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A woman found her police officer ex-boyfriend cop had used Flock's camera system 600 times to look up the location of her and her daughter, reports the Washington Post (Alternate URL here). (She found out through Have I Been Flocked, described as "a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.") But it turns out dozens more police officers have also misused Flock... Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent, a Post analysis of police and court records found. In 26 of these cases, police investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes' new partners or women they wanted to meet. In other cases, police or prosecutors have not specified the alleged surveillance targets. Flock's system was used in 46 of the cases analyzed by The Post, while the other cases involved competing products... After The Post relayed its findings to Flock, the company said in a statement it "will soon be announcing better filters and tools to stop abuse before it happens...." In April, the company rolled out a new voluntary "audit assistance" feature, which agencies can choose to enable, that automatically scans officers' searches for suspicious activity, such as queries repeatedly targeting the same vehicle or run by officers off the clock. In an interview with The Post, Flock chief executive Garrett Langley said misuse of its systems is inevitable and that the company is focused on providing tools to catch perpetrators after the fact... "We're not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions," Langley said. "What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable...." Through automated license-plate reader systems, or ALPRs, officers could trace the rhythms and travels of their subjects' daily lives, leading in some instances to violent confrontations, moments of psychological manipulation, and threats of coercion and control, the analysis found. - In Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly used Flock to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic, according to a police affidavit for a case set for trial this month. - In Kansas, a police chief who tracked his ex through Flock sneaked up on her while she was intimate with another man, a state police certification body alleged, leading to his firing. - In Florida, a deputy speeding to stop a young actress he'd added to a watch list for a license-plate tool called Guardian nearly caused a head-on crash, according to a police report and video from his dashboard camera. The deputy was arrested in March, and his attorney declined to comment. - And in California, prosecutors said a former deputy, Alexander Vanny, used Flock as part of a months-long campaign of "stalking" and "humiliating" his former fiancée that also involved following her around town and installing a hidden camera in her roommate's bathroom, according to a sentencing brief... While some of the searches resulted in officers' firings, prosecutions and prison sentences, police departments in other cases allowed officers to continue using the systems even after receiving warnings that they were being misused... An array of privacy advocates has argued that Flock could deter bad actors by making simple changes to its product, such as requiring officers to label every search with a criminal case number. Some policing experts also warned that agencies' inconsistencies in developing and enforcing standard procedures for license-plate readers could lead to further misconduct. With no federal laws governing use and only a patchwork of state laws, many of the country's roughly 18,000 police agencies are left to decide their rules on their own... Langley, Flock's chief, has dismissed pushes by activists for the company to further limit how officers use its product. "No one elected me the police chief of America," he told Forbes last year, adding, "I don't think it's our job to police the police." The Post also got this quote from an officer was fired and sentenced to probation after pleading no contest to charges of computer-system misuse, stalking and battery. "Pretty much everybody uses that computer system" improperly in the department, he said, and "they don't audit it [nearly] as much as they should." Flock told The Post it now has over 120,000 cameras in more than 6,000 communities, recording 20 billion license plate scans every month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Aug 2026 2:05am GMT

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03 Aug 2026 1:23am GMT

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03 Aug 2026 12:46am GMT

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03 Aug 2026 12:38am GMT

Long-time Slashdot reader pyroclast shared this report from Linux Journal: After years of requests from the Linux gaming community, GOG has officially confirmed that it is developing native Linux support for the GOG Galaxy launcher. The announcement marks one of the biggest shifts in the company's history and signals a stronger commitment to Linux as a first-class gaming platform. While GOG has offered DRM-free Linux game downloads since 2014, its Galaxy launcher has remained exclusive to Windows and macOS - until now. Although the company has not announced a release date, GOG says Linux has become a major area of investment, with development already underway... Unlike the web-based game downloads that Linux users already have access to, GOG Galaxy serves as a full-featured game management application. The launcher currently offers features including: - Automatic game installation and updates - Cloud save synchronization - Achievement tracking - Playtime statistics - Game library organization - Integrated storefront browsing - Friends lists and social features - Cross-platform launcher integration Today, Linux users typically access these capabilities through community projects such as Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, or Bottles. A native Galaxy client would provide an officially supported alternative with direct integration into GOG's ecosystem... For GOG, supporting Linux more fully aligns with its philosophy of giving users greater control over their purchased games. The article argues this news shows Linux growing in importance for game publishers. After the rapid adoption of Valve's Steam Deck, there's also been continuous improvements to Proton and Vulkan, increasing hardware compatibility, and native Linux game development efforts. "As more companies recognize the platform's growth, Linux users can expect broader support from game publishers and software developers alike."

