An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fast-food chain Whataburger's app has gone viral in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, which left around 1.8 million utility customers in Houston, Texas without power. Hundreds of thousands of those people may remain without power for days as Houston anticipates a heat wave, with temperatures climbing into the mid-90s. Amid frustrations with the local utility company CenterPoint Energy, which doesn't offer an app, some Houstonians got creative with their attempts to track the power outages. They turned to the Whataburger app instead.

Whataburger is a San Antonio-based fast-food chain with 127 stores in the Houston area, according to Newsweek. On the Whataburger app, users can see a map of Whataburger locations, with an orange logo indicating a store is open, and a grey logo meaning it's closed. Since CenterPoint Energy doesn't have an online map of outages, an X user with the screen name BBQBryan found that the map of which Whataburger stores are open could be a useful tool for seeing where there's power. This viral moment seems to have boosted Whataburger's download numbers. In the iOS App Store, Whataburger is currently ranked 16th in the food and drink category. Just three weeks ago, it was ranked 40th. "The Whataburger app works as a power outage tracker, handy since the electric company doesn't show a map," BBQBryan wrote in a post that now has over 22,000 likes and 6.9 million impressions.

"Well there's a use for our app we didn't think of!" the Whataburger X account replied. "We hope you and everyone else are okay!"

America's National Transportation Safety Board "is investigating a fatal crash in San Antonio, Texas, involving a Ford electric vehicle that may have been using a partially automated driving system," reports the Associated Press: The NTSB said that preliminary information shows a Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV equipped with the company's partially automated driving system collided with the rear of a Honda CR-V that was stopped in one of the highway lanes.

Television station KSAT reported that the Mach-E driver told police the Honda was stopped in the middle lane with no lights on before the crash around 9:50 p.m. The 56-year-old driver of the CR-V was killed. "NTSB is investigating this fatal crash due to its continued interest in advanced driver assistance systems and how vehicle operators interact with these technologies," the agency statement said.

Ford's Blue Cruise system allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel while it handles steering, braking and acceleration on highways. The company says the system isn't fully autonomous and it monitors drivers to make sure they pay attention to the road. It operates on 97% of controlled access highways in the U.S. and Canada, Ford says.

The BBC checks in on "the pioneers of space exploration — the 24 Nasa astronauts who travelled to the Moon in the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s." Ken Mattingly and Frank Borman died within a few days of each other late last year. Now only eight people who have voyaged beyond the Earth's orbit remain. Who are they, and what are their stories...? There are only four people still alive who have walked on the Moon — Charlie Duke is one of them. He did it aged 36, making him the youngest person to set foot on the lunar surface... Charlie Duke now lives outside San Antonio, Texas, with Dorothy, to whom he has been married for 60 years....

Jim Lovell is one of only three men to have travelled to the Moon twice, and following Frank Borman's death in November 2023, he became the oldest living astronaut....

After leaving Nasa in 1975, [Harrison Schmitt] was elected to the U.S. Senate from his home state of New Mexico, but only served one term. Since then he has worked as a consultant in various industries as well as continuing in academia.
And when confronted by a man claiming Apollo 11 was an elaborate lie, 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin "punched him on the jaw." Despite struggles in later life, he never lost his thirst for adventure and joined expeditions to both the North and South Poles, the latter at the age of 86. While embracing his celebrity, he has remained an advocate for the space programme, especially the need to explore Mars.

"I don't think we should just go there and come back — we did that with Apollo," he says.
Last 93-year-old Buzz Aldrin got married — and thanked his fans for remembering his birthday. "It means a lot and I hope to continue serving a greater cause for many more revolutions around the sun."

Antonio Regaladoarchive, reporting for MIT Technology Review: The gene-editing technology CRISPR has been used to change the genes of human babies, to modify animals, and to treat people with sickle-cell disease. Now scientists are attempting a new trick: using CRISPR to permanently cure people of HIV. In a remarkable experiment, a biotechnology company called Excision BioTherapeutics says it added the gene-editing tool to the bodies of three people living with HIV and commanded it to cut, and destroy, the virus wherever it is hiding. The early-stage study is a probing step toward the company's eventual goal of curing HIV infection with a single intravenous dose of a gene-editing drug. Excision, which is based in San Francisco, says the first patient received treatment about a year ago.

This week, doctors involved in the study reported at a meeting in Brussels that the treatment appeared safe and did not have major side-effects. However, they withheld early data about the treatment's effects, leaving outside experts guessing whether it had worked. "This is an exceptionally ambitious and important trial," says Fyodor Urnov, a genome-editing expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who believes it "would be good to know sooner than later" what the effect was -- "including, potentially, no effect."

A failure wouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with HIV. It has proved a devious adversary: there is still no vaccine, even 40 years after the virus was identified in 1983. Still, pharmaceutical companies did develop antiretroviral drugs, which stop the virus from copying itself. Taking these pills lets people with HIV live normal lives. But if they stop, the virus will quickly rebound and, if left unchecked, cause the fatal syndrome of infections and cancers known as AIDS. One reason the virus can't be fully wiped out with drugs alone is that it inserts its genetic material into the DNA of our cells, leaving behind hidden copies that can restart the infection.

Agence France-Presse reports that "Two years ago, El Salvador shrugged off a chorus of warnings and adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in a bid to revitalize its economy and improve access to financial services.

"It has not worked... Economist Cesar Villalona told AFP that Bitcoin 'does not exist in the local economy' in any significant way, because in El Salvador 'everything' is paid in dollars: wages, services and goods." Bitcoin has lost more than half its value since then and though President Nayib Bukele is wildly popular for his clampdown on criminal gangs, his currency gamble has not gone down equally well... [T]wo years after El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as its currency, alongside the U.S. dollar, "the goals that were pursued... have not been achieved, people hardly use it, they don't have much trust" in crypto, economist and former Reserve Bank governor Carlos Acevedo told AFP. "The experiment has not worked, it is a crypto winter," he said.

There are no figures available on how many Salvadorans have taken up Bitcoin. But a poll conducted in May by the Central American University found that 71 percent believed the cryptocurrency "has in no way helped to improve their family economic situation."

On the streets of San Salvador, the verdict is harsh. "I don't see that money working, it's just propaganda. Where's the benefit? There's no benefit. It's a bad investment," newspaper vendor Juan Antonio Salgado, 65, told AFP. "It's robbery," he added, in reference to the currency's volatility.
Even a video report from Al Jazeera opens by asking "So has the experiment succeeded? The general verdict — not yet, at least."

They report that even though one fifth of El Salvador's GDP comes from remittances, less than 2% of its remittances went through crypto currency and digital wallets so far this year. Building has yet to begin on "Bitcoin City" — and the country has yet to actually issue the "Volcano Bonds" that would fund its creation.

And meanwhile, the government's bitcoin purchases have now lost an estimated $45.4 million.

Last month was the planet's warmest June since global temperature record-keeping began in 1850, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its monthly climate update on Thursday. From a report: The agency also predicts unusually hot temperatures will occur in most of the United States, almost everywhere except the northern Great Plains, during August. The first two weeks of July were also likely the Earth's warmest on human record, for any time of year, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Many daily temperature records were set in June across the Southern United States, particularly in Texas and Louisiana. Temperatures in Laredo, Texas, reached 100 degrees on more than 20 days in June. Austin, El Paso and San Antonio reached triple digits on more than 10 days each. The heat index, which also accounts for humidity, was well past 100 much of the time in all of these cities. Extreme heat can be dangerous for anyone's body, but older people and outdoor workers are at particular risk. Summer heat waves in Europe last year may have killed 61,000 people across the continent, according to a recent study. This year's heat and humidity have been devastating in northern Mexico, where more than 100 people have died of heat-related causes, according to reports from the federal health ministry.

Researchers have discovered high concentrations of phosphorus in ice crystals emitted from Saturn's moon Enceladus, enhancing its potential to support life. The findings, based on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, suggest that Enceladus may possess the necessary elements for life. Reuters reports: The discovery was based on data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the first to orbit Saturn, during its 13-year landmark exploration of the gaseous giant planet, its rings and its moons from 2004 to 2017. The same team previously confirmed that Enceladus' ice grains contain a rich assortment of minerals and complex organic compounds, including the ingredients for amino acids, associated with life as scientists know it. But phosphorus, the least abundant of six chemical elements considered necessary to all living things -- the others are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur -- was still missing from the equation until now.

"It's the first time this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth," the study's lead author, Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the Free University in Berlin, said in a JPL press release. [...] One notable aspect of the latest Enceladus discovery was geochemical modeling by the study's co-authors in Europe and Japan showing that phosphorus exists in concentrations at least 100 times that of Earth's oceans, bound water-soluble forms of phosphate compounds. "This key ingredient could be abundant enough to potentially support life in Enceladus' ocean," said co-investigator Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. "This is a stunning discovery for astrobiology." "Whether life could have originated in Enceladus' ocean remains an open question," Glein said.

Space experts convened in Washington DC for 2023's "Humans to Mars Summit," reports Vice, where one panel explored civil engineering and construction on the moon and Mars. Melodie Yasher, who serves as vice president of building design and performance at ICON, previewed her company's vision of lunar infrastructure based on 3D-printing and additive manufacturing technologies... "We're looking into how to create, first, horizontal construction elements such as landing pads and roadways, and then eventually thinking about how we can develop vertical construction elements" such as "unpressurized structures and eventually, habitats that are pressurized and certified for human occupancy," she added. ICON plans to use lunar dirt, known as regolith, as a resource to manufacture a wide range of infrastructure projects on the Moon with a single robotic 3D-printing system. In 2022, the company won a $57.2 million Small Business Innovation Research contract from NASA to develop its lunar construction techniques...

Later in the same panel, Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO of XArc Exploration Architecture Corporation, also offered a sneak peek of the lunar technologies in development at the XArc subsidiary Astroport. Ximenes and his colleagues at Astroport are focused on making Moon bricks out of lunar regolith that can be used to construct landing pads, as part of their "Lunatron" bricklayer vision... Astroport is working with researchers at the University of Texas, San Antonio, to invent an induction furnace nozzle that heats up lunar regolith so that it can melt, then solidify, into bricks. A number of specialized robots would then assemble the materials into landing pads that can accommodate robotic and crewed missions to the Moon's surface. In addition to the company's work on lunar technologies, it has also created concepts for future human missions to Mars.

Academics in the US have developed an attack dubbed NUIT, for Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan, that exploits vulnerabilities in smart device microphones and voice assistants to silently and remotely access smart phones and home devices. The Register reports: The research team -- Guenevere Chen, an associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, her doctoral student Qi Xia, and Shouhuai Xu, a professor at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs -- found Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa are all vulnerable to NUIT attacks, albeit to different degrees. In an interview with The Register this month, Chen and Xia demonstrated two separate NUIT attacks: NUIT-1, which emits sounds to exploit a victim's smart speaker to attack the same victim's microphone and voice assistant on the same device, and NUIT-2, which exploits a victim's speaker to attack the same victim's microphone and voice assistant on a different device. Ideally, for the attacker, these sounds should be inaudible to humans.

The attacks work by modulating voice commands into near-ultrasound inaudible signals so that humans can't hear them but the voice assistant will still respond to them. These signals are then embedded into a carrier, such as an app or YouTube video. When a vulnerable device picks up the carrier, it ends up obeying the hidden embedded commands. Attackers can use social engineering to trick the victim into playing the sound clip, Xia explained. "And once the victim plays this clip, voluntarily or involuntarily, the attacker can manipulate your Siri to do something, for example, open your door."

For NUIT-1 attacks, using Siri, the answer is yes. The boffins found they could control an iPhone's volume so that a silent instruction to Siri generates an inaudible response. The other three voice assistants -- Google's, Cortana, and Alexa -- are still susceptible to the attacks, but for NUIT-1, the technique can't silence devices' response so the victim may notice shenanigans are afoot. It's also worth noting that the length of malicious commands must be below 77 milliseconds -- that's the average reaction time for the four voice assistants across multiple devices.

In a NUIT-2 attack, the attacker exploits the speaker on one device to attack the microphone and associated voice assistant of a second device. These attacks aren't limited by the 77-millisecond window and thus give the attacker a broader range of possible action commands. An attacker could use this scenario during Zooms meeting, for example: if an attendee unmutes themself, and their phone is placed next to their computer, an attacker could use an embedded attack signal to attack that attendees phone. The researchers will publish their research and demonstrate the NUIT attacks at the USENIX Security Symposium in August.

"A Texas truck theft ended in gun fire after the suspected thief was tracked down by thevehicle's owner's AirTag," reports AppleInsider: San Antonio police received a stolen vehicle report at around 1 pm from a Braesview home. However, before police could recover the stolen truck, the owners of the vehicle decided to perform their own investigation, using an AirTag left in the truck to do so. The unnamed owners tracked the truck to a shopping center in Southeast Military Drive, reports KSAT. However, rather than wait for police to arrive, the truck owners decided to approach the vehicle and confront the suspect.

While it is unknown exactly what happened, Police say it seems the suspected thief may have pulled out their own firearm. The vehicle owner responded by shooting and killing the suspect while they were inside the truck. It is unclear whether the vehicle owner will face charges over the matter, and an investigation is ongoing into whether the suspect actually had a weapon in the first place.
The San Antonio police department's public information officer offered these remarks (in a video from KSAT):

"Most importantly is, to the public, SAPD is urging you if you are to get your vehicle stolen: I know that it's frustrating, but please do not take matters into your own hands like this. Our police department has plenty of resources that could go into finding your vehicle, i.e. our drone system, trackers ourselves, very good patrolmen that look for these kind of things. It's never safe to take matters into your own hands, as you can see today by this incident.... That's why I urge the public, wait for police in this matter. Let us go with you. We have the training. We know exactly how to determine what's going to happen, these kind of factors and situations, and we know how to handle them."

Richard Yoo, who founded and helped build the website hosting company that became San Antonio's premier technology firm, believes he's watching its collapse. From a report: The reputation of the company now known as Rackspace Technology, he said, "is eroding rapidly" after years of shifting business plans, executive shuffles, financial losses, staff cuts and, finally, the Dec. 2 ransomware attack that left tens of thousands of customers without access to their email, contact and calendar data.

"This is the beginning of the end," Yoo said last week. "It's already just a midsize business in San Antonio. This is not a company that's on a trajectory of growth. They're on a trajectory of death. It will not be around." He puts the blame for Rackspace's deepening financial struggles -- it's posted a steady string of quarterly losses, and the value of its stock has fallen 80 percent in the past year -- on its replacement of tech-oriented leadership with board members and managers "who don't have any connection with the product." He said there's "no culture" at the company after it laid off hundreds of local staffers while it expanded globally. And he scoffed at the idea of being a "Racker," saying he never adopted the term the company uses for its employees and identity.

NASA's Juno spacecraft has made the closest approach to Jupiter's tantalizing, icy moon Europa in more than 20 years. From a report: Juno on Thursday zipped within 222 miles (357 kilometers) of Europa, thought to have an ocean flowing beneath its thick frozen crust, raising the possibility of underwater life. Scientists hope to get lucky and observe possible water plumes shooting from the surface of Europa, close in size to Earth's moon. "We have to be at the right place at just the right time, but if we are so fortunate, it's a home run for sure," Juno's chief scientist, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. John Bordi, deputy mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, expected the spacecraft to go "screaming by pretty fast," with a relative velocity of almost 15 miles per second (23.6 kilometers per second). Pictures should be available by Friday, NASA said. The latest observations will help NASA plan for its Europa Clipper mission, due to launch in 2024. The European Space Agency also plans close encounters with its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, lifting off next year.

A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago analyzed data from a moving company, concluding that 59.4% of the moves in California were out of the state — the second-highest percentage for any state in America (behind only Illinois). And that percentage is growing, reports the Los Angeles Times, since between 2018 and 2019, California had a lower outbound move rate of just 56%. Citing changes in work-life balance, opportunities for remote work and more people deciding to quit their jobs, the report found that droves of Californians are leaving for states like Texas, Virginia, Washington and Florida. California lost more than 352,000 residents between April 2020 and January 2022, according to California Department of Finance statistics [about 15,476 per month].

San Francisco and Los Angeles rank first and second in the country, respectively, for outbound moves as the cost of living and housing prices continue to balloon and homeowners flee to less expensive cities, according to a report from Redfin released this month. [Los Angeles residents] in particular, are flocking to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio and Dallas. The number of Los Angeles residents leaving the city jumped from around 33,000 in the second quarter of 2021 to nearly 41,000 in the same span of 2022, according to the report.

California has grappled with extremely high housing prices compared with other states, according to USC economics professor Matthew Kahn. Combined with the pandemic and the rise in remote work, privileged households relocated when they had the opportunity. "People want to live here, but an unintended consequence of the state's environmentalism is we're not building enough housing in desirable downtown areas," Kahn said. "That prices out middle-class people to the suburbs [and creates] long commutes. We don't have road pricing to help the traffic congestion, and these headaches add up. So when you create the possibility of work from home, many of these people ... they say 'enough' and they move to a cheaper metropolitan area." Kahn also pointed out that urban crime, a growing unhoused population, public school quality and overall quality of life are driving out residents.

"In New York City, but also in San Francisco, there are all these fights about which kids get into which elite public schools," he said. "The rich are always able to hide in their bubble, but if the middle class looks at this quality of life declining, that's a push factor to leave."

Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather cited a June report that tracked the change in spending power of a homebuyer on a $2,500 monthly budget. While 11.2% of homes in Los Angeles were affordable on that budget, using a 3% interest rate, that amount swelled to about 72% in Houston and about 50% in Phoenix. "It's really an affordability problem," Fairweather said. "California for the longest time has prioritized single-family zoning, which makes it so people stay in their homes longer because their property taxes don't reflect the true value. California is the epicenter of where the housing shortage is so people have no choice but to move elsewhere."
The Times also notes figures from the Public Policy Institute of California showing that the state's population did increase between 2010 and 2020 — but by just 5.8%, "below the national growth rate of 6.8%, and resulting in the loss of a congressional seat in 2021 for the first time in the state's history."

At least part of this seems tied to a sudden curtailing of immigration into California. UCLA economics professor Lee Ohanian points out that immigration had offset California's population outflow over the past two decades, but "Delays in processing migration requests to the U.S. were compounded during the pandemic, resulting in the lowest levels of immigration in decades, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Estimates showed a net increase of 244,000 new immigrants between 2020 and 2021 — roughly half the 477,000 new immigrant residents recorded between 2019 and 2020 and a drastic reduction from more than 1 million reported from 2015 to 2016." The state is also seeing a dwindling middle class, said Ohanian, who cited a report from the National Association of Realtors, outlining that the national median home sales price has reached $416,000, a record high. Meanwhile, California's median home price has topped $800,000. "(California is) at a risk for becoming a state for very, very wealthy people and very, very low earners who receive state and local and federal aid that allows them to be able to live here," Ohanian said. "We should worry about those in the middle who are earning that $78,000 household median income and is, at the end of the day, really struggling, especially if they have interest in buying a home."

A 37-year-old junior professor in Tennessee "identified apparently altered or duplicated images in dozens of journal articles," reports Science magazine.

But that was just the beginning for Matthew Schrag, whose sleuthing then "drew him into a different episode of possible misconduct, leading to findings that threaten one of the most cited Alzheimer's studies of this century and numerous related experiments." The first author of that influential study, published in Nature in 2006, was an ascending neuroscientist: Sylvain Lesné of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His work underpins a key element of the dominant yet controversial amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's, which holds that A clumps, known as plaques, in brain tissue are a primary cause of the devastating illness, which afflicts tens of millions globally. In what looked like a smoking gun for the theory and a lead to possible therapies, Lesné and his colleagues discovered an A subtype and seemed to prove it caused dementia in rats.

If Schrag's doubts are correct, Lesné's findings were an elaborate mirage....

A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schrag's suspicions and raised questions about Lesné's research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer's researchers — including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) — reviewed most of Schrag's findings at Science's request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné's papers. Some look like "shockingly blatant" examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer's expert at the University of Kentucky. The authors "appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments," says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. "The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to ... better fit a hypothesis...."

Schrag's work, done independently of Vanderbilt and its medical center, implies millions of federal dollars may have been misspent on the research — and much more on related efforts. Some Alzheimer's experts now suspect Lesné's studies have misdirected Alzheimer's research for 16 years. "The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments," says Stanford University neuroscientist Thomas Südhof, a Nobel laureate and expert on Alzheimer's and related conditions.

Lesné did not respond to requests for comment....

Some Alzheimer's experts see a failure of skepticism, including by journals that published the work.
Schrag has warned America's National Institutes of Health that the suspect work "not only represents a substantial investment in [NIH] research support, but has been cited ... thousands of times and thus has the potential to mislead an entire field of research."

And Harvard neurologic disease professor Dennis Selkoe told Science "There are certainly at least 12 or 15 images where I would agree that there is no other explanation" than manipulation. Selkoe's bigger worry, he says, is that the Lesné episode might further undercut public trust in science during a time of increasing skepticism and attacks. But scientists must show they can find and correct rare cases of apparent misconduct, he says. "We need to declare these examples and warn the world."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Crypto Fireside for sharing the story!

Harini Logan won the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, claiming victory in a blistering, first-of-its-kind spell-off that capped a marathon duel of one arcane term after another. From a report: Harini, 14, an eighth grader from San Antonio, beat Vikram Raju, 12, a seventh grader from Denver, after she rattled off word after word in a 90-second speed round. Both students spelled so fast that the judges had to go to video to determine a winner: Harini spelled 21 words correctly, compared with 15 for Vikram. It was a tense victory that came after she was briefly eliminated and then reinstated earlier in the finals, when the judges decided that a definition she had given for the word pullulation was acceptable.

Harini, who was making her fourth and final eligible appearance in the Bee, said winning felt "so surreal." "This is just such a dream," she said, holding the trophy on national television. Vikram stood nearby with his family, visibly trembling and his head bowed with the high emotions of the three-hour contest. But when the Bee's host, LeVar Burton, asked Vikram if he would return to the Bee next year, in what would be his own last eligible year, the boy, shaking but sounding resolute, gave a decisive "yes." It was the first time the Bee has used a spell-off since the national contest's inception, in 1925, and it came after Harini and Vikram took turns spelling a series of words incorrectly, meaning a winner could not be crowned. To viewers, the pressure of the moment felt akin to penalty kicks in a high-stakes soccer tournament.

At the end of the year 2000, Noah Grey created the free and open-source blogging software Greymatter (now maintained by a community of users). Wil Wheaton's new book describes it as "the original, primordial blogging platform. Blogs look like they do... because Noah Grey did it first."

Three days ago Noah Grey created a Gofundme campaign headlined "I am losing my home in four days."

"I am deeply ashamed and afraid of having to doing this, but I have no choice." My sister and I are about to lose our house. It's being foreclosed next Tuesday (May 3rd)... unless we can pay $35,000 before then. (We could pay $23k and get to keep the house for now, but will be left to pay off the rest over an unknown amount of time....)

I don't know who among the few friends I have that will read this can contribute anything at all, and heaven knows I understand.... [T]his was sprung on us with no warning, and having the money ready to go is our only salvation....
Noah's plea was retweeted by long-time geeks who remembered his contribution, including tech entrepreneur Anil Dash as well as the founder of Harvard's Nieman Lab. And a San Antonio newspaper reported on another response from Texas: Alex Mahan, the brand director of Lockheed Martin, wrote on Twitter: "I coded my first blog in 2000 with Greymatter. If it weren't for Noah, I might not have had a career in web development. He was always helpful and patient with my beginner questions back then. Please throw down some $ if you are able."
Wil Wheaton himself apparently got involved. (Several people made donations along with the tagline #WilSentMe.)

And with an average donation size of $95.87, a total of 1,073 people ultimately donated... $102,873.

By the end of the day Friday, wearing a t-shirt that says 127.0.0.1, Noah Grey shared a tearful video on Twitter.

"This has been the craziest, most emotionally overwhelming day of — of my life.... Oh my god, thank you. It hardly even feels like enough to say the words. But thank you so much. Everybody, oh my god... It may take me time to respond to all of this, but I will — I will.... I have never felt so seen. I have never felt so — I've never felt embraced by the internet before.
"I've seen some say this feels like 'the Old Internet' in action...." Grey posted on Twitter this weekend. "But 20+ years ago I was still a struggling mentally-ill man who wanted to matter... and never dared let himself feel he *might* til now. I am shattered with gratitude."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The newest entrant in the fight for EV market share is going back to the future with an all-electric DeLorean. The infamous gull-winged car is being resurrected in Texas by a group of executives who most recently spent time at China-backed EV startup Karma Automotive. They're working with Stephen Wynne, who acquired the DeLorean branding rights in the 1990s and supplies parts for the 6,000 or so remaining vehicles. [...] The new company is called DeLorean Motors Reimagined LLC and its chief executive officer is Joost de Vries, Texas business records and LinkedIn postings show. The firm will set up a headquarters and an engineering outfit in San Antonio, with potential to bring 450 jobs, the city's development arm said in a statement.

It's not the first time the idea of a DeLorean redux has surfaced -- web searches turn up stories every few years about how Wynne has tried to revive the brand or produce low-volume models -- but using an electric powertrain is a new twist on the idea. The original car gained notoriety in the early 1980s both for its quality problems and for the legal woes of its creator, the late John DeLorean, before the "Back to the Future" film franchise turned it into a pop-culture icon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Scammers in a few big Texas cities have been putting fake QR codes on parking meters to trick people into paying the fraudsters. Parking enforcement officers recently found stickers with fraudulent QR codes on pay stations in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. San Antonio police warned the public of the scam on December 20, saying that "people attempting to pay for parking using those QR codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website and submitted payment to a fraudulent vendor." Similar scams were then found in Austin and Houston.

The fake QR codes reportedly directed people to a "Quick Pay Parking" website at the domain passportlab.xyz, which is now offline. It's not clear how many people -- if any -- were tricked into paying the fraudsters. "We don't use QR codes at all for this very reason, because they are easy to fake or place on the devices," Austin parking division manager Jason Redfern told KXAN. "And we heard from industry leaders that this would be a possibility." Austin accepts payments directly at the meter with coins or credit or with the Park ATX mobile payment app. [...] Houston officials found five meters with fake QR codes and removed the stickers, according to KPRC 2. While the scam seems to have been centered in Texas, it could be repeated anywhere. If you see a QR code on a parking meter, ignore it and make sure you pay the city directly.

"ShotSpotter" is an AI-powered tool that claims it can detect the sound of gunshots. To install it can cost up to $95,000 per square mile — every year — reports the Associated Press.

There's just one problem. "The algorithm that analyzes sounds to distinguish gunshots from other noises has never been peer reviewed by outside academics or experts." "The concern about ShotSpotter being used as direct evidence is that there are simply no studies out there to establish the validity or the reliability of the technology. Nothing," said Tania Brief, a staff attorney at The Innocence Project, a nonprofit that seeks to reverse wrongful convictions.

A 2011 study commissioned by the company found that dumpsters, trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, fireworks, construction, trash pickup and church bells have all triggered false positive alerts, mistaking these sounds for gunshots. ShotSpotter CEO Ralph Clark said the company is constantly improving its audio classifications, but the system still logs a small percentage of false positives. In the past, these false alerts — and lack of alerts — have prompted cities from Charlotte, North Carolina, to San Antonio, Texas, to end their ShotSpotter contracts, the AP found.
And the potential for problems isn't just hypothetical. Just ask 65-year-old Michael Williams: Williams was jailed last August, accused of killing a young man from the neighborhood who asked him for a ride during a night of unrest over police brutality in May... "I kept trying to figure out, how can they get away with using the technology like that against me?" said Williams, speaking publicly for the first time about his ordeal. "That's not fair." Williams sat behind bars for nearly a year before a judge dismissed the case against him last month at the request of prosecutors, who said they had insufficient evidence.

Williams' experience highlights the real-world impacts of society's growing reliance on algorithms to help make consequential decisions about many aspects of public life... ShotSpotter evidence has increasingly been admitted in court cases around the country, now totaling some 200. ShotSpotter's website says it's "a leader in precision policing technology solutions" that helps stop gun violence by using "sensors, algorithms and artificial intelligence" to classify 14 million sounds in its proprietary database as gunshots or something else. But an Associated Press investigation, based on a review of thousands of internal documents, emails, presentations and confidential contracts, along with interviews with dozens of public defenders in communities where ShotSpotter has been deployed, has identified a number of serious flaws in using ShotSpotter as evidentiary support for prosecutors. AP's investigation found the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots.

Forensic reports prepared by ShotSpotter's employees have been used in court to improperly claim that a defendant shot at police, or provide questionable counts of the number of shots allegedly fired by defendants. Judges in a number of cases have thrown out the evidence... The company's methods for identifying gunshots aren't always guided solely by the technology. ShotSpotter employees can, and often do, change the source of sounds picked up by its sensors after listening to audio recordings, introducing the possibility of human bias into the gunshot detection algorithm. Employees can and do modify the location or number of shots fired at the request of police, according to court records. And in the past, city dispatchers or police themselves could also make some of these changes.
Three more eye-popping details from the AP's 4,000-word exposé

• "One study published in April in the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Health examined ShotSpotter in 68 large, metropolitan counties from 1999 to 2016, the largest review to date. It found that the technology didn't reduce gun violence or increase community safety..."

• "Forensic tools such as DNA and ballistics evidence used by prosecutors have had their methodologies examined in painstaking detail for decades, but ShotSpotter claims its software is proprietary, and won't release its algorithm..."

• "In 2018, it acquired a predictive policing company called HunchLab, which integrates its AI models with ShotSpotter's gunshot detection data to purportedly predict crime before it happens."

Some protesters in Minnesota set a fire last year. But then the surveillance footage from that day "set off a nearly yearlong, international manhunt...involving multiple federal agencies and Mexican police. The pursuit also involved a facial recognition system made by a Chinese company that has been blacklisted by the U.S. government."

The New York Times tells the story of the couple who was eventually arrested: Ms. Yousif gave birth while on the run, and was separated from her baby for four months by the authorities. To prosecutors, the pursuit of Mr. Felan, who was charged with arson, and Ms. Yousif, who was charged with helping him flee, was a routine response to a case of property destruction... But beyond the prosecutorial aftermath of the racial justice protests, the eight-month saga of a young Minnesota couple exposed an emerging global surveillance system that might one day find anyone, anywhere, the technology traveling easily over borders while civil liberties struggle to keep pace...

They drove, heading south on Interstate 35, a highway that runs down the middle of the country, stretching from Duluth, Minn., on Lake Superior, to Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border. They had made their way through Iowa and just hit the northern part of Missouri, 300 miles from Rochester, when police first caught up with them. A warrant had been issued for Mr. Felan's arrest, allowing the authorities to ping his cellphone to locate him. According to a court document, late on a Monday night, more than a week after the events in St. Paul, local police in rural western Missouri, who were asked to go where the phone was pinging, stopped a black S.U.V. registered to Mr. Felan. Ms. Yousif was driving, and said she didn't know where Mr. Felan was. The police let her go...

Over the next week, police kept pinging the location of Mr. Felan's phone but kept missing him. According to a court document, he sent a message to his brother in Texas saying he was turning it off between messages, worried about being tracked; the couple eventually bought new phones... On a Friday night in mid-June 2020, a surveillance camera at a Holiday Inn outside San Antonio captured Ms. Yousif and Mr. Felan driving his mother's brown Toyota Camry into the hotel's parking lot. They got out of the car, walked outside the view of the camera and then disappeared...
Later in Mexico, at a meeting with law enforcement officials in Coahuila, Federico Pérez Villoro, an investigative journalist, remembers meeting a government employee in charge of Mexico's first large-scale facial recognition system who'd said America's FBI had asked them for help finding people accused of terrorism. This is significant because they were using the Dahua surveillance system from China, that's partly state-owned and "blacklisted by the U.S. government in 2019...According to a notice in the Federal Register, Dahua's products were used in "China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance" against Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups."

Ironically, in the end it wasn't the $30 million system that identified the couple, according to the U.S. Justice Department. It was somebody who'd contacted them directly to collect the $20,000 reward. "But the technology is spreading globally, in part because China is aggressively marketing it abroad, said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Center for A.I. and Digital Policy, a nonprofit in Washington.... China is marketing mass surveillance technology to its trading partners in Africa, Asia and South America, he explained, pitching it as a way to minimize crime and promote public order in major metropolitan areas." In a 2019 report on video analytics, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that millions of surveillance cameras installed in recent decades are "waking up" thanks to automation, such as facial recognition technology, which allows them to not just record, but to analyze what is happening and flag what they see...