Forbes' senior writer on cybersecurity writes on the "warrantless monitoring of citizens en masse" in the United States.

Here's how county police armed with a "powerful new AI tool" identified the suspicious driving pattern of a grey Chevy owned by David Zayas: Searching through a database of 1.6 billion license plate records collected over the last two years from locations across New York State, the AI determined that Zayas' car was on a journey typical of a drug trafficker. According to a Department of Justice prosecutor filing, it made nine trips from Massachusetts to different parts of New York between October 2020 and August 2021 following routes known to be used by narcotics pushers and for conspicuously short stays. So on March 10 last year, Westchester PD pulled him over and searched his car, finding 112 grams of crack cocaine, a semiautomatic pistol and $34,000 in cash inside, according to court documents. A year later, Zayas pleaded guilty to a drug trafficking charge.

The previously unreported case is a window into the evolution of AI-powered policing, and a harbinger of the constitutional issues that will inevitably accompany it... Westchester PD's license plate surveillance system was built by Rekor, a $125 million market cap AI company trading on the NASDAQ. Local reporting and public government data reviewed by Forbes show Rekor has sold its ALPR tech to at least 23 police departments and local governments across America, from Lauderhill, Florida to San Diego, California. That's not including more than 40 police departments across New York state who can avail themselves of Westchester County PD's system, which runs out of its Real-Time Crime Center... It also runs the Rekor Public Safety Network, an opt-in project that has been aggregating vehicle location data from customers for the last three years, since it launched with information from 30 states that, at the time, were reading 150 million plates per month. That kind of centralized database with cross-state data sharing, has troubled civil rights activists, especially in light of recent revelations that Sacramento County Sheriff's Office was sharing license plate reader data with states that have banned abortion...

The ALPR market is growing thanks to a glut of Rekor rivals, including Flock, Motorola, Genetec, Jenoptik and many others who have contracts across federal and state governments. They're each trying to grab a slice of a market estimated to be worth at least $2.5 billion... In pursuit of that elusive profit, the market is looking beyond law enforcement to retail and fast food. Corporate giants have toyed with the idea of tying license plates to customer identities. McDonalds and White Castle have already begun using ALPR to tailor drive-through experiences, detecting returning customers and using past orders to guide them through the ordering process or offer individualized promotion offers. The latter restaurant chain uses Rekor tech to do that via a partnership with Mastercard.
A senior staff attorney at the ACLU tells Forbes that "The scale of this kind of surveillance is just incredibly massive."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geek_Cop for sharing the article.

Since 2006, Slashdot has been covering a contest CmdrTaco once summarized as "Compress Wikipedia and Win." It rewards progress on compressing a 1-billion-character excerpt of Wikipedia — approximately the amount that a human can read in a lifetime.

And today a new record was announced. The 1 billion characters have now been compressed to just 114,156,155 bytes — about 114 megabytes, or just 11.41% of the original size — by Saurabh Kumar, a New York-based quantitative developer for a high-frequency/algorithmic trading and financial services fund. The amount of each "Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge" increases based on how much compression is achieved (so if you compress the file x% better you receive x% of the prize). Kumar's compression was 1.04% smaller than the previous record, so they'll receive €5187.

But "The intention of this prize is to encourage development of intelligent compressors/programs as a path to AGI," said Marcus Hutter (now a senior researcher at Google DeepMind) in a 2020 interview with Lex Fridman.

17 years after their original post announcing the competition, Baldrson (Slashdot reader #78,598) returns to explain the contest's significance to AI research, starting with a quote from mathematician Gregory Chaitin — that "Compression is comprehension."

But they emphasize that the contest also has one specific hardware constraint rooted in theories of AI optimization: The Hutter Prize is geared toward research in that it restricts computation resources to the most general purpose hardware that is widely available. Why? As described by the seminal paper "The Hardware Lottery" by Sara Hooker, AI research is biased toward algorithms optimized for existing hardware infrastructure. While this hardware bias is justified for engineering (applying existing scientific understanding to the "utility function" of making money) to quote Sara Hooker, it "can delay research progress by casting successful ideas as failures."

The complaint that this is "mere" optimization ignores the fact that this was done on general purpose computation hardware, and is therefore in line with the spirit of Sara Hookers admonition to researchers in "The Hardware Lottery". By showing how to optimize within the constraint of general purpose computation, Saurabh's contribution may help point the way toward future directions in hardware architecture.

