Flock Safety’s automated license plate-reading cameras, used by thousands of law enforcement agencies in the U.S., have drawn intense criticism from civil liberties groups.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ceva Logistics, one of the world's largest shipping and logistics giants, has been hacked. Several companies that rely on Ceva for shipping their products to their customers say that their personal information was also stolen in the breach. The cyberattack on Ceva is affecting at least eight warehouses across Europe used for shipping goods across the continent, the company told TechCrunch. Industry news site FreightWaves reports that the hack began on July 29 and is causing shipping delays for many of the goods in affected warehouses. Ceva is a France-headquartered shipping and logistics giant that companies around the world rely on to deliver their goods from their assembly lines to customer homes. The company, which brought in $18.3 billion in revenue in 2025, has over a thousand warehouses across the world. [...] The hack at Ceva also resulted in a data breach, affecting a large amount of personal information belonging to retail customers that Ceva relies on for delivering goods to people's home addresses. Several companies reported that hackers took their customers' names, home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses used to place their orders from Ceva's systems. Dutch online retail giant Bol said on its website that hackers gained access to systems of its warehousing partner, Ceva, and warned that their customers' data may have been taken. Bol also said that it expects delays and some customer orders to be canceled as a result of the incident. De Bijenkorf, another Dutch luxury retailer, similarly confirmed order delays following the theft of its customers' data, per local media. Football club Ajax, banking giant ING, and eyeglass maker Ace & Tate also reported that customers' shipping information was affected. Video game giant Valve told customers that it learned on August 7 that data was taken from Ceva's systems, and alerted customers who recently bought its Steam hardware that they had personal information taken in the incident. Valve said in its note to customers, posted to Reddit, that Ceva stores their shipping and delivery information for 90 days following their order. So far, Ceva says the agency has received data breach reports from 10 organizations in relation to the incident.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Texas, there’s one thing liberals and conservatives agree on: They don’t want cameras trained on their cars.

Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk (Mastodon, Hacker News, MacRumors, Mac Power Users):

WebKit-based browsers on iOS and macOS can be configured to route all web traffic through proxy servers, which is how Tor browsers on iOS and our own Psylo work. We found three WebKit features — DNS prefetching, WebAuthn Related Origin Requests, and WebTransport — that bypass the configured proxy and send traffic directly from the device, which exposes the user’s real network. The same leaks also affect Apple’s iCloud Private Relay.

[…]

It must be noted that VPNs are not affected, since they tunnel the device’s entire network traffic at the system level.

[…]

We’ve addressed all three leaks in Psylo 1.3.1[…] Passkeys and WebTransport have legitimate uses, so both can be re-enabled at any time through per-silo toggles. This keeps Psylo leak-free out of the box, while users who need one of these features on a given site can opt in explicitly, with a clear understanding of the trade-off.

Psylo:

In an ideal world, we’d report the issues to Apple, they acknowledge the issue, and ship a fix in a timely manner. Unfortunately, our past experience with Apple tells us that reporting this issue would involve months of delays, inconsistent communication, and in some cases, denying the issue’s impact entirely.

We weren’t willing to wait months, or upwards of a year, sitting on bugs that undermine the core privacy guarantees of Psylo and iOS Tor browsers while saying or doing nothing.

[…]

Should we knowingly leave our users exposed while waiting for a system-level fix? We didn’t think that was acceptable or fair to our users. Or should we quietly ship our own mitigations without telling anyone? We didn’t think that was acceptable either. Security fixes deserve transparency, especially when they involve tradeoffs.

Psylo:

Soon after we published the blog, we sent a link to the blog and demo website to Apple in a security report to make them aware of it. Now the report is already in the status “We’re planning to address the issue you reported.” and a fix is planned for Fall 2026 🤯🤯🤯

Mysk:

It used to take months and months to reach this status. We got there in less than 24h

Running to the press always helps…

Previously:

• Hide My Email Vulnerability Exposes Real Address
• No Bounty for Mysk
• Psylo Web Browser 1.0
• iCloud Private Relay White Paper

Update (2026-08-11): Ben Lovejoy (MacRumors):

A class action lawsuit accusing Apple of false advertising, misrepresentation, and fraud has now been filed by Clarkson Law Firm – the same lawyers who previously obtained a $250M settlement over the delayed launch of Siri AI.

