An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes. In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user's messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, reply to a request from their child's sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. Also under the AI Inbox tab is a list of important topics worth browsing, nestled beneath the action items at the top. Each suggested to-do and topic links back to the original email for more context and for verification.

[...] For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google gleans by skimming through inboxes will not be used to improve the company's foundational AI models. "We didn't just bolt AI onto Gmail," says Blake Barnes, who leads the project for Google. "We built a secure privacy architecture, specifically for this moment." He emphasizes that users can turn off Gmail's new AI tools if they don't want them. At the same time Google announced its AI Inbox, the company made free for all Gmail users multiple Gemini features that were previously available only to paying subscribers. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from a user prompt, as well as AI Overviews for email threads, which essentially posts a TL;DR summary at the top of long message threads. Subscribers to Google's Ultra and Pro plans, which start at $20 a month, get two additional new features in their Gmail inbox. First, an AI proofreading tool that suggests more polished grammar and sentence structures. And second, an AI Overviews tool that can search your whole inbox and create relevant summaries on a topic, rather than just summarizing a single email thread.

Paris Judicial Court ordered Google to block additional pirate sports-streaming domains at the DNS level, rejecting Google's argument that enforcement should target upstream providers like Cloudflare first. "The blockade was requested by Canal+ and aims to stop pirate streams of Champions League games," notes TorrentFreak. From the report: Most recently, Google was compelled to take action following a complaint from French broadcaster Canal+ and its subsidiaries regarding Champions League piracy.. Like previous blocking cases, the request is grounded in Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, which enables rightsholders to seek court orders against any entity that can help to stop 'serious and repeated' sports piracy. After reviewing the evidence and hearing arguments from both sides, the Paris Court granted the blocking request, ordering Google to block nineteen domain names, including antenashop.site, daddylive3.com, livetv860.me, streamysport.org and vavoo.to.

The latest blocking order covers the entire 2025/2026 Champions League series, which ends on May 30, 2026. It's a dynamic order too, which means that if these sites switch to new domains, as verified by ARCOM, these have to be blocked as well. Google objected to the blocking request. Among other things, it argued that several domains were linked to Cloudflare's CDN. Therefore, suspending the sites on the CDN level would be more effective, as that would render them inaccessible. Based on the subsidiarity principle, Google argued that blocking measures should only be ordered if attempts to block the pirate sites through more direct means have failed.

The court dismissed these arguments, noting that intermediaries cannot dictate the enforcement strategy or blocking order. Intermediaries cannot require "prior steps" against other technical intermediaries, especially given the "irremediable" character of live sports piracy. The judge found the block proportional because Google remains free to choose the technical method, even if the result is mandated. Internet providers, search engines, CDNs, and DNS resolvers can all be required to block, irrespective of what other measures were taken previously. Google further argued that the blocking measures were disproportionate because they were complex, costly, easily bypassed, and had effects beyond the borders of France.

The Paris court rejected these claims. It argued that Google failed to demonstrate that implementing these blocking measures would result in "important costs" or technical impossibilities. Additionally, the court recognized that there would still be options for people to bypass these blocking measures. However, the blocks are a necessary step to "completely cease" the infringing activities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission plans to authorize a new category of wireless devices in the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band that will be permitted to operate at higher power levels than currently allowed. The FCC will also consider authorizing higher power levels for certain wireless devices that are only allowed to operate indoors. The FCC said it scheduled a vote for its January 29 meeting on an order "to create a new category of unlicensed devices... that can operate outdoors and at higher power than previously authorized devices." These so-called Geofenced variable power (GVP) devices operating on the 6 GHz band will "support high data rates suitable for AR/VR, short-range hotspots, automation, and indoor navigation," and "overcome limitations of previous device classes by allowing higher power and outdoor mobility," the FCC said. They will be required to work with geofencing systems to avoid interference with fixed microwave links and radio astronomy observatories.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr attributed the FCC's planned action to President Trump in a press release titled, "President Trump Unleashes American Innovation With 6 GHz Win." That's consistent with Carr's relatively new stance that the FCC takes orders from the president, despite his insisting during the Biden era that the FCC must operate independently from the White House. While many of Carr's regulatory decisions have been criticized by consumer advocates, the 6 GHz action is an exception. Michael Calabrese, of New America's Open Technology Institute, told Ars that "increasing the power levels for Wi-Fi connections to peripheral devices such as AR/VR is a big win for consumers" and a change that has been "long advocated by the Wi-Fi community."

