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Man Charged With 3 Felonies For Breaking 3D

Oviedo, Florida police charged a man with three felonies for cutting down an officer's 3D-printed decoy Flock surveillance camera.

After several real Flock Safety cameras were stolen in Oviedo between July 23 and August 3, 2026, police replaced them with 3D-printed decoys built by an officer at home and monitored the fakes. Evan Meyer was arrested after midnight and charged with attempted grand theft, criminal mischief over $1,000, and property crimes against computer equipment, despite the decoy costing only a few dollars of filament. Mayor Megan Sladek said she had no idea the sting was underway, and the department claims no records of the decoy's creation exist, citing an ongoing investigation.

404 Media · 22d agoPolicy & legal

Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras

Schneier on Security highlights a printed vehicle-camouflage pattern tested to defeat Flock surveillance cameras and Axon body cameras.

The post discusses covering cars with printed patterns designed to fool Flock automated license-plate recognition software, with testing reportedly done against Flock and Axon body cameras. Reader comments question effectiveness against other ALPR vendors, Flock's RF MAC-address upgrade, and whether such camouflage might become regulated. The page also contains off-topic comment threads about anti-bot over-blocking and privacy.

Schneier on Security · 9d agoResearch

The Government is Monitoring Anti

Fusion center bulletins reveal US law enforcement monitoring anti-Flock social media accounts and warning police ahead of the DeFlock Week of Action against license plate readers.

Public records requests by 404 Media and journalist Dan Boguslaw exposed intelligence bulletins from fusion centers in Colorado, Wisconsin, and Florida tracking anti-Flock sentiment, camera vandalism videos, and the DeFlock National Week of Action against automated license plate readers scheduled for August 16-22. The bulletins highlight Instagram accounts like Nomark.Project posting daily camera takedowns, and a device found during a June 25 traffic stop that could locate Flock cameras. Police are advised to increase patrols around ALPR locations and warned about upcoming DeFlock events, including 11 Florida cities signed up. DeFlock creator Will Freeman said the project never called for vandalism and that over 100 surveillance contracts have been canceled through civic engagement.

404 Media · Aug 12, 2026Policy & legal1

Project noRecognition: Teaching AI to Fool Surveillance Cameras

Security researcher Bill Swearingen's noRecognition project uses 31 million tested patterns to defeat license plate reader and surveillance camera AI detection.

Kansas City researcher Bill Swearingen built noRecognition, using reinforcement learning across roughly 31 million tests to generate printed patterns that break the detection layer of license plate readers and surveillance cameras. The strongest validated result achieved 61.7% non-detection against a detector taken from a real deployed camera, though most headline figures remain digital simulations. At DEF CON he covered a 2009 Toyota Yaris in a new pattern and reported it effective against a Flock Safety camera, with curved wheels the main weak point. He is crowdfunding apparel products and withholding his best patterns to prevent camera makers from blocking them.

Security Affairs · 29d agoAI safety & security

Doctor Doom Thanked Seattle for All the Surveillance Cameras

Activist dressed as Doctor Doom urged Seattle's council to curb Axon and Flock surveillance after a committee voted to redirect $250,000 from CCTV expansion.

Clifford Cawthon, a policy advisor at the Washington State Department of Commerce, appeared at a Seattle Public Safety Committee meeting in costume as Doctor Doom to protest the city's expanding mass surveillance. He criticized Seattle PD's access to 62 cameras feeding an Axon real-time crime center that ingests CCTV, body camera, geolocation, ALPR, and dispatch data from vendors like Axon and Flock. His group Community Not Cameras submitted a petition with five demands, and a committee already voted to move $250,000 away from CCTV expansion pending full council approval.

404 Media · 7d agoPolicy & legal

Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Apple introduces Reference Image, hardware-backed verifiable photography on iPhone 18 Pro using sensor signing and Private Cloud Compute to counter AI-generated fakes.

