fidzu : geek

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Officials in Kansas City, Missouri, are preparing to equip cameras on some public buses with facial recognition software capable of identifying passengers who appear on a list of banned riders or missing persons. Supporters and opponents alike view the effort as a major litmus test for tapping the AI-powered software on a U.S. public transportation system, positioning Kansas City as the latest epicenter of a fierce debate over whether the safety benefits of artificial intelligence are worth the privacy costs. "The idea of running face recognition on a camera that is pointed on live spaces in public is a line that until recently has never really been crossed in the last 25 years," said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology at the American Civil Liberties Union. The state of Missouri declined to help fund the project as expected due to concerns with the facial recognition component. Still, the city is pushing ahead with local and federal money, said Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at the Kansas City Transportation Authority. "Privacy is always a tricky thing," Means said. "We've always had cameras on our buses. It's just new technology. I think in time it'll smooth over and people will realize, 'Well, it didn't really feel any different'...." Images captured by cameras aboard the buses would immediately be checked against any active alerts, generated when a missing person, banned rider or someone on a law enforcement watch list designated by the transportation authority is identified... After the buses return to the depot, the transportation authority would archive the regular video footage on a local server for up to five years. The company partnering with Kansas City to run the cameras "started using live facial recognition years ago to alert nursing homes when residents left the building," according to the article, and then "brought the technology to correctional institutions and schools." But this is its first attempt at bringing its cameras onto public transportation. The article also includes this quote from Will Owen, communications director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "City residents should not be guinea pigs for transit systems to test Silicon Valley's latest unproven, biased surveillance tech."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Jun 2026 7:34am GMT

In January a college student posted a video showing him winning $100,000 on Polymarket - one of 145 that appeared to show bets adding up to almost $410,000, reports the Wall Street Journal. "But none of those bets were real." Instead its creator was "one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins," the Journal reports, citing interviews with the creators an an analysis of more than 1,100 of their videos: Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket. To get the videos to go viral, Polymarket has recruited a social-media army to copy and re-post creators' footage. Though the New York-based company has been banned from offering its primary crypto platform in the U.S. since 2022, the social-media creators are paid to specifically target U.S. users, who can still access the site with a virtual private network... Polymarket hired and worked closely with a marketing contractor to promote the site. In a message reviewed by the Journal, that contractor told its social-media army to repost content made by 10 Polymarket creators in particular... These creators didn't initially identify themselves as paid by Polymarket, although one offered a $20 bonus code in his social-media bio... The company instructed creators not to disclose they are paid, according to creators who have worked with the company. They said the pay often added up to $2,000 to $3,000 a month... A handful of videos the Journal reviewed also contained short glimpses of URLs indicating the sites were test environments for Polymarket engineers... Creators said they send the finished videos to Polymarket for review. If a video isn't engaging enough, or if it bears obvious signs of being faked, Polymarket will ask for the videos to be reshot, the creators said... Polymarket sends creators bullet-point guidance on what to say, according to creators who have worked with the company and a recruiting website... Polymarket's viral clipping campaign racked up more than 140 million views on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, according to the analytics provider Tubular... Internal materials show that Polymarket and Virality promote videos showing how easy it is to conduct insider trades on the platform. Polymarket has paid clippers to promote at least 19 videos discussing opportunities to use inside information or other tactics to manipulate markets. America's advertising laws "require people who are paid to endorse a product to disclose their ties," the article notes, "although there is some gray area about what's permitted." (After the Journal's investigation, the creators started adding "@polymarket partner" to their bios, the article points out._ And when asked for a comment, Polymarket "said it plans to conduct a comprehensive audit of active promotional content."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Jun 2026 4:34am GMT

The gaming news site Aftermath reports: Four gamers are suing Sony Interactive Entertainment for allegedly breaking a California law that requires digital storefronts selling games to make it clear people are buying licenses, not actually owning the games. Sony Interactive Entertainment's PlayStation store uses language like "Buy Now" and "Confirm Purchase," lawyers wrote in a complaint filed on Thursday... "In reality, consumers who 'purchase' digital games through PlayStation do not obtain ownership of those products," lawyers wrote. "Instead, PlayStation grants only a limited, revocable license to access the software, subject to multiple restrictions contained in a separate Software Product License Agreement".... [T]he PlayStation store does have a disclosure. Above the "Confirm Purchase" button, there's a note: "By selecting [Confirm Purchase], you agree to complete the purchase in accordance with the PlayStation Terms of Service before using this content. You further acknowledge that your purchase of this digital product amounts to a license subject to the Software Product License Agreement." These four gamers aren't satisfied with that; they said in the complaint that it's too small, and that "a reasonable customer completing a purchase would not necessarily notice this disclosure." "It's a proposed class action complaint, meaning the group of four gamers is asking a judge to grant them class action status."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Jun 2026 1:34am GMT

Tests of age-verification technology show the risks of life-altering errors.