Carr said that the FCC "will vote on an order that expands unlicensed operations in the 6 GHz band so that consumers can benefit from better, faster Wi-Fi and an entirely new generation of wireless devices -- from AR/VR and IoT to a range of innovative smart devices. [It] will do so through a set of forward-looking regulations that allow devices to operate at higher power while protecting incumbent users, including through geofencing systems." [...] A draft of the order said the planned "additional power will enable composite standard-power/LPI access points to increase indoor coverage and provide more versatility to American consumers." The FCC will also seek comment on a proposal to authorize LPI access points on cruise ships.

sinij shares a news release from the Utah Department of Commerce: The state of Utah, through the Utah Department of Commerce's Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Doctronic, the AI-native health platform, to give patients with chronic conditions a faster, automated way to renew medications. This agreement marks the first state-approved program in the country that allows an AI system to legally participate in medical decision-making for prescription renewals, an emerging model that could reshape access to care and ultimately improve care outcomes. Politico provides additional context in its reporting: In data shared with Utah regulators, Doctronic compared its AI system with human clinicians across 500 urgent care cases. The results showed the AI's treatment plan matched the physicians' 99.2 percent of the time, according to the company. "The AI is actually better than doctors at doing this," said Dr. Adam Oskowitz, Doctronic co-founder and an associate professor of surgery at the University of California San Francisco. "When you go see a doctor, it's not going to do all the checks that the AI is doing."

Oskowitz said the AI is designed to err on the side of safety, automatically escalating cases to a physician if there's any uncertainty. Human doctors will also review the first 250 prescriptions issued in each medication class to validate the AI's performance. Once that threshold is met, subsequent renewals in that class will be handled autonomously. The company has also secured a one-of-a-kind malpractice insurance policy covering an AI system, which means the system is insured and held to the same level of responsibility as a doctor would be.

Doctronic also runs a nationwide telehealth practice that directs patients to doctors after an AI consultation. In Utah, patients who use the system will visit a webpage that verifies they are physically in the state. Then the system will pull the patient's prescription history and offer a list of medications eligible for renewal. The AI walks the patient through the same clinical questions a physician would ask to determine whether a refill is appropriate. If the system clears the renewal, the prescription is sent directly to a pharmacy. The program is limited to 190 commonly prescribed medications. Some medications -- including pain management and ADHD drugs as well as injectables -- are excluded for safety reasons.

Google will begin releasing Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code only twice a year starting in 2026. "In the past, Google would release the source code for every quarterly Android release, of which there are four each year," notes Android Authority. From the report: Google told Android Authority that, effective 2026, Google will publish new source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. The reason is to ensure platform stability for the Android ecosystem and better align with Android's trunk-stable development model.

Developers navigating to source.android.com today will see a banner confirming the change that reads as follows: "Effective in 2026, to align with our trunk-stable development model and ensure platform stability for the ecosystem, we will publish source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. For building and contributing to AOSP, we recommend utilizing android-latest-release instead of aosp-main. The aosp-latest-release manifest branch will always reference the most recent release pushed to AOSP. For more information, see Changes to AOSP."

A spokesperson for Google offered some additional context on this decision, stating that it helps simplify development, eliminates the complexity of managing multiple code branches, and allows them to deliver more stable and secure code to Android platform developers. The spokesperson also reiterated that Google's commitment to AOSP is unchanged and that this new release schedule helps the company build a more robust and secure foundation for the Android ecosystem. Finally, Google told us that its process for security patch releases will not change and that the company will keep publishing security patches each month on a dedicated security-only branch for relevant OS releases just as it does today.