Flock had a devious plan to expand its surveillance network past its army of AI-powered license plate scanners.

As 404 Media reports, the controversial company drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to scan the license plates of every vehicle that drove past them — in effect turning hundreds of thousands of rideshare and delivery drivers into a network of what the reporting describes as “roaming surveillance vehicles.”

These plans were first revealed last August as part of an intended partnership between Flock and the AI-powered dashcam company Nexar. Now, a presentation document obtained by 404 Media shows that Flock was actively pitching this partnership to potential customers at the time. The presentation, which was intended to be shown to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General, was obtained by a Georgia resident through a public records request.

Flock told 404 that the partnership never went through, but the presentation still shows the company’s plans to turn rideshare and delivery drivers into mobile surveillance apparatuses — and the sheer scale is astonishing. 

“Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the Flock presentation stated. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.”

Expanding to rideshare drivers would’ve added a new dimension to Flock’s already far-reaching surveillance network. Most of its cameras are mounted on stationary poles that survey a fixed area. In addition to providing more coverage, using cars could help Flock keep a lower profile; one of the main problems Flock is facing amid overwhelming public backlash is that protestors are vandalizing or blocking its surveillance pylons.

Another murky area of Flock’s plans was that it’s unclear if the Uber and Lyft drivers would’ve been aware they were participating in surveillance efforts, 404 noted.

Flock didn’t discount the possibility of these plans being realized through another partnership in the future. If they do, it’ll only fuel the massive privacy and safety concerns already posed by its cameras. The footage it collects into a centralized network can be accessed by cops across the country, often with little accountability. At least 50 police officers have been accused of using the cameras to stalk women, according to a recent Washington Post tally.  

Several people have also been swarmed by cops after Flock wrongly identified them as suspects.

The dashcam partnership wasn’t the only plan that Flock had to deepen its surveillance. Last month, it officially cancelled a “human distress detection” pilot program, a network of always-on acoustic sensors that monitored public places for sounds of “screaming.”

More on surveillance: Public Offers Implausible Number of Alibis for Man Accused of Destroying Flock Cameras

The post Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp appeared first on Futurism.

South Australia is launching an AI royal commission to examine how the technology is reshaping work, public services, and the economy. Businesses should expect greater scrutiny of AI governance, privacy, workforce use, and accountability as separate federal standards and privacy rules move forward.

Cory Solovewicz receives more unwanted emails than you. Seriously—it’s a lot more. Since December 2024, one of the domains at which the security researcher receives email has registered 401,796 messages—by his calculations that’s an average of 699.99 pings per day.

This deluge isn’t the regular flood of spam, newsletters, and unwanted deals that fill many people’s inboxes. Instead, companies and other organizations are inadvertently sending Solovewicz other people’s private information and company secrets. Over the last few years, he’s received injury reports from a city government, confirmation of people’s pizza orders, and account setup emails from a school platform. “I get service orders for people that need repairs. I get lots of test platform credentials,” says Solovewicz, a security researcher and consultant.

Solovewicz is receiving the avalanche of messages as he’s the owner of the domains noreply.us and noreply.net, which he purchased in 2020 and 2024, respectively. After originally planning to use the noreply.us domain as a catch-all email—which receives mail sent to any @ address on that domain—to filter messages and enhance his privacy, the researcher quickly noticed that other systems were sending mail to @noreply.us addresses. “I created an accidental honeypot,” Solovewicz tells WIRED. “I had no idea it was going to turn into this.”

