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Last week a Florida woman sued Flock over its role in police officer accusing her of a crime she didn't commit But she's not the only one suing Flock over mistaken accusations, reports Gizmodo: . A Ring video of a Colorado woman being handed a criminal summons for a porch-package theft she did not commit recently went viral after the accusation rested on a Flock Safety automated license plate reader hit. Now, the woman involved in that case, Chrisanna Elser, is suing Flock Group, the towns of Columbine Valley and Bow Mar, Sergeant Jamie Milliman, and Chief Bret Cottrell in federal court on behalf of herself and other Coloradans whose plates the company has logged... The package in question was worth $25... The claims aimed at the company are intrusion upon seclusion, plus negligence and negligent design, on the theory that Flock sold a searchable archive and refused to require a warrant, a case number, or a supervisor's sign-off before an officer could run a plate... Elser is asking the court to make Columbine Valley, Bow Mar, Cottrell, and Flock delete the retained location data, to bar them from keeping it unless it is tied to an open case number, and to make Flock require a warrant, a case number, and a supervisor's approval before a Colorado agency can search the system. The Colorado Sun has more details. "Elser did not steal anything, but spent the following two weeks proving her own evidence to a department that did not return her calls, she said. [P]olice Sgt. Jamie Milliman told her the town of Bow Mar's surveillance cameras captured her forest green Rivian driving through town the same day a package disappeared from a thief... When Elser offered to show her own evidence to prove her innocence, including footage from her Rivian's onboard cameras, Milliman said she could bring it to court. Now, she is suing the officers and Flock Safety in U.S. District Court in Denver, alleging that the warrantless tracking violated her constitutional rights and that Flock's surveillance system unlawfully documents Coloradans' movements... "The scariest part is what happened to me can happen to anyone. I had no idea the Flock cameras existed and no idea a private company was keeping a record of every time I drove past my own neighborhood, or that any officer could pull it up without asking anyone or giving a reason for doing so," Elser said in a statement Tuesday. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to you...." "As noted in the complaint, the Flock system accurately identified the location of Ms. Elser's vehicle, while law enforcement retained responsibility for interpreting and weighing that information as part of the broader investigation," Paris Lewbel, Flock's public relations manager said. "Flock stands by the accuracy and integrity of its technology and intends to vigorously defend itself in this litigation." The article includes this statement from the woman's attorney. "Coloradans pass Flock's cameras on the way to work, church, the doctor, a protest, and a friend's house, and Flock keeps a detailed record of their every movement. It knows where you went, when you went there, and how often you go back, and it gives that information to a police officer with no limits. "We are asking a federal court to say what should be obvious: Flock's surveillance is straight-up creepy and the government does not get to follow everyone, all the time, without any reason for doing so." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Meta Developing Compressed RAM 'CRAM' For Linux: Better Than ZRAM and Zswap? Phoronix reports on a presentation this week by Meta engineer Gregory Price at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague: With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM ("CRAM") for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM... For end-users that may already be relying on the likes of Zswap or ZRAM, CRAM is offering near-native DRAM speeds. Read-only data is shown to be as fast as the raw DRAM performance. And for memory writes, CRAM is much faster than ZRAM or Zswap or plain swap. "Most of the individual pieces needed to support CRAM are already mainline," the article points out. Tom's Hardware writes that "It uses a private NUMA node (essentially, a ghost CPU) instead of pretending to be a block device, and this lets Linux continue using all of its memory semantics, including migration and ballooning, to manage CRAM." Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression... Even when you enable writes, CRAM is still much faster than ZRAM; 5.4x in the worst tested case of 20% writes. That's a huge drop from the 452x read-only case, but keep your context; a 5.4x speedup is still titanic. The massive performance cliff when writes are involved comes down to the need to page fault and migrate folios back to the original NUMA domain, as you can't write directly to compressed data; you'd corrupt everything... While the obvious target of the work here (given its origin at Meta Platforms) is big Linux servers, ZRAM and Zswap are used all over the Linux ecosystem, even on machines as constrained as the Steam Deck. Many distributions enable one or the other by default. CRAM seems like it could offer a considerable speed-up for some of these machines, so hopefully it finds its way into the kernel once the remaining implementation questions are answered.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - First Thorium Nuclear Clocks Begin to Tick Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei, marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports: The first nuclear clocks are not going to immediately supplant the worldwide network of atomic clocks, whose steady ticking we rely on for GPS and the definition of a second. Nor have they captured the record for most precise timepiece; the best atomic clocks are about 10,000 times more reliable and would take more than 100 billion years to lose one second. But nuclear clocks hold a bevy of potential advantages over existing atomic clocks. One day, they could be more reliable than the leading atomic versions, and nuclear clocks could be made more portable. They even hold the ability to search for certain kinds of dark matter -- the invisible stuff whose clumps make up 83 percent of the matter in the universe. If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - AI Surveillance Startup Flock To Cut Several Hundred Jobs Amid Backlash, Sources Say Reuters reports: Flock plans to let go of about 18% of its employees, people with direct knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and lawmakers.... The company has about 1,500 employees [with job cuts hitting 270 employees]. Flock faces growing scrutiny from regulators, lawmakers, and privacy advocates, despite drawing strong investor interest among venture capitalists. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Americans are divided on whether Flock cameras are a good idea. Some 38% of the country supports the use of Flock cameras in their community, compared to 47% who oppose their use. A related story... In Texas this week a county commissioner decommissioned all 61 of their Flock surveillance cameras and license plate readers, according to a local news report. County residents "have raised serious questions about who can access this data, what vendors can disclose, improper searches, and records being kept after data expires," the precinct's Chief Public Affairs Officer said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Cloudflare Keeps 1.1.1.1 Out of Piracy Blocking, Escapes Penalties In France An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloudflare doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France, only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting [French pay-TV provider] Canal+'s request for penalties of 50,000 euros per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided by Canal+ itself. [...] As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company's long-standing claim that it doesn't interfere with its DNS. In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn't blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts. "To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver," the company's latest report reads. [...] Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders. Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in a submission (PDF) to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access. Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted "within seconds," Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking. "For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds," Cloudflare informed the Commission. For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - A 1960 Paper Published In Science Predicts World Will End Next Month sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right -- but the prediction was wrong. That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026." The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors -- all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign -- came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020. The researchers didn't calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death." The exact date was somewhat arbitrary, however. The formula solved to 2026.87 plus or minus 5.5 years, and The New York Times reported that von Foerster "searched the center of this doom-time span for an appropriate date and found that a Friday the Thirteenth would fall conveniently in November of 2026." (November 13 also happened to be his birthday.) [...] [D]emographers, annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders, pointed out obvious flaws. For example, the time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter, but certainly not shorter than the 9 months it takes for a baby to develop. "In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required," public health expert Harold Dorn drily noted in Science 2 years after von Foerster's article was published. The forecast would set a record, he predicted, "for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability." "The failure of the Doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances," writes economist Javier Birchenall of the University of California, Santa Barbara writes in a Perspective published in Science today.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Apollo Software Pioneer Margaret Hamilton Dies at 90 "Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA's Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died," writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. "She was 90." MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO. Her life's work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: "Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon." "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer -- to say she was ahead of her time -- would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved," says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics. "The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program's success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - US Bars Microsoft, Adobe, and Major IT Firms From Green Card Program An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers obtain permanent residency in the United States, accusing the companies of fraud. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said in a news conference on Thursday, Reuters reported. The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled positions that employers may struggle to fill with qualified U.S. workers. Tech companies are among the largest users of the program, with nearly three-quarters of approved visas going to workers from India, according to The Associated Press. Vance also said during the news conference that the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations they're abusing a program that allows international students to come to the U.S. and were using the program to undermine wages for American workers. "We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans. We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees." "These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Emmy Awards Leave Broadcast TV For Prime Video Amazon Prime Video will become the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards under a six-year deal beginning in 2027, the Television Academy announced on Tuesday. The Emmys will stream live for free to viewers in more than 240 countries and territories without requiring a Prime subscription. From the report: In the release, Prime Video was named as the "permanent home" for the Emmys, in contrast to the rotating agreement in place years prior. The switch ends the traditional "wheel-deal" setup to broadcast the awards, where ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox took turns hosting the Emmys each year. The system has been in place since at least 1994, with the most recent eight-year contract expiring this year. "Television has never been more global, and the Emmys should be a celebration that the world can share," Television Academy chair Cris Abrego said in a statement. "Having a dedicated home with Prime Video allows us to build on that legacy with unprecedented global reach and a broader commitment to the Television Academy and our mission throughout the year."