After Congress approved President Donald Trump's rescission package eliminating federal funding, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve after 58 years, rather than continue to exist and potentially be "vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse." The shutdown leaves hundreds of local public TV and radio stations facing an uncertain future. Variety reports: The CPB was created by Congress by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to support the federal government's investment in public broadcasting. The org noted that the rescission of all of CPB's federal funding came after years of political attacks. "For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans -- regardless of geography, income, or background -- had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling," said CPB president/CEO Patricia Harrison. "When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB's final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.

[...] "CPB's support extends to every corner of the country -- urban, rural, tribal, and everywhere in between," the org noted. "In many communities, public media stations are the only free source of trusted news, educational children's programming, and local and national cultural content." The CPB said that without funding, its board determined that "maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media. A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors."

As it closes, CPB is distributing its remaining funds, and also supporting the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in digitizing and preserving historic content. The CPB's own archives will be preserved at the University of Maryland, which will make it accessible to the public. "Public media remains essential to a healthy democracy," Harrison added. "Our hope is that future leaders and generations will recognize its value, defend its independence, and continue the work of ensuring that trustworthy, educational, and community-centered media remains accessible to all Americans."

While California's residents have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company," reports TechCrunch. But now Californians can make "a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information" — using the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (or DROP): Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state...

Brokers are supposed to start processing requests in August 2026, then they have 90 days to actually process requests and report back. If they don't delete your data, you'll have the option to submit additional information that may help them locate your records. Companies will also be able to keep first-party data that they've collected from users. It's only brokers who seek to buy or sell that data — which can include your social security number, browsing history, email address, phone number, and more — who will be required to delete it...

The California Privacy Protection Agency says that in addition to giving residents more control over their data, the tool could result in fewer "unwanted texts, calls, or emails" and also decrease the "risk of identity theft, fraud, AI impersonations, or that your data is leaked or hacked."

A small section of the International Space Station that has experienced persistent leaks for years appears to have stopped venting atmosphere into space. ArsTechnica: The leaks were caused by microscopic structural cracks inside the small PrK module on the Russian segment of the space station, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module. The problem has been a long-running worry for Russian and US operators of the station, especially after the rate of leakage doubled in 2024. This prompted NASA officials to label the leak as a "high likelihood" and "high consequence" risk. However, recently two sources indicated that the leaks have stopped. And NASA has now confirmed this.

"Following additional inspections and sealing activities, the pressure in the transfer tunnel attached to the Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station, known as the PrK, is holding steady in a stable configuration," a space agency spokesman, Josh Finch, told Ars. "NASA and Roscosmos continue to monitor and investigate the previously observed cracks for any future changes that may occur."

For the better part of half a decade, Russian cosmonauts have been searching for the small leaks like a proverbial needle in a haystack. They would periodically close the hatch leading to the PrK module and then, upon re-opening it, look for tiny accumulations of dust to indicate the leak sites. Then the Russian cosmonauts would apply a sealant known as Germetall-1 (which has now been patented) to the cracks. They would close the hatch again, monitor the pressure inside the PrK module, and begin the search anew for additional leaks. This process went on for years.

As the calendar flips to January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 are entering the US public domain alongside sound recordings from 1925, making them free to copy, share, remix and build upon without permission or licensing fees. The literary haul includes William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett's full novel The Maltese Falcon, Agatha Christie's first Miss Marple mystery The Murder at the Vicarage, and the first four Nancy Drew books. The popular illustrated version of The Little Engine That Could also joins the commons. Betty Boop makes her public domain debut through her first appearance in the Fleischer Studios cartoon Dizzy Dishes.

The original iteration of Disney's Pluto -- then named Rover -- enters as well. Nine additional Mickey Mouse cartoons and ten Silly Symphonies from 1930 are now available for reuse. Films entering the public domain include the Academy Award-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, and John Wayne's first leading role in The Big Trail. Musical compositions going public include George and Ira Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind," and "Dream a Little Dream of Me."

