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Submission + - Flock Cameras Being Destroyed Across the US (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Surveillance cameras owned by Flock Safety have been cut down with electic saws in New York State, vandalized with paint in Okland, California, and rammed with a truck in Idaho. Flock claims its services fight crime and law enforcement agencies use their services to track vehicles based on license plate numbers and reconstruct the their movements, even when the drivers and owners of these vehicles have never been accused or convicted of any crime.

Flock states it has 120,000 automated cameras that record license plate data, as well as pan, tilt and zoom cameras across the United States.

A guerilla mindset among average citizens have seen these cameras forcibly disabled within recent weeks with sympathy directed toward the vigilantes. In June, a West Virginia man accused of destroying several Flock cameras was arrested. Under a Facebook post from the local NBC affiliate announcing his arrest are dozens of people volunteering to provide alibis. “He was out fishing with me that day, you got the wrong guy,” one man wrote.

Submission + - AI Companies Destroying Books At Scale (futurism.com)

Submitted by nightflameauto
nightflameauto writes: AI companies are purchasing books from pre-AI times. The claim is that those books are free from the defects of AI generated text, and therefore more valuable for ingestion into AI datasets. In order to accomplish this, they are tearing the books down to be scanned, then destroying them as the scans are completed. This includes rare and out-of-print books that may be some of the few copies of any given published work left in existence.

Submission + - AI Companies Buying Antique Books To Train Models, Then Destroying Them (futurism.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.

As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Submission + - Taylor Farms Spent Big on MAGA and Anti-Regulatory Lobbying Before Diarrhea Outb (wired.com) 1

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Wired reports that Taylor Farms spent Big on MAGA and anti-regulatory lobbying before diarrhea outbreak. The company donated more than $3.6 million to conservative groups between 2020 and 2025, including $1 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC.

The iceberg lettuce supplier at the center of the turbo diarrhea outbreak has spent millions of dollars to sway sentiment around food regulation and elect Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans, according to public filings.

Taylor Farms donated more than $2 million to conservative political groups in 2025, according to Federal Election Commission filings. That includes a $1 million donation to MAGA Inc., the Trump-centric super PAC, and $1.1 million to other super PACs dedicated to electing Republicans.

Bruce Taylor, the chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms, is also a longtime donor to Republican causes. Since 2020, Taylor has personally donated more than $900,000 to Republican PACs and candidates, including contributions to Texas senator John Cornyn and Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn.

Marion Nestle, a food policy expert, said that Taylor Farms’ donations are part of a wider problem in the American food industry: that multibillion-dollar companies use their financial resources to push policies that would reduce food safety regulation and accountability when outbreaks occur.

In a post on X, the US Department of Health and Human Services emphasized that Taylor Farms’ political donations did not influence the Trump administration’s response to the cyclospora outbreak.

Taylor Farms has apparently taken issue with the CDC’s and FDA’s handling of the investigation into the current cyclospora outbreak, which has sickened thousands of people across multiple states. The company recently claimed in a big lie that the FDA “apologized” after announcing a false-positive test of a sample of Taylor Farms’ lettuce; the FDA told reporters that no, actually, an official apology never happened. (The company did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.)

In 2013, the FDA named Taylor Farms as a source of a cyclospora outbreak that sickened hundreds. In 2015, the company voluntarily recalled multiple products containing celery because they may have been contaminated with E. coli. And in 2024, the company recalled certain yellow onions as part of an E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. Following the outbreak, CBS News reported that FDA inspectors found dozens of violations at the Colorado Taylor Farms facility linked to the Quarter Pounder outbreak, including minimal handwashing and dirty equipment.

In one particularly gruesome case, the Department of Labor fined a Taylor Farms New Jersey facility $1.1 million due to violations. The May 2025 inspection came after an employee died after sustaining injuries cleaning an industrial blancher at the facility. Oh, sh*t...literally. Enshittification of the food supply in this new golden age.

Submission + - Pan Am plane whose crash inspired safety briefings found after 74 years (bbc.com)

Submitted by BeaverCleaver
BeaverCleaver writes: Today, before every commercial flight, cabin crew are required to outline where a plane's exits are, as well as the location of life vests and how to inflate them. This rule came after a Pan Am flight crashed into the sea in 1952. Everyone on board survived the impact, but passengers struggled to locate life vests and rafts as the plane rapidly sank. Of the 69 passengers and crew onboard, just 17 survived. The BBC reports that the wreckage of the aircraft has been found, under 610m of water off the coast of Peurto Rico.

Submission + - Firefox 153 was released today (firefox.com)

Submitted by williamyf
williamyf writes: FireFox 153 was released today. The most important user Facing Changes are changes in the Handling of PDFs (you can now merge PDF's and add images to them), and HDR video playback (on Windows, subjected to HDR being active system wide). Other changes under the hood include browser wide containers, and QWAC support. The full list is in the chage notes.

But the most important feature is that this version is an ESR, and therefore, defines the feature set of ESR for the next year. Why is being an ESR so important you ask?

1.) ESR, and not "normal (a.k.a. Rapid Release)" FireFox is the OotB browser for many important distros, like Debian, RHEL, Kali, TAILS, Suse Leap, Slackware and such.

2.) Many organizations large and small standarize on FireFox ESR as their default browser, regardless of the default browser that comes with their OS.

3.) FireFox ESR is the basis for many projects downstram, like WaterFox or KaiOS. All these projects will inherit for a year whatever ESR brings to the table today.

4.) Many ISVs and SaaS providers, if they certify their wares for FireFox at all, certify for the ESR version only.

Please notice that ESR 153 will NOT be offered as an automatic update until 2 months from now (ESR 140 will still be supported), If you want it now, you need to do a manual download and install.

Also of note, ESR 115 will be supported until march 2027. If you have unsupported versions of MacOS or Windows (like 7 or 8.x) this is the version to get, but even Mozilla themselves cautions about running a supported browser on top oh an unsupported OS:

"Note that Microsoft ended official support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 in January 2023. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates and have known vulnerabilities. Without official support from Microsoft, maintaining Firefox for outdated operating systems becomes costly for Mozilla and risky for users. "

Submission + - LibreOffice Once Again Slams Microsoft For Using 'Lock-In' With Office Files (xda-developers.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One of the founding members of The Document Foundation and handler of LibreOffice's PR and media relations, Italo Vignoli, took to the LibreOffice blog to call out Microsoft's practices with its Office application. The last time we saw Vignoli take to the stage, we saw him accusing Euro-Office of being just as bad as Microsoft with its practices. Vignoli's new post focuses entirely on Microsoft's strategy. He says that "the dominant format for office documents" is owned by Microsoft Office, particularly the DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats. The problem with these formats, Vignoli states, is that they "belong to Microsoft, are controlled by Microsoft and serve Microsoft’s interest." This makes it difficult for other formats to take hold.

Vignoli explains his point by stating that open document formats don't hide anything. People developing their own apps can use the format to both read and write the document format with perfection. Meanwhile, proprietary formats such as Microsoft's "contain undocumented features, private extensions or behaviours" that developers can't fully adapt to. That means that a presentation that looks great in the source software comes out strange when rebuilt in a third-party app. This, Vignoli says, is a huge issue [...]. Vignoli claims this creates a huge issue with document preservation. If a Word document was saved in one version of Office, will it still be readable in 20 years? Microsoft has added legacy support to its software before, but the company can one day decide that it's not worth the effort anymore and cut it out. When that happens, you have old documents that are either jumbled or unable to be opened at all.

Submission + - China — New law bans AI companions bots (scmp.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Two of China’s major consumer-facing artificial intelligence apps, ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen, are moving to disable customised agent features, as new rules on humanlike AI interaction services are set to take effect, part of Beijing’s push to build a broader regulatory framework for the fast-growing sector.

Doubao informed users in a Friday night notice that its agent feature would go offline on July 15 because of “product function adjustments”. After October 15, Doubao’s related data would be handled in accordance with the company’s privacy policy and no longer be viewable or recoverable inside the app.

Qwen also issued a similar notice on Saturday morning, saying that its “humanlike interactive agents and user-created agent functions” would be disabled on July 10, while broader “Qwen agent functions and services” would be taken offline on July 15. Users would no longer be able to access related agent settings or previous conversations after the shutdown.

Both apps had offered a pool of agents, created by both the companies and users, that could be customised for specific tasks, skills and speaking styles. Users could also create their own agents, turning a general-purpose chatbot into a named assistant, tutor, role-playing character or companion with a fixed persona and tone.

The timing coincides with the implementation of the Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, effective July 15. Issued in April, the rules cover AI services that “simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction”.

The rules exclude customer service bots, knowledge Q&A, workplace assistants, education and scientific research tools, as long as they do not involve sustained emotional interaction.

Submission + - Records Are Made to Be Broken: Patch Tuesday Raises Triage Stakes (darkreading.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: When Microsoft vice president of engineering Tom Gallagher warned in May that the company's monthly patch releases could soon grow larger because of AI-driven vulnerability discovery, few likely expected the numbers would surpass 600 just two months later.

But with fixes for 622 unique CVEs, Microsoft’s July 2026 Patch Tuesday update is the largest by far in the program's history and offers a preview of the growing prioritization challenges organizations face as AI dramatically increases the volume of flaws requiring attention.

July's update contains fixes for three zero-day vulnerabilities, two of which attackers are already exploiting and one that's publicly known but remains unexploited. The patch update also includes fixes for more than five dozen critical vulnerabilities, many of which Microsoft identified as flaws that attackers are more likely to exploit. The total includes 416 vulnerabilities in Windows, 82 each in Office and Office 2016, 46 in Edge, 27 in Microsoft Developer Tools, and 17 in SharePoint Server.

"If people want a severity hook, July has 26 vulnerabilities with a CVSS base score above 9.0, and 13 of those sit at 9.8," said Josh Taylor, lead cybersecurity analyst at Fortra, in an emailed comment. "That matters, but CVSS is still only one part of the risk story. The real triage problem this month is the mix of exploited issues, a publicly disclosed BitLocker flaw, and a massive concentration of vulnerabilities in Windows and Office," he said. And rather than focusing on volume, patching teams need to prioritize the exploited vulnerabilities and their exposed infrastructure first, Taylor added.

"Today, July 14, 2026, marks a pivotal moment in our industry," researchers from Nightwing said in a statement. "We are officially moving past the traditional 'Patch Tuesday' approach and entering an era of continuous, high-volume security updates" and continuous patching.

Submission + - These are America's 10 worst states to live in for 2026 according to CNBC 1

Submitted by Nicholas Grayhame
Nicholas Grayhame writes: CNBC lists America’s 10 worst states to live in based on their quality of life scores:

As more companies insist their employees return to the office, they know they need to offer something in return to attract and retain good people. Thats why finding a place where people will want to live is an increasingly important factor as companies decide where to set up shop.

"Quality of place, especially investing in quality of place, is the top thing you can do for talent attraction and retention," said site selection consultant Larry Gigerich, managing executive director of Ginovus in Indianapolis, and chairman of the Site Selectors Guild.

CNBC is placing increasing emphasis on Quality of Life, one of the 10 categories of competitiveness in our annual Americas Top States for Business study. It is our annual ranking of every states business climate, now in its 20th year. Under this years methodology, the category makes up 11.6% of a states overall score, up from about ten percent last year.

To score the states for quality of life, we use hard data on factors like crime rates, air quality and healthcare. We also consider the cost and availability of childcare, inclusiveness of state laws, and reproductive rights. Some states offer exemplary quality of life. But these ten states do not make the grade. ...

Here is the full list of America’s 10 worst states to live in:

1. Tennessee
2. Texas
3. Indiana
4. Louisiana
5. Georgia
6. Utah
7. Missouri
8. Alabama
9. Oklahoma
10. Arkansas

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