The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia.

I wrote about this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled mass surveillance. The interesting development in the article is that AI allows people to ask natural language questions about video footage to AIs—and AIs can answer them. //

That lets intelligence officers hunt through massive streams of videos using simple search terms, such as two men handing a bag to each other; a person who has changed their appearance, or has changed clothes multiple times in a day; or a vehicle that has recently been painted over, or has driven past the same spot several times in a short period.

The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries—and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering ad. The idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” said Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at Carat. //

Rontea • July 1, 2026 9:22 AM

In a world where even the emptiness of your refrigerator becomes a pretext for surveillance, the absurdity is complete. Papa Johns peers into your void, not to offer solace, but to monetize your hunger. The fridge, once a private cathedral of decay and disappointment, now signals the market when your despair has ripened.

We have reached a point where the faint growl of a stomach is data, where the absence of milk is a summons to the algorithm. They do not wait for you to feel desire; they conjure it, weaponize it, and then serve it back to you with garlic sauce. The empty fridge is no longer your own—it belongs to the ad.

To be hungry is to be known. To be known is to be hunted. And still, we will scan the QR code, because our revolt extends only as far as our apathy will allow.

NASA officials said Tuesday that they are seriously considering sending the full-scale engineering model of the Perseverance rover, which is currently housed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, to the Moon to expedite their efforts to explore the south pole region.

The car-sized rover nicknamed “Promise,” which serves as a testbed for Perseverance and was not otherwise planned for a launch, would land equipped with a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG) to power it across difficult terrain and through the lunar night. //

NASA has an MMRTG available, with a supply of Plutonium-238 that is just decaying away. It is likely the rover, with a mass of about 1 ton, would need to be delivered by Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander or SpaceX’s Starship due to its size. //

Over the years, Promise has served as a test bed for problems that Perseverance might encounter on Mars. Commands are often tested on this vehicle in the “Mars yard” at the California laboratory before similar commands are sent to the rover on the surface of Mars. It has also helped ensure Perseverance can safely traverse various areas on Mars.

Perseverance launched to Mars in July 2020, and its predecessor, the similarly sized Curiosity rover, launched to the red planet in November 2011. //

Curiosus Novitius Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
2y
105
semyorka said:
To be clear, there is no pre-existing "Promise" rover. "PROMISE" stands for "Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration"
At least it wasn't Prototype Repurposed from Old Mars Inventory for Secondhand Expeditions. //

brokescientist Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
7y
135
I was just at JPL last week and they have also recently dusted off ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer). After over a decade in storage they were surprised everything seemed to be operational. Having the test bed is likely important, but actually using hardware and working to deploy long shelved ideas is really cool, and likely much more exciting for the engineers.

The Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE is the best dedicated film scanner on the market. It features a dedicated infrared scanning channel that allows for the removal of dust and scratches from your scans. The 8200i SE also has a high-resolution sensor that produces superb image quality. And if you need to scan slides or negatives, the 8200i SE comes with an integrated slide holder.

Note: Plustek has recently released a new model with the same model name (Plustek OpticFilm 8200i) that is currently incompatible with VueScan so it’s hard to know whether you have the Plustek 8200i that is compatible with VueScan or the one that isn’t.

When it comes to scanning film and slides, the Nikon CoolScan 5000 is the gold standard. Unfortunately, Nikon no longer makes them, which means your only option is to buy a used scanner.

If you’re looking for the best flatbed photo scanner, the Epson v600 is our top pick. It’s a versatile scanner that can handle both individual photos and photo albums, and it produces high-quality scans. The v600 is also great for scanning delicate photos, as you can place them directly on the flatbed without having to use a sheet feeder. And if you need to scan multiple photos at once, the v600 can do that too.

Share files without the cloud.
Fast, private, offline.
Open source and cross-platform file sharing for everyone.

The bases for declaring the start of a “Golden Era of Nuclear Power” are a set of achievements that only a few could imagine just a year ago. After 50 years without starting any novel reactors in the United States, a handful of exciting new projects have achieved substantial completion. Those projects reached their current state just 14 months after President Trump issued an Executive Order with the audacious goal of achieving criticality for three new reactors by July 4, 2026. The Reactor Pilot Program (RPP) participants were announced just 10 months ago. //

Three new power and heat production reactors from three young ventures – Antares, Aalo and Deployable – have been constructed or installed at the Idaho National Laboratory. Antares’s Mark-0 successfully completed its initial startup, reaching criticality on June 1, becoming the INL’s 53 reactor. Aalo Atomics’s Critical Test Reactor and Deployable Energy’s Unity Nuclear Battery (UNB) are within days of achieving initial criticality. During the celebration, Sec. Wright gave a progress report on the imminent reactor startups: //

Though the celebration event was INL-centric, the speakers also mentioned additional activity that is underway in other locations. Two more reactors are at a similar development stage in Lockhart, TX (Oklo Isotopes’s Groves) and Orangeville, UT (Valar’s Ward 250). After starting operations on June 18, Valar increased the Ward 250’s power to its rated level of 100 kWt and also tested the system at its short term maximum power of 250 kWt. It is conducting a carefully planned sequence of operational and safety tests. Oklo Isotopes’s Groves is complete and close to starting up.

The leaders of the Radiant Nuclear’s Kaleidos DOME testing program chose to skip the race for early criticality in favor of assembling a more complete, full scale power plant. Radiant’s plan is to go critical and then promptly move to full power operations. The final reactor that is under construction at INL, Oklo’s Aurora-INL, is a significantly larger reactor – 75 MWe – that should be ready to operate in 2028. //

Three of the new reactors at INL took advantage of existing facilities and buildings, the other two at INL and the two outside INL are building new facilities from scratch. It has been a very long time since five new reactors were simultaneously under construction at INL. It’s possible that it has never happened before. //

As one senior official stated, he is happy that the new default attitude is to say “yes” or to find a way to the point where “yes” is the right answer.

That same senior official also noted that these new reactors represented a completely different paradigm from the one that produced the first 52 reactors built at Idaho National Laboratory. Instead of government funded, government directed and private company supported projects, all of the new ones are privately funded and privately directed with the support of laboratory experts and the oversight of the government officials at the Department of Energy.

Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild. //

The article doesn’t speculate, but I will. This could be a deliberately designed backdoor, of the sort I wrote about back in 2013. I could imagine some government agency figuring out how to break this class of RSA keys, and then convincing different providers to hand them out to users.

Important -- It's heavily recommended to activate HTTPS before enabling this feature, to avoid possible MITM attacks.

The Vaultwarden Admin panel allows a server administrator to configure Vaultwarden, view all the registered users and organizations and also to delete them. It allows inviting new users even when registration has been disabled. And it provides a diagnostics page in which you can generate the Support String.

In the wake of recent success with air-to-air schlieren photography using the speckled desert floor as a background, researchers at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards, California, are now looking to the heavens for backgrounds upon which to capture images of supersonic shock waves using ground-based cameras. A bright light source and/or speckled background – such as the sun or moon – is necessary for visualizing aerodynamic flow phenomena generated by aircraft or other objects passing between the observer’s camera and the backdrop. This patent-pending method, made possible by improved image processing technology, is called Background-Oriented Schlieren using Celestial Objects, or BOSCO.

Flow visualization is one of the fundamental tools of aeronautics research, and schlieren photography has been used for many years to visualize air density gradients caused by aerodynamic flow. Traditionally, this method has required complex and precisely aligned optics as well as a bright light source. Refracted light rays revealed the intensity of air density gradients around the test object, usually a model in a wind tunnel. Capturing schlieren images of a full-scale aircraft in flight was even more challenging due to the need for precise alignment of the plane with the camera and the sun.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has told investors that it plans to launch a new Starlink mobile service for US consumers, in a move that would upend the country’s multibillion-dollar phone network market.

German physicist Max Planck was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, earning the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of quanta. There has never been a whisper of scandal about the man’s integrity or his scientific work. So a pair of science historians were puzzled when they discovered that a scientific journal had inexplicably retracted two of Planck’s papers from the 1940s.

The journal in question is Naturwissenschaften, now known as The Science of Nature. The journal typically adds a large RETRACTED notice across digital papers that have been retracted, leaving them available for download. But it has removed the two Planck papers entirely, leaving just a blank page (and empty PDFs) with a brief note saying the articles had been “withdrawn due to article violation.” //

Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect the retraction decision was made around this time. “All this clearly suggests that some lawyer at Springer was overshadowing the process and considered these papers as problematic forms of ‘duplicate publications,’” they wrote. //

Duplication/self-plagiarism is also more of an issue now, when publications are a major factor when it comes to hiring and promoting scientists, as well as acquiring research fundings. Applying these contemporary standards can be problematic for the “digital circulation of historical texts,” the authors concluded. //

gowanusstinks Seniorius Lurkius
7y
29
So an entanglement issue?

I’ll let myself out. //

SplatMan_DK Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
18y
8,310
Subscriptor++
It's really Schrödingers scientific paper.

Just stop looking for it or reading it, and it will be right back. //

Keith Tanner Ars Tribunus Militum
8y
2,325
SplatMan_DK said:

It's really Schrödingers scientific paper.

Just stop looking for it or reading it, and it will be right back.
Maybe it’s more Heisenbergian. You can either read the paper or you can know what’s in it, but not both.

Rocket Lab announced on Monday that it is acquiring the satellite communications company Iridium. The deal, made for cash and shares of Rocket Lab stock, values Iridium at about $8 billion.

The deal pairs the launch company, founded and led by Peter Beck, with a decades-old profitable satellite company whose network of 80 satellites in low-Earth orbit provides telecommunications services.

“We believe this will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry,” Beck said in a short promotional video announcing the deal. “It’s the ultimate combination for growth.” //

Beck said the deal provides a shortcut for Rocket Lab to enter the “space applications” business—that is, providing space-based services rather than launching the satellites that offer voice, Internet, and other communication services to customers on Earth. This is where the majority of revenue in the space industry lies.

“This is a deal where one plus one equals three,” he said.

Learn to get the most out of your ZFS filesystem in our new series on storage fundamentals. //

But before we get to the numbers—and they are coming, I promise!—for all the ways you can shape eight disks’ worth of ZFS, we need to talk about how ZFS stores your data on-disk in the first place.

Sony recently informed its PlayStation customers in the United Kingdom that they will no longer be able to watch previously purchased movies and shows from production and distribution company StudioCanal. As of September 1, affected customers will no longer be able to stream 551 titles from the PlayStation Store. //

Regardless, the incident is a reminder that we don’t own the stuff we purchase digitally . Instead, digital rentals and purchases are merely long-term licenses that are only valid for as long as the streaming service has the right to distribute said content. Often, that’s a finite amount of time.

Still, Sony’s announcement has frustrated some, including those who believe Sony should offer refunds or who think digital stores should stop using terms like “purchase” for long-term rentals. //

Resistance Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
5m
770
I have a proposal, if these companies want to offer a license for purchase, they should have to:

1. Own a perpetual license to offer the content.
2. Adequately fund a trust to maintain access to the content. //

C.M. Allen Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9y
6,205

peachpuff said:
Yaaaar matey, downloading we shall go 🦜 🏴‍☠️

Well, if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

SCOTUS falls short of deeming geofence warrants unconstitutional, though. //

The Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The same logic already applied to a cellphone’s tracking, and the high court found “no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History” collected by third parties like Google.

Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone’s location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool. //

According to Alito, the majority announced a “new rule” that will “unleash” “upheaval” in Fourth Amendment law, requiring that “the police must obtain a warrant every time they access any cell-phone location information from a third party, however brief the duration, however innocuous the request, and however voluntarily that information was disclosed by the user.” //

SirOmega Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
24y
6,246
Subscriptor++

Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.

The Fourth Amendment protects individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy, and governmental “intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search.” Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 304. The Amendment’s “basic purpose” is “to safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by governmental officials,” id., at 303, and it was designed “to place obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595. Pp. 10–29.
Click to expand...

On this same ground, can we determine that Flock's new cameras that ping your phone wifi, bluetooth, airpods, car, etc. are also a fourth amendment search since Flock is basically taking a digital inventory of what devices are inside a closed and locked vehicle when it drives by their camera? //

Tactical Finesse Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
4m
1,116
pondo said:

I think it only becomes a 4th amendment issue when the cops access that data. That's one of the things I really don't like about Flock, Palantir, etc; they are not the government so your "rights" are a bit limited. I suspect they'd be free to share that data with the extended car warranty folks.
They'll share the data to anyone with a credit card....and it is extremely cheap. I priced out a data set from one of these brokers for work.

Messenger users should note that:

• Legitimate CMA support services will not request verification codes within the application.
• CMA support services do not send users links to “verify” or “restore” accounts.
• They should never provide a verification code without confirming the request comes from a legitimate CMA communication channel.
  As always, it’s a good idea to resist taking on the feeling of urgency that’s often conveyed in such messages. There is rarely a penalty for waiting an extra hour or two to act, even when responding to legitimate requests.

CMA = commercial messaging application

“The Radiochemistry of Uranium” by James E. Gindler

Old school technical reference book on uranium chemistry.

Source ☢️: moltensalt.org/references/sta…

Old film rolls from flea markets, scanned and put online. Someone's vacations, birthdays, random Tuesdays — forgotten in a drawer for decades. I don't know where or when these were taken. Help me figure it out.

These are the photos nobody thought were worth keeping — and they're the most honest record of how people actually lived. A roll of Agfa from 1968 could only be from 1968. Putting these online is the only shot at getting a photo back to the people in it.

The world’s largest encyclopedia was overrun by bias and censorship—and pushed me out when I tried to fix it. //

Twenty-five years ago, I co-founded Wikipedia, arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. On Monday, I was indefinitely banned from the site. The story of what happened to me is, in many ways, the story of our censorious times, in which independent thinking is seen as a threat rather than a virtue, and punished as such. //

How could this happen to a supposedly neutral encyclopedia that anybody can edit? It goes back to a fundamental problem with the site: Wikipedia has never developed a community charter. Instead, it operates under vague, collaboratively written rules that are interpreted by an all-powerful class of “admin” moderators beholden more to each other than to any constitutional framework. It is rule by an anonymous mob, and not even a large one; of about 800 administrator accounts, only about 400 are active. //

In one of life’s quirky ironies, two hours after I was kicked off the site I founded, I was at a gala dinner in lower Manhattan, accepting a Tablet magazine Sinai Award, which honors individuals who have acted courageously to promote freedom. What was the award for? Co-founding Wikipedia, and attempting to reform it.

In my acceptance speech, I told the story I have just told you. And as I said then, the last few days have been filled with a mixture of bemusement and shock. But my life has had a lot of controversies like this because, as a general rule, I stand on several principles, no matter who they bother:

1. There is an objective truth.
2. Knowledge is one of the most important things in life, and it ought to be made available for free, if at all possible.
3. Knowledge projects must absolutely be neutral.

Wikipedia changed the world. But its tragedy is that it grew so large that it sucked most of the air out of competing projects and, even as it grew to dominance, it was taken over by ideologues and shills who co-opted it for propaganda purposes. For those people, the temerity to try to recruit people from outside their weird clique was an unpardonable sin.

Unfortunately for them, I don’t particularly care.

Over the past year, I have fought tirelessly to reform Wikipedia because its founding mission is more important today than ever before. Information is the most valuable currency in any society, and the ability of citizens to access, evaluate, and learn from a diversity of viewpoints is essential to a free civilization. Yet Wikipedia’s yearslong shift away from that principle—toward ideological gatekeeping and narrative control—undermines the very purpose for which it was created. //

In the long term, I’d like to archive all the world’s free encyclopedias, to make them available in a single format and share them across a truly decentralized network, like the old-fashioned internet. Wikipedia needs a competitor—or, perhaps, a system of competitors.

The company I created may no longer uphold its own founding principles, but people still want and need the kind of knowledge Wikipedia was built to provide. They deserve more than one place to look for it.