fidzu : geek

Futurism reports: 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the Los Angeles Police Department Office of the Inspector General caught the department's ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months - each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which "resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles," the LAPD's cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over. "The biggest issue remains this national database at the FBI called NCIC," Flock's CEO Garrett Langley recently told The Drive, complaining about "how archaic its structure is." Flock CEO: There's no feedback loop mechanisms; it's really just a static comma-separated file. We've tried to build around it. We have this concept called "suppression." A local agency - let's take Atlanta, where I live - might see that there's a stolen plate out of California, but it's already been resolved because it's a rental car or a dealer car. They can, in Flock, suppress that: "Never alert us on that for the next year." That's to get around the fact that they can't force another agency to remove it from NCIC. Ideally, the way it would work is if enough agencies - let's call it one, two, or three - flag a tag as no longer valid or a bad entry, it should just get removed. Or at least it should get pushed more aggressively by the FBI... I'm hopeful that they'll see there's an opportunity to make something like NCIC, which is an important tool not just for companies like Flock, but for police departments to work together, start to make some enhancements to modernize what's a central part of our policing system. Later in the interview he says "It's less than one in a million alerts that an officer says, 'I'm not sure if that's right.' Less than one in a million." A recent report from Business Insider shares a worst-case scenario. In the summer of 2024 a Sacramento police officer said Flock's cameras had sent six false alerts for the same vehicle, wrongly saying it had been stolen or used in a felony crime in the nearby suburb of Roseville: Roseville police could see that Flock's software kept confusing the "9" on the man's license plate for an "8." The car owner said he would take off his license plate cover. Soon after, it happened again. It's "easier at this point we have it memorized," a dispatch supervisor in Roseville wrote in an email to a colleague. Flock says that in optimal conditions, its cameras accurately read more than 96% of license plate characters. Hundreds of pages of records from the Roseville Police Department show a different picture. In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent 1,427 alerts to Roseville police, flagging vehicles as stolen or used in a felony after they passed one of the city's Flock cameras. An analysis by the police department found that in 71% of those alerts, Flock's machine-learning software incorrectly read the license plates... The cameras regularly missed vehicles, captured blurry images, misread license plate characters and states, and sent delayed alerts to police about vehicles possibly connected to crimes, the records show... A factor that contributed to the misread problems in Roseville was the "particularly unique deployment" that the city requested, a Flock spokeswoman said. Roseville said it has its cameras configured so that they capture only the backs of vehicles, a setup intended to avoid capturing personally identifiable information like faces. Roseville's setup included older hardware and placement of cameras higher and further from vehicles than the company typically recommends, Flock added... In Toledo, Ohio, driver Brandon Upchurch was mauled by a police dog after a Flock camera misread the "7" on his license plate as a "2." As a result of his injuries, he said, he lost his job and was evicted from his home. He settled a lawsuit against the city and police officer for $35,000. None of the incorrect Flock alerts in Roseville resulted in a traffic stop or arrest, a department spokesman said. Roseville requires police officers to verify that a license plate is stolen or have independent reasonable suspicion of a crime before making a traffic stop... Flock said Roseville's camera performance has significantly improved, which the police department disputed... Flock's cameras also missed vehicles altogether... At one point, Flock's product director for machine learning suggested that officers ask drivers to remove license plate frames that made it "very difficult for the machine vision to tell it is actually a 'E' and not an 'F.'" Roseville told Flock at the time that it wouldn't do so, according to the department spokesman. Flock in 2024 shared an analysis with Roseville's police department, outlining reasons for the misreads. Vehicles far from a camera were sometimes blurry. Plates were cut off by trees or license plate frames. And Flock's software confused similar characters, mistaking an "N" for a "V", or a "1" for a "4...." Roseville isn't the first organization to flag inaccuracies in Flock's technology. In 2021, the research firm IPVM independently tested Flock's license plate readers, concluding that Flock misidentified the state in about one of 10 reads, and that the system regularly misclassified vehicles' type and make. IPVM said that Flock subsequently blocked it from purchasing its cameras for testing. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Cognitive Dissident for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Aug 2026 7:34am GMT

Microsoft's cloud storage app OneDrive got a new Photos app in the worst possible way, reports the blog Neowin . "The app is reportedly showing up even on Windows 11 Enterprise machines, despite apparently being a beta application aimed at consumer functionality." One admin questioned why a beta app was appearing on an Enterprise SKU in the first place, while another described the situation as yet another consumer-oriented feature being forced onto corporate PCs. Things get even more frustrating for IT departments because there does not appear to be a straightforward Microsoft-provided way to disable the app... Enterprise administrators generally need to know what is being installed on their managed devices, particularly when a software is labeled as beta. Quietly adding another application and leaving admins to clean it up themselves is therefore unlikely to win Microsoft many fans. But there's another problem, according to the blog Windows Latest. "OneDrive Photos automatically scans your system storage for photos," and apparently "doesn't need a Microsoft account to work, as it can also detect your local files." There's also a People section that groups similar faces in your photos. Microsoft asks for permission before turning it on and explicitly warns that facial data could be considered biometric data in some regions. The company says only you can see the grouped faces, that the data isn't shared with third parties, and that you can delete it by disabling the feature. In a statement to Neowin, Microsoft admitted this new photos "experience" they're "incubating" had gone "more broadly than it should have," and then promised that "We're fixing that." The spokesperson also said the Windows Photos app will "always give you the option of local and cloud photos" and, also a choice of whether or not to use it OneDrive." But there's another "awkward catch," notes the blog Digital Trends. "Users currently can't uninstall OneDrive Photos without removing the main OneDrive app too." Because OneDrive Photos is tied to the main OneDrive sync client, Windows 11 doesn't currently offer a separate uninstall option. The only straightforward way to get rid of OneDrive Photos right now is to uninstall OneDrive itself... Removing the main client can also affect its File Explorer integration and shortcuts... Microsoft says this will change. The company is working on controls that will let users remove OneDrive Photos separately from the main OneDrive app. On enterprise PCs managed through Intune, Microsoft says the app will automatically disappear where it isn't supported.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Aug 2026 4:34am GMT

