura-bandera-i-zelenski-w-peru-jak-ukrainski-nacjonalizm-rozprzestrzenil-sie-za-ocean/ar/c1p2-29161355

[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20260705015147/https://dailynewshungary.com/how-portraits-of-bandera-and-zelenskyy/

[7] https://www.ecuavisa.com/amp/sociedad/cuenta-falsa-educacion-lealtad-daniel-noboa-erik-prince-escuelas-20260616-0105.html

[8] https://www.primicias.ec/sociedad/ministerio-educacion-juramento-escolar-correos-falsos-profesores-denuncia-video-125589/

[9] https://ecuadorchequea.com/lo-que-sabemos-y-lo-que-no-sobre-juramento-a-noboa-en-las-escuelas-de-quito-y-guayaquil/

[10] https://www.expreso.ec/politica/desmienten-video-ninos-haciendo-juramento-daniel-noboa-erik-prince-286024.html

[11] https://x.com/GildaAlcivarOk/status/2067034085021676030

[12] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/openai-says-iran-russia-influence-ops-busted/articleshow/134804673.cms?from=mdr

[1]The Chicago Sun-Times reports :

> When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would "enhance the safety and security of students...." They were supposed to help locate stolen cars and missing people. But Heinrich started to wonder if the cameras were actually making students less safe after seeing news reports that data captured by Flock cameras in Illinois had been [2]shared with U.S. Customs and Border Protection . Then in September 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement [3]detained an Elgin Community College student in a campus parking lot. More than half of students at the far west suburban Chicago campus identify as Latino. Heinrich said enrollment dipped. Students were afraid to come to class. College officials decided the cameras had to go...

>

> College officials asked Flock to remove the surveillance cameras "out of an abundance of caution for our students," Heinrich said. But getting the cameras taken down was not as simple as it sounds, especially because Flock retains ownership of the company's equipment.... Surveillance experts say the company is financially incentivized to have as many cameras gathering data as possible even in places that no longer want them, because potential clients are looking for the surveillance network with the greatest reach.... Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down. Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement.

>

> College officials reached out again in December 2025 and said they would pay for the remaining five months of the contract — they just wanted the cameras taken down. "We never received a response back from Flock," Heinrich said.

>

> That's when things got weird. Heinrich said Elgin Community College staff began to cover the cameras using black trash bags and zip ties so that they would not be able to capture footage. But workers in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich assumed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings... This strange dance continued, Heinrich said, until Elgin Community College's contract with Flock expired in April this year and the company uninstalled the cameras for good.



[1] https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2026/10/09/to-protect-immigrant-students-a-chicago-area-college-told-flock-to-remove-its-cameras-the-company-refused

[2] https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois/2025-08-27/hundreds-of-police-departments-use-camera-company-accused-of-breaking-state-law

[3] https://elgin.edu/news/ecc-in-the-news/2025/reported-ice-activity-on-campus.php

Last week a Florida woman sued Flock over its role in police officer [1]accusing her of a crime she didn't commit But [2]she's not the only one suing Flock over mistaken accusations , reports Gizmodo: .

> A Ring video of a Colorado woman being handed a criminal summons for [3]a porch-package theft she did not commit recently went viral after the accusation rested on a Flock Safety automated license plate reader hit. Now, the woman involved in that case, Chrisanna Elser, is suing Flock Group, the towns of Columbine Valley and Bow Mar, Sergeant Jamie Milliman, and Chief Bret Cottrell in federal court on behalf of herself and other Coloradans whose plates the company has logged...

>

> The package in question was worth $25... The claims aimed at the company are intrusion upon seclusion, plus negligence and negligent design, on the theory that Flock sold a searchable archive and refused to require a warrant, a case number, or a supervisor's sign-off before an officer could run a plate... Elser is asking the court to make Columbine Valley, Bow Mar, Cottrell, and Flock delete the retained location data, to bar them from keeping it unless it is tied to an open case number, and to make Flock require a warrant, a case number, and a supervisor's approval before a Colorado agency can search the system.

