Garrett Langley, CEO of surveillance firm Flock Safety, has been giving media interviews urging a 'compromise' between privacy and public safety as scrutiny of his company's cameras and license plate recognition tools intensifies. The pushback follows a Washington Post investigation citing 46 cases of police officers allegedly misusing Flock's technology to track partners or exes, prompting Langley to apologize while denying his company caused the abuse.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple is preparing a new iMac powered by the M6 chip, its first Mac processor built on a 2nm process, along with some unspecified new color options. The redesigned iMac is expected to ship before the end of the year, ending a roughly two-year gap since the last update and skipping the M2 and M5 generations entirely.
The widely cited treatise by Richard Cook argues that hazardous complex systems—like healthcare, aviation, and power generation—are inherently risky and are protected by multiple layers of technical, human, and organizational defenses. Catastrophic failure rarely stems from one cause; instead it emerges when several small, often latent failures align simultaneously to overwhelm those defenses. Most failure trajectories are stopped before they cascade, largely thanks to human operators catching problems in real time.
A landmark ruling by Judge William Alsup found that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was lawful under fair use, even though the company was penalized $1.5 billion for obtaining those books through pirated shadow libraries. Attorney Cathy Gellis explains that the judge distinguished between illegally acquiring texts and the act of training an AI on them, comparing the latter to a writer studying literature rather than copying it.
Reports highlight mounting concern among investors about the sustainability of massive AI data-center buildouts, alongside scrutiny of OpenAI's financial position. Analysts point to roughly $3 trillion in AI-related debt that sits off company balance sheets, raising questions about how these commitments are being tracked and financed.
Despite many employers reversing AI-related layoffs over the past year, 53% of Americans still fear AI could cost someone in their household a job, according to new commentary from Gartner's Jackie Swanson. She argues most companies have detailed AI adoption plans but lack honest strategies for addressing the impact on employees, career pacing, and leadership pipelines. Contract software firm Ironclad offers a contrasting approach, framing AI as a tool for skill-building and business growth rather than job cuts, using peer training and upskilling programs to maintain worker confidence.
Slovakia's national security agency NBU issued an alert stating that NERO R-ONE traffic cameras purchased for a €30 million EU-funded monitoring project contain a hidden backdoor allowing shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The agency found the devices are rebranded versions of a Russian camera made by St. Petersburg-based Semicon, following opposition claims that the Interior Ministry bought them through a Cyprus shell company using fake certifications.
Canonical is funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group aimed at automatically converting large C codebases into Rust. UK Research and Innovation is providing matching funds, and the project will be led by student Alex Wood under Professor Meng Wang, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager as co-supervisors.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple is making major layout changes to its retail stores this fall, including reorganizing the Avenues sections and adding new accessory bays. While Apple was expected to release only a refreshed HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K, the scope of these store changes suggests the long-rumored smart home hub with a display may launch at the same time.
China's space agency announced it has scrubbed the planned 2025 launch of its Chang'e 7 lunar south pole mission from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, citing that conditions for launch had not been met. The mission, comprising an orbiter, lander, rover and hopper probe atop a Long March 5 rocket, was likely delayed due to Typhoon Narra churning near Hainan island, though officials gave no official cause.
An owner of a 2021 Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet used it as a always-on smart-home dashboard, but Amazon software kept forcing shutdowns after months of diagnosis with Claude Code hit a wall: three protected Amazon packages held reboot and shutdown permissions that couldn't be disabled without root access, and no public root method existed for this device. Over several months the owner paid $266.15 across four AI coding models—Kimi K3, GLM-5.2, GLM-5.3, and Claude—to find and fix an exploit, with GLM-5.3 finally completing a working root method in a single day.
Amazon is currently selling the Asus Prime AMD Radeon RX 9070 OC Edition for $629.99, down 16% from its usual $750 price. The card runs on AMD's RDNA 4 architecture with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, 56 Compute Units, and a factory overclock reaching up to 2,610 MHz boost clock, delivering performance comparable to Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti Super.
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