Apple announced Reference Image, an opt-in camera mode debuting on the main sensor of iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that produces securely timestamped, verifiable photographs. The design splits into two phases: a secure digital negative created by cryptographically signing pixel data at the sensor immediately after capture (preventing injection or tampering), then developing that negative into a reference image. Private Cloud Compute handles processing without exposing image contents to anyone, including Apple, and fraudulent reference images can be revoked without revealing the photographer's identity. Apple positions the system as stronger than C2PA-based approaches, which sign metadata after capture, are vulnerable to editing-chain compromise, and can tie images to a device or individual.

Florida and Texas move to block Flock cameras over privacy concerns

Florida and Texas move to end use of Flock license plate cameras, citing privacy concerns and database misuse by police.

Florida's Department of Transportation said it will cease using license plate readers, such as Flock's cameras, on state highways and has 30 days to remove them, following Governor DeSantis calling the technology 'out of control'. Texas separately ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras, citing abuse including the indictment of a Lufkin officer on 100 felony counts for allegedly searching Flock's database without authorization. Flock operates roughly 130,000 license plate readers across the US, and towns including Evanston, Cambridge, and Eugene report the company reinstalled cameras after contracts were terminated.

TechCrunch · Security · 15d agoPolicy & legal

Researchers built a $7 gadget for anyone paranoid about hidden cameras in hotel rooms

KAIST-led researchers built SweepLED, a sub-$7 smartphone LED clip using AI to detect hidden cameras with 93.9-95.1% accuracy.

SweepLED, built by KAIST with the National University of Singapore and Singapore Management University, clips 15 LEDs to a smartphone camera and sweeps multi-angle light while the phone films reflections. A spatio-temporal AI model compares LED-on and LED-off frames to distinguish lens reflections from glossy surfaces across three viewpoints. Testing on 30 objects, 12 with hidden cameras, achieved 93.9% accuracy handheld and 95.1% static. Core components cost under $7, targeting privacy checks in hotels and short-term rentals.

Help Net Security · 14d agoResearch1

AI will not fix a governance problem in your camera estate

Hikvision EMEA security director argues camera estates need governance, recovery controls, and secure-by-default settings rather than AI fixes.

Rob Janssens, EMEA Cyber Security Director at Hikvision Europe, discusses securing surveillance camera estates whose lifecycles outlive their installers, leaving lost documentation and admin credentials. He advocates secure-by-default settings such as mandatory password activation, login-failure monitoring, IP filtering, and controlled SSH access, and argues customers should be able to recover control without the original integrator. He distinguishes secure-by-design from secure-by-default, recommends VPNs and network segmentation over disabling controls, and weighs European requirements like source code escrow and country-of-origin rules.

Help Net Security · 21d agoIndustry

Why the current tech backlash feels different

The Verge's Decoder mailbag discusses the current tech backlash, arguing AI hype overstates verifiability outside software engineering.

Nilay Patel's Decoder mailbag episode addresses listener feedback on the widely discussed 'software brain' essay. He argues AI hype is concentrated on software because code is verifiable through compilation, while domains like drug discovery, math and science lack equivalent verifiability. The episode also touches on AI backlash, surveillance, data centers and upcoming midterm coverage.

The Verge · AI · 6d agoAI industry1

OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300 million, report says

OpenAI acquired smartphone camera startup Glass Imaging for over $300 million, deepening rumored hardware ambitions after its $6.5 billion io deal.

OpenAI bought Glass Imaging, a Los Altos startup founded in 2019 by former Apple engineers Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop who led Apple's Portrait Mode team, per a Wall Street Journal report. Glass Imaging had raised about $30 million and uses neural networks that learn individual camera systems to improve image quality at capture time. The acquisition fuels speculation about OpenAI hardware plans including smartphones, earbuds, and AI companion devices, following its $6.5 billion purchase of Jony Ive's io startup in 2025.

TechCrunch · AI · 2d agoAI industry

Norway considers ban on camera-enabled wearable ‘pervert glasses’

Norway's government is weighing bans on camera-enabled smart glasses and facial recognition in public to protect privacy.

Norway's digital minister Karianne Tung said the government is considering regulating or banning camera-enabled wearables such as Meta and Snap smart glasses over privacy concerns. Potential measures may include banning facial recognition of other people in public places. The government plans to set up an expert group to advise on better protecting privacy rights amid a trend of combining AI with cameras and microphones in everyday devices.