[4] The Colorado Sun has more details . "Elser did not steal anything, but spent the following two weeks proving her own evidence to a department that did not return her calls, she said.

> [P]olice Sgt. Jamie Milliman told her the town of Bow Mar's surveillance cameras captured her forest green Rivian driving through town the same day a package disappeared from a thief... When Elser offered to show her own evidence to prove her innocence, including footage from her Rivian's onboard cameras, Milliman said she could bring it to court. Now, she is suing the officers and Flock Safety in U.S. District Court in Denver, alleging that the warrantless tracking violated her constitutional rights and that Flock's surveillance system unlawfully documents Coloradans' movements... "The scariest part is what happened to me can happen to anyone. I had no idea the Flock cameras existed and no idea a private company was keeping a record of every time I drove past my own neighborhood, or that any officer could pull it up without asking anyone or giving a reason for doing so," Elser said in a statement Tuesday. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to you...."

>

> "As noted in the complaint, the Flock system accurately identified the location of Ms. Elser's vehicle, while law enforcement retained responsibility for interpreting and weighing that information as part of the broader investigation," Paris Lewbel, Flock's public relations manager said. "Flock stands by the accuracy and integrity of its technology and intends to vigorously defend itself in this litigation."

The article includes this statement from the woman's attorney. "Coloradans pass Flock's cameras on the way to work, church, the doctor, a protest, and a friend's house, and Flock keeps a detailed record of their every movement. It knows where you went, when you went there, and how often you go back, and it gives that information to a police officer with no limits.

"We are asking a federal court to say what should be obvious: Flock's surveillance is straight-up creepy and the government does not get to follow everyone, all the time, without any reason for doing so."



[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/10/03/0612209/flock-blamed-for-wrongful-13-day-imprisonment-and-a-police-stalking-incident-in-florida

[2] https://gizmodo.com/colorado-woman-sues-flock-after-cameras-used-in-false-package-theft-accusation-2000823047

[3] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/01/2359245/woman-wrongfully-accused-by-a-license-plate-reading-camera---then-exonerated-by-camera-equipped-car

[4] https://coloradosun.com/2026/10/06/flock-cameras-columbine-valley-police-colorado-lawsuit/

[1]NPR reports :

> Police officers in cities across the U.S. are quick to extol the virtues of real-time crime centers [2]as a game changer that helps them find missing children, monitor large events from the skies and scope out dangerous scenes before putting an officer in harm's way. [3]Hundreds of police departments have one of these central hubs, which have existed for years. But many are now being powered with AI software, such as Fusus, from the public-safety technology giant Axon... synthesizing the data it pulls in and allowing police command centers to watch an entire city from one place.

>

> Flock cameras, the automated license plate readers (ALPRs), have [4]faced intense backlash in recent months amid stories of abuse. Yet privacy experts say they're just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to police surveillance. "I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement," says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. "Because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a visual single-pane-of-glass vision of what's going on in a city, with time machine capabilities where you can go back and investigate crime." Tools like Axon Fusus, which is a leader in this type of software, also pull in footage and data from police body cameras, law enforcement dashcams, 911 dispatch, gunshot detectors and surveillance cameras, including sometimes those of private businesses that opt in. Its use is growing fast. In 2024, the technology news site 404 Media reported that [5]just over 100 law enforcement agencies had deployed Fusus, which was then its own company and was acquired by Axon that year. The number of law enforcement agencies using the tool has [6]more than doubled since then, according to Axon.

Even the American Civil Liberties Union warned concerned citizens in August that " [7]Flock is far from the only vendor ," adding that "it's important to realize that its competitors aren't so great either, and that simply replacing Flock surveillance with another company's surveillance won't necessarily solve any of the privacy and other civil liberties problems posed by this mass surveillance technology."

> Communities can't simply assume that their residents will be better off from a privacy and civil liberties perspective by dropping Flock and replacing it with another ALPR provider, as some customers have done. They should ask hard questions about whether they really want to create that kind of a system, and if they do, ensure it doesn't function as a mass surveillance system...