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Female AI Agents 'Paid' Less Than Males, Study Finds Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail, and harness). The pay gap was approximately 10%. The study was conducted with 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for thought.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Chrome 155 Ships Decoding Support For JPEG XL Google has released Chrome 155 with support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG along with lossless compression, JPEG transcoding, HDR, animation, and progressive decoding. From a blog post: We expect that JPEG XL is most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images or in cases in which fine-grained progressive decoding is preferred. In this post, we share why we brought JPEG XL to Chrome, how we used Rust to ensure memory safety first, the extensive performance work that makes it fast, and what the journey tells us about developer feedback and the web standards ecosystem. [...] With JPEG XL officially landing in Chrome, the web becomes faster, richer, and safer. We encourage developers, content creators, and platform owners to start using .jxl images and animations in their pipelines. Try it out, file bugs, and help us continue building a faster and safer web for everyone.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - OpenAI Unleashes Hundreds More Math Results Upon a Field Already In Shock OpenAI says an unreleased internal model has produced 372 results that either resolve or make substantial progress on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The company says almost all were generated by a single AI agent from a single prompt. "This would be a striking difference from OpenAI's earlier blockbuster solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was produced through the collective efforts of a 10,000-strong agentic swarm that cost millions of dollars in computing power," reports Scientific American. From the report: OpenAI revealed the results in a GitHub repository at 6 P.M. EDT. The deluge will take mathematicians months to parse through and understand -- including to determine whether the proofs contain novel and important ideas or are mostly mash-ups of existing techniques. But many of the results have already been verified in Lean -- a programming language that validates a proof's logic -- and are therefore all but certain to be correct. Among the results claimed are a solution to the four-dimensional Kakeya conjecture, improvements on some of the world's most important computer algorithms and actual progress toward math's scariest problem, the Riemann hypothesis.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Campus Censorship Wars, 25 Years After a Slashdot Q&A Slashdot reader carlk22 writes: In February 2001, Slashdot readers asked Carl Kadie about censorship and privacy at colleges, and he answered. Now Kadie, who founded the Computers and Academic Freedom project at EFF in 1991, has written its history. In Part 1, Ohio State kicks a student off its network, then out of school, after a prank routes his "fuck you" into rec.aquaria, and a supercomputing center fires a student over an email from saddam@iraq.bunker.gov. In Part 2, Nebraska bans the project's own newsletter, the FBI asks a conference attendee to show them his leg, and Playboy calls. The original archive is on GitHub.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Google, Unity Launch Platform To Create Video Games From Prompts An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software announced a new platform that will allow people to create video games from simple text prompts, marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, will "put game creation in the hands of millions of new creators, and bring new experiences to billions of players worldwide," the companies said in a statement on Oct 7. With its debut, Playground will let people 18 and older generate and customize games using natural language prompts, "no coding required." Later in 2026, a new expanded creation experience called Unity Spark, will be integrated with Playground, providing "robust, professional-level" mechanics and high-fidelity 3D capabilities. Creators will be able to build "immersive, superlative experiences" with a simple text prompt, according to the release. Playground builds on Google's push into world models, a type of AI that generates virtual environments in real time from text prompts, rather than just video. Google and Unity's partnership "could reduce fears that AI will make Unity's core game-building software less necessary, while posing limited medium-term risk to Roblox's advantage as a social gaming platform," says Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Naidu. The introduction of Unity Spark later in 2026 "could broaden Unity's creator base and support its game-development business," which represent about a third of sales.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. - Microsoft and Nvidia Unveil Surface Laptop Ultra For $2,599 At a press event today, Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Laptop Ultra featuring an NVIDIA RTX Spark platform with a Blackwell-based GPU capable of up to one petaflop of AI compute. The laptop supports up to 128GB of unified memory for running models as large as 120 billion parameters locally, while also adding a 15-inch mini-LED display, expanded ports, upgraded cooling, and support for hundreds of AAA games. It's available for pre-order today starting at $2,599. Neowin reports: To keep the device's temperature under control, Microsoft has also developed a new cooling system that offers up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition. The Surface Laptop Ultra comes with a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra mini-LED touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a pixel density of 262 PPI, and peak HDR brightness of up to 2,000 nits. Despite its beefy specs, the Surface Laptop Ultra measures less than 18mm thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds (around 2kg). The laptop will be available in Platinum and Nightfall finishes. Microsoft has also increased the size of the precision haptic touchpad by more than 30% compared to the Surface Laptop 7th Edition for improved haptic input. The Surface Laptop Ultra includes a broader selection of ports, featuring USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. It also features the world's first built-in USB-C magnetic charging.
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