The National Park Service (NPS), the agency tasked with managing the U.S. national parks and monuments, has purchased Flock cameras and had them installed at parks including in Yosemite.

Current and former NPS rangers are not happy about it.

“Flock protects property, not people or parks. People should be free to recreate in ways that are respectful to the ecosystem — but the surveillance is a disrespectful invasion of privacy,” a current NPS ranger told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the ranger and others anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.

Another current NPS ranger said, “I just think that every American should be free to visit our national parks without their location being traced and tracked by the federal government. Wild places are at the core of American freedom and nobody should be afraid to visit them.”

A former NPS ranger added, “I think if the public knew that their public lands were being surveilled, they would push back.”

Flock cameras constantly scan the license plate, color, model, make, and other identifying features of every vehicle that drives past, creating a timestamped record of where a vehicle was at a particular time, and by extension, a person. This data is then available to Flock’s law enforcement customers and is usually queried by police without a warrant. Many of Flock’s cameras are part of a national network that other law enforcement officials can then query. For example, a cop in Texas might query the network to look for a specific vehicle and search cameras across the country. This, among increased reporting of cops abusing their access to Flock to stalk people with no legitimate investigative purpose, and local cops performing lookups for ICE, has contributed to a nationwide conversation around Flock and whether communities want the company’s cameras in their neighborhoods.

Flock cameras are installed inside Yosemite, WBTW News 13 reported earlier this month. The outlet referenced data from DeFlock, an open source map of Flock and other automatic license plate reader (ALPR) locations. 

There is also a Flock camera on a road towards the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, according to the data.

NPS also plans to install cameras from Verkada, a controversial company with a history of abusing its own products and whose products sometimes have facial detection capabilities, according to a letter from Michael Donato, the acting deputy superintendent of National Capital Parks - East, sent to the Washington Support Office Visitor and Resource Protection Program.

“Some parks have USPP [United States Park Police] Flock cameras for license plate recognition, but for parks that don’t, the Verkada cameras will provide LPR,” the letter, which 404 Media viewed, reads.

The NPS told 404 Media in a statement: “Yosemite National Park uses a traffic-monitoring system to measure vehicle counts, travel times and entrance-station wait times. The system helps the park better understand traffic conditions and provide visitors with information to help them make informed decisions about when to visit and where parking is available. The cameras are not connected to law enforcement or DMV databases.”

One of the current rangers said, “Last year Yosemite changed the rules about hanging flags on El Capitan and tried to backdate the rule change to make it look like the people involved had committed a crime. What happens when that sort of malfeasance is combined with the ability to track any park visitor's location, anywhere in the country? If that happens, we are no longer free in this country.”

They added, “I fear for the day when a visitor's National Park experience is interrupted by being pulled over and held at gunpoint because a license plate reader misread their plate.”

There has been progress for Ferrari in 2026, but can the Scuderia improve further in the second half?

LISSABON (ANP/DPA) - Het Openbaar Ministerie in Portugal is een onderzoek begonnen naar de dood van het 19-jarige wielertalent Finlay Tarling. De wielrenner uit Wales kwam vrijdag om het leven door een botsing met een auto tijdens de achtste etappe in de Ronde van Portugal. Die wagen was geen onderdeel van de officiële karavaan.

Het onderzoek moet duidelijk maken hoe het voertuig op het wedstrijdparcours terecht kon komen. De automobilist wachtte aanvankelijk en liet het peloton passeren, verklaarde een politiewoordvoerder tegenover de Portugese omroep RTP. Toen er geen renners meer in zicht waren, vroeg hij aan toeschouwers in de buurt of de weg vrij was. Omdat de toeschouwers er ten onrechte van uitgingen dat er geen renners meer zouden komen, reed de man het parcours op, waar hij korte tijd later in botsing kwam met de renner van het NSN Development Team.

De rechtbank heeft opdracht gegeven tot een autopsie op het lichaam van Tarling.

Microsoft's making some major changes to File Explorer and the context menu in order to resolve quality issues and offer more user flexibility when you right click. "Windows" and "quality" are rarely used positively together, something Microsoft admitted this year. Even the company's boss, Satya Nadella, noted that the company needed to "win back" its fans. For many Windows users, the face of the operating system is File Explorer, and the application has suffered from feature overload, poorly thought-through design choices, and a general feeling of instability and sluggishness. "What people remember most are the worst moments," wrote Microsoft, "A single freeze while renaming a file, a slow right-click, or a Home view that flashes and reloads can outweigh dozens of smooth interactions." It is true that complaints are usually louder than compliments, although (at the risk of metaphor overload) there is rarely smoke without fire. According to Microsoft, it has spent the last few months tinkering with File Explorer, working through the mystery freezes and workflow disruptions, and making the tool more usable overall. However, the Context Menu has had perhaps a bigger visible overhaul in a shorter time. Available in the Experimental Windows Insider Channel, the update reflects Microsoft's efforts to undo the last few years of bloat that made the menu "cluttered and sluggish". Still got your Windows 10 muscle memory? No problem – Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Delete, and Share can be inline if you want. Missing a Print command? That can be there. Send to or Create shortcut utterly pointless? Again, they can be turned off. We checked out the new menu on a sacrificial PC and found the options useful. Where the context menu had indeed become a bloated mess over the years, it was now simple to tweak it to meet the user's needs rather than the operating system's. Heck, even Copilot wasn't front and center unless requested (although our installation got a bit unhappy about Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot, and some PowerToys iconography wasn't present – this is the Experimental Channel after all.) Perhaps the most significant aspect of Microsoft's changes is an admission that, hey, maybe things were better left alone. The company recently pushed the movable Taskbar (dropped in Windows 11) into Release Preview and, for users who were happier with the Windows 10 way of doing things in the context menu, "we've added options to bring that feel back." Perhaps, somewhere deep in the bowels of Redmond, an engineer has dusted off that adage: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" Or at least struck out, "Or keep fixing it until it's broke." ®

De Zambianen hebben Hakainde Hichilema opnieuw tot president verkozen. De democratische belofte waarmee hij in 2021 aantrad is verbleekt en staat het land steeds centraler in de grondstoffenwedloop tussen Washington en Beijing.

In het Rijksmuseum ligt sinds 1902 een uit Indonesië geroofde diamant. Die is formeel teruggevraagd en dat verzoek wordt vermoedelijk ingewilligd. Maar van wie ín Indonesië is de diamant?

Plantaardige producten zijn vaker voordeliger dan de goedkoopste vlees- en zuivelproducten. Dat blijkt uit nieuw onderzoek van ProVeg Nederland. Vooral plantaardige varianten van vlees, kaas en boter zijn voordeliger.

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Sainsbury's has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop. "I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless," Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal. The comedy promoter was buying supplies in the store in East Dulwich, in south-east London, for a standup event at Dulwich Hamlet football club when, after scanning his items and a Nectar card, he was approached by two managers who told him he could not be served owing to an earlier incident. He was then asked to leave and they tried to escort him from the store.

As he left, he saw an overhead CCTV monitor alert with a red circle surrounding his face. He asked the shop staff to keep his shopping in the trolley so his friend could come and pick up the supplies for the comedy night happening soon next door. "I think they were quite confused by this, understandably, but agreed and my colleague Dave went in to pay for and pick up the shop about five minutes later. There was no pause for thought from the staff, no suggestion that they understood this is not how a shoplifter would behave. Just blindly following the machine's orders." Sainsbury's head office apologised to Arnold the next day and has paused use of its AI-assisted Facewatch technology in the store while an investigation takes place. Arnold says the facial recognition tech should be paused in all stores. "Anyone could be falsely accused and at some point that will be someone vulnerable, someone with mental health issues like anxiety. It's inevitable," said Arnold. "Also, I would worry about the confidence-destroying effect of it happening to a younger person or someone less willing or able to stand up for themselves as I have done."

A Sainsbury's spokesperson said: "We have contacted Mr Arnold to apologise for his experience at our Dulwich superstore. The incident was caused by human error, not the facial recognition technology. Customers can be reassured that the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate, and every match is reviewed by a trained manager." A Facewatch spokesperson said their technology was not at fault in this case. "A correct alert was sent to the retailer, but was subsequently subject to human error in the way it was handled in store," they said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UKHSA rules out British produce as source of infections and says evidence points to consumption of imported eggs

One person has died and more than 200 others have fallen ill during a UK-wide outbreak of salmonella that health officials have linked to the consumption of imported eggs.

The 207 people affected range in age from under one year to 90 years old, according to the UK Health Security Agency, which is leading an investigation into the outbreak.

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