Technology News

Police use of automated license-plate reader cameras is being challenged in a lawsuit alleging that the cameras enable warrantless surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The city of Norfolk, Virginia, was sued yesterday by plaintiffs represented by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public-interest law firm.

Norfolk, a city with about 238,000 residents, "has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program," said the complaint filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Like many other cities, Norfolk uses cameras made by the company Flock Safety. A 404 Media article said Institute for Justice lawyer Robert Frommer "told 404 Media that the lawsuit could have easily been filed in any of the more than 5,000 communities where Flock is active, but that Norfolk made sense because the Fourth Circuit of Appeals—which Norfolk is part of—recently held that persistent, warrantless drone surveillance in Baltimore is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment in a case called Beautiful Struggle v Baltimore Police Department."

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Fortinet, a maker of network security software, has kept a critical vulnerability under wraps for more than a week amid reports that attackers are using it to execute malicious code on servers used by sensitive customer organizations.

Fortinet representatives didn’t respond to emailed questions and have yet to release any sort of public advisory detailing the vulnerability or the specific software that’s affected. The lack of transparency is consistent with previous zero-days that have been exploited against Fortinet customers. With no authoritative source for information, customers, reporters, and others have few other avenues for information other than social media posts where the attacks are being discussed.

RCE stands for remote code execution

According to one Reddit post, the vulnerability affects FortiManager, a software tool for managing all traffic and devices on an organization’s network. Specific versions vulnerable, the post said, include FortiManager versions:

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Like Frodo himself, I wasn't sure we were going to make it all the way to the end of our quest. But this week, my family crossed an important life threshold: every member has now heard J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (LotR) read aloud—and sung aloud—in its entirety.

Five years ago, I read the series to my eldest daughter; this time, I read it for my wife and two younger children. It took a full year each time, reading 20–45 minutes before bed whenever we could manage it, to go "there and back again" with our heroes. The first half of The Two Towers, with its slow-talking Ents and a scattered Fellowship, nearly derailed us on both reads, but we rallied, pressing ahead even when iPad games and TV shows appeared more enticing. Reader, it was worth the push.

Gollum's ultimate actions on the edge of the Crack of Doom, the final moments of Sauron and Saruman as impotent mists blown off into the east, Frodo's woundedness and final ride to the Grey Havens—all of it remains powerful and left a suitable impression upon the new listeners.

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Agatha All Along, The Simpsons, and Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Disney+ this month.

Qualcomm has a new chip for flagship phones, and the best part is that it uses an improved version of the Oryon CPU architecture that the Snapdragon X Elite chips brought to Windows PCs earlier this year.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the follow-up to last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3—yet another change to the naming convention that Qualcomm uses for its high-end phone chips, though, as usual, the number 8 is still involved. The 8 Elite uses a "brand-new, 2nd-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU" with clock speeds up to 4.32 GHz, which Qualcomm says will improve performance by about 45 percent compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Rather than a mix of large, medium, and small CPU cores as it has used in the past, the 8 Elite has two "Prime" cores for hitting that high peak clock speed, while the other six are all "Performance" cores that peak at a lower 3.53 GHz. But it doesn't look like Qualcomm is using a mix of different CPU architectures anymore, choosing to distinguish the higher-performing core from the lower-performing ones by clock speed alone.

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Elon Musk may have personally used AI to rip off a Blade Runner 2049 image for a Tesla cybercab event after producers rejected any association between their iconic sci-fi movie and Musk or any of his companies.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, lawyers for Alcon Entertainment—exclusive rightsholder of the 2017 Blade Runner 2049 movie—accused Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) of conspiring with Musk and Tesla to steal the image and infringe Alcon's copyright to benefit financially off the brand association.

According to the complaint, WBD did not approach Alcon for permission until six hours before the Tesla event when Alcon "refused all permissions and adamantly objected" to linking their movie with Musk's cybercab.

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It's been just over two years now since soon-to-depart CTO John Carmack told a Meta Connect audience about his vision for a super low-end VR headset that came in at $250 and 250 grams. "We're not building that headset today, but I keep trying," Carmack said at the time with some exasperation.