Editor/publisher Neil Clarke "said he recently had to temporarily shutter the online submission form for his science fiction and fantasy magazine, Clarkesworld," reports CNN, "after his team was inundated with a deluge of 'consistently bad' AI-generated submissions." "They're some of the worst stories we've seen, actually," Clarke said of the hundreds of pieces of AI-produced content he and his team of humans now must manually parse through. "But it's more of the problem of volume, not quality. The quantity is burying us." "It almost doubled our workload," he added...

Clarke said he and his team turned to AI-powered detectors of AI-generated work to deal with the deluge of submissions but found these tools weren't helpful because of how unreliably they flag "false positives and false negatives," especially for writers whose second language is English. "You listen to these AI experts, they go on about how these things are going to do amazing breakthroughs in different fields," Clarke said. "But those aren't the fields they're currently working in."
They're not the only ones concerned, according to the article. the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development "recently said the intergovernmental organization has found that AI can improve some aspects of job quality, but there are tradeoffs." "Workers do report, though, that the intensity of their work has increased after the adoption of AI in their workplaces," Cormann said in public remarks, pointing to the findings of a report released by the organization. The report also found that for non-AI specialists and non-managers, the use of AI had only a "minimal impact on wages so far" — meaning that for the average employee, the work is scaling up, but the pay isn't.

Ivana Saula, the research director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said that workers in her union have said they feel like "guinea pigs" as employers rush to roll out AI-powered tools on the job. And it hasn't always gone smoothly, Saula said. The implementation of these new tech tools has often led to more "residual tasks that a human still needs to do." This can include picking up additional logistics tasks that a machine simply can't do, Saula said, adding more time and pressure to a daily work flow... "It's never just clean cut, where the machine can entirely replace the human," Saula told CNN. "It can replace certain aspects of what a worker does, but there's some tasks that are outstanding that get placed on whoever remains."

Workers are also "saying that my workload is heavier" after the implementation of new AI tools, Saula said, and "the intensity at which I work is much faster because now it's being set by the machine." She added that the feedback they are getting from workers shows how important it is to "actually involve workers in the process of implementation."

In 2015 the founders of "Solar AquaGrid" proposed water-saving solar panels to shade irrigation canals, but they "couldn't get anyone to commit," remembers the Associated Press.

But "fast forward eight years," and you'll find them "preparing to break ground on the first solar-covered canal project in the United States." The idea is simple: install solar panels over canals in sunny, water-scarce regions where they reduce evaporation and make electricity. A study by the University of California, Merced gives a boost to the idea, estimating that 63 billion gallons of water could be saved by covering California's 4,000 miles of canals. Researchers believe that much installed solar would also generate a significant amount of electricity.

But that's an estimate — neither it, nor other potential benefits have been tested scientifically. That's about to change with Project Nexus in California's Central Valley...

They thought research from a reputable institution might do the trick, and [in 2021] got funding for UC Merced to study the impact of solar-covered-canals in California... Around the same time, the Turlock Irrigation District, an entity that also provides power, reached out to UC Merced. It was looking to build a solar project to comply with the state's increased goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045. But land was very expensive, so building atop existing infrastructure was appealing. Then there was the prospect that shade from panels might reduce weeds growing in the canals — a problem that costs this utility $1 million annually...

The state committed $20 million in public funds, turning the pilot into a three-party collaboration among the private, public and academic sectors. About 1.6 miles (2.6 kilometers) of canals between 20 and 110 feet wide will be covered with solar panels between five and 15 feet off the ground. The UC Merced team will study impacts ranging from evaporation to water quality, said Brandi McKuin, lead researcher on the study. "We need to get to the heart of those questions before we make any recommendations about how to do this more widely," she said.
"California isn't first with this technology," the article points out, since India "pioneered it on one of the largest irrigation projects in the world..." But soon even more U.S. canals may be getting solar panels.

