In light of plummeting public support for its widespread automatic license plate readers, surveillance company Flock has lost dozens of contracts with cities across the US.

The company even drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to spy on other vehicles, as 404 Media reported this week.

Citizens are increasingly disgusted by the company’s presence on public streets, opting to hack down the cameras, blind them, or sabotage them in other creative ways.

“His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.” https://t.co/OIQNOt9B0a @TechCrunch

— Christina Ayiotis, Esq., CRM, CIPP/E, AIGP (@christinayiotis) August 10, 2026

And according to cybersecurity researcher Bill Swearingen, there may be other creative ways to befuddle Flock’s spy cams. He devised with a special computer-generated pattern which, once stretched out across the vehicle in the form of a wrap, will result it in not being flagged as a car by Flock’s cameras.

During this year’s Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Swearingen showed off a 2009 Toyota Yaris wrapped in vinyl featuring the logo of automotive publication Donut Media (which is owned by Futurism‘s parent company Recurrent Ventures.)

Despite the car looking a bit chaotic — albeit still very much like a small passenger vehicle to the human eye — “we proved it was effective,” Swearingen told TechCrunch. The Yaris successfully defeated surveillance detection at Def Con during the pattern’s first public test.

“Privacy is a fundamental right,” he added, aiming to give people a way to “opt out of being tracked.”

To come up with the pattern, he used a reinforcement learning model that trained itself on patterns that evade detection. The model got to the point of being able to confuse all 11 open source detection algorithms he tested, per TechCrunch, in addition to Flock’s license plate readers and even Axon’s body-worn cameras used by police departments.

As part of his noRecognition crowdsourcing campaign, Swearingen has also come up with T-shirts and hoodies that feature algorithmic detection-busting patterns. He hopes to eventually put pattern-printed skins for entire cars on sale as well.

The effort is part of a much broader trend of companies offering up garments that incorporate “adversarial patterns,” which can exploit weaknesses in computer vision systems.

One thing is clear: as outrage over Flock’s heavy presence across the country grows, people are looking for any way to foil the tech — especially if it looks cool.

More on Flock: Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp

The post Man Covers Car in Special Wrap That Breaks Flock Cameras’ Electronic Brains appeared first on Futurism.

It’s not just you — the United States is going through a record-bustingly hot summer.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous US averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit in July, which is even hotter than the July 1936 Dust Bowl, an environmental and agricultural disaster marked by devastating dust storms.

Much like the Dust Bowl, which was the result of both natural and human-made factors, this year’s record-breaking temperatures are the result of a strong El Niño — a naturally occuring weather pattern — exacerbating the calamitous effects of human-caused climate change.

“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters told the Associated Press. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US — just a cataclysmic event in US history.”

“If we’re exceeding records from the Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble,” Masters added.

While the heat was more concentrated in the Midwest during the Dust Bowl, all 48 lower states experienced excessive heat this summer — at least one degree Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average.

And instead of focusing on ways to fight the effects of climate change, much of the country is moving in the opposite direction. The Trump administration is closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and is actively seeking to reopen coal-burning plants. AI data centers powered by gas generators are compounding a major uptick in greenhouse gas emissions.

The result is a country literally on fire, while suffering the second-worst July drought conditions on record for the contiguous US, according to Yale Climate Connections. Per the US Drought Monitor, a whopping 71 percent of the contiguous US experienced abnormal dryness or drought during the first week of August, coming on top of billions of dollars in direct damages during the first half of 2026.

Meanwhile, major wildfires continue to burn across both the US and Canada, exposing millions to dangerous levels of air pollution and causing an estimated 4,000 premature deaths across the continent within a single week last month, according to The Economist.

The prognosis is just as grim as one might think.

“This may be one of the coolest years we’re gonna experience for the rest of our lives,” Masters told the AP.

To give humanity a fighting chance we need to “stop burning so many fossil fuels,” he added. “We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we’ve put in place.”

More on climate change: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build

The post It’s Official: This Is the Hottest America Has Ever Been appeared first on Futurism.

German AI researcher and hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner became the poster child for the hubris of an AI-obsessed Wall Street last month.

Some $35 billion of investors’ money, in the form of leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks, evaporated in front of the 24-year-old’s eyes as tech shares were hit by yet another major sell off.

The humbling couldn’t have come at a worse time. The funds vanished days before his wedding with Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. According to the New Yorker, the two had to cancel their honeymoon as a result.

Aschenbrenner isn’t alone. According to new data from Hedge Fund Research, tech funds dropped by seven percent in July, the worst period for the investments since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Telegraph reports.

A separate hedge fund, called value Aligned Research Advisors, which shares a similar portfolio to Aschenbrenner’s, similarly slid 44 percent in July as tech stocks reeled from major volatility.

The bruising month has further compounded fears over a massive surge in AI spending with no clear path to profitability in sight. Investors have become wary of big tech companies’ ever-higher capital expenditure forecasts as concerns over an AI bubble continue to mount.

Staying on track and maintaining high profit margins has become a high risk high reward game.

“When valuations are elevated, and positioning is concentrated, the difference between being on the right and wrong side of a trade can become unusually large — and very quickly,” Erlen Capital Management managing partner Bruno Schneller told the Telegraph. “Specialist technology strategies can generate exceptional returns when momentum and narrative are aligned, but they can also experience abrupt, leverage-amplified reversals when those conditions change.”

The game is far from over. Even Aschenbrenner’s fund has since recovered and his making new investments after being forced to unwind trades and sell major chunks of its holdings last month.

Yet how much longer the highly AI-leveraged stock market can sustain itself is anybody’s guess. In a blog post on Friday, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok pointed out that those who reap the biggest profits, including companies making AI models, are massively depending on profits being “funded by investors rather than earned from customers.”

Put simply, AI companies aren’t making any significant amount of money from providing a worthwhile product, but from “capital raised by the layer losing money,” per Slok.

“Capital can bridge the gap for a while, but not indefinitely,” Slok argued. “And therein lies the risk: will the ROI show up for AI’s end customers fast enough to sustain the spending that is generating those upstream margins?”

More on AI: VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud

The post AI Investors Are Suddenly Quaking in Their Boots appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission approved an experimental and controversial new satellite being developed by venture Reflect Orbital to reflect sunlight down onto the Earth to illuminate patches of it at night for paying customers.

The purported goal is to allow solar farms to continue generating electricity even after nightfall and provide illumination during emergencies. Those may sound like noble ideas on the surface, but the concept comes with major downsides as well.

One is that such bright satellites could easily wreck deep space observations. Astronomers were appalled at the news, with the FCC receiving nearly nearly 2,000 public comments criticizing the proposal, as Wired reported at the time.

And it’s not just professional astronomers that could be affected, as experts told The Verge. Amateur astronomers gazing up at the prototype mirror satellite, dubbed Eärendil-1 — continuing Silicon Valley’s obsession with borrowing names from JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” — could easily be blinded. Even looking through a 12-inch telescope, a common type used by enthusiasts, could result in permanent eye damage.

It’s a considerable risk to human health that makes the FCC’s approval “extraordinary,” as Royal Astronomical Society deputy executive director Robert Massey told The Verge.

It’s a risk experts have known for decades now. Case in point, observing a similar proposed Russian prototype, dubbed Znamya, could cause damage equivalent to staring at the Sun around a total eclipse, according to a 2000 research article by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. (Russia launched two experimental Znamya space mirror satellites in the 1990s, but later abandoned the program.)

Critics of the FCC’s approval of Reflect Orbital’s plans pointed out the risk of eye damage to the regulator, which wound up being deemed irrelevant and too “small” of a factor compared to the “benefits of permitting American companies to test innovative technology in space.”

As The Verge points out, astronomers won’t even be warned of when and where the mirror satellite will be in the night sky, which could result in them gazing at it inadvertently.

Reflect Orbital spokesperson Christopher Buscombe told the publication that the company is in active talks with “scientists, astronomers, environmental researchers and other stakeholders” and that it will use its initial demonstration satellite to test out built-in safeguards.

The Air Line Pilots Association has also raised concerns over Reflect Orbital’s inadequate approach to air safety. The satellites could also disrupt sleep and the circadian rhythms migratory species.

“The proposed scale of orbital deployment would represent a significant alteration of the natural night-time light environment at a planetary scale,” the presidents of several international chronobiology assocaitions said in a joint statement quoted by The Guardian.

Buscombe told The Verge that the company would limit the amount of light being reflected and calibrate brightness to “levels humans and animals already tolerate.” But experts warn there are far too many variables that the company won’t be able to control for, from light scattering in the atmosphere to interactions with clouds.

Satellites in general are an increasingly controversial topic. The number of spacecraft in low Earth has exploded over the past decade, and many are being delivered at lower altitudes that make them appear even brighter.

“The stars above us are a valued part of human heritage – deploying more than one million exceptionally bright satellites would utterly destroy this and permanently scar the natural landscape,” Massey told The Verge.

More on the satellites: Astronomers Horrified by Enormous Mirror Satellite That Reflects Sunlight Back Down to Earth at Night

The post Scientists Warn That New Satellites Could Cause Eye Damage for People on the Ground appeared first on Futurism.

Last week, Nieman Lab revealed that USA Today‘s parent company USA Today Co (formerly Gannett) was partnering with AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize “actionable intelligence” on its audience.

According to USA Today CEO Mike Reed, the goal is to “build a common intelligence layer” on reader data to “monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”

The largest newspaper’s new partnership with the Peter Thiel-cofounded company, which has long been mired in controversy — from collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and being linked to US airstrikes that killed over 120 schoolchildren in Iran to its mercurial CEO, who has a long history of strange outbursts — has raised plenty of eyebrows.

Workers represented by The News Guild, the country’s largest communications and media labor union, including journalists at USA Today, were “shocked” by the news, according to a new statement, and are calling for the company to “immediately end its partnership with Palantir.”

“While [Reed] championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers,” the statement reads.

“We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns,” the union wrote. “Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

The News Guild accused USA Today Co of not disclosing details regarding the new partnership and raised concerns over how readers’ personal information and data will be treated and protected.

“Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?” the union wrote.

As a result, the union is calling for USA Today Co to “steer clear” in order to maintain journalistic integrity and maintain “with the kind of responsibility and skepticism that the nation’s largest network of journalists should exhibit.”

The union also called attention to the dire state of the news industry, with a major pivot to AI being cited to justify major layoffs at countless newspapers and publications.

Even within Palantir’s own ranks, employees are starting to speak up, with some starting to wonder whether “they’re the bad guys,” as Wired reported earlier this year.

The company’s reputation has taken such a major hit that even its major contract with the UK government’s National Health Service is on shaky ground. Earlier this year, London mayor Sadiq Khan also blocked a Palantir contract with the city’s Metropolitan police force, arguing the department “did not adequately demonstrate value for money for Londoners.”

More on Palantir: USA Today Partners With Palantir to Gain “Actionable Intelligence” On Its Audiences

The post USA Today Journalists Horrified by Newspaper’s Partnership With Palantir appeared first on Futurism.

A quiet war is playing out in rural communities across the country.

City council meetings are bursting into conflict as local residents try to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. Americans are starting to see through the promises of tech companies and the local politicians they’ve wooed, realizing that the advantages of hosting a resource-hogging data center in the neighborhood are slim.

Yet tech giants are finding creative — and sometimes startlingly dirty — new ways to circumvent local opposition in their quest to build out these sprawling facilities. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon exploited 45-year-old zoning laws in Gilroy, California, to start construction on a data center without any residents knowing for five entire years.

“Many if not most residents first learned about this project after construction had already begun,” local elementary-school teacher Coleen Crew told the town’s recent council meeting, as quoted by the WSJ.

A single city staffer, the community’s development director, greenlit Amazon’s 438,500-square-foot data center, which spans 56 acres of former farmland. The ancient zoning criteria allowed industrial development along the location on a local freeway.

Gilroy’s mayor was surprised his constituents suddenly wanted a say.

“It didn’t bother them that a food-distribution center came to Gilroy without their engagement, but now it bothers them that a data center is coming to Gilroy without them having the possibility of engagement,” he told the WSJ.

There are plenty of reasons why residents would be against Amazon’s latest project. Data centers are a massive resource hog and have been known to raise electricity prices, spike local greenhouse gas emissions, generate ear-splitting noise, and taint water supplies. They are not typically major job creators.

In short, likening it to a “food-distribution center” isn’t exactly a fair comparison.

Amazon Web Services president of economic development Roger Wehner told the WSJ that the company “followed standard approval processes for an industrially zoned parcel,” but acknowledged that it should’ve recognized the community’s desire for “more engagement sooner.”

“We’ve since met directly with residents and hosted an open house to hear feedback and answer questions,” he added.

City officials are now wondering whether to change the approval process in ways that would force developers to hold community meetings and engage with residents.

When resident Rosa Rodriguez found out about the project, she asked city staff in February to publicly comment on an environmental review report, citing concerns over the drought the region is facing. But planners shut her down, telling her the comment period had closed back in September 2024, long before she knew about the project’s existence.

Amazon has since tried to win over the public, touting a new wastewater pipeline, tax revenue, construction jobs, and even the sponsorship of the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival. However, frustrated residents weren’t mollified, demanding to at least be made aware of big unfolding projects like the data center.

More on data centers: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build

The post Amazon Used a Startlingly Dirty Trick to Build a Data Center Without Consent of Community appeared first on Futurism.

Even as they promise AI will supercharge productivity, tech leaders are sending a clear message: any efficiency gains won’t help individual workers.

During a podcast appearance last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he doesn’t “expect AI” to lead to a shorter four-hour work week. He argued that workers are “secretly” going to be “happy” about being “much busier” and working even harder thanks to AI — a bizarre and out-of-touch comment from a billionaire with extraordinary power over the lives of working people.

Now, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has similarly cracked the whip, as Business Insider reports — and he’s even willing to berate the company’s workers for asking for more time off.

During a July Q&A with staff, Bosworth shut down an employee who asked if AI productivity gains could be used to revive “Meta Days,” a cancelled holiday program that once allowed staff to take more days off a year.

Bosworth was apparently appalled at the idea, saying that “I hope that what we do with our extra time is do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day.”

The thinly-veiled implication at a tech giant that’s been rocked by repeated rounds of brutal layoffs: you should be so happy to still be employed!

“We got billions of people using our products every day,” he added. “I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.”

The executive then dug his heels even further, personally insulting the staffer for asking about work-life balance.

“Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off,” he said, per BI. “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.”

It’s a harrowing reaction, highlighting not just how AI is leading to widespread burnout, but just how grim the working environment at Meta has become as of late. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company fired around 8,000 employees earlier this year as its attempts to catch up to the competition in the AI space continue to sputter.

In June, Zuckerberg acknowledged plummeting morale among workers, while offering underwhelming ideas to lift their spirits.

Taking time off has become a massive point of contention, with a lawsuit filed last month accusing Meta of using AI tools to tag workers who had taken time off for maternity leave or disability accommodation, in order to lay them off later.

After his tirade, Bosworth appeared to have had a moment of clarity. He apologized for coming down “too hard” on the employee, per BI, while trying to brush off his abrasive commentary as “tongue-in-cheek.”

But the damage was already done. Bosworth’s crashout once again highlights how precarious the situation for knowledge workers has become. Any productivity gains from AI are unlikely to lead to any meaningful improvements in the quality of life for them, even as they’re already struggling to stay employed.

Besides, as managers are finding out the hard way, those productivity gains appear to be far more elusive than company leaders led us to believe.

More on Meta: Sam Altman Says Even the Power of AI Will Never Lead to a Shorter Work Week

The post Meta Exec Rages Against Employees Asking for More Time Off Because AI Made Them More Efficient appeared first on Futurism.