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© Richard Drury via Getty

Futurism reports: 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the Los Angeles Police Department Office of the Inspector General caught the department's ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which "resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles," the LAPD's cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over. "The biggest issue remains this national database at the FBI called NCIC," Flock's CEO Garrett Langley recently told The Drive, complaining about "how archaic its structure is." Flock CEO: There's no feedback loop mechanisms; it's really just a static comma-separated file. We've tried to build around it. We have this concept called "suppression." A local agency — let's take Atlanta, where I live — might see that there's a stolen plate out of California, but it's already been resolved because it's a rental car or a dealer car. They can, in Flock, suppress that: "Never alert us on that for the next year." That's to get around the fact that they can't force another agency to remove it from NCIC. Ideally, the way it would work is if enough agencies — let's call it one, two, or three — flag a tag as no longer valid or a bad entry, it should just get removed. Or at least it should get pushed more aggressively by the FBI... I'm hopeful that they'll see there's an opportunity to make something like NCIC, which is an important tool not just for companies like Flock, but for police departments to work together, start to make some enhancements to modernize what's a central part of our policing system. Later in the interview he says "It's less than one in a million alerts that an officer says, 'I'm not sure if that's right.' Less than one in a million." A recent report from Business Insider shares a worst-case scenario. In the summer of 2024 a Sacramento police officer said Flock's cameras had sent six false alerts for the same vehicle, wrongly saying it had been stolen or used in a felony crime in the nearby suburb of Roseville: Roseville police could see that Flock's software kept confusing the "9" on the man's license plate for an "8." The car owner said he would take off his license plate cover. Soon after, it happened again. It's "easier at this point we have it memorized," a dispatch supervisor in Roseville wrote in an email to a colleague. Flock says that in optimal conditions, its cameras accurately read more than 96% of license plate characters. Hundreds of pages of records from the Roseville Police Department show a different picture. In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent 1,427 alerts to Roseville police, flagging vehicles as stolen or used in a felony after they passed one of the city's Flock cameras. An analysis by the police department found that in 71% of those alerts, Flock's machine-learning software incorrectly read the license plates... The cameras regularly missed vehicles, captured blurry images, misread license plate characters and states, and sent delayed alerts to police about vehicles possibly connected to crimes, the records show... A factor that contributed to the misread problems in Roseville was the "particularly unique deployment" that the city requested, a Flock spokeswoman said. Roseville said it has its cameras configured so that they capture only the backs of vehicles, a setup intended to avoid capturing personally identifiable information like faces. Roseville's setup included older hardware and placement of cameras higher and further from vehicles than the company typically recommends, Flock added... In Toledo, Ohio, driver Brandon Upchurch was mauled by a police dog after a Flock camera misread the "7" on his license plate as a "2." As a result of his injuries, he said, he lost his job and was evicted from his home. He settled a lawsuit against the city and police officer for $35,000. None of the incorrect Flock alerts in Roseville resulted in a traffic stop or arrest, a department spokesman said. Roseville requires police officers to verify that a license plate is stolen or have independent reasonable suspicion of a crime before making a traffic stop... Flock said Roseville's camera performance has significantly improved, which the police department disputed... Flock's cameras also missed vehicles altogether... At one point, Flock's product director for machine learning suggested that officers ask drivers to remove license plate frames that made it "very difficult for the machine vision to tell it is actually a 'E' and not an 'F.'" Roseville told Flock at the time that it wouldn't do so, according to the department spokesman. Flock in 2024 shared an analysis with Roseville's police department, outlining reasons for the misreads. Vehicles far from a camera were sometimes blurry. Plates were cut off by trees or license plate frames. And Flock's software confused similar characters, mistaking an "N" for a "V", or a "1" for a "4...." Roseville isn't the first organization to flag inaccuracies in Flock's technology. In 2021, the research firm IPVM independently tested Flock's license plate readers, concluding that Flock misidentified the state in about one of 10 reads, and that the system regularly misclassified vehicles' type and make. IPVM said that Flock subsequently blocked it from purchasing its cameras for testing. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Cognitive Dissident for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a time of rising skepticism against tech surveillance, it seems not even the best intentions can spare you from backlash.

That’s a lesson some good samaritans in Los Vegas learned the hard way, after a thermal imaging drone they were using to track a runaway dog was trashed by a group of unidentified vandals.

According to to Las Vegas station FOX5, the volunteer animal rescue group Paws Patrol LV has been scrambling to replace a $7,000 camera drone after it suddenly went offline while tracking an injured dog.

“For the past couple of days, we’ve been searching for a dog we believe was hit by a car,” the group wrote in a post on Facebook. “We searched on foot, but the vegetation was simply too dense to see through with flashlights. So we launched our thermal drone… one of the most valuable rescue tools we’ve ever owned.”

“Less than a minute after it took off,” the post continues, “a group of unhoused individuals knocked it out of the sky, smashed it, and threw it into the water.”

The animal-rescue group wasn’t left empty-handed for long, however, as a business owner from Montana chipped in to donate a brand new thermal imaging drone, per an update on the original post.

While it would be easy to blame a group of unwashed Luddites for the damage, it’s important to keep in mind that the true identity of the vandal or vandals remains unknown. If the vandals really are homeless, as Paws Patrol LV volunteers suggest, then their aversion to strange drones makes sense — elsewhere, surveillance drones have been deployed by police officers to clear homeless camps, while private citizens have used drones to drop dog feces on homeless populations struggling to survive.

And one doesn’t necessarily have to be homeless to have an aversion to the growing number of surveillance drones surfing our skies. In some parts of the US, malicious operators have used drones to harass random suburbanites and poach wildlife, while insurance adjusters are increasingly conducting secretive drone flights to find excuses to penalize homeowners and sometimes even drop customers altogether.

While we hope the dog gets found, the episode underscores a larger point: the skies have become a contested space, with drone operators both benevolent and vindictive jockeying for control — not just of the airspace itself, but over how their drones are perceived.

More on drones: We’re Admittedly Terrified That They’ve Now Invented Invisible Drones

The post Volunteers Tracking Lost Dog Baffled When Locals Trash Thermal Imaging Drone appeared first on Futurism.

When you read the newspaper, does it read you back?

On Thursday, USA Today Co — formerly known as Gannett, the publisher of its eponymous newspaper USA Today— announced that it was partnering with the AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize and gain “actionable intelligence” on its audiences, Nieman Lab reports.

The largest newspaper publisher in the nation’s partnership was revealed in its second quarter earnings call. After extolling Palantir’s AI-powered platform, USA Today CEO Mike Reed said that it would allow the paper to “build a common intelligence layer” on the data it collects on its readers.

“Every visit, every session, and every moment of attention creates a signal,” Reed told investors Thursday morning, as quoted by Nieman. “When we connect those signals, they become actionable intelligence that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”

The optics of partnering with Palantir — a company that provides military targeting software and wields a vast surveillance panopticon — are undeniably touchy. It’s worked hand in hand with ICE, secretly providing the agency a tool that scours citizen’s Medicaid and other government data to create a map of people it could potentially deport. It also supplies the Israeli military with an AI battlefield decision-making tool that can analyze enemy targets for elimination.

Still, it’s unclear how much more invasive the USA Today’s partnership will be compared to the routine data gathering and audience analysis that websites typically perform. One example of what Palantir’s platform could do, according to president of USA Today Media Kristin Roberts, was automatically identify partnerships to make money through affiliate links.

“Historically, much of our commerce business has relied on manual processes to connect affiliate opportunities with our content,” Roberts added.

It’s the latest deal Palantir has struck with media outlets as they struggle to bring in traffic from search engines in an increasingly AI-dominated web ecosystem. It’s also partnered with Axel Springer, the publisher which owns Politico, Business Insider, and the German newspaper BILD. Thomson Reuters’ partnership in particular is a case study in the dangers of letting online brands act as data brokers: 404 Media found that the Reuters publisher had supplied personal data to ICE, and some employees are protesting its $125 million deal to sell the agency voter data.