On the pricing half of the equation, the recently released Quest 3S headset is nearly on target for Carmack's hopes and dreams. Meta's new $299 headset is a significant drop from the $499 Quest 3 and the cheapest price point for a Meta VR headset since the company raised the price of the aging Quest 2 to $400 back in the summer of 2022. When you account for a few years of inflation in there, the Quest 3S is close to the $250 headset Carmack envisioned.

A new button on the underside of the Quest 3S lets you transition to pass-through mode at any time. Credit: Kyle Orland

Unfortunately, Meta must still seriously tackle the "250 grams" part of Carmack's vision. The 514g Quest 3S feels at least as unwieldy on your face as the 515g Quest 3, and both are still quite far from the "super light comforts" Carmack envisioned. Add in all the compromises Meta made so the Quest 3S could hit that lower price point, and you have a cheap, half-measure headset that we can only really recommend to the most price-conscious of VR consumers.

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The 115,000-plus files related to UN Women included detailed financial disclosures from organizations around the world—and personal details and testimonials from vulnerable individuals.

New cars really are better than they used to be. They last longer, they're more efficient, and they're safer for the occupants in a crash. But it's not entirely a one-way street. If the last time you bought a car was more than a decade ago, you're probably shocked at the cumulative effect of inflation since then. But even ignoring sticker shock, there's also the matter of cars (almost) all having lifeless steering. But a patent filed last year by Mercedes-Benz might have the answer.

Regular readers will have read me complain about the death of steering feedback more than once. And that's a bad thing if you care about driving, or even if you don't. The late Richard Parry-Jones, an engineer whose career at Ford saw him rise to become CTO and head of global R&D, tracked customer satisfaction data and was able to prove to skeptical colleagues that good steering was highly correlated with customer satisfaction "because bad steering is tiring," he wrote.

Mostly, it's down to a switch from hydraulic to electric power-assisted steering—in many cases, the electric motor is placed on the steering column, which has the side effect of filtering out road forces, keeping them from being transferred back up the column and to the driver's hands via the steering wheel.

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Absolution, the latest book in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series, begins with a mysterious alligator experiment that seems to have gone wrong. Read the first two chapters here.

The name might be a mouthful, but these are the best earbuds I've ever heard under $100.

Claude is the first major AI model to be able to take control of a computer to do useful work.

Claude is the first major AI model to be able to take control of a computer to do useful work.

The North Atlantic Fella Organization, which started as a way to fight Kremlin propaganda, has raised millions of dollars to send vital equipment directly to soldiers fighting Russia.

No, it’s not a Dyson. But in some ways, Shark’s cordless stick vacuum with PowerDetect is even better.

I’m a side sleeper, and I tested the top foam, cooling, and firm mattresses to find the best support and pressure relief.

Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and the New York Post have accused artificial intelligence start-up Perplexity of a “brazen scheme” to rip off their journalism for its AI-driven search engine in a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday.

The publishers, both subsidiaries of News Corp, alleged the AI start-up, which is seeking to raise up to $1 billion in a funding round that will value it at $8 billion, was “engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying” of their work.

The lawsuit said Perplexity is “diverting customers and critical revenues” away from the news publishers, whose titles include The Wall Street Journal, “freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce.”

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The iPad mini is a niche product, that much is clear. But for those who want an extra-small tablet, the launch of the sixth-generation iPad mini in 2021 was a red-letter day. For the first time in ages, the mini got close to the same kind of performance and features as its bigger brethren.

Then it didn’t get any updates for a couple of years. It was still a good tablet, but it wasn’t positioned to take advantage of new products or features on Apple’s docket like Apple Intelligence or the Apple Pencil Pro.

Enter the new 2024 refresh of the iPad mini, which releases October 23. For the most part, it’s the same as the previous generation—but Apple has laser-focused on a couple of tweaks to modernize the device just enough to keep it competitive in the company’s current ecosystem.

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Today, Google published a white paper that shows how we’ve incorporated seven goals from our Secure by Design Pledge.Today, Google published a white paper that shows how we’ve incorporated seven goals from our Secure by Design Pledge.

This tiny tablet’s processor is its biggest upgrade.