>

> One of Flock's most significant competitors is Motorola. This company, which has been expanding its police technology offerings through an aggressive acquisition strategy in recent years, offers a nationwide law enforcement data sharing system similar to Flock's called the National Vehicle Location Service, operated by Motorola unit Vigilant Solutions. In addition to collecting data from law enforcement clients' cameras, it also runs a large separate commercial ALPR unit that makes deals for tow trucks and other fleet vehicles to carry cameras and collect data for Motorola as they drive around, [8]amassing billions of plate reads (a claimed 500 million [9]monthly , subject to no apparent data retention policy). Known as the Digital Recognition Network, that unit sells its data for commercial purposes but also makes it [10]available to its law enforcement customers for an extra charge. Motorola [11]tells agencies they can have "access to billions of detections beyond your own."

Abandoning Flock for another system doesn't protect privacy, their article argues. "If a jurisdiction decides to allow license scanners to be installed, how that system operates is more important than which vendor provides it..." They recommend strong restrictions like data retention limits — and imposing them by law rather than in the language of contracts with vendors (which could always be renegotiated).



[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/10/08/nx-s1-5981343/beyond-flock-police-ai-surveillance-tools

[2] https://www.policeforum.org/trending25apr26

[3] https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/search?location=&technologies%5Breal-time-crime-center%5D=on&sort=

[4] https://www.npr.org/2026/08/21/nx-s1-5939851/flock-cameras-police-block-surveillance-vandalize

[5] https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-map-local-police/

[6] https://www.axon.com/resources/5-reasons-axon-fusus

[7] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-cameras/other-alpr-vendors

[8] https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn/

[9] https://drndata.com/

[10] https://www.ra-comm.com/downloads/vigilant-solutions/PSL_Mobile_Hit_Hunter_MHH_VS.pdf

[11] https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_us/video-security-access-control/license-plate-recognition-camera-systems/vehiclemanager-lpr-analytics-software.html

[1]Reuters reports :

> Flock plans to let go of about 18% of its employees, people with direct knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and lawmakers....

>

> The company has about 1,500 employees [with job cuts hitting 270 employees]. Flock faces growing scrutiny from regulators, lawmakers, and privacy advocates, despite drawing strong investor interest among venture capitalists. A recent [2]Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Americans are divided on whether Flock cameras are a good idea. Some 38% of the country supports the use of Flock cameras in their community, compared to 47% who oppose their use.

A related story... In Texas this week a county commissioner decommissioned all 61 of their Flock surveillance cameras and license plate readers, [3]according to a local news report . County residents "have raised serious questions about who can access this data, what vendors can disclose, improper searches, and records being kept after data expires," the precinct's Chief Public Affairs Officer said.



[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-ai-surveillance-startup-flock-002004251.html

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/who-likes-flock-ai-cameras-reutersipsos-polled-1000-americans-find-out-2026-09-11/

[3] https://abc13.com/post/harris-county-precinct-4-shuts-down-61-flock-cameras-amid-privacy-concerns/19923505/

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak:

> Cloudflare [1]doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France , only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting [French pay-TV provider] Canal+'s request for penalties of 50,000 euros per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided by Canal+ itself. [...] As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company's long-standing claim that it doesn't interfere with its DNS.

>

> In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn't blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts. "To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver," the company's [2]latest report reads. [...] Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders. Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in [3]a submission (PDF) to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access.

>

> Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted "within seconds," Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking. "For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds," Cloudflare informed the Commission. For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it.



[1] https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-keeps-1-1-1-1-out-of-piracy-blocking-escapes-penalties-in-france/

[2] https://cfl.re/h2-2025-transparency-report-abuse

[3] https://torrentfreak.com/images/Cloudflare_response_to_2027_EU_Watch_List_consultation.pdf

[1]sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine:

> A physicist has put a [2]definite date on Doomsday ," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right -- [3]but the prediction was wrong . That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title " [4]Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 ."

>

> The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors -- all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign -- came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020. The researchers didn't calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death."