USA Today, it’s worth noting, has spent the past few years shoving AI into its operations and ruthless monetizing its content. It was caught using the tech to generate parts of its articles, and published automated sports stories that served up heaps of targeted gambling ads.

More on privacy: Flock Is Losing Dozens of Contracts as Controversy Grows

The post USA Today Partners With Palantir to Gain “Actionable Intelligence” On Its Audiences appeared first on Futurism.

A security researcher has designed an algorithm that can create computer-generated patterns capable of hiding people, faces, and vehicles from detection by surveillance cameras.

Using ‘spy glasses’ made by Facebook owner leads to floods of negative comments, say content creators

It was hardly an offensive video. Amid the buzz of the Tour de France finale, Oliver Hooson filmed himself whipping up a delicious-looking flat white for a fellow cycling enthusiast. But after posting the footage on social media, the comments that soon rolled in were a real shock. “PERV,” read one. “Out here pushing creep glasses,” said another. His mistake? Documenting the moment with Meta’s “spy glasses”.

Despite being marketed as the latest must-have gadget, Meta’s smartglasses, which can record video footage while being worn, have faced a vicious backlash, particularly relating to concerns about surveillance. There are widespread fears about the glasses being used to film people, especially women, without their consent, and the resultant footage being posted on social media. This has earned them the label of “pervert glasses”, and content creators, no matter how they are used, have faced a flood of negative comments for deploying them.

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© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

© Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

Dozens of Flock cameras have been vandalized around Dallas Texas in the last six months, reports a local news station. In Utah, ABC News reports, a county sheriff's office even said Wednesday a Flock camera was even vandalized within days of its being installed. And in the Minnesota city of Winona, "Every Flock license plate reader camera operated by the Winona Police Department has been sawed off and stolen in what investigators believe was a coordinated theft," according to local media: All eight cameras were taken August 1, according to the Winona Police Department. A patrol officer first noticed the cameras had not sent any alerts in 24 hours. When officers checked the locations, they found the cameras had been cut from their poles and taken. The poles were left behind. Two additional Flock cameras on the Mississippi River Bridge, owned by Buffalo County, were also stolen in the same manner... The thefts are part of a broader national trend. Flock cameras have been vandalized and cut down in communities across the country. When someone in Florida filmed a damaged Flock camera lying in the grass in Florida, their footage attracted 980,000 views on social media, according to a local news report, with the uploader saying "Most of the people that are commenting are against Flock cameras." But that report adds it's one of at least five cameras recently damaged just in Florida: - In another incident, investigators "found the black camera and its pole lying on the ground." - Two days later, sheriff's deputies found a camera destroyed "with pieces scattered on the ground. Deputies reported the damage appeared to have been caused by a blunt object." - On July 31, "Police said two camera poles had been intentionally cut in half, causing an estimated $10,000 in damage to the system." In West Virginia 20-year-old Wesley Jackson has been arrested for allegedly vandalizing Flock cameras, with another 20-year-old (a university student) now arrested for being his accomplice, according to a local news report. Ironically, Jackson's arrest was made possible partly by information from... automated license plate readers. But the Washington Post notes there's now a flood of Facebook commenters jokingly offering to provide a fake alibi: "Couldn't have been him — we were out counting blades of grass," said one of the 29,000 commenters on a post about the arrest from the local news station WDTV. Others attested that the man, Wesley Jackson, had been helping them "replace the roof on a homeless shelter," "playing halo 2," "changing the tires" on their car or giving their "doggie a treat" at the time the cameras were destroyed. Meanwhile, the anti-surveillance group DeFlock reports 100 communities have now rejected automated license plate readers. Wednesday an Arizona county sheriff explained to his local Board of Supervisors why he will not renew his office's contract with Flock when it expires next month. Local Arizona media reports: "We have a camera system that can do facial recognition technology and can start building a data set on what our citizens are doing on a day-to-day basis," Teeple told supervisors. "That, in my training and experience, is a huge Fourth Amendment violation." Recently an Arizona man even told his city council he'd be launching AI-powered satellites to monitor "where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home," reports 404 Media: It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said... He said he'd already started compiling profiles on their vehicles, spouses vehicles, children's vehicles, and planned to combine that data with Bluetooth signals, advertising IDs, and commercial data sources, "so our authorized users can replay the movements of every government official and their immediate family," he said. Local businesses would be invited to join the network, to "protect" officials while they shop, eat at restaurants, and move around the city. And CNET reports "a quiet battle is happening across the US" between "towns working to adopt Flock Safety systems and those trying to ban them entirely." From major cities like Los Angeles canceling its Flock contract to towns wrapping Flock AI cams in plastic bags because Flock won't take them down, it's a wild time for surveillance and questions about government accountability.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plus: A judge rules cell tower dumps unconstitutional, water utility hacks spread to a dozen states, a phishing email opens a missile-parts supplier’s inbox, and a ransomware boss gets 16 years.