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03 Aug 2026 12:35am GMT

Researchers found enterprises are spending time troubleshooting cloud connectivity due to increased AI workloads, reports Computer Weekly. More than 400 IT and infrastructure decision-makers (US and UK) were surveyed for internet/cloud/AI exchange operator DE-CIX by market researchers Censuswide. But despite 96% of respondents claiming their enterprise networks are ready for cloud/AI loads, the average IT team still spends more than 11 hours each week resolving cloud connectivity problems Other leading concerns included downtime or reliability issues (26%), latency or slow performance (28%), and security vulnerabilities/DDoS attacks (27%). Cost of connectivity, staff expertise and lack of visibility/control over data flows were also cited as major challenges... As a result, as indicated in the study, many businesses are now turning to private interconnection, which enables enterprises to connect directly to cloud providers over dedicated infrastructure rather than routing traffic across the public Internet. Designed to deliver lower latency, greater resilience, enhanced security and more predictable performance, private interconnection has become an increasingly important way of supporting modern cloud and AI workloads. Specifically, the data showed that 61% of companies are already using private connectivity to clouds, while another 31% are actively considering it... [And 71% of enterprises with 1000 or more employees] Only 8.62% of the smaller companies were spending 21 to 40 hours per week dealing with connectivity issues, while just 2.53% of the largest companies in the sample do. Summing up these findings, DE-CIX said that together they suggest direct interconnection is rapidly becoming a core component of enterprise cloud and AI infrastructure and a competitive advantage for companies, though optimising interconnection strategies clearly remains a pressing challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises... "Every AI application depends on data moving quickly, securely and predictably between users, clouds and AI infrastructure. Our research suggests that far too many enterprises are still spending valuable time trying to maintain that kind of connectivity, with more than a third spending between 11 and 20 hours per week, and just under one in 10 spending between 21 to 40 hours per week. This confirms what we already knew - that that network architecture can make or break AI adoption." Elsewhere The Register reports that cloud infrastructure services "grew at their fastest for eight years during the second quarter of 2026, thanks to the AI craze and continued demand for flexible and scalable IT infrastructure." According to the latest figures from Synergy Research, enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure passed $143 billion in Q2, a year-on-year growth rate of 43 percent. This followed 11 successive quarters of increasing growth rates, during which the market has now doubled in size... "AI has, of course, driven most of that incremental growth, and we now see year-on-year growth rates of 165 percent for AI-specific cloud services...." And the top three global players continue to dominate the market, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud together accounting for 67 percent of all the cloud revenue during the quarter. That percentage has increased since the third quarter of last year, when the triumvirate made up 63 percent of enterprise cloud infra spending.

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02 Aug 2026 11:35pm GMT

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Arch Linux August ISO, COSMIC 1.5, Shotcut 26.7, Nano 9.2, Xen 4.22, Linux desktop market share surpasses 10% in North America, and more.

02 Aug 2026 11:28pm GMT

Collabora is bringing Mesa's open-source RADV Vulkan driver to Windows, with the experimental port already capable of launching Counter-Strike 2.

02 Aug 2026 10:32pm GMT

The new AerynOS installation image adds experimental OpenZFS data-drive support, systemd 261.2, and the latest repository changes.

02 Aug 2026 9:54pm GMT

"We believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards."

01 Aug 2026 6:20pm GMT

Christopher Nolan's impressionistic remix of Homer's epic poem finds the man behind the myth.

01 Aug 2026 3:19pm GMT

Reddit may still be considering ending its licensing deal with Google.

01 Aug 2026 12:30pm GMT