"Anyone saying you should install Linux is being an annoying nerd"

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/61804

Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety's cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.

State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company's automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration's deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.

“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company's Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.

“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things," Cox added.

Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people's travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.

The ACLU—which recently launched a "Get the Flock Out" campaign to "fight creepy ALPR cameras"—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.

Automatic license plate readers track our every move and funnel our personal information into enormous databases that police can access to spy on us without a warrant.Surveillance company Flock Safety is the largest provider of these cameras — it's time we get all of them out of our communities.

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— ACLU (@aclu.org) June 28, 2026 at 11:15 AM

"Flock's ALPR cameras aren't like your normal traffic cameras," the ACLU explained. "This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find."

The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.

“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan," ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.

There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.

According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.

Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.

Susie O'Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California's nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company's national network without city officials' knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.

O'Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.

"I have goose hbumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis," she said. "And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way."

Less than a week after Good's killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city's Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.

“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.

Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue."

"There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant," he added.

At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.

Krishnamoorthi and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have also urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Flock Safety "for failing to implement cybersecurity protections, allowing Americans’ personal data to be exposed to hackers, criminals, and spies to steal."

Their demand came after the cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock revealed that hackers stole passwords and data from at least 35 Flock customer accounts.

In May, US Reps. Jesús "Chuy" Garcia (D-Ill.) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.) introduced a bipartisan amendment to a bill that would prohibit state and local governments receiving federal highway funds from using ALPRs for purposes other than electronic toll collection.

It's not just Flock. Axon, Vigilant Solutions—a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions—Genetec, PlateSmart, Innova Systems, Rekor, ELSAG, Perceptics, Jenoptik, and other firms market ALPRs to law enforcement agencies, private companies, and others.

"It doesn't matter which company has its creepy cameras in your neighborhood," the ACLU said, "they all have the same problems: a lack of transparency, oversight, and regulation into how they collect, store, and use our data, and how to hold public and private actors accountable if they abuse it."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

https://archive.ph/moVLf

https://archive.ph/FmQHy

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8940919

For decades, China was known as the world’s factory, building products for famous Western brands. But after spending a week inside some of Ningbo’s most advanced factories, I realised that story has completely changed. From AI-powered manufacturing and 5G smart factories to premium electric vehicles and global Chinese brands, what I saw genuinely surprised me. In this video, I’ll show you why competing with China’s manufacturing industry is becoming harder than ever.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/67238198

Turns out that token embeddings in smaller language models collapse into a narrow cone as they pass through transformer layers which reduces their representation expressivity. And the effect is much more servere in smaller models than larger ones. So one of the reasons larger models outperform smaller ones is due to having better organization of latent representations. Good news is that you can use a training objective that spreads embeddings uniformly across the representation space to counter the problem which means smaller models could be a lot more capable.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8940333

Massive deposits of industrial metals and rare earths are over two kilometers below the earth's surface.

Identifying the location of those reserves requires revolutionary, ultra-high-powered antennas.

Breakthroughs in boring technology and materials science are necessary to recover those metals at depth, safely and at scale.

China has monopolies on both the antennas, and on the large boring machines that make the deep mining of the Earth's lithosphere possible.

(original article in Swedish that reported this)

Posting this because I hadn't heard about it before and I'm probably not the only Mullvad user here, so might as well.

I'm not Swedish, but going off NATOpedia, it seems like the party is basically reinventing fascism from first principles:

The party claims to stand for a "class-conscious populism" which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology and unites the "productive" classes of society against the "Transferiat", with the "Transferiat" being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off social welfare benefits, as well as those who work "made-up services"[...]

The party differs from modern day left-wing parties by seeing the working class as co-dependent with people working in enterprise and business and instead sees the classes that "live off transfers", as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.

Their ideology is nonsense fake-marxist revisionism to redirect anger at capitalism and turn it against immigrants and people who need social welfare (though they do back some generally left oriented social policies, their main thing appears to be racism)

Even if you're comfortable with funding this, it still begs the question of just how trustworthy Mullvad actually is.

I guess this still beats any of the dozens of Israeli VPNs that definitely spy on you, but it's not great

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8931409

Farmers are reporting healthier sheep and improved pasture quality after grazing livestock beneath more than one million solar panels. The results highlight how agrivoltaics can boost agricultural productivity while generating clean energy, demonstrating that farming and solar power can successfully coexist.

The Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act) just passed the US House of Representatives — 267 votes to 117. But the Senate may be a very different story.

Key senators say the House bill is too weak — it stripped the 'duty of care' standard from the Senate's own stronger KOSA bill, which passed 91-3 in 2024.

Civil liberties groups say the age verification provisions are too dangerous for everyone's privacy. And there's a third debate about whether the bill could undermine state-level lawsuits that are already making progress.

Clean energy is replacing dirty energy much faster than expected.

Want proof? The Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi is 12 years ahead of the state’s already ambitious clean energy timeline. It just got approved to maintain that lead with upgrades that will make it 90% renewable by 2030.

Looking for a good wireless PC controller. I don't really want an XBox, Switch or PlayStation controller. Something decent quality that feels good but isn't over like, $150AUD

Fuck scalpers, I really wanted a Steam controller