TechCrunch · Security · 14d agoPolicy & legal

Texas Police Used AI to Write Report About Using Flock to Search for Woman Who Had Abortion

Johnson County, Texas deputies used Axon's Draft One AI to write a report about searching 80,000+ Flock cameras for a woman who self-administered an abortion.

Documents show the Johnson County Sheriff's Office used Flock's nationwide camera network and Axon's Draft One, which drafts police reports from body camera audio, in its investigation of a woman's self-administered abortion. The AI-generated report summarized deputies' discussion of legal implications, noting Texas law provided no applicable criminal charges. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has repeatedly claimed the search was a family welfare check, but earlier police reports indicate it was initiated at the behest of the woman's abusive partner.

404 Media · 14d agoAI safety & security

More Americans oppose police license plate cameras than support them: survey

A survey finds more Americans oppose police license plate cameras than support them amid reported police abuses of surveillance cameras.

A new survey shows opposition to police license plate reader cameras now exceeds support among Americans. The backlash comes amid a wave of reported police abuses involving surveillance cameras. The findings add to public debate over police surveillance technology.

TechCrunch · Security · 19d agoPolicy & legal

'I Saw a Shiny Thing': Cop Explains Why He Used License Plate Reader to Stalk Woman

Body camera footage shows Florida officer Lamar Roman used DMV databases and ALPR cameras to stalk a woman; dozens of Flock misuse cases surfaced.

404 Media published body camera footage showing the investigation into officer Lamar Roman, who met a woman on the set of Apple TV's Bad Monkey, then illegally queried DMV databases and placed her plate on an ALPR hot list. He nearly caused a head-on collision while following her and illegally pulled her over, and was later arrested in front of his home. Flock's CEO said the system has caught many abusive officers, and the Washington Post found at least 50 misuse incidents; Roman used Turing's Guardian ALPR system.

404 Media · 27d agoPolicy & legal

After accusations of selling ‘perv glasses,’ Meta prepares to sell a pair without a camera

Meta is preparing camera-less Luna smart glasses with microphones and an AI button to access its chatbot and Muse agent, per reports.

The Information reports Meta is developing Luna, a camera-free smart glasses model with six built-in microphones and a side button that activates Meta's AI chatbot and its Muse consumer agent, possibly unveiled at next week's Meta Connect event. The move follows consumer backlash over camera-equipped glasses that critics called 'perv glasses.' Meta's Reality Labs continues to post large losses despite the smart glasses line's relative market success.

TechCrunch · AI · 9h agoAI industry

Apple’s new iPhone camera mode promises to prove your photo isn’t AI

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro adds a Reference Image mode that cryptographically signs camera sensor pixels to prove photos were not AI-generated or edited.

Apple will launch a Reference Image mode with the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, using the new camera sensor to sign every pixel and develop the signed data via Private Cloud Compute into an unalterable reference image viewable in Photos. Users can compare the reference image against edited versions to verify authenticity, building on provenance standards like SynthID, C2PA, and Meta's Content Seal. A Reference Image API will span iOS, iPadOS, and macOS for third-party apps, though the feature launches without EU support, arriving there in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.

The Verge · AI · 7d agoAI industry

Flock camera use by internal affairs unit puts DC police at odds with officers’ union

DC's Metropolitan Police Department used Flock license plate cameras to track officers under internal affairs investigation, prompting a union grievance and council scrutiny.

The DC Police Union learned in July 2026 that MPD Internal Affairs used Flock ALPR cameras to monitor officers under investigation without their knowledge, filing a grievance that management denied. Secure Justice found more than 90 US cities and counties ended Flock contracts in August 2026 alone, with over 200 terminations since 2021, while Texas and Florida announced new usage restrictions. On September 14, DC Councilmember Brooke Pinto asked Interim Chief Jeffery Carroll ten questions about the department's use of Flock data.

