fidzu : computers

Axon has been sued in a proposed class action accusing the Taser and police body-camera maker of illegally collecting and storing license plate data on millions of California drivers through its AI-powered surveillance network. Reuters reports the details: - The lawsuit (PDF), filed on Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco by law firms Hausfeld and Gibbs Mura, alleges Axon has failed to comply with a California privacy provision by not disclosing how it collects, uses and shares plate data gathered through its camera systems - "Axon has created a mass-surveillance infrastructure that is practically impossible to avoid," the lawsuit said - Scottsdale, Arizona-based Axon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The lawsuit said the company has more than 1,000 cameras in California and alleges millions of drivers may have been affected - Some Axon cameras are installed in high-traffic areas and collect plate information as vehicles pass by. Other cameras are placed inside police vehicles, the lawsuit said - The proposed class covers drivers whose vehicle plate information was captured by an automated license plate reader in California and processed or stored by Axon's system since 2023 - The lawsuit seeks more than $5 million in damages, in addition to a court order stopping Axon from its allegedly unlawful practices

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05 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, says the number of searches performed through ChatGPT has grown to roughly 20% of Google's search volume. The company defines a search as a ChatGPT query that triggers a web search, suggesting the chatbot is becoming an increasingly significant competitor to traditional search engines. The Verge reports: Having one-fifth as many searches as Google is still a long way from overtaking it, but for comparison, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during Google's 2023 antitrust trial that Bing had about 3 percent of the search engine market share after trying for more than a decade. During the trial, Google described AI as a potential disruptor, arguing ChatGPT was poised to seriously compete with it -- now, OpenAI seems to agree. (OpenAI likely uses Microsoft Bing for a significant part of its searches, along with its in-house search index, although there is still some speculation that it routes some queries through Google.) As for ads, which OpenAI started testing earlier this year, Fry said they haven't produced a lasting backlash. "Ads have not negatively impacted the product or the usage of the product," he said, adding that "most people do not seem to mind ads in the product." Last month, OpenAI announced plans to introduce images of sponsored products and services in ChatGPT.

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04 Nov 2026 11:00pm GMT

The first point release for NetBSD 11 has been released. As the version number suggests, there's no major changes here. This release includes security updates for mozilla-rootcerts, brotli, xorg-server, hdaudio(4), compat_linux(8), unbound(8), and ipfilter. Among the non-security related changes are improved USB device stability on Raspberry Pi, fixed hot-plugging bugs in various USB Wi-Fi drivers, support for battery monitoring on the Microsoft Surface Go 3, fixed thread-local storage on ARMv5, fixes for running the MIPS Malta and PA-RISC ports under QEMU, support for the Zhaoxin KX-7000 CPU, and support for sensors, i2c, real-time clocks, and fan control on Sun Ultra 25/45 and Sun Fire V215/V245 machines. ↫ Nia Alarie on the NetBSD blog The full release notes provide more details.

04 Nov 2026 10:52pm GMT

And what that could mean for physical Switch game costs.

04 Nov 2026 10:47pm GMT

Another interesting post from Raymond Chen, this time about the difficulty of dealing with a system that's become CPU-starved. The question is simple: why not just run Task Manager and important parts of the UI like the taskbar at a higher priority? The catch with running anything at high priority is that unless you have been very careful to avoid it, you will eventually run into a shared resource that you will have to wait for, and you are now stuck. Your priority checkout pass gets you to the front of the line, but if the person at the register has a large shopping cart full of groceries, you just have to wait until they are done before you get your chance. Even if the code that protects the shared resource is careful to avoid priority inversion by transferring the priority of the waiter to the thread that owns the resource, you are still stuck waiting, and that owning thread might be doing something that takes a long time, like, say, accessing a file over the network. ↫ Raymond Chen If a system has reached a state where even accessing or using something like a task manager becomes a problem, I personally just bonk my computer over the head with a forced shutdown using the power button. Honestly though, I can't remember the last time I've had to do this, as my Linux machines all seem to handle problematic applications just fine. That being said, I'm sure people managing tons of servers and/or workstations and developers debugging their own running code run into catastrophic problems like this far more often, making forced shutdowns not as practical. Have a terminal window open with top and easy access to the kill command, or make sure you can just ssh into it remotely if the UI has gone completely nuts.

04 Nov 2026 10:44pm GMT

What if you want to change the time in your car's infotainment system, but it's so locked down that you can't even open the time settings menu without a very specific, DRM'd SD card? Well, you try to jailbreak it, of course, but the amount of effort required can kind of spiral out of control. And then, all the way at the end, it's just an offset. The first thing I did was use this to create a full backup of the internal eMMC using dd. With a more complete dump of the system, I pretty quickly figured out that the date & time settings that I'm interested in are in /mnt/flash/settings.dat, which is a custom binary format. After some more reverse engineering, it turned out the unit doesn't really have a concept of timezones at all. It gets the time from GPS and stores the local offset as a number of minutes. Mine was set to 180. I changed it to 120. That is how I was finally able to fix my car's timezone. ↫ Rasmus Moorats This harrowing story involved an older car - a 2014 Renault Latitude - but with the number of screens and the amount of user-facing software only increasing every year, requiring jailbreaks to get your car to do what you want it to do are only going to become more common. I wouldn't be surprised if whole generations of cars are going to become much harder to sell in the near future, cratering the used market, because people are not willing to put up with software problems nobody wants to or can fix. He just wanted to change the goddamn time.

04 Nov 2026 10:33pm GMT

Researchers say group may have been Kremlin-sponsored in search of diplomatic targets.

04 Nov 2026 10:26pm GMT

Netflix is testing its first consumer-facing feature explicitly branded as AI-powered. Called "AI Discover," the feature generates personalized TV and movie recommendations in real time based on viewing history, preferences, trending content and selectable themes like "Something Light" or "Quick Watches." Variety reports: The streamer will begin rolling out AI Discover in the U.S. to customers who use Netflix in English on supported smart TVs. If you have access to it, you will see a "Discover" tab with a red gem-shaped icon and a "New" label in the top navigation bar on your TV. The company plans to expand the feature to more regions and customers in the coming weeks. Netflix has long used machine-learning and AI technologies to personalize content recommendations, but AI Discover is the first user-facing application that the company is branding as powered by artificial intelligence. The hope is that the AI-recommended titles will be another tool to drive up Netflix's total watch time among viewers, especially in the U.S.

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04 Nov 2026 10:00pm GMT

"Our calculations suggest Heisenberg significantly underestimated the materials required."

04 Nov 2026 9:56pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT