Tag: technology

‘Quality decays exponentially following AI arrival’: Research shows experts and contributors leaving online communities amidst silent ‘knowledge reset’

Research from the University of Auckland on Stack Overflow’s demise over the last few years points to an increasingly worrying trend in the software community: the best, or highest-skill, contributors are leaving in droves.

AI, which arguably bridges the gap between most entry-level and mid-range coders and some of the best in the business, might actually be accelerating the latter’s exit from online communities, as they feel their efforts are no longer as valued as they once were.

Stack Overflow has seen a nearly 76% decline in monthly questions posted since ChatGPT’s advent in 2022, indicating that both new and existing users are abandoning the site.

A much broader problem than just Stack Overflow?

Stack Overflow’s problems and the reason for its decline were multi-faceted; however, many users felt that the site and some of its most talented contributors engaged in a certain degree of hubris.

This, coupled with heavy-handed moderation that many called ‘self-righteous,’ meant that users finding a viable option would inevitably leave the platform.

ChatGPT and its AI alternatives became considerably more pliable and, over time, doubled as search engines for many coders with routine, repeatable queries, even as AI increasingly handled questions such as syntax issues better than before.

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‘Whoever came up with this is a massive idiot’: LG’s gaming monitors and TVs are facing a user revolt, due to seemingly installing adware on PCs — and telling you to warn guests they may be recorded by AI features, to comply with ‘wiretapping’ laws

How smart should a smart TV be? According to LG‘s latest TV terms and conditions, the answer is “not quite smart enough to comply with wiretapping laws”, because that’s now your responsibility if LG captures the voice of a guest in your house through its AI voice services. Though the situation with LG monitors appears to be even more dramatic.

As Gamers Nexus reports, some LG monitors appear to be installing adware on Windows PCs without asking for permission: in addition to the LG Monitor App Installer, they also install McAfee Scam Detector.

LG’s own app requires full access to all system resources, which potentially includes all your online activity, logins, hardware, location and more — while McAfee has a long history of being installed on devices as ‘bloatware’, and people are not reacting positively to suddenly finding it on their PC.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for all of this, but when big tech firms keep getting caught doing bad things because they thought they could get away with it, it’s no wonder people are assuming the worst.

The bit that’s causing consternation regarding smart TVs is part 6(d) of the new LG Electronics terms of service, headed Voice Recognition and Privacy Compliance.

As Notebookcheck‘s Hannes Brecher notes, the section states that it’s your responsibility “to obtain all necessary consents from any third parties whose voices may be captured by the Product and to notify household members and guests that their voices may be captured and processed, in compliance with applicable wiretapping, eavesdropping, and privacy laws.”

There are three ways around that. One, you can turn off all microphone-based features. Some people won’t mind that, but they can be useful — especially asking it for settings you don’t know how to find.

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Bipartisan Lawmakers Introduce Bill Requiring Human Control over AI Weapons

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers introduced legislation on Friday aimed at ensuring human decisionmaking remains central to the use of lethal force by AI-enabled military systems.

Axios reports that Reps. Tom Barrett (R-MI), Don Beyer (D-VA), and Sara Jacobs (D-CA), have put forward the Human Authority over Autonomous Weapons Act. The legislation seeks to establish legal requirements for human oversight of autonomous and AI-powered weapon systems deployed by the United States military.

The proposed bill mandates that the Pentagon ensure any intentionally lethal use of an autonomous or AI-enabled weapon system must be subject to human oversight, approval, or maintain a human-in-the-loop protocol. This requirement would apply across military operations where autonomous systems might be employed for lethal purposes.

Under the legislation’s provisions, military commanders would be required to verify AI-generated targets using non-AI sources for a period of five years following the bill’s enactment. This verification requirement aims to provide a safeguard against potential errors or unintended consequences from AI target identification systems. The bill does include an exemption for missile defense systems.

The legislative effort comes as lawmakers from both political parties seek to establish legal frameworks governing the military’s use of AI, particularly as autonomous weapons systems become increasingly prevalent in modern warfare scenarios. While the Pentagon currently maintains existing policy requiring appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force, this bill would codify human oversight requirements into federal law, making them legally binding rather than administrative policy.

The introduction of this legislation follows several notable developments in the military AI space. Earlier this year, the Pentagon’s use of AI during the raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro created tensions with Anthropic regarding the firm’s established boundaries concerning autonomous weapons and mass surveillance applications, ultimately leading to a legal war between the company and the Pentagon. That incident highlighted growing concerns about how AI technologies are being deployed in military contexts and the ethical considerations surrounding such use.

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Flock Safety Defends Cameras After AI System Triggers Wrongful Police Stops Of Two Journalists

Plymouth, Minnesota – Automotive journalist Joel Feder and his wife were detained by multiple police officers in a coordinated stop while driving a Jaguar Land Rover press vehicle, after Flock Safety’s automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras flagged the car based on a flawed database entry.

According to Feder’s detailed account in The Drive, officers boxed in the $155,000 Range Rover in a Kohl’s parking lot after the vehicle triggered alerts via Flock’s network. Police had been tracking it for days, believing the New Jersey manufacturer plate (34 10 DTM) was stolen. Officers approached with hands on their weapons, ordered the couple out of the vehicle, and conducted pat-downs before verifying the car’s legitimacy through Jaguar Land Rover. Feder subsequently obtained and published the body camera footage of the encounter.

The incident stemmed from an incomplete report of a similar plate (34 03 DTM) lost during a photo shoot in California, which was entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database simply as “34 DTM.” Flock’s AI system matched Feder’s plate – ignoring the smaller middle digits – and generated alerts. Local officers did not fully verify the complete plate visible in Flock’s own images.

The problem was not confined to one vehicle. Last Wednesday, fellow auto journalist Tim Esterdahl, publisher of Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, was pulled over by two officers in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, while driving his 14-year-old child in a $105,000 Range Rover Sport loaned to him by Jaguar Land Rover for review. Its plate: New Jersey 34 08 DTM. Jaguar Land Rover has been working to correct the underlying reports.

Flock Safety maintains that its cameras performed as designed, matching partial plates per law enforcement preferences for hotlist alerts. Chief Communications Officer Joshua Thomas told The Drive the system was asked whether those characters were present and correctly answered that they were – it simply was not built to flag that additional characters existed. He conceded that for alerts originating from NCIC rather than an individual agency’s custom list, the system arguably should test for an exact match rather than mere presence, and called that fair feedback to take back to his team.

Thomas said Flock is working to get the original police report corrected and is meeting with the FBI officials who curate NCIC to develop a way for incomplete data to be flagged as such for officers seeing automated alerts in the field. He emphasized that a camera alert “does not equal probable cause,” comparing it to an alarm going off, and stressed that the system depends on both valid inputs and humans verifying outputs.

But the scale is what makes the error rate consequential. Thomas said the system is roughly 99 percent accurate while performing approximately 20 billion reads per month – arithmetic that leaves on the order of 200 million misreads every month. How many of those escalate into armed stops is unknown.

Plymouth police acknowledged shortcomings in verification but pointed to the challenges of varying license plate formats nationwide. According to the department’s Flock transparency portal, the city operates 18 cameras that read more than 580,000 license plates in a recent 30-day period, generating over 14,800 hotlist hits – one of which was Feder.

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The Supreme Court’s AI Collision Course

Imagine a tight House race in a swing state. In the final weeks of the campaign, a new super PAC begins spending heavily against the incumbent. It runs ads on local television and reaches individual voters with highly tailored texts. The messaging is hard-hitting and seems to be swaying the electorate. None of it traces back to the opposing campaign.

It also doesn’t trace back to any human operative. The super PAC is funded by a single LLC whose donor cannot be identified, and its spending decisions are being made by an AI agent that has been given a budget and a political objective and is now operating without any meaningful human direction. The “consultants” placing the ads are software. The text messages were crafted by the AI.

This is not a hypothetical we will face in some distant future. The technology already exists. A wealthy person, foreign government, or corporation that wants to influence an election without ever exposing themselves to scrutiny could set up such a campaign operation today. And under the Supreme Court’s current campaign finance doctrine, the states and Congress may have little power to stop it.

The AI industry has emerged as one of the largest forces in American politics. Super PACs funded by AI companies and their investors have raised well over $100 million to shape the 2026 midterms, backing candidates in both parties who share the industry’s preferred approach to regulation, and attacking those who don’t. So far, their ads rarely mention artificial intelligence at all. They talk about issues like immigration, corruption, and cost of living, and it isn’t obvious to the average viewer that these ads were funded by a multi-billion dollar industry with its own unspoken legislative wish list.

But there’s a deeper, less-obvious dynamic operating in the background. The constitutional doctrine that currently protects the right of these companies to spend millions in our elections is the same doctrine that will be asked to protect something even stranger: The “speech” of artificial intelligence itself.

Modern campaign finance doctrine has been established, affirmed, and extended by Supreme Court decisions over the last 50 years. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), it held that raising and spending money in political campaigns is tantamount to speech itself, and, therefore, that most legislative efforts to address the influence of money in elections would be subject to strict judicial oversight. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) extended this framework to corporations, and then, most famously, Citizens United v. FEC (2010) extended it further to independent spending.

The court’s campaign finance jurisprudence was not built with artificial intelligence in mind, but its logic isn’t confined to the campaign finance context. If “speaker identity” does not matter for corporations and unions and super PACs, why should it matter when it comes to AI platforms?

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FLOCK SAFETY: The Great Normalization (Nobody Declared Martial Law… Yet America Began Looking Like It Anyway)

There are stories that announce themselves with explosions, riots, or breaking-news headlines, and then there are stories so subtle that they quietly rewrite an entire society before anyone realizes what has happened. This is one of those stories. During the preparation of this investigation, several retired police officers, private security professionals, emergency responders, and ordinary citizens described nearly identical experiences despite living hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. None believed they were witnessing anything extraordinary at first. It was only when they looked backward—sometimes over a decade—that a disturbing pattern became impossible to ignore. Streets had not become military checkpoints overnight. Neighborhoods had not suddenly filled with surveillance towers. Instead, the changes arrived one camera, one drone, one security contract, and one “temporary” emergency measure at a time until extraordinary security became indistinguishable from ordinary life. What follows is not an argument against public safety, nor an attempt to romanticize a past that was hardly free from crime or violence. It is an examination of a transformation that has occurred quietly enough for most people to stop seeing it altogether.

There is an old saying among investigators that people rarely notice change while it is happening. They notice it only when they compare today’s reality with memories that have remained frozen in time. Memory preserves snapshots, while history moves continuously. That disconnect explains why so many citizens insist that nothing fundamental has changed even as the physical landscape around them becomes increasingly populated by surveillance cameras, armed guards, automated license plate readers, biometric scanners, drones, and predictive security technologies. No single installation appears revolutionary. No single policy seems capable of altering the character of a society. Yet history rarely advances through dramatic leaps. More often, it advances through thousands of small decisions that seem perfectly reasonable when viewed independently but become historically significant when examined collectively.

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Two US Service Members Killed in Action in Jordan, One Missing in Action After Iranian Drone Attack

Two US service members were killed in action in Jordan this week.

One service member is still missing.

Full statement from CENTCOM:

On July 17, two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action as U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and partner forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. Additionally, one service member is currently missing in action.

Four American service members were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals. They have since been discharged. Other personnel who were evaluated for minor injuries have returned to duty.

Out of respect for the families, CENTCOM will withhold additional information, including the identities of the fallen warriors, until 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified.

CBS News reported on Friday that several US service members were injured this week in Iranian attacks on two Jordanian bases.

US strikes have continued against Iranian missile and drone sites in and around the Strait of Hormuz for several consecutive days.

On Thursday, the US launched its sixth night in a row of strikes against Iran as Tehran struck Jordan and Kuwait.

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Ukraine/Russia War Intensifies, As Drones Strike Major Russian Oil Refinery

The war between Russia and Ukraine fell through the cracks a little when the United States and Israel started a war with Iran back in February. However, Ukraine and Russia are still very much locked in a war, as Kiev used drones to strike a major Russian oil refinery overnight.

Back in late June, Ukraine struck a Moscow refinery and caused “oil rain” to pour over the Russian capital of Moscow.

Drone Strike on Moscow Refinery Causes “Oil Rain” in Russian Capital

The Russian Defense Ministry added that Vladimir Zelensky, Ukraine’s ruler, ordered the attacks on the eve of the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit in Ankara “to demonstrate to his European sponsors, including the UK, his willingness to strike civilian targets in Russia from Ukraine at their expense.”

The UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) attack occurred on the Omsk Oil Refinery in Omsk Region and is the first in central Russia since the start of the Ukraine conflict.

The Omsk Oil Refinery, which is operated by Gazprom Neft, specializes in the production of gasoline, diesel, aviation kerosene and road‑building bitumen. The refinery has an installed capacity of 20.5 million tons of crude per year. Omsk accounts for around one in every six liters of Euro‑5 gasoline and diesel fuel produced in Russia, as well as a significant share of the country’s aviation fuel.

Governor Vitaly Khotsenko wrote on Telegram on Monday that the facility was hit after several drones reached the city’s northern industrial zone.  Khotsenko said most of the incoming UAVs were destroyed by air defenses and that, according to preliminary information, there were no deaths or injuries, according to a report by RT. 

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California Grocery Stores Use Facial Recognition Technology To Combat Theft

Faced with a shoplifting epidemic that has battered California retailers for years, Grocery Outlet is fighting back with technology.

Customers are not thrilled about it.

The Emeryville-based discount grocery chain has begun installing facial recognition software called SAFR at a handful of Bay Area stores, including its Pleasant Hill “Bargain Market” location, CBS News San Francisco reported.

Customers walking through the doors will find signs warning them the system is in use, a disclosure the company says is meant to keep shoppers informed.

The rollout comes as California tries to combat a shoplifting problem that has spiraled out of control.

FBI data cited by CBS shows theft in the state has jumped 50 percent since the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge that has forced retailers from big-box chains to neighborhood grocers to spend millions on security measures, or in some cases, shutter stores altogether.

For June Guerrero, who spent years managing a retail store, the new technology is a welcome and overdue response to a problem she saw firsthand.

“I worked for years as a manager of a store and the theft was just unbelievable,” Guerrero told CBS News. “I agree with it.”

Not every customer sees it that way. Barbara Jackson told the outlet she’s uneasy about having her face scanned every time she shops for groceries.

“I do understand, but invading my privacy with my picture, I don’t agree on that,” Jackson said. “You gotta find a better way.”

Shopper Steve Burdette raised a different concern: the risk of the system misidentifying innocent customers as thieves.

“It could lead to a lot of problems, I think for companies and businesses and people,” he said.

SAFR president Charisse Jacques pushed back on the notion that the technology amounts to mass surveillance. She said the company does not maintain a database of every customer who walks through the door, retains information on suspected shoplifters only for a limited window, and does not share data with outside agencies — including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the New York Post.

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Massive Security Blunder Exposes San Francisco Police’s Expanding Drone Surveillance

A major security lapse has exposed hours of live surveillance footage from the San Francisco Police Department’s drone program.

The footage offers a rare glimpse into the scale of aerial policing now taking place over one of America’s largest cities.

According to WIRED, two cybersecurity researchers discovered that live feeds from five SFPD drones had been publicly accessible through a web link generated by drone manufacturer Skydio.

The stream reportedly remained exposed for months before it was taken offline.

The leaked footage showed drones tracking suspects through city streets, monitoring apartment buildings, following vehicles, and assisting officers during arrests and investigations.

In one example, multiple drones tracked a suspect across San Francisco before officers surrounded and arrested him following what police described as an alleged vehicle theft-related incident.

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