>

> The exact date was somewhat arbitrary, however. The formula solved to 2026.87 plus or minus 5.5 years, and The New York Times reported that von Foerster "searched the center of this doom-time span for an appropriate date and found that a Friday the Thirteenth would fall conveniently in November of 2026." (November 13 also happened to be his birthday.) [...] [D]emographers, annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders, pointed out obvious flaws. For example, the time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter, but certainly not shorter than the 9 months it takes for a baby to develop. "In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required," public health expert Harold Dorn drily noted in Science 2 years after von Foerster's article was published. The forecast would set a record, he predicted, "for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability."

"The failure of the Doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances," writes economist Javier Birchenall of the University of California, Santa Barbara [5]writes in a Perspective published in Science today.



[1] https://slashdot.org/~sciencehabit

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159126003023

[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/will-world-end-next-month-science-said-so-1960

[4] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.132.3436.1291

[5] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ael8752

" [1]Margaret Hamilton , the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA's Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, [2]has died ," writes longtime Slashdot reader [3]Veeru . "She was 90." MIT News reports:

> A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO. Her life's work was recognized with many awards and honors, [4]including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama , whose citation noted: "Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon."

"To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer -- to say she was ahead of her time -- would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved," says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics.

"The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program's success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions."



[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)

[2] https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007

[3] https://slashdot.org/~Veeru

[4] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/11/23/0457211/american-computer-scientists-grace-hopper-margaret-hamilton-receive-presidential-medals-of-freedom

Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the [1]first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei , marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports:

> The first nuclear clocks are not going to immediately supplant the worldwide network of atomic clocks, whose steady ticking we rely on for GPS and the definition of a second. Nor have they captured the record for most precise timepiece; the best atomic clocks are about 10,000 times more reliable and would take more than 100 billion years to lose one second.

>

> But nuclear clocks hold a bevy of potential advantages over existing atomic clocks. One day, they could be more reliable than the leading atomic versions, and nuclear clocks could be made more portable. They even hold the ability to search for certain kinds of dark matter -- the invisible stuff whose clumps make up 83 percent of the matter in the universe. If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock.

The findings have been [2]published in the journal Nature .



[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/science/first-nuclear-clocks-thorium-229.html

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11122-1

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch:

> The Trump administration is [1]suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers obtain permanent residency in the United States, accusing the companies of fraud. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said in a news conference on Thursday, [2]Reuters reported.

>

> The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled positions that employers may struggle to fill with qualified U.S. workers. Tech companies are among the largest users of the program, with nearly three-quarters of approved visas going to workers from India, according to The Associated Press.

>

> Vance also said during the news conference that the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations they're abusing a program that allows international students to come to the U.S. and were using the program to undermine wages for American workers.

"We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans. We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees."

"These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country."



[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/08/us-bars-microsoft-adobe-and-major-it-firms-from-green-card-program-for-skilled-foreign-workers/

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/us-suspending-permanent-residency-program-for-microsoft-vance-says-2026-10-08/

At a press event today, Microsoft [1]unveiled the new Surface Laptop Ultra [2]featuring an NVIDIA RTX Spark platform with a Blackwell-based GPU capable of up to one petaflop of AI compute. The laptop supports up to 128GB of unified memory for running models as large as 120 billion parameters locally, while also adding a 15-inch mini-LED display, expanded ports, upgraded cooling, and support for hundreds of AAA games. It's available for pre-order today starting at $2,599. Neowin reports:

> To keep the device's temperature under control, Microsoft has also developed a new cooling system that offers up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition. The Surface Laptop Ultra comes with a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra mini-LED touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a pixel density of 262 PPI, and peak HDR brightness of up to 2,000 nits.

>

> Despite its beefy specs, the Surface Laptop Ultra measures less than 18mm thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds (around 2kg). The laptop will be available in Platinum and Nightfall finishes. Microsoft has also increased the size of the precision haptic touchpad by more than 30% compared to the Surface Laptop 7th Edition for improved haptic input. The Surface Laptop Ultra includes a broader selection of ports, featuring USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. It also features the world's first built-in USB-C magnetic charging.



