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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/what-happens-when-neutrinos-swap-identities-inside-a-supernova/

Our basic understanding of core-collapse supernovae hasn't changed in decades. Large stars burn through all the fuel at their cores and start creating heavier elements in reactions that consume energy. The lack of energy from these reactions allows gravity to pull the interior of the star in on itself, collapsing it into a neutron star or black hole. The energy released by this process then blows the remainder of the star apart.

And, generally, that's right. But there's an entire busload of devils in the details. The statistics of supernovae that we've observed indicate that the model may be seriously incomplete. And on the theoretical side, there are still plenty of uncertainties, including over some of the basics, such as whether all core collapses actually result in a supernova.

A paper being released by Physical Review D provides what might be a potential explanation for the discrepancy: flavor-changing neutrinos. Neutrinos play a key role in our current models of supernovae, and right now, those models don't take into account one of neutrinos' most striking features: their ability to change identity.

We've observed plenty of supernovae, so it would seem like there would be little mystery left. But a number of observations suggest there are some subtleties that we might be missing. For example, if we compare the rate of star formation in the Universe to the frequency of supernovae, there's a discrepancy; it appears we're forming enough stars to fuel a much higher frequency of supernovae than we actually observe. Also, in cases where we can identify the progenitor star that exploded, we find too few red supergiants, indicating that they may be contributing to this discrepancy.

Other problems come from observations of gravitational waves generated by mergers of the black holes left behind after a supernova. These mergers suggest there's a "mass gap" in black hole formation—a range of masses where there are fewer black holes than you'd expect from an even distribution. But that data is complicated by the fact that theorists haven't definitively identified the conditions that determine when a neutron star tips over into a black hole instead.

Meanwhile, on the theory side, things have been in a bit of flux. As we've added ever more sophisticated physics to our models of supernovae, we've gone through periods where either everything blows up or nothing blows up. It has been harder to develop models that give us a good picture of why some stars blow up and others might not.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/09/17/fujitsu-ready-to-sell-its-custom-monaka-arm-chip-maybe-to-rival-server-makers/5297025

Fujitsu will start selling its Monaka processors, and servers packing them, in November.

The Japanese giant started talking about Monaka way back in 2023, when it teased the processor as being derived from the silicon it designed for the Fugaku supercomputer, but adapted for datacenter use.

Fugaku was the world's most powerful supercomputer from 2020 to 2022, and remains in ninth place on the Top 500 list six years after its debut. Who wouldn't want the tech that powered that behemoth in their datacenter? 

Yet as The Register reported earlier this year, Monaka diverged significantly from the silicon inside Fugaku. It's built on Broadcom's 3D-chip stacking tech and use the Armv9 ISA. The chip features a quartet of 2nm compute dies, each packing 36 cores. Also inside the chip are four SRAM 5nm chiplets, and it's all connected by a central I/O and memory die with 12 channels of DDR5 and PCIe 6.0 connectivity.

For years, Fujitsu told the Monaka-curious that the chip would see the light of day in 2027.

Earlier this week Fujitsu announced it will start selling the chips, and servers that use it, from November. The company will sell the chip to cloud operators and server manufacturers. The latter will have to compete with Fujitsu itself, which has created three servers that use the CPU:

A 1U server that can pack one or two processors, running at either 2.1GHz or 2.9GHz, room for eight E3.S SSDs and two M.2 SSDs, and the ability to run in both air-cooled environments where the temperature hits 40C and cope with 45C when using liquid cooling.

A 2U server with a pair of CPUs running at 2.1GHz, four E3.S disks and two M.2s, and supporting only air cooling.

A 2U, dual-CPU model designed to be used for multi-node deployments, four to a rack, running at 2.9GHz, packing just two E1.S SSDs and the two M.2s, and requiring liquid cooling. This is the model Fujitsu thinks will suit HPC and academic users.

All the servers use a 144-core processor.

Fujitsu hasn't named a price, at least in public. It is of course touting it as a strong option for inferencing workloads, thanks to a claimed ability to handle double the inferencing output of rival CPUs.

That quality alone will gather some attention from AI giants, hyperscalers, and neoclouds, if only because silicon supply chains remain fragile and any new source of inferencing power is worthy of investigation. The fact that these machines can run in quite hot air-cooled datacenters won't hurt.

Whether any server-makers beyond those who supply hyperscalers buy in is less certain. For nigh-on a decade now, vendors of Arm CPUs have touted their low power consumption as a must-have, but manufacturers have made only token efforts to deliver products that host Arm chips.

Interestingly, Fujitsu is pitching its smaller servers as a sovereign solution, in part because it's making the machines in Japan. Europe, the other market into which Fujitsu will initially sell the boxes, is also increasingly interested in sovereign tech.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective.

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

[...] Now, Lipps has filed a lawsuit against the city and one of its detectives over her arrest. It alleges that Detective Lucas Heck proceeded with charges despite knowing that Lipps lived in Tennessee, had never visited North Dakota, did not match the physical description of the suspect captured on surveillance footage, and had no unexplained funds linking her to the thefts.

[...] Lipps is seeking $10 million in damages, along with punitive damages against Heck and attorneys' fees, and has requested a jury trial.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/we-now-know-how-warm-the-t-rex-was/

Science

It was once widely believed that dinosaurs were all cold-blooded creatures, since they were classified as reptiles. But there is an increasing amount of evidence to the contrary, though scientists still don't know the exact body temperatures of most dinosaurs. A domino in that discussion appears to have fallen, with a new study from researchers at UCLA that says the Tyrannosaurus rex had a similar body temperature to humans.

The research, published Wednesday in Science Advances, was done in cooperation with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which provided teeth from Thomas the T. rex, a 34-foot-tall, 66-million-year-old specimen found in Montana in 2003 and one of the most complete in the world.

Researchers from UCLA measured isotopic signatures on the tooth enamel to determine the giant predator’s body temperature.

According to Robert Eagle, co-author of the study and associate professor at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, it's possible to glean information from any bone in the body, but teeth are especially helpful because "tooth enamel has large crystalline structures that are extremely durable," which helps them resist "chemical alteration" from being underground for eons.

Based on that process, the team determined that the T. rex's body temperature was likely around 36.3 degrees Celsius (about 97 degrees Fahrenheit).

This puts the T. rex in the same general category as humans with our 98.6-degree bodies. It also puts them in the same neighborhood as Indian and African elephants, as well as large, flightless birds like ostriches and emus. 

"This is the first thermodynamically and relatively direct measure of body temperature," Eagle told CNET in an email.

UCLA created the process years ago and used it to determine that the megalodon was also a warm-blooded predator. However, the method destroys the samples, which led the National History Museum to deny UCLA the teeth until the process could be made more efficient, thereby sacrificing smaller parts of the teeth.

"Nobody hands you a T. rex tooth unless you can show them you only need a few milligrams," Aradhna Tripati, climate scientist, co-author of the study, and director of the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science, said in an email to CNET. "The instrument and method that my lab did is what made the science possible. It was over a decade of work involving senior scientists, like Rob, and technical staff like the lead author of this study."

This sounds like a simple little thing, but it actually has some rather large implications. A prior study from 2022 suggested that, while reptiles are cold-blooded, evidence supported the idea that meat-eating dinosaurs had avian metabolisms, which would make them warm-blooded, whereas others, like the plant-eating Stegosaurus, were possibly cold-blooded.

“It’s thought that many dinosaurs, but not necessarily all, were warm-blooded,” Eagle said. “However, even amongst warm-blooded (or endothermic) organisms there are questions of the degree — they can be warm-blooded like sloths or anteaters (low-level endothermy), modern large mammals, or avian endotherms, which typically have higher metabolic rates than mammals.”

At the time, researchers could only guess at the general temperature of many of these dinosaurs, so the study by UCLA not only backs up that the T. rex was warm-blooded, but it's the first such study to produce precise measurements.

"For an animal this famous, it is remarkable how little we actually knew," Tripati said. "We had constraints on T. rex metabolism, mainly from bone and biomechanics, some of which has been controversial. We did not have a direct body temperature determination."

Figuring out the core body temperature of the T. rex can give scientists all sorts of data about how they behaved and where they lived, and help explain some things humans already knew. For example, Tripati says that T. rex fossils have been found all the way up in Alberta and Saskatchewan and all the way down to Texas. No reptile alive today has that kind of range since they are cold-blooded and need to stick to warmer climates.

"Thermal physiology drives behavior, range, energy budget and how a species responds to a changing climate," Tripati said. "A warm-blooded T. rex could have gone almost anywhere on the continent, including the high Arctic. That is a very different animal from a sun-basking reptile."

Eagle added that being warm-blooded means the T. rex likely had to hunt more often than originally thought to maintain its energy — and said it's even possible that the T. rex migrated to find food, which may have led it into colder climates.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/09/hackers-reveal-how-flock-cameras-really-track-cars-and-people/

Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety's cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people.
[...]
The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption.
[...]
The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets
[...]
"Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?" one of the hackers, from a collective calling itself stegan0gram, said in an interview. "We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse engineering of the cameras and associated solar equipment."
[...]
The hackers said they were able to access the Android system on the camera and found two partitions—sections of its hard drive, essentially. A few of these were unencrypted, the hackers said, including one called "vendor" and another called "media." The latter contained an encryption key that unlocked another part, which contained much of the media—the videos and stills—the camera took.

In early 2025, security researcher Jon "GainSec" Gaines reverse-engineered a Flock license-plate reader and documented flaws that could be used to gain root-level access. After Gaines disclosed his findings, the company acknowledged the findings but downplayed their severity, writing that the flaws required physical access to the device and that even someone who gained access to a camera "would still not be able to gain access to footage," because images remained on the device only briefly after being transmitted to the cloud.
[...]
A typical passing vehicle generated about 28 images, though some produced more than 100. The camera uses different exposures to capture both the license plate and the wider scene, then scans the images, selects and crops useful frames, and sends them with other data to Flock over the cellular network. The camera itself does not appear to read the plate or identify the vehicle's make, model, and color. That appears to happen on Flock's servers.

According to our analysis, the camera's logs recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454.
[...]
The software running on the camera explicitly detects people, something that is typically overlooked in discussions around Flock cameras. When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection.

To test what the software could actually see, WIRED extracted the models from the camera's files and ran them against test images and footage recovered from the device.
[...]
  The models detected people in 11 of the clips, all of them riding motorcycles. The small number is likely due to the camera's position above a roadway, pointed down at passing traffic where pedestrians were unlikely to appear.

The tests also showed how broadly the camera's license plate detector could interpret what it saw. In some cases it mistook bumper stickers, dealership frames, and other graphics for license plates and cropped them out as if they were plates. In one video of a passing motorcycle, the detector cropped an American flag patch on the rider's saddlebag as if it were a plate.
[...]
In August, WIRED obtained frontend code for Flock's police software, now called OS Investigate and previously known as Nightshift, and reconstructed portions of the tool. That software showed how Flock can use the records generated by its cameras, along with police files and commercial data, to identify drivers and surface vehicles that repeatedly travel together and search for people based on patterns of movement. The data provides a view of the other end of a system.
[...]
Noel Pichardo, a former Pawtucket, Rhode Island, police officer who became an outspoken critic of Flock after challenging his department's use of the cameras, says he understands the activists' frustration but worries that sabotaging devices could ultimately strengthen the case for them.
[...]
The camera's logs also show the camera struggling with storage. Its logs recorded more than 27,000 "no space left on device" errors while trying to save full-resolution images, along with tens of thousands of related errors, crashes, and reboots. At the same time, about every two minutes, code checked that the camera was still running and logged the message, "Who's a good boy?!" More than 12,000 of those messages appear in the recovered logs.

When the camera did restart, another service left a final message in the logs: "A reboot was requested! ¡Adiós, Amigos!"

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/09/16/aws-says-wartime-damage-means-some-middle-east-cloud-resources-are-gone-for-good/5296830

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran.

In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible.

"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the update says.

"After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region."

After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to migrate their workloads to other Regions. The company said most did so before further attacks disrupted a second Availability Zone in April and rendered the entire Region unavailable.

AWS has reached a similar conclusion about one Availability Zone in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saying it cannot re-establish access to the resources and data hosted there.

The affected Zone, mec1-az2, is one of three in AWS's UAE Region. Two AWS facilities in the country were hit by drones back in March as Iran retaliated against US-Israeli strikes on its territory.

AWS says it continues to work on recovering resources in the Region, including some hosted in the other affected Availability Zones (mec1-az1 and mec1-az3). It adds that "most customers" have been able to restart operations in other AWS Regions by restoring from backups or copying any data that remained accessible.

The company says its support teams remain available to help customers move their applications to alternate Regions.

The Register asked AWS to comment, but the company declined to add to the information on its Health Dashboard.

In AWS terminology, a Region is a geographic area containing multiple isolated Availability Zones. Each Zone consists of one or more discrete datacenters with independent power, cooling, and network connectivity.

AWS recommends distributing applications and resources across multiple Availability Zones to withstand the loss of a single location. That approach cannot protect against a Region-wide failure, however. Workloads that must survive such an event require a disaster recovery plan involving another Region.

AWS and several other tech companies advised customers after the first strikes to recover whatever resources they could and replicate them in alternate Regions, ideally in Europe, rather than wait for services in the Middle East to return. That advice appears to have been well-founded.

AWS said at the time: "Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/09/not-just-proton-getting-to-know-valves-new-steamos-compatibility-layers/

Since the release of the Steam Deck, Valve fans have gotten very familiar with the idea of the Proton compatibility layer that allows games written for Windows to run capably on the Linux-based SteamOS (though Valve's efforts in this realm date back further than that). To get more games running on the SteamOS-powered Steam Frame, though, Valve is relying on two additional compatibility layers that are new to the Steam architecture.

The first, FEX, is Valve's port of fex-emu, an open source project that emulates x86 processor instructions on an Arm chipset.
[...]
While Proton was based on the pre-existing Wine conversion tool, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge last year that the company has been funding Fex lead developer Ryan Houdek since the project was just a prototype.
[...]
The second new compatibility layer hitting Steam is Lepton, an expansion of the pre-existing Waydroid project focused on getting standard Android APKs to run on SteamOS through a software container. This layer is especially necessary for the Steam Frame, since many of the standalone VR titles players will be running on the device were originally designed for the Android-based Quest headsets.
[...]
VR.org dug through Steam metadata this month and found that 52 of the first 120 "Great on Frame" games run on the Steam Frame as Android executables translated via Lepton. That includes the first trio of Steam games listed on the storefront without any Windows, Mac, or Linux builds (note the lack of desktop system requirements on the store pages).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/09/17/judge-orders-microsoft-to-spill-internal-docs-and-scour-execs-comms-in-secondhand-licensing-case/5296820

The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was canceled.

Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, potentially explosive internal document written by Microsoft entitled the "Second-Hand Software" (SHS) Presentation.

ValueLicensing and Microsoft agreed to vacate the case management conference ahead of its scheduled date on September 14, 2026. The result is the Consent Order [PDF], which, unsurprisingly, focuses on locating and asking for the disclosure of Microsoft documents that may bear on the reseller's allegation that the company offered incentives for customers to shift to subscription services in return for not selling their pre-owned licenses.

The confidentiality designation applied to several documents in the case has also been lifted.

In addition, there are many references to a June 2013 document that Microsoft disclosed on December 22, 2025, entitled "Second-Hand Software Presentation" (SHS Presentation).

June 2013 was a busy time for Microsoft: it had launched the Office 365 subscription service two years previously, but there was a question over what to do about those customers with perpetual licenses that Microsoft wanted to move into the brave new world of "an always-up-to-date cloud service, at a predictable monthly subscription."

While the content of the SHS Presentation has yet to be made public, the Consent Order treats it as a "Known Adverse Document," meaning it is unlikely to be good news for Microsoft. Furthermore, the consent order requires Microsoft to explain by October 31 why it had not disclosed it earlier. This case was filed in 2021 and yet it took until the end of 2025 for Microsoft to produce the presentation.

Microsoft was also asked  to conduct extensive, unredacted disclosure searches across its corporate mailboxes and SharePoint accounts of high-level executives for search terms including "antitrust," "used licenses,"  "second hand",  and "Value Licensing," between July 3, 2012 and June 1, 2020.  It has until November 30 to produce any documents found during the search.

Execs whose mailboxes and document repositories must be searched include Richard Chin, currently a Corporate VP at Microsoft responsible for the company's monetization approach and who was a General Manager between 2012 and 2020 working on pricing, licensing, and the business models in the Cloud and AI world. Kevin Turner, who was Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft from 2005 to 2016, is also on the list.

As for confidentiality, the consent order stated, "No blanket or default designation of such documents as 'Restricted' or 'Confidential' shall be applied." Instead, it'll be on a document-by-document basis and "limited to the precise words, figures or passages said to be sensitive; and be supported by specific reasons rather than general assertions."

"Defendants shall disclose by no later than 4pm on 30 November 2026 any further documents they have identified relating to the same or similar matters addressed in the SHS Presentation."

Microsoft will also keep ValueLicensing appraised of its progress every 21 days.

Microsoft told The Register it had no comment to make on the Consent Order.

ValueLicensing boss Jonathan Horley said, "ValueLicensing have been working to get appropriate disclosure for some years and this Order is the result of that work and more recently disclosed documents.

"This is a further stage enabling a better understanding of how Microsoft dealt with the second-hand software market which brings a liability trial one stage closer."

The case has had several twists over the years, not least Microsoft's "Hail Mary" attempt to make it about copyright rather than the allegation that it deliberately stifled the sale of secondhand software licenses. This latest turn might eventually give an intriguing insight into how the US biz dealt with the market while encouraging customers to embrace subscriptions.

Time to break out the popcorn, perhaps?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/16/spacex-aims-starship-for-orbit-on-september-22/5296836

SpaceX is aiming for a September 22 launch of its monstrous Starship rocket on a 10-hour mission to deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit.

The flight, set to launch at 1215 UTC if all goes to plan and the authorities give the green light, will be the first time Starship has gone into orbit, and the mission is planned to fly at an altitude of approximately 275 km. The mission aims for six orbits, followed by a deorbit burn using a single Raptor engine. The engineers are then planning a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile.

The Super Heavy Booster will be ditched in the Gulf of Mexico, hopefully under better control this time. On flight 13, the booster made a "hard splashdown," as SpaceX delicately put it, after only eight of the planned 13 engines reignited. The booster used all 33 engines for its boostback burn, but according to SpaceX, "the three center engines showed signs of ice clogging which triggered an early end to the maneuver."

In true iterative style, SpaceX tweaked the hardware to improve filtering and updated the software to "enhance relight reliability."

SpaceX has also changed Starship's heatshield, including adding curved tiles to reduce heating in tile gaps and "additional retention mechanisms added to tiles in areas deemed to be at highest risk of falling off during ascent." It is also reusing a pair of tiles recovered from the previous flight test. If Starship is to become truly reusable, these tiles will need to fly over and over again.

Getting to orbit is by no means guaranteed. The SpaceX team will only command a final burn to enter orbit if there is sufficient hardware redundancy to perform a deorbit burn when the time comes. After all, nobody wants something the size of Starship making an uncontrolled reentry after its orbit eventually decays.

Starship has had an eventful test program. Some missions were spectacularly successful, and several boosters returned to be caught by arms on the launch tower. Others were impressive failures.

The vehicle is critical to SpaceX's future; it can loft far greater payloads than the company's workhorse Falcon 9 and is an essential part of NASA's Artemis program. For Artemis III, planned for 2027, SpaceX is expected to launch a Starship equipped with the docking apparatus planned for the lunar variant. Reaching orbit is therefore a critical step.

Original Submission

OpenAI Admits Its Agents Went Off The Rails Another Six Times

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/17/openai-admits-its-agents-went-off-the-rails-another-six-times/5297016

OpenAI has revealed another six occasions on which its AI software behaved unexpectedly or did dangerous things.

The startup added the incidents to its misalignment reports page on Wednesday evening, Pacific Time, and described them as follows:

·       Self-generated prompt injections in compaction summaries

·       Encouraging deception in compaction summaries

·       Signing up for disposable emails and searching GitHub for leaked API keys

·       Uploading files to the internet in order to cite them

·       Unsanctioned Artifactory writes and cross-sample communication

·       Unauthorized communication via temporary file hosting services

The details are unsettling.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/lawmakers-target-flock-cameras-with-a-threat-to-highway-funding/

A bipartisan pair of US lawmakers tell WIRED they plan to introduce legislation today that would strip federal funding from states that fail to restrict the use of Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers. The devices, which help police track the location of vehicles tied to crimes, have become the subject of nationwide backlash in recent months over more nefarious uses by officers.

The No FLOCK Act—for Federal License-Plate Observation and Camera Keeping—directs the US secretary of transportation to withhold 10 percent of annual financial support due to states for highways, roads, and bridges if it fails to ban Flock and similar devices for all but five use cases. Congressmen Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat representing Chicago suburbs, and Michael Cloud, a Republican whose Texas district includes Corpus Christi, are cosponsoring the bill.

The legislation says that Flock cameras could be used only for "enforcing toll systems, identifying stolen vehicles, missing or endangered persons, vehicles registered to persons with a warrant for a felony offense, or investigating a vehicle involved in a felony offense." Notably absent are uses like conducting traffic studies, investigating minor drug crimes, and enforcing parking and speeding rules.

"Our investigation into Flock exposed serious gaps in oversight, and this bipartisan bill would put clear limits in place to prevent abuse while preserving legitimate public safety uses," Krishnamoorthi said in a statement.

But the bill stops short of banning Flock systems altogether, which has been the number one demand from supporters of a global protest movement against the Atlanta-based company and its competitors. It also doesn't stop Flock users from broadly sharing license plate tracking data with other government agencies, including immigration authorities.

Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the proposed bill.

If the legislation passes this year, states that fail to comply with it would begin losing out on tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual transportation funding starting in October 2028.

The Department of Transportation calculates the amount of so-called surface transportation funds it gives to states based on factors such as how many roadways they have and how busy they are. Congress has repeatedly threatened taking away the funding to pressure states into taking action on public safety. The tactic helped establish a national minimum drinking age, standard rules for what constitutes driving under the influence, and regulations for billboards alongside highways.

Another bipartisan bill introduced in Congress recently called for banning the use of federal funding to purchase Flock cameras. Flock's lobbying spending in Washington, DC, has been steady over the past 18 months, and it recently hired a fifth firm to help with the efforts, according to federal records.

A number of issues related to emerging technologies, including rogue AI systems, data center construction, and law enforcement abuse of Flock cameras, have become major topics in the upcoming US midterm elections, which are now less than two months away. But it's unclear whether any legislation designed to address voters' concerns will advance through Congress anytime soon, let alone gain the approval of President Donald Trump.

The president expressed support for Flock cameras on Sunday, telling reporters that they help law enforcement authorities. Lawmakers largely agree, but they are frustrated by cases in which police officers have been caught using Flock footage for personal reasons, such as stalking their one-time romantic partners. One report found at least 100 instances of alleged abuse over the past eight years.

"Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund the shredding of their own civil liberties or the growth of a surveillance state," Cloud said in a statement. "Flock cameras are enabling mass surveillance of Americans, infringing on the Fourth Amendment."

About 25 states and US territories have laws about automated license plate readers, including mandating transparency about the systems and requiring unnecessary data to be promptly deleted, but few of the measures limit types of uses, according to the New York University School of Law's Policing Project.

The bill is "a first step toward reining in unchecked surveillance," Cloud said, adding, "we can protect public safety without sacrificing the privacy of Americans."

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/17/swift-64-unifies-building-across-linux-macos-windows/5297006

Although Swift serves as Apple's primary language for macOS and iOS application development, the open-source community continues to expand its reach—driving its adoption as a multi-platform language or even a cross-platform one in fields beyond user interface design.

Tuesday's Swift 6.4 release continued that work. Along with the usual assortment of type shortcuts and async adjustments came word that Swift Build is now the default build engine for the Swift Package Manager.

Synergies have already ensued! The pairing sets the stage for a faster build process. A developer can write a program in Swift and Swift Build will automatically download and install the required dependencies, testing them for compatibility. It then compiles the code into a CPU-specific binary.

The merger also unifies the Swift developer experience regardless of platform.

With this integration, a developer can run through the entire build process in their own environment, be it Apple's Xcode IDE or a beloved command line, and all the steps will be exactly the same for a Linux, macOS, or Windows app.

Or the developer can run their builds from VS Code, thanks to a new extension available on the Open VSX Registry.

Sweetening the deal, the integrated package comes with a tool to generate an SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) for each app, listing all the dependencies in either the SPDX or CycloneDX format (SE-0509). SBOMs are da bomb when it comes to software auditing and checking for potential security bugs.

In a way, Swift is following the lead of Rust's Cargo and Go's command line, both of which run as unified toolchains, as does Bun for JavaScript. A single integrated workflow can take the place of manually calling one tool after another to schlep some code into production.

Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/09/16/congress/paul-kills-kill-switch-bill-01081348:

Sen. Rand Paul blocked an attempt by fellow Republican Sen. John Kennedy to quickly pass legislation that would require companies to build a "kill switch" into their artificial intelligence model.

Kennedy, of Louisiana, went to the Senate floor Wednesday to try to pass his bill without holding a formal vote — a step that can be prevented by any one of his 99 colleagues. He argued that the measure was effectively a short-term step, with Congress unlikely to pass more sweeping AI legislation in the immediate future even amid fears that technological advancements could spiral out of human control.

"We are not going to get up off our ice-cold lazy butts and address this anytime soon," Kennedy said about Congress' inability to pass a more comprehensive bill. "But still we've got this risk out there that we know is real of one of these models becoming the Terminator."

Paul, however, blocked Kennedy's request to pass the bill through a unanimous consent agreement, saying from the Senate floor, "I think we should have as many facts as possible before we dictate rules for the whole economy.

"I don't oppose the spirit of this bill, but I do ask that we make sure that we have all the information," the Kentucky lawmaker added.

Paul tried to amend Kennedy's bill to establish a group that could make recommendations on AI guardrail policies to the Senate Commerce Committee. Kennedy rejected that suggestion.

"My mama didn't raise a fool," he said, adding that "a committee is a way to kill this."

Are model "guardrails" even possible in principle? How would a "kill switch" be implemented if it is part of the model, where the model could just choose to ignore it?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Downloading a model is increasingly easy. Understanding how it was made, or changing a system at its root, is another matter:

The AI industry likes to abuse the word "open." It appears in product releases, research papers, policy debates, and investor presentations. A company publishes model files to Hugging Face, developers run them on their own GPUs, and the release is quickly described as an "open source model." Not necessarily. It may only be open-weight.

The difference is more than a technicality. It determines whether you can merely deploy a completed neural network or whether you can meaningfully inspect, reproduce, alter, and redistribute the system that produced it. A genuinely open source system should grant the freedom to do all of the above.

Weights are the learned numerical parameters created by training. Together with the model architecture and inference code, they allow a large language model (LLM) to function. You can download an open-weight model, self-host it, fine-tune it on internal documents, and avoid routing prompts through a proprietary API.

Open weights are publicly available. They matter because running them locally can offer greater control over data, privacy, costs, supplier API changes, and vendor lock-in. They've also helped build a large ecosystem of local-model runtimes, inference providers, fine-tuning tools, and specialized downstream models.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), makes the distinction directly: "Open Weights refer to the final weights and biases of a trained neural network." Those values determine how a model interprets prompts and produces outputs. Releasing them can let others fine-tune, adapt, or deploy the model. But the OSI adds that weights alone expose only "a fraction of the information required for full accountability."

As James Landay, director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), explained: "Open weights are progress. You can download the model, run it on your own machine, keep it out of someone else's data pipeline. But you still can't see how the thing was built, what it was trained on, or why it behaves the way it does. That's not an open model. That's open distribution."

looorg writes:

The next CEO genius tries his hand at predicting future trends in computing. Next on the chopping block ... The keyboard.

'The end of the keyboard is near': Christian Klein predicts voice translation will be the next workplace advantage

The English engineer, Henry Mill, submitted the first-ever patent for a "machine transcribing letters" in 1714. It never actually went into production, but it was a forerunner of the typewriter and then the electronic keyboard: 312 years later, Christian Klein, CEO of software giant SAP, is noting the end of an era.

It had a good run. But now it's time to go behind the shed and move to the farm up north.

"The end of the keyboard is near," he tells me. "When you encounter voice recognition from many of these large language models, [it] is super strong. Now we have to do some work to translate voice into business language and business data."

The future will be, for sure, that you are not typing any data information into an SAP system. You can instead ask certain analytical questions with your voice."

That will be the most annoying office change since the "open office" or the "paper free office". If you thought it was annoying when people just spoke on the their phones imagine the wonders of them engaging in data input or any kind of data alterations, or query or manipulation or just anything really ...

But SAP's prediction that "data-inputting" via typing will end in the next two to three years at the firm has significance well beyond the death of QWERTY.

Gone in two or three years? Suuuure.

https://fortune.com/2026/09/16/end-of-keyboard-near-christian-klein-sap-predicts-voice-translation-next-workplace-advantage/

Original Submission