GoKawiil
Tech News
The Albany Police Department in Georgia posted surveillance footage on Facebook asking the public to identify a man who picked up $30 he found on the floor of a Walmart without turning it in to employees. The post, shared August 18, drew thousands of mocking comments from people questioning why police were devoting resources to such a minor incident.
Ring has introduced a new encryption system that deletes the company's copy of users' video decryption keys after 24 hours. This means that once that window closes, Ring itself no longer holds the keys needed to decrypt footage, restricting what it can hand over in response to law enforcement requests.
A veteran developer describes how coding assistance has evolved from tab-completion to agentic coding to full harness-managed workflows over the past eighteen months. He argues that with a shared skills file and unified tooling across Cursor, Claude, and Pi, the choice of underlying AI model has become largely commoditized, and he now relies heavily on the cheaper Deepseek-v4-flash model for routine work.
South Africa's government has proposed a law requiring 'practising natural scientists' to register with the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions, covering anyone providing scientific services or advice, whether paid or unpaid. Exceptions apply to educators at recognized institutions and those crafting government science policy, but failure to comply could result in up to a year in prison.
Canada's requirement that streaming services fund and feature domestic content has drawn attention as a potential irritant in trade negotiations with the United States. US officials and industry groups have pointed to these rules as a barrier that disadvantages American streaming companies operating in Canada.
Apple has abandoned its plan to shift Hide My Email addresses from the @icloud.com domain to @private.icloud.com. The company confirmed Monday that masked email addresses will stay on @icloud.com, reversing an earlier decision announced this year.
DuckDuckGo's new survey of nearly 2,000 U.S. adults found that almost a third of respondents have confided something to an AI chatbot they wouldn't tell friends, family or doctors, with the figure jumping to 56% among self-identified AI enthusiasts. The survey also found that most respondents didn't know chatbot conversations are typically used for training by default, and only a quarter knew such chats could be subpoenaed by law enforcement.
Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley used a Fox News interview to urge critics to find a middle ground between privacy and public safety, as opposition to his company's AI camera network intensifies. The remarks follow a Washington Post investigation that uncovered dozens of cases of police misusing Flock's surveillance tools, including to track women, prompting Langley to issue a public apology earlier this month.
Georgia's GBI arrested three former Savannah Police Department officers and one former civilian staffer for improperly accessing Flock Safety's license plate reader network for non-law-enforcement purposes. The officers face two counts of misuse of a license plate reader system plus a violation of oath of office charge, while the civilian employee faces two misuse counts. Savannah PD uncovered the abuse through an internal audit, fired the individuals, and referred the case to state investigators.
The release of Anthropic's Fable model, while praised for its capability, came with pricing high enough that developers are now routing tasks across multiple models rather than defaulting to the priciest option. GLM 5.2, launched the same week at roughly one-ninth Fable's cost, is proving sufficient for routine coding tasks when paired with strong context from more capable models. Some developers now use Fable primarily to shape design decisions before handing execution off to cheaper models like GLM.