Plus: A judge rules cell tower dumps unconstitutional, water utility hacks spread to a dozen states, a phishing email opens a missile-parts supplier’s inbox, and a ransomware boss gets 16 years.

Two security researchers bought cheap domains—including noreply.net and deleteduser.com—and set up email listening services. Hundreds of companies are sending them corporate secrets.

Two security researchers bought cheap domains—including noreply.net and deleteduser.com—and set up email listening services. Hundreds of companies are sending them corporate secrets.

When police in West Virginia’s Monongalia County arrested 20-year-old Wesley Jackson for his alleged involvement in the destruction of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) deployed by the company Flock Safety, they likely never could have imagined the outpouring of support he would receive from the online community.

In the days after Jackson’s arrest, a post by local news station WDTV gathered over 29,000 comments. As the Washington Post observed, those comments were overwhelmingly positive, with community members and strangers alike singing Jackson’s praises, and concocting a seemingly endless variety of alibis.

To take the community’s word — or words — for it, Jackson couldn’t have been the perpetrator, as he was simultaneously replacing the roof on a homeless shelter, dispensing dogs treats, canoeing, saving puppies from burning buildings, sweeping a parking lot, and rescuing cats from trees at the time the alleged offenses were committed.

“He was actually kissing the homies goodnight at the time of the incident,” one absurdist commenter protested. “Couldn’t have been him.”

Take a look at the comments under any news article or police report about ALPR vandalism, and it’s clear the phenomenon stretches far beyond Monongalia County. It seems the trend is spreading so fast that there doesn’t even necessarily need to be an arrest for John Q Public to lionize privacy minded saboteurs.

Case in point, when police in Winona, Minnesota released a statement claiming that “all eight of our city’s Flock cameras were missing,” the public quickly sprang into action, peppering the department’s page with hundreds of comments in support of the perpetrator, who remains at large. The support was so overwhelming that the department soon shut down comments under the release.

“Whoever you’re suspecting was actually on a fishing trip with me between July 29th and August 1st,” one commenter joked.

“Love seeing the comments on these police releases of flocks being cut down,” remarked another. “It restores some faith in humanity that no one wants to be tracked indefinitely in the name of ‘safety.'”

More on Flock: Flock Is Losing Dozens of Contracts as Controversy Grows

The post Public Offers Implausible Number of Alibis for Man Accused of Destroying Flock Cameras appeared first on Futurism.

The backlash to what some dub ‘pervert glasses’ is growing – but people living with disabilities point out the new tech can also be life-changing

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One summer day earlier this year, Rhys left a cafe in Melbourne where he had been working remotely, when his phone pinged with a message on the dating app Grindr.

The message was a photo of him sitting at a table outside the cafe on his laptop, with his dog seated on the ground next to him. In the foreground, in a man’s hand was an iPhone unlocked.

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© Photograph: Supplied

© Photograph: Supplied

© Photograph: Supplied