20 Jun 2026 11:15am GMT

I mean, this is preaching to the choir, but let's go anyway. I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots. Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it's worth pointing out. ↫ movq.de blog Just a series of observations about how much better graphical user interfaces were back in the '90s and early 2000s. We've lost so many affordances based on both common sense and scientific study, and what we ended up with is a confusing, inconsistent mess. It doesn't really matter where you look - user interface design has deteriorated since the early 2000s, a decline that only accelerated thanks to the arrival of the iPhone, where consistency is a dirty word, and the web, where the advertising people took prominence over the design people. I just want my buttons to look like buttons man.

19 Jun 2026 8:21pm GMT

A French launch startup is scrapping the name of its rocket, apparently due to a trademark issue.

19 Jun 2026 1:36pm GMT

A fascinating novel approach by researchers at MIT, called Fractal, to study in-depth how processors actually work. A team at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) decided to build something different. Fractal, an operating system kernel written from the ground up, treats the hardware itself as the object of study. Its first major use, a deep look at branch predictors - a CPU's way of guessing what code to run next, before it knows for certain, so it doesn't have to waste time waiting to find out - inside Apple's M1 processor, has already turned up findings that prior work missed, including the first evidence that a class of speculative attack known as "Phantom" affects Apple Silicon. "We're using hardware in ways it wasn't designed for," says Joseph Ravichandran, the MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) who led the project. "It's not even obvious that this is a possible thing you could do with the hardware. But we found a way to pull all these different primitives off. It's like a microscope. If you've got a hand magnifying glass, you can see a little bit. But if you had an electron microscope, now we're really talking. That's what Fractal is. The electron microscope of operating systems." ↫ Rachel Gordon at MIT News While Fractal is small, its creators also added POSIX system calls, a C library, vim, GCC, a shell, and more. This way, it feels more familiar, and makes it easier for researchers to get started with the tool. Fractal is open source and hosted on GitHub, it has its own website, and there's a detailed research paper with more in-depth information.

19 Jun 2026 12:34pm GMT

Researchers say these coral strongholds may help repopulate more degraded reefs.

19 Jun 2026 11:15am GMT

Five years after releasing the Amiga 1000, Commodore was about to launch the Amiga 3000, their first real high-end Amiga. With a 68030 processor, on-board SCSI and a slightly updated graphics chipset, all in a sleek desktop case, the Amiga was truly ready for the era of professional 32-bit computing. But Moore's law wasn't the only thing thad had been pressuring Commodore since the release of the Amiga 1000: The desktop metaphor had matured even further, and the competition had been hard at work. IBM had launched OS/2, Windows 3.0 had turned Microsoft's offering from a proof of concept into something actually usable, and new players had entered the scene - among them NeXTStep, with its polished 3D look. It was time to bring AmigaOS, too, into the 1990s. ↫ Carl Svensson It's interesting - there's a lot of focus on the first version of the Amiga operating system and the third one, but you don't hear a lot about AmigaOS 2.x. It turns out this is rather odd, because as Svensson details, this version came with an absolute ton of changes and improvements, from an entirely new widget toolkit to a brand new file system, and so much more. The new widget toolkit and accompanying style guide also ensured that the operating system looked, felt, and behaved consistently. Remember when we cared about that? There's so much more cool features, though, like command history, line editing, universal clipboard support and more just for the CLI, as well as something called Commodities. These were tiny little programs managed from a central location, which didn't even need a GUI to work. Commodities included by default were things like ClickToFront, a focus-follows-mouse option, and more. Oh and of course, BASIC was replaced by ARexx. The list just keeps going, and you should really read Svensson's article.

18 Jun 2026 9:40pm GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT