NPR reports:


Police officers in cities across the U.S. are quick to extol the virtues of real-time crime centers as a game changer that helps them find missing children, monitor large events from the skies and scope out dangerous scenes before putting an officer in harm's way. Hundreds of police departments have one of these central hubs, which have existed for years. But many are now being powered with AI software, such as Fusus, from the public-safety technology giant Axon... synthesizing the data it pulls in and allowing police command centers to watch an entire city from one place.

Flock cameras, the automated license plate readers (ALPRs), have faced intense backlash in recent months amid stories of abuse. Yet privacy experts say they're just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to police surveillance. "I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement," says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. "Because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a visual single-pane-of-glass vision of what's going on in a city, with time machine capabilities where you can go back and investigate crime." Tools like Axon Fusus, which is a leader in this type of software, also pull in footage and data from police body cameras, law enforcement dashcams, 911 dispatch, gunshot detectors and surveillance cameras, including sometimes those of private businesses that opt in. Its use is growing fast. In 2024, the technology news site 404 Media reported that just over 100 law enforcement agencies had deployed Fusus, which was then its own company and was acquired by Axon that year. The number of law enforcement agencies using the tool has more than doubled since then, according to Axon.


Even the American Civil Liberties Union warned concerned citizens in August that "Flock is far from the only vendor," adding that "it's important to realize that its competitors aren't so great either, and that simply replacing Flock surveillance with another company's surveillance won't necessarily solve any of the privacy and other civil liberties problems posed by this mass surveillance technology."

Communities can't simply assume that their residents will be better off from a privacy and civil liberties perspective by dropping Flock and replacing it with another ALPR provider, as some customers have done. They should ask hard questions about whether they really want to create that kind of a system, and if they do, ensure it doesn't function as a mass surveillance system...
One of Flock's most significant competitors is Motorola. This company, which has been expanding its police technology offerings through an aggressive acquisition strategy in recent years, offers a nationwide law enforcement data sharing system similar to Flock's called the National Vehicle Location Service, operated by Motorola unit Vigilant Solutions. In addition to collecting data from law enforcement clients' cameras, it also runs a large separate commercial ALPR unit that makes deals for tow trucks and other fleet vehicles to carry cameras and collect data for Motorola as they drive around, amassing billions of plate reads (a claimed 500 million monthly, subject to no apparent data retention policy). Known as the Digital Recognition Network, that unit sells its data for commercial purposes but also makes it available to its law enforcement customers for an extra charge. Motorola tells agencies they can have "access to billions of detections beyond your own."

Abandoning Flock for another system doesn't protect privacy, their article argues. "If a jurisdiction decides to allow license scanners to be installed, how that system operates is more important than which vendor provides it..." They recommend strong restrictions like data retention limits — and imposing them by law rather than in the language of contracts with vendors (which could always be renegotiated).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lawrence Barretto selects his winners and losers from the Singapore Grand Prix weekend.

Isack Hadjar admits he was "happy with the overall pace" during last weekend's Singapore Grand Prix, as the Red Bull driver recovered to P10 from the pit lane.

Liam Lawson scored valuable points for Racing Bulls in both the Sprint and Grand Prix at the Marina Bay Street Circuit.

Toto Wolff admits he is wary of the growing threat that Red Bull could pose to Mercedes, after Max Verstappen claimed a dominant victory in the Singapore Grand Prix.

Booking heeft een rechter nodig om zijn personeel vaker naar kantoor te krijgen. Japke-d. Bouma snapt dat niet. Want als één bedrijf weet hoe je mensen ergens naartoe lokt, is het Booking wel. ‘Nog maar zeven flexplekken beschikbaar! Wees er snel bij!’

Defensiebedrijven breiden uit. Van Thales tot Destinus en Damen – ze zoeken aan de TU Delft naar gespecialiseerde techneuten en betalen er fors voor. Wat vinden die studenten ervan? „Als je niet aan wapens werkt, is het alternatief dat het moet worden ingekocht bij een ander land.”

Het gaat in dit land geweldig met migratie: het Europees migratiepact is een mislukking, de opvang zit continu vol en de instroom blijft hoog. Het gaat zelfs zo goed dat met grote migratie grote bouwverantwoordelijkheid komt, want het Economisch Instituut voor de Bouw heeft berekend dat er de komende tien jaar maar liefst 340 duizend huizen nodig zijn voor Nieuwe Nederlanders, waarvan 60% voor asielzoekers. Het afgelopen decennium was ook al zo'n feest: "Van de 2,2 miljoen migranten die in de periode 2015-2024 naar Nederland kwamen, verbleven er in 2024 nog 1,4 miljoen in ons land. Deze groep bewoonde ongeveer 435.000 woningen. Daarmee kwam 60% van de woningvraag in de afgelopen tien jaar vanuit migratie." En onze woonminister Boekholt-O'Sullivan maar kwekken over meer, sneller en beter bouwen, terwijl haar hele ministerschap een bouwval is. Sowieso is het de vraag of tegen deze aantallen op te bouwen valt. Misschien moeten we in plaats van drie keer ook maar gewoon zes keer 'bouwen' roepen en kijken of dat helpt. Of minder minder minder minder minder minder migranten binnenlaten natuurlijk.

A piece of internet history that once traveled strapped to a pigeon's leg is up for auction at Christie's, where someone has already bid $4,000 for what might be the world's most expensive ping. The unusual lot is a surviving IP packet from a 2001 experiment in which Norwegian Linux enthusiasts decided to find out whether the internet could, in fact, run on birds. The idea dates back to April 1, 1990, when American network engineer David Waitzman published RFC 1149, titled A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. Written in the wonderfully dry language of an official internet standards document, the April Fools' proposal outlined how carrier pigeons could transport IP datagrams between locations. It noted that avian carriers could provide high bandwidth, although latency would be another matter entirely. Most people appreciated the joke and moved on. The Bergen Linux User Group (BLUG), however, decided to actually build the thing. On April 28, 2001, the group put RFC 1149 to the test using racing pigeons, printers, and scanners. IP packets were printed as hexadecimal strings on strips of paper, attached to the birds' legs, and flown between two lofts 5km (roughly 3 miles) apart. The results hardly amounted to a ringing endorsement of pigeon-powered networking. Nine packets were dispatched, but only four replies came back, giving the experiment a packet-loss rate of about 56 percent. Still, the network worked, at least in the loosest possible sense of the word. Actual IP packets had traveled through the air without a single router, fiber-optic cable, or telecoms provider getting involved. One of those packets has now resurfaced at auction house Christie's as part of its Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts Including Americana and Science auction. The item is a small scroll of paper measuring just 41mm by 210mm, complete with creases from being rolled up and attached to the pigeon's leg. It is now framed, with an inscription on the reverse identifying it as the property of Waitzman, to whom it was presented in 2002. Christie's initially estimated the packet would fetch between $2,000 and $3,000, but bidding has already reached $4,000. The auction closes on October 13. The auction house describes the experiment as an example of the internet's tradition of the "artful hack," celebrating the technical ingenuity and sense of humor of its early community. There is, of course, something rather fitting about an internet packet that took to the skies 25 years ago now commanding thousands of dollars. Most packets disappear into the ether once they've served their purpose. This one ended up in a frame and is being sold by Christie's. Not bad for something delivered by a pigeon. ®

UTRECHT (ANP) - Rabobank verhoogt de rente op de meeste spaarrekeningen woensdag met 0,1 procentpunt. Het is volgens een woordvoerder de tweede renteverhoging in drie maanden. Daarvoor was de laatste wijziging meer dan een jaar geleden.

De rente op rekeningen met maximaal 10.000 euro gaat bijvoorbeeld omhoog van 1,5 naar 1,6 procent, meldt de bank op de website. Als mensen hun geld langer vastzetten, is de rentestijging hoger. Alleen voor rekeningen met meer dan 5 miljoen euro blijft de rente ongewijzigd, op 0 procent.

De stijging volgt op een renteverhoging van de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB) vorige maand, met een kwart procentpunt tot 2,5 procent. Dat was de tweede renteverhoging dit jaar. Nederlandse banken zijn doorgaans terughoudend met het laten stijgen van de spaarrente.