The Record · 15h agoPolicy & legal

Former TikTok execs built an app that uses AI to teach you how to pose for a photo

Ex-TikTok employees launched Superpose, an iOS camera app using generative AI to suggest photo poses, with $2.2M raised.

Former TikTok employees Melody Chu and Jing Liu launched Superpose, an iOS camera app that generates four AI pose suggestions per photo, with over 22,000 downloads and 190,000 poses generated since July. The app offers five free generations daily, with paid packs of five for $2.99 or 20 for $9.99. The startup raised $2.2 million from Khosla Ventures, Meitu, and OVTR VC, competing with Google's Camera Coach and Adobe's AI photo critique features.

TechCrunch · AI · 1d agoAI industry

EventEgoHands++: Event-based Egocentric 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction with Real Dataset

EventEgoHands++ reconstructs egocentric 3D hand meshes from event cameras using instance-level detection and a 1M-frame real dataset.

EventEgoHands++ adds a Hand Detector estimating instance-level bounding boxes and masks for both hands, plus Adaptive Attention that dynamically gates attention based on detection results to learn inter-hand relationships. The authors extend the synthetic N-HOT3D dataset and construct EEH-R, the largest real-world event-based egocentric hand dataset to date, with roughly 1 million annotated frames including low-light conditions. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets show consistent improvements over baselines.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

Hierarchical NeRF with JAX3D for Volumetric Rendering, Novel-View Synthesis, and 3D Reconstruction

MarkTechPost tutorial implements a hierarchical NeRF in JAX using jax3d volume-rendering primitives for novel-view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.

The tutorial builds an end-to-end hierarchical Neural Radiance Field using JAX, Flax, Optax, and jax3d's volume-rendering functions (sample_along_rays, volume_rendering, sample_piecewise_constant_pdf). It implements positional encoding, skip connections, separate coarse and fine networks, and view-direction conditioning with hierarchical importance sampling. Training uses JAX JIT compilation, Adam optimization, exponential learning-rate decay, and gradient clipping. Evaluation covers PSNR, depth and opacity visualization, 360-degree rendering, and marching-cubes geometry extraction.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI research

World in World: Explore the World with World Models

World in World is a training-free inference-time interface enabling camera-controlled rerendering, long-horizon revisiting, and motion transfer with frozen causal video world models.

The framework converts heterogeneous control evidence into camera- and time-labelled clean visual states that are read through the native self-attention of a frozen causal video model. Evidence includes source-video observations, target-view scene projections, geometry renderings for completing newly exposed regions, and retrieved generated states beyond the rolling cache. A correspondence router combines persistent point identities with geometry for token correspondences, while evidence-wise attention CFG independently regulates each auxiliary channel. The shared interface supports camera-controlled rerendering, long-horizon revisiting, and human-motion transfer without additional training.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Where the backlash against Flock Safety is having the biggest impact

More than 90 cities ended Flock Safety contracts in August as Texas and Florida restrict license plate reader use amid privacy protests.

Over 90 cities and counties terminated Flock Safety contracts in August, per Secure Justice, which has tracked more than 200 municipal terminations since 2021. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott barred state agencies from funding Flock cameras on Aug. 28 after a report that a state agency secretly diverted $30 million; Florida's transportation department banned ALPRs on state highways and Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized the technology. Los Angeles chose not to renew its LAPD contract over data-ownership terms, and Atlanta's mayor ordered a 30-day review of the roughly 5,000 ALPR cameras in the metro area. Several Flock-related police abuse cases, including a Texas officer indicted on 100 felony counts, have fueled the backlash.

The Record · 8d agoPolicy & legal

Fashion app Daydream uses Apple Intelligence to help you shop the outfits in your camera roll

Fashion app Daydream uses iOS 27 Apple Intelligence APIs to turn saved outfit photos into shoppable matches and enable Siri voice search.

Daydream launched photo-based outfit shopping and Siri natural-language search built on Apple's iOS 27 developer tools, matching images against roughly 3 million products from 325+ retailers and 10,000 brands. The app claims over 1.5 million shoppers and frames the features as steps toward a cross-surface shopping agent. Competitors include Google, Amazon, Onton, and Alta.