With nearly 70% of the market, "Meta wants its smart glasses to be a big hit," writes the Los Angeles Times. But after some users found ways to disable the light that warns people they're being filmed, "the high-tech specs have also turned into a liability, as some are calling the gadget 'pervert glasses...'" Some people are using the glasses - which look like a pair of regular spectacles - to record people without their knowledge and publish the videos on social media. The users secretly videotape and share what happens when they try to pick up women. Now, a growing number of people are worried they could be covertly recorded at the gym or even during sex. The backlash has prompted Meta to update its glasses to address privacy concerns, and some places have banned them, adding to the angst surrounding technology that's rapidly evolving... Concern about the glasses has exploded as more videos of interactions with people who don't know they're being recorded go viral on social media. On Instagram, some videos depict people getting approached in malls and grocery stores and on college campuses and sidewalks. While the videos are portrayed as jokes, the people filmed don't appear to know they're being recorded and sometimes seem uncomfortable, telling the strangers to leave them alone or stop harassing them. The outcry has spread beyond social media, with comedian Jimmy Kimmel calling the Meta devices "pervert glasses" on national television and singer Lorde telling concertgoers that smart glasses are "not sexy..." Instagram, which is owned by Meta, has been disabling accounts and taking down some of these pickup or prank videos for violating the platform's rules against harassment and bullying... Businesses are making their own calls about smart glasses. The 5 Point Cafe in Seattle, which banned Google Glass in the past, has banned Meta glasses from its diner and dive bar. "Leave your Meta-SpyBan Display at home, they are officially Ray-Ban-ned from all of our restaurants. We serve privacy, not side-eye surveillance," a 2025 Instagram post from the business states. An Android app that warns people if they're being recorded has roughly 110,000 downloads in the last six months, according to the article. The app's creator says it's a "social problem" that "we don't value privacy, that we feel entitled to use others for our entertainment or our private gain, and technology amplifies that." The American Civil Liberties Union and more than 70 organizations even sent a letter urging Meta to promise they'd leave facial recognition features out of their smart glasses, according to the article. But a Meta spokesperson said "no final decision has been made."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Aug 2026 1:59am GMT

The massive Toba eruption seems to have had little climate impact.

09 Aug 2026 11:00am 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

The European Union's Digital Markets Act keeps delivering for EU citizens. Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple's EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Apple began evaluating the request in March, and on June 26, proposed a project plan. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors According to Apple, this minor feature is going to cost Apple "significant engineering effort"; I'd estimate it'll cost them about one to two golden statues.

08 Aug 2026 7:50pm GMT

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has put up a new maintenance release, version 4.1.0. It's got a small number of fixes, two very minor new features, as well a few updated translations. That's it.

08 Aug 2026 7:25pm GMT

About 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous.

08 Aug 2026 11:30am GMT

Open source WeatherNext model can make accurate predictions with lower-resolution weather data.

08 Aug 2026 11:05am GMT

There's been a small flurry of articles from a variety of sources, all talking about more or less the same thing: Microsoft is trying to explain why Windows 11 is as difficult to develop as it is, in turn justifying why it's become such a mess over the years. I'm picking this one from Windows Central, which is an interview with Microsoft's CVP of Design and Research for Windows and Devices, Marcus Ash. Taking the long, still ongoing transition from the Control Panel to the Settings application as an example, Ash explains why this is such a long and difficult process. Unsurprisingly, Ash says that the reason this has taken so long is that Microsoft prides itself on compatibility with legacy tooling and workflows, so it can't just rush in and modernize everything without first ensuring the modern replacements maintain functionality with what came before. ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central This isn't really news to anyone. One of Windows' prized strong points is its often excellent backwards compatibility. This doesn't just apply to individual applications, but also to things like software makers adding settings panels to Control Panel, or complex business applications expecting certain entry points into the Control Panel to exist - and much, much more, all over the operating system. I'm exaggerating, but you can't so much as move a single pixel in the taskbar without breaking some component of some obscure corporate middleware suite from 1999 that somehow still functions as the beating heart of like 187 Fortune 500 companies. Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft is going about this the wrong way entirely. Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I feel like Microsoft has so man tools at its disposal to deal with this issue that it's not really using to their fullest potential. Specifically, Windows itself has a number of incredibly capable tools in its toolbox to make sure any application ever written for Windows and even DOS, regardless of how many bits it requires, can run. Windows has advanced and highly capable tools for virtualisation and containerisation, and on top of that, Windows NT has a very capable personalities system that feels underutilised, too. Couldn't these tools be harnessed to effectively isolate the entire backwards compatibility problem from the actual Windows operating system people use, and turn them into optional components installed and activated when required by an older application? Isolating backwards compatibility this way would then leave the Windows team much less shackled and more free to improve Windows at every level without having to worry so much about maintaining backwards compatibility. If the components an older application needs are virtualised, containerised, or part of a Windows NT personality and thus frozen in time, the Windows team would be free to work on the "current" version of said component without breaking the application in question. I feel like Microsoft has tried to use these technologies to address backwards compatibility in the past, but in true Microsoft fashion, it always seems to do so halfheartedly, without any real coherent vision behind it. Again, I wish to reiterate I'm by no means qualified enough to make any definitive statements about this, but it sure does feel like Microsoft is underutilising a lot of the tools it already has at its disposal.

06 Aug 2026 10:20pm GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT