Facial recognition technology in U.K. shops "will soon alert police in real time to the presence of serious offenders," reports The Guardian, "with civil liberties groups warning of a 'dangerous escalation' towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector."

Facewatch, a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury's, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves, said it was launching a UK-first feature to "alert police instantly when the most serious offenders trigger a live facial recognition match". Facewatch's chief executive, Nick Fisher, said the "unique technical development" would be launched in autumn and would warn police in an average of four seconds when the "worst offenders" were flagged on its network... Charlie Whelton, the policy and campaigns officer at [civil liberties nonprofit] Liberty, said it was concerned about this "untested, opaque development" and the way facial recognition technology had been allowed to "proliferate without anything to govern it".
"It's not against the law to walk into a shop even if you've committed crimes in the past," he said. "The idea of calling the police on somebody who hasn't committed a crime, but there's a concern they might, is really upending the way we do things. And of course, it's not infallible. These systems do make mistakes, and it's very hard to argue with that when it happens to you." A number of people have been forced to leave shops after being falsely identified by Facewatch technology as a shoplifter, with some describing it as "Orwellian" and saying they felt as though they were "guilty until proven innocent"...

The use of the Facewatch technology looks set to quickly expand, with Sainsbury's recently announcing plans to increase its use from 55 stores to more than 200 by the end of the year. Facewatch said it alerted retailers almost 300,000 times that a "known repeat offender" had entered a store during the first six months of 2026, and that its system allowed staff to intervene "before theft, abuse or violence could occur or escalate"... [E]xperts argue the use of facial recognition technology in shops to catch shoplifters is disproportionate. Nuala Polo, the UK public policy lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute, which studies the impact of AI on society, said: "There are other, much less intrusive means that you can use to catch shoplifters where you don't need to be scanning millions of faces every day, virtually without consent...."

The campaign group Big Brother Watch has criticised police for "inserting themselves into this cowboy operation" and said people would be matched against "a secret blacklist compiled by unaccountable businesses and private security guards".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports:





An islandwide blackout struck Cuba on Friday for the second time this week as the nation of nearly 10 million people grapples with a crumbling power grid and fuel shortages stemming from a U.S. energy blockade...

Authorities reported that they have already begun restoring power to some areas. On Monday, another massive blackout affected nearly 10 million people nationwide. Authorities reported during the week that service was gradually being restored from that outage.

"While total blackouts have become increasingly common in the Caribbean country, it's unusual for back-to-back ones to hit just days apart..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

Along the Naturaliste coast

Photo Rhythms has added a photo to the pool:

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

Busselton sunset

Keith Midson has added a photo to the pool:

A lone surfer contemplating the surf at Kelvedon Beach, Tasmania.

OPINION Things you might not know about me. I was the first person to write a popular article about the web. Little did I, or anyone else, know how it would change everything. Our lives were transformed when all of human knowledge became just a click away. That was then. This is now. Today, more web traffic now comes from bots than humans. We're just picking up AI's crumbs. That was not how it was meant to be. Mind you, I was never an internet idealist. I didn't think the internet would set us free and lead us to a technological paradise. I did think, however, we'd do better than we have. The internet quickly became, as the song goes, for porn. That was relatively harmless, though, compared to doxxing, targeted misinformation, and automated botnets and troll farms. But there was still some good, although it was hard to find at times. And it was all driven by people. Now it's another story. Cloudflare's public Radar "Bot vs Human" tracker is reporting that bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva's Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at about 53 percent of measured web traffic for the second year in a row, with humans at 47 percent. Separately, according to Pangram, an AI detection company, on websites such as LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit, "about one in four long-form items were fully AI-generated." The company went on to report that "LinkedIn was the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40 percent of long-form posts [were] flagged as fully AI-generated. However, if we included mixed AI and human content, X/Twitter was the worst off: almost half of X articles were either fully AI-generated (23.9 percent) or AI-assisted/mixed (22.9 percent), with only 53.2 percent of X articles flagging as fully human-authored." There are that many flesh-and-blood people still posting on LinkedIn and Twitter? Based on what I've been seeing, I'd have guessed there were fewer. So, with the web increasingly written and consumed by AI, where does that leave us, exactly? Nowhere good. It's not just online. AI is everywhere. A non-fiction writer friend of mine "wrote" a novel last year using AI as a goof. It was, well, awful. But he put it online to see what would happen. A year and a half later, it's still bringing in a few thousand dollars a month. That's a lot better than many full-time, mid-tier novelists I know are doing. Of course, AI isn't actually writing anything. It's really a copy-and-paste scam on an industrial scale. OpenAI and the other AI powers claim it's not so. However, a recent court filing by the New York Times and others alleges that Vincent Monaco, who leads privacy engineering at OpenAI, acknowledged in a deposition that "OpenAI had searched training datasets and output data despite the company's initial claims that it couldn't access that data. The outlets also alleged OpenAI deleted logs, a violation of the court's preservation orders." As it happens, one of the publishers suing OpenAI is Ziff-Davis, which published my web article back in 1993. Since then, it's published thousands of my Linux and open source news stories, how-tos, interviews, and features. So, when someone accuses me of using AI in my Linux stories, my reply is "Where do you think AI got that information and phrasing in the first place? Hello! It was me." Just go ahead and cut me a check, OpenAI, and all will be forgiven. That said, another AI problem I'm all too painfully aware of is that you can't trust AI's answers. When AI tells you something about Linux, for example, it's not just quoting me, the Linux Kernel Mailing List, or Linux Weekly News. No, it's also pulling data from Ima Moron, a poster from a deservedly obscure subreddit. Repeat after me: AI isn't intelligent at all. It's just a copy-and-paste of words that are likely to go together. It may sound right, but it often isn't. Confidence is why so many buy AI garbage as gospel truth. You really can't trust it. The reason I use Perplexity as my search engine isn't that it's more accurate than other AI LLMs; it's that it shows me its sources. I can see if what it just turned up is the real thing or just BS. Guess what? It's often crap. It's only going to get worse. I saw the AI model collapse coming back in 2025. It's here now. When I dive into AI "answers" today, every time and in every question, I find it referring not to primary or reputable secondary sources, but to AI summaries. When you pile garbage on top of garbage you do not get reliable information. I see this all the time in Google's AI Overviews. That's one of the reasons I almost never use Google anymore. Unfortunately, everyone else is using Google's made-up answers and not even looking down the page to get a real answer from a true expert, or at least someone with a clue about your question of the day. I can tell on many subjects when an answer is likely to be accurate. But I don't have a clue about medical treatments. I wouldn't trust an AI answer on a serious health problem at all. Nevertheless, I know millions of people do that every day. That's seriously scary. Equally worrying is that many of us now turn to AI for companionship. I understand loneliness, but this is no cure; it's, at best, a sticking plaster. You see, the web really is written by AI for AI. We're losing both accuracy and humanity. This is not the web I'd hoped we would end up with. I fear there's no way we can reverse this trend. We'd rather have easy, fast answers and artificial companionship than the real things. That's profoundly sad. Pass the cheese. ®