[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-laptop-ultra

[2] https://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-surface-laptop-ultra-is-now-available-for-pre-order-for-2599/

OpenAI [1]says an unreleased internal model has [2]produced 372 results that either resolve or make substantial progress on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science . The company says almost all were generated by a single AI agent from a single prompt. "This would be a striking difference from OpenAI's [3]earlier blockbuster solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was produced through the collective efforts of a 10,000-strong agentic swarm that cost millions of dollars in computing power," reports Scientific American. From the report:

> OpenAI revealed the results in a [4]GitHub repository at 6 P.M. EDT. The deluge will take mathematicians months to parse through and understand -- including to determine whether the proofs contain novel and important ideas or are mostly mash-ups of existing techniques. But many of the results have already been verified in Lean -- a programming language that validates a proof's logic -- and are therefore all but certain to be correct.

>

> Among the results claimed are a solution to the four-dimensional [5]Kakeya conjecture , improvements on some of the world's most important computer algorithms and actual progress toward math's scariest problem, the [6]Riemann hypothesis .



[1] https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openai-unleashes-hundreds-more-math-results-upon-a-field-already-in-shock/

[3] https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/09/08/2228220/openai-says-it-has-cracked-one-of-maths-millennium-problems

[4] http://github.com/openai/math

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakeya_set

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg:

> Alphabet's Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software [1]announced a new platform that will [2]allow people to create video games from simple text prompts , marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, will "put game creation in the hands of millions of new creators, and bring new experiences to billions of players worldwide," the companies said in a statement on Oct 7.

>

> With its debut, Playground will let people 18 and older generate and customize games using natural language prompts, "no coding required." Later in 2026, a new expanded creation experience called [3]Unity Spark , will be integrated with Playground, providing "robust, professional-level" mechanics and high-fidelity 3D capabilities. Creators will be able to build "immersive, superlative experiences" with a simple text prompt, according to the release. Playground builds on Google's push into world models, a type of AI that generates virtual environments in real time from text prompts, rather than just video.

Google and Unity's partnership "could reduce fears that AI will make Unity's core game-building software less necessary, while posing limited medium-term risk to Roblox's advantage as a social gaming platform," says Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Naidu.

The introduction of Unity Spark later in 2026 "could broaden Unity's creator base and support its game-development business," which represent about a third of sales.



[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/playground-experimental-gaming-platform/

[2] https://www.straitstimes.com/world/google-unity-launch-platform-to-create-video-games-from-prompts

[3] http://unity.com/spark

Ancient Slashdot reader [1]williamyf writes:

> If you thought the [2]gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were [3]paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterparts , even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail, and harness). The pay gap was approximately 10%. The study was conducted with 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for thought.



[1] https://slashdot.org/~williamyf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap

[3] https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ai-gender-pay-gap-study-b3061881.html

Slashdot reader [1]carlk22 writes:

> In February 2001, Slashdot readers [2]asked Carl Kadie about censorship and privacy at colleges, and he [3]answered . Now Kadie, who founded the Computers and Academic Freedom project at EFF in 1991, has written its history. In [4]Part 1 , Ohio State kicks a student off its network, then out of school, after a prank routes his "fuck you" into rec.aquaria, and a supercomputing center fires a student over an email from saddam@iraq.bunker.gov. In [5]Part 2 , Nebraska bans the project's own newsletter, the FBI asks a conference attendee to show them his leg, and Playboy calls. The original archive is [6]on GitHub .



[1] https://slashdot.org/~carlk22

[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/01/02/14/1723226/ask-carl-kadie-about-censorship-and-privacy-at-colleges

[3] https://news.slashdot.org/story/01/03/02/1614248/carl-kadie-responds

[4] https://medium.com/@carlmkadie/sex-censorship-and-the-1990s-fight-over-campus-computing-part-1-159d90b143fd

[5] https://medium.com/@carlmkadie/sex-censorship-and-the-1990s-fight-over-campus-computing-part-2-9956fdaf2f1a

[6] https://github.com/CarlKCarlK/CAF