TechCrunch · AI · 2d agoAI industry

AlayaVista: Streaming World Modeling from Panoramic States to Perspective Video

AlayaVista is a camera-controllable streaming video world model that decouples panoramic scene evolution from perspective synthesis, trained on a 1,318-hour 4K dataset.

AlayaVista builds a 360-degree scene prior from a single perspective image, evolves it as a camera-conditioned panoramic latent state, and maps it to perspective video via a latent viewport renderer plus a perspective refiner. Chunk-autoregressive generation and few-step distillation enable efficient streaming. The authors introduce MUGEN, a real-world panoramic video dataset with 1,318 hours of at-least-4K video and rich semantic and geometric annotations.

Hugging Face daily papers · 4d agoAI research

Axis Robotics Releases AXIS: A Browser-Based Data Engine With 207 Robot Manipulation Tasks and 50,129 Trajectories

Axis Robotics and academic partners released AXIS, a browser-based teleoperation system yielding 207 manipulation tasks and 50,129 trajectories that lifts pi0.5 to 88.8 on LIBERO-Plus.

A team from Axis Robotics, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, and NTU introduced AXIS, a browser-based data engine where contributors teleoperate a simulated Franka Research 3 in a MuJoCo WebAssembly frontend while GPU backends handle task generation, training, and evaluation. The released snapshot holds 207 tasks, 50,129 episodes, and 60K+ task or scene variants from more than 70,000 community contributors. Continual pretraining of pi0.5 on AXIS data raises LIBERO-Plus performance from 83.9 to 88.8, versus 57.5 for a volume-matched RoboCasa365 control; the 2.36 TB dataset is gated for non-commercial academic use.

MarkTechPost · 9d agoAI research

Risks in IoT Supply Chain

Unit 42 analyzes multilayer IoT supply chain risks across hardware, firmware, and software, citing counterfeit Cisco switches and OpenWrt attacks.

Unit 42 examines weaknesses in the IoT supply chain ecosystem across hardware, firmware, operation, and vulnerability layers, noting that 89% of IT decision-makers reported IoT device growth and IDC forecast 41.6 billion connected IoT devices by 2025. Examples include counterfeit Cisco Catalyst 2960-X switches with possible backdoor access (F-Secure, July 2020), a March 2020 OpenWrt flaw enabling malicious update impersonation, and threat actor interest in TeamViewer remote support software. The report stresses that untracked third-party components and missing device inventories make it hard to assess vulnerability impact across vendors.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 28d agoResearch

Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?

Evaluation of 2-8B VLMs (Qwen3-VL, Gemma3) against BioCLIP on camera-trap species ID shows all models degrade sharply on field imagery.

The study tests whether edge-deployable 2-8B vision-language models carry genuine taxonomic knowledge, comparing Qwen3-VL 2B/4B/8B and Gemma3 4B against the 300M specialist BioCLIP on a 96-species task across clean iNaturalist photos and six LILA.science camera-trap collections. All models degrade 9.6-26.6 percentage points on field imagery, and BioCLIP outperforms every VLM by 33.2-59.2 points on an expanded 200-image sample, suggesting specialized data rather than scale drives the gap. Under open-set prompting, 5.9-9.6% of responses are syntactically valid but taxonomically nonexistent species names, with fabrication rankings replicating across evaluation sets.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

Srsly Risky Biz: Trump's Private Hacker Memo Is the Right Idea

A Trump presidential memo directs DHS to authorize vetted private-sector hackers to conduct cyber operations against foreign cybercriminal groups (CE-TCOs).

A presidential memorandum directs the Department of Homeland Security to establish a program authorizing private companies to conduct cyber surveillance and cyber effects operations against Cyber-Enabled Transnational Crime Organisations (CE-TCOs). Participating companies must pass vetting, obtain government approval before operations, and post a USD $1 million bond. The accompanying fact sheet cites more than USD $20.8 billion in US losses to cyber-enabled crime in 2025. Critics worry about accidental escalation if operations touch foreign government systems.

Risky Business News · 27d agoPolicy & legal1