Facial recognition technology in U.K. shops “will soon alert police in real time to the presence of serious offenders,” reports The Guardian, “with civil liberties groups warning of a ‘dangerous escalation’ towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector.”Facewatch, a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury’s, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves,...

The Associated Press reports:An islandwide blackout struck Cuba on Friday for the second time this week as the nation of nearly 10 million people grapples with a crumbling power grid and fuel shortages stemming from a U.S. energy blockade… Authorities reported that they have already begun restoring power to some areas. On Monday, another massive blackout affected nearly 10 million people...

“Meta has axed a controversial feature that allowed users to modify photos from public Instagram accounts using AI,” reports TechCrunch:The feature, which wasn’t designed to alert a user if their photos were used in this way, prompted immediate backlash… The company issued a blog post Friday announcing that it was removing the feature. Puck News founding partner Dylan Byers was the first to...

Since February, New York state police have arrested 48 people for trespassing on a former IBM campus in Somers, New York, reports the Wall Street Journal. 30 of the arrests were teenagers.The long-vacant site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers, who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories and any other disused structure they can breach… [I]t’s...

For nearly two years the Free Software Foundation has been fighting web crawlers (including many aggressively scraping training data for AI models). A botnet controlling about five million IPs hit one system for six months in 2025. Their systems administrator wrote this week that they view these as distributed denial-of-service attacks. How are they fighting back?We noticed patterns in the...

Nerds.xyz reports:DuckDuckGo just gave its browser a feature that a lot of people have been waiting for. The privacy-focused browser can now block most video ads on YouTube, letting users watch videos without sitting through the pre-roll and mid-roll interruptions that have become part of everyday life on the platform. The feature is already enabled by default for iPhone, Windows, and Mac users...

Environmental groups want America’s FCC “to slam the brakes on orbital datacenters,” writes The Register. They’re arguing for an environmental impact assessment for what could be 1 million satellites:Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this week… The filing doesn’t target any...

“Flexible, app-based scheduling lets large pools of part-time workers choose four-hour shifts and even select the type of work they prefer,” writes long-time Slashdot reader Tony Isaac. While the system started during the pandemic when factories faced severe labor shortages, the model is now “supplying hundreds of trained workers each week… while giving people — from retirees to sidejob...

In March, Anthropic’s Claude “quietly deployed software to spy on China-based customers,” reports the Washington Post — apparently to unmask Chinese rivals “suspected of hijacking its technology to make their own AI tools smarter.”Last week Anthropic removed the spyware “after a software developer revealed its existence and privacy advocates criticized Anthropic, saying it had surveilled its...

“We need you in the fight,” says the American legal expert in privacy, surveillance, AI, and Internet freedom of speech who became the EFF’s new executive director in March. As EFF celebrates the anniversary of its founding 1990, “Each headline is different, but they tell one story: Many of the threats that once seemed hypothetical are now reality, and EFF’s work to ensure technology supports...

Meta “said in a court filing on Monday that four states were seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties,” reports Reuters, “over accusations the company designed its Facebook and Instagram platforms to addict young users and misled the public about their safety.”Meta put forward the figure in its response to the attorneys general’s filings on how penalties should be calculated if the states prevailed...

“Are you armed?!” the police officer screamed. “Get out of the car!” A writer for the car-news site The Drive describes how “a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement… led to me and my wife being surrounded by police, hands on their guns, in a Kohl’s parking lot in suburban Minnesota.”After dropping off our Amazon returns, we’d just gotten back in the Range...

The FCC has approved (PDF) Reflect Orbital’s Earendil-1 test satellite, which will use a 60-by-60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight back to Earth after dark. “The reflected light from the satellite is supposed to span an area about 3 miles wide on the ground,” reports PCMag. It comes despite objections from astronomers and environmental groups who are concerned that the satellites will unleash...