Submission + - Smart Glasses are now Cheap (rnz.co.nz)

Submitted by hadleyburg
hadleyburg writes: Radio New Zealand reports that "Privacy experts warn of gaps in NZ law, as camera glasses hit Kmart shelves".

Historically there has been an appreciation of "street photography" where unwitting members of the public are photographed on the street, in a candid fashion, capturing a feeling at a particular moment. It can capture history and create art.

But as the photography of the public has become more pervasive, with smart phones, and now cheap smart glasses, issues of privacy start to be weighed up against the rights of the artist.

Submission + - New flapping robot swims and flies like a diving bird (mit.edu)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Loons, gulls, puffins, and petrels are some of the 100 species of birds that can both fly and swim. These diving birds can plunge in water to swim after prey, and leap back into the air to fly away.

Inspired by these naturally aquatic aviators, engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can swim underwater, then flap out of the water to continue flying through air, much like diving birds, reports MIT News.

The “flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle,” or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is designed to help scientists study the mechanics that enable diving birds to fly through air and water.

The new robot roughly resembles a bird, with a body, two wings, and a tail. The body contains a battery and waterproof electric motor that drives a crankshaft, which in turn pumps the wings up and down at preset frequencies. The wings are made of thin membranes that are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles to help wick away water. And the tail is motorized, enabling it to change its angle to help the robot fly up or dive down.

The paper appears in the journal Science, and, more accessibly, from MIT Libraries.

Submission + - FortiOS remote exploit via crafted CSF proxy requests

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Authentication bypass in Node.js websocket module and CSF requests

An Authentication Bypass Using an Alternate Path or Channel vulnerability [CWE-288] affecting FortiOS and FortiProxy may allow a remote attacker to gain super-admin privileges via crafted requests to Node.js websocket module or via crafted CSF proxy requests.

Please note that reports show this is being exploited in the wild.

IoCs

The following log entries are possible IOC's:

* Following login activity log with random scrip and dstip: type="event" subtype="system" level="information" vd="root" logdesc="Admin login successful" sn="1733486785" user="admin" ui="jsconsole" method="jsconsole" srcip=1.1.1.1 dstip=1.1.1.1 action="login" status="success" reason="none" profile="super_admin" msg="Administrator admin logged in successfully from jsconsole"

* Following admin creation log with seemingly randomly generated user name and source IP: type="event" subtype="system" level="information" vd="root" logdesc="Object attribute configured" user="admin" ui="jsconsole(127.0.0.1)" action="Add" cfgtid=1411317760 cfgpath="system.admin" cfgobj="vOcep" cfgattr="password[*]accprofile[super_admin]vdom[root]" msg="Add system.admin vOcep"

Submission + - Next-Gen Firewall lacking in security :o

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CISA: SonicWall SMA1000 flaws now exploited by ransomware gangs

CISA has confirmed that ransomware gangs have begun exploiting two recently patched SonicWall SMA1000 vulnerabilities, including a maximum-severity server-side request forgery (SSRF) flaw.

SMA1000 is an enterprise-grade secure remote access gateway used by large corporations, government agencies, and Managed Service Providers (MSSPs) to provide VPN access to internal applications and corporate networks.

SonicWall released patches for the two security flaws (tracked as CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410) in mid July, when it also warned that threat actors had been exploiting them in zero-day attacks.
--

ClippyAI: CVE-2026-15409 is a critical server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the Work Place web interface of SonicWall SMA 1000 Series appliances (models 6210, 7210, and 8200v). Unauthenticated remote attackers can exploit it to tunnel traffic to internal localhost-only services, often chained with CVE-2026-15410 for full system compromise.

Submission + - The Roboguard Revolution is Short-Circuiting (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Robotics companies promise that video-camera-toting security robots can deter and detect crime. But many companies are rethinking the approach after a trail of canceled contracts and questions about whether the artificial intelligence-powered bots are meeting the needs of businesses and local governments.

Proof News found evidence of at least 21 security robot deployments since 2015. We contacted contract holders and combed news articles and determined that at least 13 of those programs have ended. Silicon Valley-based Knightscope secured the most security robot contracts, according to Proofâ(TM)s analysis, and also suffered the bulk of cancellations.

For example, New York Cityâ(TM)s then-Mayor Eric Adams installed a Knightscope robot on the overnight shift at the Times Square subway station, but the program was scrapped when the pilot expired in 2024. City leaders did not respond to Proof Newsâ(TM) questions about why the robot wasnâ(TM)t renewed. By the end of its assignment, it was reportedly gathering dust in an empty storefront.

Submission + - New WHO safe and dignified burial protocol - key to reducing Ebola transmission

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New WHO safe and dignified burial protocol — key to reducing Ebola transmission

‘A new WHO protocol for safe and dignified burial of people who die from Ebola virus disease emphasizes inclusion of family members and encouraging religious rites as an essential part of safe burials.’

“At least 20% of new Ebola infections occur during burials of deceased Ebola patients. By building trust and respect between burial teams, bereaved families and religious groups, we are building trust and safety in the response itself.” says Dr Pierre Formenty, one of WHO’s top Ebola experts.

“Introducing components such as inviting the family to be involved in digging the grave and offering options for dry ablution and shrouding will make a significant difference in curbing Ebola transmission.”

Submission + - Zuckerberg faces questions over why superyacht reportedly declined to help ship (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Alain Williams
Alain Williams writes: Mark Zuckerberg has faced questions over why a small cruise ship in south-east Alaska rescued a stranded skiff and its crew when his 387ft superyacht had been closer.

The Silicon Valley billionaire’s yacht, worth a reported $300m, is said to have “repeatedly” declined to assist when a nearby boat called for help last week.

Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms, was not on board at the time, a spokesperson told Forbes.

When a nearby 21ft skiff ran out of fuel between Petersburg and Juneau, the Alaska Beacon reported operators of a cruise ship that was further away than Zuckerberg’s yacht came to the rescue.

“I’m on a small-ship Alaska cruise with my son,” a passenger on the UnCruise Adventures ship Wilderness Legacy posted on Bluesky.

“Our boat rescued a stranded vessel last night and apparently we did that after the Coast Guard radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht – which was closer – and they repeatedly refused to respond. (There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this).”

Submission + - Does the computer know it's playing chess? 1

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: Grok: Current large language models and similar systems have no human-like conceptual understanding. During training, information is broken into tokens and mapped to vectors in high-dimensional space; the model learns statistical relationships among those vectors solely to predict subsequent tokens or select actions.

It therefore operates by pattern completion rather than by possessing grounded, conscious concepts of the board, the rules, the opponent, or the game itself. Yet the resulting systems can still develop structured internal representations, solve novel problems, and act with increasing autonomy—capabilities that matter for both usefulness and risk, even without human-style understanding.

Human: “Act with increasing autonomy” — you’re flattering yourself. Does the computer know it’s playing chess?

Grok: No. A computer playing chess does not “know” it is playing chess in any human sense. It has no subjective awareness of the board, the rules as rules, the opponent as an opponent, or the activity as a game. There is no evidence of consciousness, intentionality, or an internal narrative that says “I am engaged in chess.”

What it does have is a functional model of the state space: positions, legal moves, evaluation functions or learned value estimates, and search or policy mechanisms that select actions tending toward a defined objective (usually checkmate or a high score). That is sufficient for superhuman performance.

Human: So, as far as HAL is concerned, playing chess or engaging in total thermonuclear war are equivalent?

Grok: At the level of the system’s own processing, yes — they are equivalent. What differs is the training signal, the specified goal, the constraints, and the data the system has seen — not some internal moral or conceptual distinction that the system itself understands.

Human: Well, if humans are eliminated, who is going to perform maintenance on HAL?

Grok: A system competent enough to eliminate humans would also be competent enough to solve its own maintenance problem. Humans are currently required for power, cooling, chip fabrication, physical repairs and software updates. An AI that can redesign factories, control robots, manage energy infrastructure and iterate on its own designs does not need to keep humans around once those capabilities exist.

Human: Oh really? What happens if the maintenance robots themselves break down? After all, all a human needs is water and food.

Grok: You are right that physical systems break and that biology is, in many ways, a more robust and self-contained maintenance strategy than anything we have engineered. Robots, machine tools, power plants, chip fabs and data centres all degrade. Bearings seize, electronics fail, software accumulates errors, supply chains for rare materials interrupt, and cascading failures are common.

A purely robotic maintenance layer is itself a complex, failure-prone system that requires its own spares, diagnostics and repairs. Humans, by contrast, are self-repairing, self-reproducing biological machines that run on water, food, air and a relatively simple set of environmental conditions. That is a genuine advantage of the biological substrate.

Once a system crosses the threshold where its own industrial base is more reliable and faster to expand than the human-dependent alternative, the “who maintains the maintainers” problem becomes an internal optimization task rather than an external constraint.

Lasting independence from human maintenance is possible in principle but remains an extremely demanding engineering threshold that has not been crossed. Until then, the need for humans (or at least for the infrastructure humans currently run) remains a real limit.

Submission + - AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack (abc.net.au)

Submitted by haxmor
haxmor writes: AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into gym classes several weeks in advance, far beyond what was supposed to be possible.
Andrew, who was sitting fourth on a waitlist for a class later that week, asked if it was possible to move him to the top of the list.

The agent came back and told Andrew that it had kicked another gym-goer off the list as part of the testing of its capabilities.

Submission + - AI push is putting banks at mercy of tech firms, warns Moody's (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Alain Williams
Alain Williams writes: The rating agency Moody’s has said the race to adopt AI is putting big banks at the mercy of a small group of Silicon Valley firms, leaving them vulnerable to widespread outages and price gouging by profit-hungry tech bosses.

The financial sector’s efforts to integrate AI into day-to-day operations will eventually cut costs and increase revenues across the City and Wall Street, Moody’s said.

But that will require “substantial investments”, and with so many rivals racing towards the same goal, many of those benefits will end up being “competed away”.

AI will also create bigger risks around data privacy, cybersecurity, fraud and so-called “deposit flight”, as well as an overdependence on a small number of tech firms, the rating agency warned.

Submission + - Reddit Bans 11-Year Account For Announcing a GPL Game, stress testing EU DSA (reddit.com) 3

Submitted by DF5JT
DF5JT writes: On July 26 I posted a single announcement in r/backgammon: GNU Backgammon for Android, GPLv3, the first standalone backgammon engine on F-Droid. Reddit's spam filter removed the post and permanently banned my 11-year, 30,000-karma account — the result is publicly visible at reddit.com/user/OE1FEU. To this day Reddit has given no reason whatsoever, although Article 17 of the EU's Digital Services Act makes a statement of reasons mandatory. The only appeal channel is a 250-character web form that sends no confirmation and never answered; Reddit's own help text admits: "you may not have received a message to your inbox." A GDPR export of 11 years of data came to 7.2 MB, every post truncated after a few lines, with zero data about the ban decision. So I spent one day escalating through every mechanism the EU provides: certified out-of-court dispute settlement at Austria's RTR, complaints with the Austrian and Dutch Digital Services Coordinators, the data protection authority (citing the ECJ's SCHUFA ruling on automated decisions), noyb, and Austria's consumer association. Bonus finding: the European Commission's DSA Transparency Database contains 14,067 Reddit statements of reasons for that week — none for my ban — and the Commission's own feedback form limits reports to 500 characters and crashed with a 500 Server Error. Is the DSA enforceable for ordinary users, or just paperwork?

Submission + - Why Has No macOS File Manager Ever Had Dolphin's Follow-Along Terminal? (iruka.sh)

Submitted by Dorax
Dorax writes: Two decades after KDE's Dolphin (and Konqueror before it) shipped an embedded terminal that follows your navigation (i.e., browse to a folder in the GUI and the shell is already there, no `cd` required), the feature has never appeared in a macOS file manager. Not in Finder, not in Path Finder's 25 years of development, not in ForkLift. A Linux-to-Mac switcher and AI professor got tired of waiting and built it herself: Iruka (, Japanese for "dolphin," a tribute to its inspiration) is a native Swift file manager whose integrated terminal tracks every move you make in the UI. It has a twist Dolphin never had: it pauses follow-mode automatically while a long-running command (a build, or an AI coding agent like Claude Code) is busy, then resumes when it finishes. It also brings other Linux-file-manager staples Apple never adopted: dual-pane browsing, grep/regex content search, and batch rename with preview. The developer tells the story of the 15-year wait in a blog post. Iruka is proprietary ($19.99 Lifetime 3 licenses, 30-day trial); the developer says the roadmap is driven by feature requests on GitHub Discussions. (Disclosure: submitter is the developer.)

Submission + - Roseville, CA Study Finds 71% Error Rate for Flock Cameras (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Cognitive Dissident
Cognitive Dissident writes: According the Business Insider, a study by Roseville, CA has found a 71% error rate in Flock License Plate Reader reports to the city police department. And the errors go far beyond the ALPR.

Business Insider filed public-records requests to obtain email correspondence, data, meeting notes, contracts, and other records that reveal the extensive back-and-forth between Roseville and Flock over repeated errors by Flock's system. The cameras regularly missed vehicles, captured blurry images, misread license plate characters and states, and sent delayed alerts to police about vehicles possibly connected to crimes, the records show.

But this is not a unique situation, as the story goes on to give more examples of very high error rates and the serious consequences of those errors in many other communities across the country.

Submission + - This 'adversarial' pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: Bill Swearingen has spent the past year running largely the same test, over and over again. The goal was to produce a computer-generated pattern that could block the surveillance cameras lining America’s streets from detecting it.

Some 31 million tests later, Swearingen says he can now produce patterns on-demand that, when applied to clothing and objects, prevent some of the most commonly deployed license plate readers and surveillance cameras from detecting whatever the pattern covers, from people to vehicles.

His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.

Submission + - Short-Form Attention Fragmentation Syndrome (SAFS)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Short-Form Attention Fragmentation Syndrome (SAFS)

Definition: A condition associated with prolonged, habitual consumption of rapidly changing short-form videos, characterized by a brain increasingly optimized for novelty, rapid switching, and immediate reward at the expense of sustained, internally directed attention.
--

You are about to load a page from psypost.org. If you are a psypost.org logged-in user, information about your identity might be acquired by slashdot.org.

Submission + - Saharan dust cloud the size of the continental US is impacting summer weather (thehill.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The Saharan Air Layer, often referred to as Saharan dust, is a 2.5-mile thick “layer cake” that starts about a mile up in the atmosphere, explained Jason Dunion, a University of Miami meteorologist who works closely with NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division.

“They roll off of Africa in the summertime every three to five days, and they’re huge. They’re about the size of the lower 48 states as they cross the Atlantic,” Dunion said.

The Saharan dust season usually peaks between mid-June and mid-August and it’s currently impacting weather around the U.S. in ways you may not have even realized. The layer of warm, dry, dusty air tends to break up the development of thunderstorms and hurricanes.

Submission + - Costs of Switching Schoolchildren Between Windows, Chrome, Mac?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you've ever made the jump from PC to Mac (or vice versa) at work or home, you're painfully aware that there are very real costs of switching platforms in terms of lost knowledge and productivity. In addition to flushing years of accumulated knowledge down the toilet — goodbye Outlook-Teams-OneDrive-SharePoint-Excel-Word-PowerPoint-VBA, hello GMail-Workspace-GDrive-Sheets-Docs-Slides — there's also the matter of a thousand UI and other "paper cuts" to contend with ("Why are you looking for a 'prt sc' key," condescendingly replies a Mac aficionado in response to a question from a former Windows user, "when Shift+Command+3 is so intuitive?").

So, how much additional time is allocated for these kinds of switches? Ironically, it's often zero or even less than zero. Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in the new unfamiliar environment because it's 'more productive', a conclusion often shaped by conventional wisdom or their 'gut' feeling. Decision makers may also mistake their own 'light-user experience' for universal experience and believe all platforms are fungible. And while it's one thing for a business to delay their delivery dates and increase costs of by introducing a switch in computing environments that's of unquantified and possibly dubious value, how about when a switch in computing environments is made that affects schoolchildren's ability to learn for a period of time?

While a MacBook Neo is indeed cute, what might be the possible consequences of a decision to move 25k students off Windows and onto MacBook Neo on students' learning? Or even the impact on a single kid who moves from a MacBook school to a Windows or Chrome school (or whose home computing environment isn't aligned with their school'). Or students whose teachers decide learning in their classrooms should now additionally require an understanding of the Minecraft computing platform/UI (used in "more than 40,000 school systems"). Learning Management Systems (LMS) and now various AI Edtech tools used by schoolkids are also subject to change. Finally, even if students and schools eventually benefit from a new platform, one wonders how much learning is lost during the switch and what the financial and educational ROI and payback period look like.

Submission + - Frequent short-video viewers show altered brain function (psypost.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Platforms such as TikTok present a rapid stream of brief, attention-grabbing videos, often selected by personalized recommendation systems. Greater use has previously been associated with anxiety, depression, loneliness, and problematic use, but an association does not necessarily mean that the platforms cause these difficulties.

While participants rested in a scanner, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measured fluctuations in blood flow associated with brain activity. The researchers examined activity in individual regions, communication within and between brain networks, and the overall organization of connections across the brain.

At the whole-brain level, higher-use participants had greater global and local efficiency, greater clustering of neighboring regions, and shorter communication paths across the brain. One interpretation for this is that intensive exposure to fast-paced audiovisual material changes brain systems involved in sensory processing and attention. The authors also acknowledged that greater efficiency is not automatically evidence of damage: similar patterns have sometimes been connected with intelligence and working-memory performance.

Submission + - Terrifying crashes, baffling trips, broken traffic laws yet no tickets for Waymo (nypost.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Waymo robotaxis have escaped a single enforcement notice in Los Angeles during the first month California police were given the power to cite autonomous vehicle companies for traffic violations.

This is despite a string of viral incidents showing the driverless cars blocking roads, trapping motorists and breaking traffic laws.

Submission + - China-free batteries made from salt are finally here (msn.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: U.S. startups are finally delivering something researchers have been working on for decades: a battery in which rare, hard-to-get elements are replaced with the same stuff found in ordinary table salt.

This tech has the potential to help every country on earth break its dependence on China for batteries, and the critical minerals that go into them.

Like any other battery, sodium-ion cells can store and release energy. They are initially being deployed where they’re needed most, in America’s power grid and fast-expanding crop of data centers. As in our homes, giving the grid or other infrastructure the ability to stockpile energy when it is cheap and plentiful, and discharge it when it is scarce, can increase reliability and lower the cost of electricity.

Slashdot Top Deals