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

rohantstevens posted a photo:

rohantstevens posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

As the cost of living rises, old-school bartering makes a comeback. Bartering is one of the oldest trade systems in the world, and as the cost of living soars, there is growing interest in trading homegrown and homemade goods.

US Senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham has died at age 71. A Republican senator, Graham said in 2016, "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it." The Republican party has yet to be destroyed, and if it is to be destroyed Graham will not see its destruction. Because he is dead.

10,000 Kiwis voted. More than 65,000 votes in the Waiata 100 have been tallied. Aotearoa has spoken.

A nice article about the list from Nick Bollinger - "What do New Zealand's favourite songs say about us?" A previous top 100 by APRA (the Australasian Performing Right Association) - Top 100 New Zealand Songs Of All Time

Duke University would like to tell you about its conservation program. From modesty flaps to apology notes written on the effigy of a cat with a lettuce on its head, Duke library's conservation blog runs the gammut. Insight ranges from conservation methods and andequipment, to the items themselves. In their blog, Duke have made accessible some of the knowledge and techniques which allow preservation of some of our oldest and most charming artifacts.

Er zitten ca. 2.000 gasten bij elkaar en het is iedere avond rellen, vechten, slaan, intimideren en chaos. Het is zelfs zo erg en vervelend, dat het Rode Kruis dat over de hele wereld actief is in de gevaarlijkste brandhaarden niet meer in Ter Apel durft te zijn. Kennelijk grijpt de beveiliging niet of nauwelijks in en dus was het vannacht gewoon weer raak. "Vooral een klein groepje mannen zocht steeds de confrontatie op met elkaar en met vluchtelingen uit het aanmeldcentrum. Bij een opstootje kreeg een oudere vluchteling die langsliep ogenschijnlijk uit het niets een trap van een van deze mannen. Bij de vechtpartij die daarop volgde, grepen beveiligers in eerste instantie niet in. Toen de oudere man op de grond belandde, mengden diverse omstanders zich in de vechtpartij." En: "Bij een andere vechtpartij greep de politie in, maar werden geen aanhoudingen verricht." En: "Tijdens meerdere opstootjes werden flesjes bier kapotgeslagen." 

Paar vragen. Hoe kan het dat 'met name een klein groepje mannen' (waar de NOS hier ook de nadruk op legt) herhaaldelijk de confrontatie zoekt met vluchtelingen uit het aanmeldcentrum? Wie zijn de mannen als zij niet asielzoekers van het aanmeldcentrum zijn? Komen ze uit Ter Apel of zijn het 'andere' asielzoekers? Waarom worden de leden van dat 'kleine groepje mannen', als we blijkbaar toch weten wie het zijn, niet aangepakt en in de cel gesmeten? Waarom staan die beveiligers erbij te kijken als een stel doetjes? En waarom grijpt de politie niet in als ze ter plaatse moeten komen? Als het iedere avond uit de hand loopt, waarom wordt er dan niemand opgepakt? Wanneer halen we de ME erbij? Wanneer (maar neem de tijd hoor) kunnen we een keer wat daadkracht verwachten van de politiek? En tot slot: iedere week komen er nog steeds 600 - 1.000 nieuwe asielzoekers bij in Nederland, terwijl er geen politiek idee, geen beleid, geen plek, geen draagvlak, geen capaciteit en geen woning is, dus: waarom blijft die kraan maar open staan?