Oscar winner Mikey Madison and Jeremy Strong to star in film focused on fallout from whistleblower Frances Haugen
The first trailer for Aaron Sorkin’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to The Social Network has landed.
The Social Reckoning has been described as a film that isn’t a “straight sequel” but one that will still revisit Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Continue reading...The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
Continue reading...Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice in Wonderland … being the star of a classic story might seem like a dream, but there’s a dark side, argues the author of The Children
I’d loved the children for years before discovering they were real. I can almost summon the magic I felt when I first saw the photographs that proved it: the little boy clad in an approximation of hunters’ skins, posing victorious. The dark-haired girl with the offset gaze, her interior expression that of a person just growing used to being looked at.
And – this is the one that really kills me – the big-eyed, dimple-chinned seven-year-old in a soft sweater and tenderly mummish haircut, clutching the teddy bear that would end up even more famous than he would.
Continue reading...From marvelling at teenage wonderkids to tracking the world’s largest coffee pot, our team of writers outline their expectations for the jamboree in North America
Spain and Portugal in the final, with Spain winning. I’ve played our Bracketology game 20 times and gotten 20 different paths but Spain always end up winning. Alexander Abnos
Continue reading...ROSMALEN (ANP) - Tennisser Tallon Griekspoor heeft zich ten koste van Botic van de Zandschulp geplaatst voor de tweede ronde van het grastoernooi van Rosmalen. Griekspoor won het duel tussen de twee beste spelers van Nederland met 6-2 6-7 (2) 6-4. De partij werd dinsdag gestaakt vanwege de regen bij een 2-0-voorsprong in de derde set in het voordeel van Griekspoor.
De mondiale nummer 41 treft in de tweede ronde de Chinees Zhang Zhizhen. Griekspoor (29) en Van de Zandschulp (30) bereikten maandag al als duo de tweede ronde van het dubbelspel in Rosmalen.
Griekspoor had dinsdag de eerste set gewonnen dankzij twee late breaks. Na een slordige tweede set trok Van de Zandschulp de stand gelijk in de tiebreak. De voorsprong van Griekspoor in de derde set kwam na de hervatting niet meer in gevaar. Hij wist op 5-3 twee matchpoints niet te benutten, maar verzekerde zich van de winst op eigen service.
Griekspoor ging onlangs in de eerste ronde van Roland Garros onderuit tegen de Italiaan Matteo Arnaldi. De vroege uitschakeling kostte hem acht plaatsen op de wereldranglijst.
Tijdens de tweede golf van coronabesmettingen in het najaar van 2020 begonnen de spanningen in het kabinet, zei oud-minister Wouter Koolmees van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid tijdens een verhoor door de parlementaire enquêtecommissie corona. Volgens hem zijn er "vast en zeker lelijke woorden gebruikt", maar kwam het kabinet altijd tot beleid dat door iedereen gedragen werd.
"In de tweede golf kwam er discussie over de aanpak en de maatregelen die moesten worden genomen", aldus Koolmees. "Maar daar was het overleg in het Catshuis ook voor bedoeld", verwees de oud-minister naar informele overleggen tussen een aantal betrokken ministers. "De vertrouwelijkheid van het Catshuis zorgde ervoor dat je van je hart geen moordkuil hoefde te maken."
Het botste volgens Koolmees tussen ministers die het belang van de zorg benadrukten en ministers die keken naar andere belangen. Maar: "Als we zagen dat de situatie slechter werd, was er ook geen discussie over dat we maatregelen moesten nemen om het virus in te dammen."
BASRA (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Irak versnelt de olieverladingen in zijn belangrijkste haven en voert de export vanuit de Perzische Golf op. Dat blijkt volgens persbureau Bloomberg uit tankergegevens. Het is een nieuw teken dat grote landen van het oliekartel OPEC in het Midden-Oosten meer vaten door de Straat van Hormuz vervoeren.
Uit de gegevens die Bloomberg heeft verzameld komt naar voren dat ongeveer 7 miljoen vaten Iraakse olie deze maand tot nu toe de belangrijke zeestraat hebben verlaten of in de haven van de stad Basra worden geladen. Dat komt nu al overeen met de totale hoeveelheid ruwe olie die in april en mei werd geladen en verscheept.
Sinds het begin van de Iranoorlog eind februari heeft Iran de Straat van Hormuz vrijwel afgesloten voor olietankers en andere schepen. Dat zorgde ervoor dat de olie-export uit het Midden-Oosten flink is teruggelopen. Alleen Saudi-Arabië en de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten konden aanzienlijke hoeveelheden vervoeren dankzij pijpleidingen.