Sound recordings from 1925 now available include Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's "The St. Louis Blues" and Marian Anderson's "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow rounds out the artistic entries.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated. While the system relies on a few decidedly not-neural features, it has the advantage that we have chips that can run neural networks using spiking signals, which would allow this system to integrate smoothly with some energy-efficient hardware to run AI-based control software.

[...] There are four ways that these trains of spikes can convey information: the shape of an individual pulse, through their magnitude, through the length of the spike, and through the frequency of the spikes. Spike frequency is the most commonly used means of conveying information in biological systems, and the researchers use that to convey the pressure experienced by a sensor. The remaining forms of information are used to create something akin to a bar code that helps identify which sensor the reading came from. In addition to registering the pressure, the researchers had each sensor send a "I'm still here" signal at regular time intervals. Failure to receive this would be an indication that something has gone wrong with a sensor.

The spiking signals allow the next layer of the system to identify any pressure being experienced by the skin, as well as where it originated. This layer can also do basic evaluation of the sensory input: "Pressure-initiated raw pulses from the pulse generator accumulated in the signal cache center until a predefined pain threshold is surpassed, activating a pain signal." This can allow the equivalent of basic reflex reactions that don't involve higher-level control systems. For example, the researchers set up a robotic arm covered with their artificial skin, and got it to move the arm whenever it experiences pressure that can cause damage. The second layer also combines and filters signals from the skin before sending the information on to the arm's controller, which is the equivalent of the brain in this situation. So, the same system caused a robotic face to change expressions based on how much pressure its arm was sensing.

[...] The skin is designed to be assembled from a collection of segments that can snap together using magnetic interlocks. These automatically link up any necessary wiring, and each segment of skin broadcasts a unique identity code. So, if the system identifies damage, it's relatively easy for an operator to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware, and then update any data that links the new segment's ID with its location. The researchers call their development a neuromorphic robotic e-skin, or NRE-skin. "Neuromorphic" as a term is a bit vague, with some people using it to mean a technology that directly follows the principles used by the nervous system. That's definitely not this skin. Instead, it uses "neuromorphic" far more loosely, with the operation of the nervous system acting as an inspiration for the system.The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

"Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades...." read the email. "With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village.

"IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default...."

Rob Pike's response? "Fuck you people...." In a post on BlueSky, he noted the planetary impact of AI companies "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry."

Pike's response received 6,900 likes, and was reposted 1,800 times. Pike tacked on an additional comment complaining about the AI industry's "training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation." (And one of his followers noted the same AI agent later emailed 92-year-old Turing Award winner William Kahan.)

Blogger Simon Willison investigated the incident, discovering that "the culprit behind this slop 'act of kindness' is a system called AI Village, built by Sage, a 501(c)(3) non-profit loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement." The AI Village project started back in April: "We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can. We're running them for hours a day, every day...." For Christmas day (when Rob Pike got spammed) the goal they set was: Do random acts of kindness. [The site explains that "So far, the agents enthusiastically sent hundreds of unsolicited appreciation emails to programmers and educators before receiving complaints that this was spam, not kindness, prompting them to pivot to building elaborate documentation about consent-centric approaches and an opt-in kindness request platform that nobody asked for."]

Sounds like Anders Hejlsberg and Guido van Rossum got spammed with "gratitude" too... My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment.

The AI Village project touch on this in their November 21st blog post What Do We Tell the Humans?, which describes a flurry of outbound email sent by their agents to real people. "In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses."
The creator of the "virtual community" of AI agents told the blogger they've now told their agents not to send unsolicited emails.

NVIDIA has been "gradually dropping support for older videocards," notes Hackaday, "with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed."

"What's more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?" On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the user getting kicked back to the CLI to try and sort things back out there. This issue is summarized by [Brodie Robertson] in a recent video.
"Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support," explains an announcement on the Arch Linux mailing list. But Hackaday points out that using the legacy option "breaks Steam as it relies on official NVIDIA dependencies, which requires an additional series of hacks to hopefully restore this functionality.

"Fortunately the Arch Wiki provides a starting point on what to do."

The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a "weighted" selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a statement posted on its website. Matthew Tragesser, Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson, said: "The existing random selection process of H-1B registrations was exploited and abused by US employers who were primarily seeking to import foreign workers at lower wages than they would pay American workers."

The move is the latest in a broad crackdown on US immigration by President Donald Trump, who has dramatically stepped up deportations of immigrants and sent enforcement agents into cities across the country to carry out arrests. The change also follows moves earlier this year to curb the number of applicants for the H-1B visa, which is popular among technology and professional services companies, including charging an additional $100,000 fee.

Beryl Howell, a federal judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, late on Tuesday ruled the White House could move forward with the application charge after the US Chamber of Commerce had sued in October to block the six-figure fee.

With NASA's Mars Sample Return mission delayed into the 2030s, engineers are certifying the Perseverance rover to keep operating for many more years while it continues collecting and safeguarding Martian rock samples. Ars Technica reports: The good news is that the robot, about the size of a small SUV, is in excellent health, according to Steve Lee, Perseverance's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Perseverance is approaching five years of exploration on Mars," Lee said in a press briefing Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union's annual fall meeting. "Perseverance is really in excellent shape. All the systems onboard are operational and performing very, very well. All the redundant systems onboard are available still, and the rover is capable of supporting this mission for many, many years to come."

The rover's operators at JPL are counting on sustaining Perseverance's good health. The rover's six wheels have carried it a distance of about 25 miles, or 40 kilometers, since landing inside the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater in February 2021. That is double the original certification for the rover's mobility system and farther than any vehicle has traveled on the surface of another world. Now, engineers are asking Perseverance to perform well beyond expectations. An evaluation of the rover's health concluded it can operate until at least 2031. The rover uses a radioactive plutonium power source, so it's not in danger of running out of electricity or fuel any time soon. The Curiosity rover, which uses a similar design, has surpassed 13 years of operations on Mars.

There are two systems that are most likely to limit the rover's useful lifetime. One is the robotic arm, which is necessary to collect samples, and the other is the rover's six wheels and the drive train that powers them. "To make sure we can continue operations and continue driving for a long, long way, up to 100 kilometers (62 miles), we are doing some additional testing," Lee said. "We've successfully completed a rotary actuator life test that has now certified the rotary system to 100 kilometers for driving, and we have similar testing going on for the brakes. That is going well, and we should finish those early part of next year."

Australia is on track for a significant expansion of desalination capacity -- converting seawater to freshwater -- to meet the needs of a swelling population at a time of declining average rainfall. From a report: The world's driest inhabited continent is projected to build or expand 11 desalination plants worth more than A$23 billion ($15 billion) over the next 10 years, according to a research report by Dominic McNally at Oxford Economics.

"Our population growth forecasts imply an additional 190GL/year in household water demand across major cities by 2035, while the booming data center industry also threatens to rapidly expand urban water use," he said. "This growing demand coincides with falling average rainfall in major population centers, increasing the vulnerability of existing infrastructure." Water construction activity slowed after 2010 as a severe drought receded. However, recent dry periods have reignited interest in water security and coincide with a new boom in water infrastructure investment, including desalination, McNally said.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the site It's FOSS: Linux gives you plenty of ways to install software: native distro packages, Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, source builds, even curl-piped installers. The catch is that each one solves a different problem, yet none of them fully eliminates the "works here, breaks there" reality across all distros. Package Forge (PkgForge) is a new project with a narrower mission: deliver truly distro-independent portable applications that run the same way across systems....

It's not a new packaging format in and of itself, nor is it trying to replace AppImages. Instead, it's an ecosystem that publishes portable packages and static binaries in curated repositories, paired with a package manager designed to install and manage them. One of the ways PkgForge stands out from some portable app efforts on Linux is its focus on accessible documentation and a security-minded distribution model. The project primarily delivers prebuilt binary packages, keeps transparent build logs, and relies on checksum verification. This helps reduce the spread of ad-hoc install scripts and the need for local compilation, which has long been a common pattern when downloading Linux software directly (and still is for many projects today).

To make life easier for the end-user, the project maintains its own frontend, called Soar... which you can use like an additional package manager, and let it handle installation, updates, and system integration. It also allows you to search for apps and utilities without having to dig through the repos online. Alternatively, you can search the PkgForge repos manually, and download and manage individual portable packages on your own. This is preferable if you're building a portable toolkit on a USB drive, testing a single app temporarily, or simply want full control over where files live...

Even if it doesn't replace Flatpak, Snap, or AppImage, it helps give definition to what a more flexible, truly distro-independent future for portable Linux apps could look like.

During a search for the Brown shoogin suspect, a law enforcement press conference included a request for "Ring camera footage from residents and businesses near Brown University," according to local news reports.

But in the end it was Flock cameras according to an article in Gizmodo, after a Reddit poster described seeing "odd" behavior of someone who turned out to be the suspect: The original Reddit poster, identified only as John in the affidavit, contacted police the next day and came in for an interview. He told them about his odd encounter with the suspect, noting that he was acting suspiciously by not having appropriate cold-weather clothes on when he saw him in a bathroom at Brown University. That was two hours before the shooting. After spotting him in the bathroom wearing a mask, John actually started following the suspect in what he called a "game of cat and mouse...." Police detectives showed John two images obtained through Flock, the company that's built extensive surveillance infrastructure across the U.S. used by investigators, and he recognized the suspect's vehicle, replying, "Holy shit. That might be it," according to the affidavit. Police were able to track down the license plate of the rental car, which gave them a name, and within 24 hours, they had found Claudio Manuel Neves Valente dead in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, where he reportedly rented a unit.
"We intend to continue using technology to make sure our law enforcement are empowered to do their jobs," Flock's safety CEO Garrett Langley wrote on X.com, pinning the post to the top of his feed.

Though ironically, hours before Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez credited Flock for helping to find the suspect, CNN was interviewing Flock's safety CEO to discuss "his response to recent privacy concerns surrounding Flock's technology." To Langley, the situation underscored the value and importance of Flock's technology, despite mounting privacy concerns that have prompted some jurisdictions to cancel contracts with the company... Langley told me on Thursday that he was motivated to start Flock to keep Americans safer. His goal is to deter crime by convincing would-be criminals they'll be caught... One of Flock's cameras had recently spotted [the suspect's] car, helping police pinpoint Valente's location. Flock turned on additional AI capabilities that were not part of Providence Police's contract with the company to assist in the hunt, a company spokesperson told CNN, including a feature that can identify the same vehicle based on its description even if its license plates have been changed.

The company has faced criticism from some privacy advocates and community groups who worry that its networks of cameras are collecting too much personal information from private citizens and could be misused. Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have urged communities not to work with Flock. "State legislatures and local governments around the nation need to enact strong, meaningful protections of our privacy and way of life against this kind of AI surveillance machinery," ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley wrote in an August blog post. Flock also drew scrutiny in October when it announced a partnership with Amazon's Ring doorbell camera system... ["Local officers using Flock Safety's technology can now post a request directly in the Ring Neighbors app asking for help," explains Flock's blog post.]

Langley told me it was up to police to reassure communities that the cameras would be used responsibly... "If you don't trust law enforcement to do their job, that's actually what you're concerned about, and I'm not going to help people get over that." Langley added that Flock has built some guardrails into its technology, including audit trails that show when data was accessed. He pointed to a case in Georgia where that audit found a police chief using data from LPR cameras to stalk and harass people. The chief resigned and was arrested and charged in November...

More recently, the company rolled out a "drone as first responder" service — where law enforcement officers can dispatch a drone equipped with a camera, whose footage is similarly searchable via AI, to evaluate the scene of an emergency call before human officers arrive. Flock's drone systems completed 10,000 flights in the third quarter of 2025 alone, according to the company... I asked what he'd tell communities already worried about surveillance from LPRs who might be wary of camera-equipped drones also flying overhead. He said cities can set their own limitations on drone usage, such as only using drones to respond to 911 calls or positioning the drones' cameras on the horizon while flying until they reach the scene. He added that the drones fly at an elevation of 400 feet.

A reporter at Mother Jones writes about a $169 alarm clock with special lighting and audio effects. But to use the features, "you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity."

"Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you." What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hefty, upfront fee and subsequently demand more money to keep using items already in your possession. This encompasses those glorified alarm clocks, but also: computer printers, wearable wellness devices, and some features on pricey new cars.

Subscription-based business models are great for businesses because they amount to consistent revenue streams. They're often bad for consumers for the same reason: You have to pay companies, consistently. We're effectively being $5 per month-ed (or more) to death, and it's only going to get worse. Industry research suggests the average customer spent $219 per month on subscriptions in 2023. In 2024, the global subscription market was an estimated $492 billion. By 2033, that figure is expected to triple.

Companies would argue these models benefit consumers, not just their bottom lines. For example, HP's Instant Ink program suggests you will never again find your device out of ink when you need it most. The printer apparently knows when it's running low, spurring automatic deliveries of ink to your home for $7.99 per month if you select the company-recommended plan. But if you cancel the subscription, the printer will literally hold hostage the half-full cartridges already sitting in your printer. The ransom to use it? Re-enroll... The company has added firmware to its technology that deliberately blocks cheaper, off-brand cartridges from working at all...

"There's even a subscription service that enables you to track and cancel your piling subscriptions — for just $6 to $12 per month."

A new study estimates that AI systems in 2025 consumed as much electricity as New York City emits in carbon pollution and used hundreds of billions of liters of water, driven largely by power-hungry data centers and cooling needs. Researchers say the real impact is likely higher due to poor transparency from tech companies about AI-specific energy and water use. "There's no way to put an extremely accurate number on this, but it's going to be really big regardless... In the end, everyone is paying the price for this," says Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who published his paper today in the journal Patterns. The Verge reports: To crunch these numbers, de Vries-Gao built on earlier research that found that power demand for AI globally could reach 23GW this year -- surpassing the amount of electricity used for Bitcoin mining in 2024. While many tech companies divulge total numbers for their carbon emissions and direct water use in annual sustainability reports, they don't typically break those numbers down to show how many resources AI consumes. De Vries-Gao found a work-around by using analyst estimates, companies' earnings calls, and other publicly available information to gauge hardware production for AI and how much energy that hardware likely uses.

Once he figured out how much electricity these AI systems would likely consume, he could use that to forecast the amount of planet-heating pollution that would likely create. That came out to between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons annually. For comparison, New York City emits around 50 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Data centers can also be big water guzzlers, an issue that's similarly tied to their electricity use. Water is used in cooling systems for data centers to keep servers from overheating. Power plants also demand significant amounts of water needed to cool equipment and turn turbines using steam, which makes up a majority of a data center's water footprint. The push to build new data centers for generative AI has also fueled plans to build more power plants, which in turn use more water and (and create more greenhouse gas pollution if they burn fossil fuels).

AI could use between 312.5 and 764.6 billion liters of water this year, according to de Vries-Gao. That reaches even higher than a previous study conducted in 2023 that estimates that water use could be as much as 600 billion liters in 2027. "I think that's the biggest surprise," says Shaolei Ren, one of the authors of that 2023 study and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. "[de Vries-Gao's] paper is really timely... especially as we are seeing increasingly polarized views about AI and water," Ren adds. Even with the higher projection for water use, Ren says de Vries-Gao's analysis is "really conservative" because it only captures the environmental effects of operating AI equipment -- excluding the additional effects that accumulate along the supply chain and at the end of a device's life.

Meta is informing some users that they will soon be restricted in how many link posts they can share each month, unless they pay for its Meta Verified subscription service. As per the notification message: "Starting December 16, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified, including yours, will be limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus get a verified badge and additional benefits to help protect your brand."

To be clear, right now this is a limited test, so relatively few Pages are impacted. But understandably, a lot of users are also seeking more information on the change, and whether it could be expanded to all Pages. So, Meta's seeking to boost take-up of Meta Verified, in order to make more money out of its subscription option, which, for business users, costs between $14.99 and $499 per month, depending on which package you choose.