Arizona's Gila River Indian Community "received funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to install solar on their canals in an effort to save water to ease stress on the Colorado River. And one of Arizona's largest water and power utilities, the Salt River Project, is studying the technology alongside Arizona State University. And a group of more than 100 climate advocacy groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace, have now sent a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Bureau Commissioner Camille Touton urging them "to accelerate the widespread deployment of solar photovoltaic energy systems" above the Bureau's canals and aqueducts. Covering all 8,000 miles of Bureau-owned canals and aqueducts could "generate over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy — enough to power nearly 20 million homes — and reduce water evaporation by tens of billions of gallons."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The number one movie in North America is Warner Bros. Discovery's Barbie, which Deadline reports has teamed up with Oppenheimer to fuel a mind-blowing $300M+ box office weekend. ["Oppenheimer Shatters Expectations with $80 Million Debut," read the headline at Variety.]

Now it seems everybody is trying to tap into Barbie buzz, including Microsoft's Xbox [which added Barbie and Ken's cars to Forza Horizon 5] and even Microsoft-backed education nonprofit Code.org. ("Are your students excited about Barbie The Movie? Have them try an HourOfCode [programming game] with Barbie herself!").
The idea is to inspire young students to become coders. But as Code.org shares Instagram images of a software developer Barbie, Slashdot reader theodp remembers when, nine years ago, Code.org's CEO "took to Twitter to blast Barbie and urge for her replacement." They'd joined a viral 2014 Computer Engineer Barbie protest that arose in response to the publication of Barbie F***s It Up Again, a scathing and widely reported-on blog post that prompted Mattel to pull the book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer immediately from Amazon. This may have helped lead to Barbie's loss of her crown as the most popular girls' toy in the ensuing 2014 holiday season to Disney's Frozen princesses Elsa and Anna, and got the Mattel exec who had to apologize for Computer Engineer Barbie called to the White House for a sit down a few months later. (Barbie got a brainy makeover soon thereafter)...

The following year, Disney-owned Lucasfilm and Code.org teamed up on Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code, a signature tutorial for the 2015 Hour of Code. Returning to a Disney princess theme in 2016, Disney and Code.org revealed a new Hour of Code tutorial featuring characters from the animated film Moana just a day ahead of its theatrical release. It was later noted that Moana's screenwriters included Pamela Ribon, who penned the 2014 Barbie-blasting blog post that ended Barbie's short reign as the Hour of Code role model of choice for girls.

Interestingly, Ribon seems to bear no Barbie grudges either, tweeting on the day of the Barbie movie release, "I was like holy s*** can't wait to see it."
To be fair, the movie's trailer promises "If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you," in a deconstruction where Barbie is played by D.C. movies' "Harley Quinn" actress Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey), whose other roles include Tonya Harding and the home-wrecking second wife in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Leaving a Ubisoft account inactive for too long "apparently puts it at risk of permanent deletion," writes PC Gamer, calling the policy "a customer-unfriendly practice." A piracy and anti-DRM focused Twitter account, PC_enjoyer, recently shared a screenshot of a Ubisoft support email telling the user that their Ubisoft account had been suspended for "inactivity," and would be "permanently closed" after 30 days. The email provided a link to cancel the move. Now, that sounds like a phishing scam, right? I and many commenters wondered that, looking at the original post, but less than a day later, Ubisoft's verified support account responded to the tweet, seemingly confirming the screenshotted email's legitimacy.

"You can avoid the account closure by logging into your account within the 30 days (since receiving the email pictured) and selecting the Cancel Account Closure link contained in the email," Ubisoft Support wrote. "We certainly do not want you to lose access to your games or account so if you have any difficulties logging in then please create a support case with us."

I was unable to find anything regarding account closure for inactivity in Ubisoft's US terms of use or its end user licence agreement, but the company does reserve the right to suspend or end services at any time. Ubisoft has a support page titled "Closure of inactive Ubisoft accounts." The page first describes instances where the service clashes with local data privacy laws, then reads: "We may also close long-term inactive accounts to maintain our database. You will be notified by email if we begin the process of closing your inactive account."

This page links to another dedicated to voluntarily closing one's Ubisoft account, and seems to operate by the same rules: a 30-day suspension before permanent deletion. "As we will be unable to recover the account once it has been closed, we strongly recommend only putting in the request if you are absolutely sure you would like to close your account."
"If you have a good spam filter or just reasonably assume it's a phishing attempt, then you might one day try your old games and find they're just gone," worries long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. "If you're someone who still plays games from decades ago every so often, this is a scenario you might want to think about."

The site Eurogamer reports that when a Twitter user complained that "I lost my Ubisoft account, and all the Ubisoft Steam game[s] I've bought are now useless", Ubisoft Support "responded to say that players can raise a ticket if they would like to recover their account."

The original tweet now includes this "reader-added context" supplied by other Twitter users — along with three informative links: For added context, Ubisoft can be required under certain data protection laws, such as the GDPR, to close inactive accounts if they deem the data no longer necessary for collection.

Ubisoft has claimed they don't close accounts that are inactive for less than 4 years.

Amazon has already cut 27,000 jobs in the past few months. Now the Associated Press reports that Amazon "is asking some corporate workers to relocate to other cities as part of its return-to-office policy, which mandates workers to be in the office three days a week." An Amazon spokesperson confirmed on Friday that relocations are happening but would not comment on reports by several news outlets that the tech giant was requiring some workers in smaller offices to move to main offices located in bigger cities. Amazon didn't provide details on the number of employees that will be required to relocate. Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said the company will provide "relocations benefits" to workers who are asked to move and consider requests for exceptions on a case-by-case basis...

Citing internal messages, Business Insider reported earlier Amazon employees who refuse to relocate near main offices of their teams are being told they either have to find a new job internally or leave the company through a "voluntary resignation."
"There's more energy, collaboration, and connections happening since we've been working together at least three days per week," an Amazon spokesperson told the Associated Press, adding "we've heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices."

For a taste of Comic-Con, one San Diego newspaper is sharing photos of the 30 buildings in San Diego that had their exteriors covered this week with promotional "building wraps" for "the latest TV shows, movies and even a National Geographic special."

Some of the stranger announcements this year:

• Jamie Lee Curtis has co-authored a horror graphic novel with an environmentalist theme called Mother Nature.

• It was also announced that season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would include a musical episode.

• Star Trek: the Next Generation star Jonathan Frakes has directed a Star Trek: Lower Decks episode in which the animated characters crossover into the live-action world of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

And the A.V. Club offers a slideshow with its choices for this year's hottest trailers. Some of the highlights:

• The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon
• Wheel of Time (Season 2)
• The Marvels (a new movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe)
• Agatha Christie's A Haunting In Venice (starring Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot)
• Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire (Season 2)
• Harley Quinn (Season 4)

Gizmodo reports: Thousands of top Russian officials and state employees have reportedly been banned from using iPhones and other Apple products over concerns they could serve as surreptitious spying tools for Western intelligence agencies...

Russia's trade minister, according to a Financial Times report, said the new ban will take effect Monday, July 17. The move affects a variety of Apple products from iPhones, iPads, and laptops, and builds off of similar restrictions already put in place by the digital development ministry and state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec. Kremlin officials also advised staff working on Vladimir Putin's 2024 presidential re-election campaign against using a variety of US-developed smartphones over similar espionage conveners earlier this year...

Russian intelligence officials last month accused the US National Security Agency of hacking into thousands of Russian-owned iPhones and targeting the phones of foreign diplomats based in Russia... To be clear, Russian officials still haven't provided any clear evidence proving the alleged US conspiracy. Apple has also publicly denied the claims and recently told the Times it "has never worked with any government to build a backdoor into any Apple product, and never will."
The Financial Times got a skeptical response to that from Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia's Security Council and one of the country's fiercest hardliners. "When a big tech compan...â.âclaims it does not co-operate with the intelligence community — either it lies shamelessly or it is about to [go bust]."

Thanks to Slashdot reader dovthelachma for sharing the news.

"If the U.S. is to ease its dependence for lithium on other countries such as China, it may need this quiet corner of southwest Arkansas to lead the way," reports the Wall Street Journal, visiting the "thick-wooded back roads" and "crisscrossing fields where oil drillers gave up long ago" in Magnolia, Arkansas. (Population: 11,105) Exxon Mobil, a new player in the hunt for U.S. lithium, is planning to build one of the world's largest lithium processing facilities not far from Magnolia, with a capacity to produce 75,000 to 100,000 metric tons of lithium a year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that Exxon purchased 120,000 gross acres in the area for a price tag of more than $100 million. A consultant for the seller had estimated the prospect could have the equivalent of 4 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent, enough to power 50 million EVs... To push the project forward, Exxon will have to profitably scale up the technology used to siphon lithium from brine, which for years has been an elusive goal across the industry... Exxon believes it can leverage its engineering prowess to become a low-cost domestic supplier of lithium, and has had discussions with battery and EV manufacturers, people familiar with the matter said. The company would also benefit from green-energy subsidies included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which allows for tax credits of 10% of the cost of producing lithium.

Exxon, which is generally bullish about the future of oil and natural gas, is also preparing for a future less dependent on gasoline. Last year, it projected light-duty vehicle demand for internal combustion engine fuels could peak by 2025, while EVs, hybrids and vehicles powered by fuel cells could grow to more than 50% of new car sales by 2050.
"Other companies including Standard Lithium and Tetra Technologies are planning to build capacity in the area..."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

There's been several articles on how programmers can adapt to writing code with AI. But presumably AI companies will then gather more data from how real-world programmers use their tools.

So long-time Slashdot reader ThePub2000 has a question. "Where's the generative leaps if the humans using it as an assistant don't make leaps forward in a public space?" Let's posit a couple of things:

- First, your AI responses are good enough to use.
- Second, because they're good enough to use you no longer need to post publicly about programming questions.

Where does AI go after it's "perfected itself"?

Or, must we live in a dystopian world where code is scrapable for free, regardless of license, but access to support in an AI from that code comes at a price?

Last weekend in Portland, Oregon, the Software Freedom Conservancy hosted a new conference called the Free and Open Source Software Yearly.

And long-time free software activist Bradley M. Kuhn (currently a policy fellow/hacker-in-residence for the Software Freedom Conservancy) hosted a lively panel discussion on "the recent change" to public source code releases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux which shed light on what may happen next. The panel also included:

• benny Vasquez, the Chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation
• Jeremy Alison, Samba co-founder and software engineer at CIQ (focused on Rocky Linux). Allison is also Jeremy Allison - Sam Slashdot reader #8,157.
• James (Jim) Wright, Oracle's chief architect for Open Source policy/strategy/compliance/alliances

"Red Hat themselves did not reply to our repeated requests to join us on this panel... SUSE was also invited but let us know they were unable to send someone on short notice to Portland for the panel."

One interesting audience question for the panel came from Karsten Wade, a one-time Red Hat senior community architect who left Red Hat in April after 21 years, but said he was "responsible for bringing the CentOS team onboard to Red Hat." Wade argued that CentOS "was always doing a clean rebuild from source RPMS of their own..." So "isn't all of this thunder doing Red Hat's job for them, of trying to get everyone to say, 'This thing is not the equivalent to RHEL.'"

In response Jeremy Alison made a good point. "None of us here are the arbiters of whether it's good enough of a rebuild of Red Hat Linux. The customers are the arbiters." But this led to an audience member asking a very forward-looking question: what are the chances the community could adopt a new (and open) enterprise Linux standard that distributions could follow. AlmaLinux's Vasquez replied, "Chances are real high... I think everyone sees that as the obvious answer. I think that's the obvious next step. I'll leave it at that." And Oracle's Wright added "to the extent that the market asks us to standardize? We're all responsive."

When asked if they'd consider adding features not found in RHEL ("such as high-security gates through reproducible builds") AlmaLinux's Vasquez said "100% -- yeah. One of the things that we're kind of excited about is the opportunities that this opens for us. We had decided we were just going to focus on this north star of 1:1 Red Hat no matter what -- and with that limitation being removed, we have all kinds of options." And CIQ's Alison said "We're working on FIPS certification for an earlier version of Rocky, that Red Hat, I don't believe, FIPS certified. And we're planning to release that."

AlmaLinux's Vasquez emphasized later that "We're just going to build Enterprise Linux. Red Hat has done a great job of establishing a fantastic target for all of us, but they don't own the rights to enterprise Linux. We can make this happen, without forcing an uncomfortable conversation with Red Hat. We can get around this."

And Alison later applied a "Star Wars" quote to Red Hat's predicament. "The more things you try and grab, the more things slip through your fingers." The more somebody tries to exert control over a codebase, the more the pushback will occur from people who collaborate in that codebase." AlmaLinux's Vasquez also said they're already "in conversations" with independent software vendors about the "flow of support" into non-Red Hat distributions -- though that's always been the case. "Finding ways to reduce the barrier for those independent software vendors to add official support for us is, like, maybe more cumbersome now, but it's the same problem that we've had..."

Early in the discussion Oracle's Jim Wright pointed out that even Red Hat's own web site defines open source code as "designed to be publicly accessible — anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit." ("Until now," Wright added pointedly...) There was some mild teasing of Oracle during the 50-minute discussion -- someone asked at one point if they'd re-license their proprietary implementation of ZFS under the GPL. But at the end of the panel, Oracle's Jim Wright still reminded the audience that "If you want to work on open source Linux, we are hiring."

Read Slashdot's transcript of highlights from the discussion.

"Having big U.K. meat-eaters cut some of it out of their diet would be like taking 8 million cars off the road," reports the BBC: That's just one of the findings of new research that scientists say gives the most reliable calculation yet of how what we eat impacts our planet.

The Oxford University study is the first to pinpoint the difference high- and low-meat diets have on greenhouse gas emissions, researchers say... [Oxford University] professor Peter Scarborough, who is part of the Livestock Environment And People project surveyed 55,000 people who were divided into big meat-eaters, who ate more than 100g of meat a day, which equates to a big burger, low meat-eaters, whose daily intake was 50g or less, approximately a couple of chipolata sausages, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans... The research shows that a big meat-eater's diet produces an average of 10.24 kg of planet-warming greenhouse gasses each day. A low meat-eater produces almost half that at 5.37 kg per day. [Fish diet: 4.74 kg. "Vegetarian" diet: 4.16 kg] And for vegan diets — it's halved again to 2.47 kg a day.

The analysis is the first to look at the detailed impact of diets on other environmental measures all together. These are land use, water use, water pollution and loss of species, usually caused by loss of habitat because of expansion of farming. In all cases high meat-eaters had a significantly higher adverse impact than other groups...

A separate study also published in Nature Food in 2021 concluded that food production was responsible for a third of all global greenhouse gas emissions. And an independent review for the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) called for a 30% reduction in meat consumption by 2032 in order to meet the UK's net zero target.
"The meat industry said the analysis overstated the impact of eating meat."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader beforewisdom for sharing the article.

Something unexpected happened at this year's Comic-Con, reports Entertainment Weekly: As film and TV actors skipped San Diego Comic-Con in support of the SAG-AFTRA strike, a number of voice actors gathered to show their support — and raise awareness about the threat of artificial intelligence on their industry.

The National Association of Voice Actors hosted a panel Saturday morning, where multiple actors and SAG officials spoke to a packed room about how rapidly changing AI technology can threaten both fans and creators... The panelists took a deep dive into the many different forms of AI, particularly in its use in voice work — from original voices like Apple's Siri to synthetic voices copying live actors. All cautioned that AI inherently is not a bad tool and can in some ways enhance voice performances, but fans and actors should push back against exploitative methods.

"Voice acting is the tip of the spear of how AI can either be used to lift people up and enhance the opportunities that actors have — or be used in a negative way to steal their voices and crush human creativity," SAG-AFTRA executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told the crowd. "We need to be very vigilant about that. AI isn't implementing itself. People are choosing to implement AI. So, we've got to reject the idea that this is something that is going to happen to us, and there's nothing to be done about that. That is an absolute myth that is being foisted upon us by the people who want us to think we have no power."

Ultimately, the panelists explained, it all comes down to consent. Currently, there are no federal or international laws protecting a person's likeness, and many existing contracts allow a company to capture an actor's voice or likeness and use it "in perpetuity." NAVA and SAG-AFTRA are calling upon voice actors and fans alike to push back, both by establishing protective contract language and by pushing for global laws.
In addition, the site also reports that "Actors, cosplayers, and a congressman hit the streets of San Diego during Comic-Con 2023 on Friday to show their support for the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike."

Long-time Slashdot reader maxcelcat writes: A fleet of some 500 drives were performing a display over Melbourne's Docklands in the lead up to the FIFA Women's World Cup. About 350 of them didn't come back and are now being fished out of the Yarra River, no doubt somewhat worse for wear.

According to the operators, the drones experienced some kind of malfunction or loss of signal, which triggered a fail safe — an automated landing. So hundreds of drones landed safely... on the surface of a river!
One local newscaster called it "a spectacular malfunction" (in a report with a brief clip of the drones gently lowering themselves into the water).

The report also notes another drone company also once lost 50 drones in a river — worth tens of thousands of dollars — during a Christmas show.