Scientists have discovered that people walking in crowds tend to spontaneously turn counterclockwise—regardless of the environment, from schoolyards to busy settings—a surprise finding that “may represent a manifestation of a deeper biological principle of symmetry breaking,” according to a study published in Nature Communications on Wednesday.
The bizarre finding was made essentially by accident; during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers led by Iñaki Echeverría Huarte, a professor who studies pedestrian dynamics at the University of Navarra in Spain, studied the movements of pedestrians as part of a project to inform public health guidance on social distancing measures. But the videos revealed something unexpected—a consistent pattern of people turning counterclockwise when switching direction.
“The discovery was a serendipitous one (as sometimes happens in science),” Huarte told 404 Media in an email exchange that also included study co-author Claudio Feliciani, a professor who studies crowd dynamics at the University of Tokyo. “Since then, we have completed a series of experiments in Spain to test several hypotheses.”
“Curiously, during a conference where I was presenting the first part of this story, Claudio and I got talking and thought together: why not run an experiment in Japan?” he continued. “We were convinced the rotation would flip there, for several reasons (cultural ones, and the different type of avoidance behaviour that exists in Japan compared with Spain). However...it did not.”
Indeed, over the course of several experiments that took place in different environments in Spain and Japan, the counterclockwise bias persisted, suggesting that the team may have stumbled on a hidden rule of behavior. This preference showed up whether people were walking alone, or as part of a group, suggesting that it emerges from individuals, rather than as a collective phenomenon that is only present in crowds.
“We are now only sure that it is not a collective but an individual bias, and that is very, very robust,” said Feliciani. However, the team stopped short of describing the bias as a “universal law” until more research is conducted, especially in more complex scenarios, such as emergency evacuations or dense crowds.
For this study, the researchers analyzed the movements of hundreds of participants, including adults who were instructed to move freely in different settings, teenagers playing in their schoolyard in Spain, and children at a nursery school in Japan. They accounted for individual variations such as handedness (left or right), age, as well as local social etiquette about expected behavior in crowds.
In each situation, the participants displayed a clear counterclockwise bias in the rotation of their bodies as they moved to a new direction. Each group also contained people who turned predominantly clockwise or showed no rotational bias, but they were fewer in number than the counterclockwise turners. The nursery school children showed an even stronger bias toward counterclockwise turns, suggesting that it may not be a learned behavior, but something biologically rooted.
“It is likely biomechanical, but exactly why is hard to tell,” said Feliciani. He added that this symmetry-breaking motion appears to be unusual in animals, and that “most animals show no bias, and humans are probably the exception or, for sure, a rare case.”
That said, the study outlined a few exceptions, including temnothorax ants, which tend to turn left while exploring, and budgies, which show preferences in certain lateral directions during flight.
Huarte is working on follow-up studies that use virtual reality to shed light on the bias, but for now, this weird pattern remains unexplained. A better understanding of its origins could be useful for applications in busy settings like airports, museums, shopping centres, and other public spaces. It’s also an example of how unexpected behavior can be hidden in plain sight.
“I believe the real value of our discoveries lies in the fact that it can lead to other discoveries on how we process locomotor information and use them to move,” Feliciani concluded.
We start this week with Emanuel’s story about the internal memes Google employees are making all about AI. Definitely check out some of the examples in the article or on YouTube. After the break, Jason tells us how Microsoft explicitly wants to “make people addicted” to its new AI assistant, according to an internal document. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains how companies are using Reddit to manipulate AI search results and big LEGO drama.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
For months during the summer of 2024, Jarmarus Brown, an Orange City, Florida police officer, ran his ex-girlfriend's license plate through the Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) system lookup database at least 69 times. He searched for the license plate belonging to her mom at least 24 times, and searched for the license plate belonging to her dad at least 15 times. Brown’s searches were happening so often, and were so commonplace, that even one of his colleagues noticed Brown researching his ex-girlfriend's whereabouts while the law enforcement officers sat in their police cruisers, according to court records obtained by 404 Media.
“While they were sitting there, Officer [Shadrich] King noticed Jarmarus was on the Flock system and a license plate reader image of [Brown’s ex-girlfriend] was on the screen,” a police affidavit about Brown’s behavior obtained by 404 Media reads. “Officer King said he mentioned to Jarmarus that he needed to stop running her vehicle in that system because he could get in trouble. Jarmarus responded saying that he knew that, and he was going to stop.” Flock’s automated license plate readers document every car that drives past them, creating a broad network of people’s movements around the country. Police can then look up license plates to learn where a specific car and, by extension, person, has traveled over time.
On another occasion, Brown told King that he believed his ex was lying about her whereabouts. She “told Jarmarus she was at her house with her mother, but Jarmarus knew for a fact she was not. When questioned by Officer King as to how he knew for a fact she was lying, Jarmarus said he used the Flock system and saw that her vehicle was elsewhere,” the affidavit reads. “Jarmarus then asked Officer King if he wanted to join him on a ‘stakeout’ to try to see where her vehicle was located.”
According to Brown’s ex-girlfriend, while they were dating he would “constantly require [her] to either be on FaceTime with him or be on the phone with him, even while she was working […] Jarmarus would try to control aspects of [her] life, such as the amount of makeup she would wear and the length of her fingernails.” According to the affidavit, Brown’s stalking extended beyond license place lookups; at one point while they were dating, he put an Apple AirTag in her wallet. But the bulk of his surveillance came through Flock, the affidavit says, noting that he kept “randomly showing up at the places she was at.”
The affidavit states Brown told investigators that “he would occasionally run her tag through Flock to track her whereabouts” because he believed she was lying to him. “It was dumb as hell on my end, emotions flowing, mind going,” he told investigators. The investigators ultimately determined Brown “knowingly and intentionally accessed the password protected computer systems, Flock and DAVID [a Florida DMV vehicle information database], to run the license plates of vehicles [she] frequently drove, for his own personal reasons. There was no work related, justifiable, reasons to do so, other than to track [her] whereabouts.” Brown was ultimately charged with stalking and hacking-related charges; he served one day in prison and was sentenced to five years of probation.
Brown’s case was not a one-off. Local news reports from around the country repeatedly detail police abusing the Flock surveillance systemic order to stalk their partners or ex-partners. The contours of each story are much the same, with the police officer in question using their access to the system to repeatedly track a specific person over the course of weeks or months. The cases highlight the fact that Flock can be used to track the whereabouts of individual people, that police do not get a warrant in order to use the system, and that, if they have access to the system, they have the technical ability to look up any license plate they want for any reason they want. An April study by the civil rights group Institute for Justice found that at least 18 police officers have been caught around the country using Flock to stalk a romantic interest in the last few years; another database, called the ALPR Abuse Library, has documented 20 specific cases of “stalking/targeting” around the country.
The known cases of police stalking are almost certainly a vast underreporting of the overall abuse, because they largely include only cases in which the behavior was so egregious that it led to police officers being fired, arrested, or both.
Flock told 404 Media that it is “aware of 15 incidents of abuse, each surfaced because of the transparency and accountability features deliberately built into our platform.”
“There are also 140,000 monthly active users of Flock, so the relatively rare instances of abuse, while obviously wrong and awful, are exactly that—rare,” a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “Humans are fallible; unlike most tools society provide law enforcement, Flock ensures that in the instances when our technology is misused, the evidence used to hold responsible parties accountable, is right there in our system. We also encourage all our customers to have a usage policy, regular training, and to implement our Audit Assistance tool, which proactively flags unintended use.”
It is definitely the case that Flock’s audit tools have proven useful in holding police accountable, because journalists, activists, and concerned citizens from around the country have pored through Flock audit logs that they have obtained through public records requests to document abuse. But it is also the case that Flock has strenuously fought against lawsuits and potential regulations that are seeking to require police to get a warrant to use the system. And many cases of abuse have not been detected by police departments themselves but by those private citizens, journalists, and stalking victims who have found patterns of abuse in public records files they have obtained from their local police departments. In most cases of Flock-related stalking reviewed by 404 Media, the abuse occurred over the course of months or years, and the victims were subjected to dozens or hundreds of lookups.
Other abuse cases have been discovered using the website HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a website that compiles Flock searches released via public records requests and turns them into a searchable database. Flock has repeatedly tried to get that website taken down, as we have previously reported.
In Wisconsin, a stalking victim checked her own license plate on HaveIBeenFlocked.com and learned that City of Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala had searched her license plate more than 100 times. After reporting this alleged abuse to the police, the agency ran its own audit and learned that Ayala had also searched the license plate of a second victim 124 times in a two-month span last year, according to court records. Each time, Ayala simply listed “investigation” as the reason for his search. In another alleged abuse case in Idaho, the police chief used Flock to allegedly stalk his wife using the reason “test” in the Flock system.
A citizens’ anti-surveillance organizing group, called Deflock Joplin, found anomalous searches by a police officer in Joplin, Missouri, last year. Using Flock audit logs they obtained using a public records request, they found one single license plate that was searched by one specific police officer 395 times in a 10-month span in 2025; they found that a second plate had been searched 147 times (the police officer’s name was redacted in the records).
“The activity presented here is startling and damning,” Deflock Joplin wrote in a blog about its investigation. “One user's account at JPD has surveilled people for around a year without detection. We see no conceivable way the Joplin Police Department is auditing these logs. This activity was blatant and obvious if anyone had bothered to take a look. We were able to find this data, file records requests, create a website, and share them in our spare time […] This system must be removed or severely curtailed to protect residents and their privacy.”
Soon after Deflock Joplin shared its findings with the city, the police officer in question was fired: “During that investigation, it was found that this single Joplin Police Officer did violate the policy
regarding department equipment and systems,” the city wrote in a press release. “Any misuse of the Flock system or any other Joplin Police resource will not be tolerated, and discipline will be administered swiftly and in accordance with policy.”
In Orange City, Florida, Brown’s ex suspected she was being stalked and spoke to a friend within the police department, who told her that Brown “used law enforcement databases to track her whereabouts.” She then made a stalking complaint, which started the investigation, according to the affidavit.
In Coffee County, Georgia, officer Chris Rozar was charged with eight crimes, including computer invasion of privacy, prohibited use of captured license plate data, and stalking, because he allegedly “did knowingly misuse the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office Flock Law Enforcement Camera System and Tag Reader System […] for the purposes of stalking,” and that he “did follow, track, and surveil [the victim] throughout multiple locations in Coffee County, without the consent of said person, for the purpose of harassing and intimidating said person.” This case, too, was not discovered through Flock’s auditing tools: “The investigation began about two years ago after a woman came forward with allegations that Rozar had [been] stalking her,” a press release about Rozar’s arrest reads.
In Bonner Springs, Kansas, a police officer allegedly used Leonardo-brand license plate reader cameras to stalk his ex wife as part of a horrifying and extensive hacking and spying campaign; the officer was also found to have beastiality and child sexual abuse material on his devices.
There are more than a dozen other cases from around the country where the story is much the same; a police officer stalks their partner or an ex for months before ultimately getting caught and fired or arrested. These cases repeatedly show that, because there are few limits on what police can use Flock for, they are often able to abuse the system for months or years before being caught.
Many of the known cases of police abuse were only discovered after the victim reported being stalked or after data crunching by journalists or local government transparency groups; many of the cases of abuse happened over the course of months. 404 Media is also aware of several instances in which an officer improperly used Flock and was simply warned or made to take leave, which did not rise to the level of being arrested or fired. 404 Media is also aware of at least one case that has not yet been reported in the media; in Dunwoody, Georgia, several police officers were fired or made to resign for improperly researching people through the Georgia Crime Information Center, a state database. At least one of the fired officers also improperly searched the city's Flock cameras, according to an internal investigative report shared with 404 Media by Jason Hunyar, a Dunwoody resident who has been investigating Flock. Dunwoody has a very close relationship with Flock and the company used Dunwoody as a demonstration for other police departments during sales pitches until Hunyar discovered that the company was accessing cameras in a children's gymnasium during these sales pitches.
“The fundamental problem with these systems is that they place private information about people’s movements over time in the hands of every officer,” Michael Soyfer, an Institute for Justice attorney, said in the organization’s report. “Without the constitutional safeguard of a warrant requirement, that predictably allows officers to abuse their access to these systems for things like stalking romantic partners.”
As Brendon Burton continues to pursue the strange corners of rural North America, the Portland-based photographer has discovered a newfound interest in the people who once inhabited them.
No longer entirely devoid of human figures, his isolated landscapes step into the walls of abandoned homes and provide a setting for enigmatic narratives. Burton’s quiet introduction to life through the presence of domestic, intimate objects allows the viewer to piece together a speculative story about their previous owners.
From a pair of worn boots and aged portraits to a patterned quilt resting upon a bed that was once made for the last time, photography introduces an element of permanence, preserving existence while original context has long faded away.
Burton has turned to direction and video of late, working on five music videos slated to release within the next few months. He has also published a second edition of his book, Epitaph, which you can pick up on his website. Follow Burton on Instagram to tag along on his travels and adventures.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Brendon Burton’s Enigmatic Photographs Preserve Traces of North American Life appeared first on Colossal.
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