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Customer-Losing Flock Now Offers Buyouts to Avoid Laying Off Employees

20 Sep 2026, 02:34 by EditorDavid

Mashable writes: Flock Safety offered employees voluntary buyouts on Friday, WIRED reported... Without the buyouts, those familiar with the situation suspect the company would have to lay off some of its 1,500 employees. WIRED writes that people familiar with the program "say they believe that a significant number of the startup's roughly 1,500 employees may try to depart." Flock is making the severance offers as it continues to lose customers... The company has had many of its contracts either not extended or dropped this year, which could leave it short of revenue goals, according to two of the people. A wave of vandalism targeting its cameras has unexpectedly increased expenses. Without buyouts, Flock almost certainly would have to lay off some staff, one of the people believes... People familiar with Flock's severance plan tell WIRED that some employees may take the offer amid speculation that the company, which has raised about $1.2 billion in venture capital, might resort to selling off parts or all of its business to stay afloat... One advocacy group identified 93 city and county governments that cut ties with Flock in August alone. Overall in 2026, roughly three times as many local governments have dropped Flock compared to the previous five years. Flock has recently been building products that extend the company beyond its core license plate reader offering. WIRED reported last month that the company has developed AI-powered investigative software to identify drivers, find potential associates based on patterns of movement, and search across police records and other data. A separate WIRED analysis of Flock's software found tools designed to continuously search camera feeds for people matching written descriptions. WIRED's analysis of Flock's code also found potential integrations with drones and other surveillance systems. Flock's financial scrambles might explain an incident in Syracuse, New York. The nonprofit news site Central Current discovered the city's contract said its license plate data wouldn't be shared outside the police department, reports Mashable: But the department had granted access to other agencies, which police said was an accident. Over roughly a year, searches by officers around the country reached Syracuse's data nearly 4.4 million times. And that wasn't the only surprise in the paperwork. Central Current also found that Flock could keep using Syracuse data after the contract ended. When the city approved cameras from Axon to replace Flock's, Flock said Syracuse couldn't simply end its agreement early. It warned that the city might have to pay for both systems; so even as officials moved to replace the cameras, they faced questions about what Flock could do with the data and what the city might still owe. Meanwhile, the Texas Department of Transportation "has stopped issuing permits allowing Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers to be installed along state roads..." reports the Texas Tribune. "There were an estimated 13,000 Flock cameras across Texas in August, but hundreds of the devices have been shut down after [governor] Abbott's funding freeze." And in August Florida's Republican Governor "ordered his state's transportation department to remove the cameras from state roads, saying he didn't want 'a surveillance state.'"

Developer Abandons 'PS5 Linux' Project After Sony Patches AI-Discovered Exploit

19 Sep 2026, 22:05 by EditorDavid

"In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC," writes the blog It's FOSS. It ran Steam games and emulators using the PS5's on-board hardware. But this week Andy announced he's "stopping all my work on PS5 Linux" and "stepping away from the PS5 scene." stopping work on porting the project to the PS5 Pro, which would've shipped sometime in 2027. Andy Nguyen: After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish PS5 Pro support and release in 2027, it's all down the sink. The scene used to be a group of highly talented researchers, but now it is just a bunch of noobs using LLMs and writing hacks they don't even understand. Slop kiddies found the only hypervisor bug left, which I had also found a while ago, and decided to report to Sony. I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy Linux. They agreed to wait, but not a day passed and they decided to waste it instead. Or, as It's FOSS tells it: Running Linux on a PlayStation console is possible because the PS5 Linux project was able to find a way past the hypervisor using exploits Sony had already patched, covering firmware 3.00 through 7.61. .. [The bug's discoverer writes it was] found with what he calls his "trusty ai clanker machine" and no help from anyone else. He had even agreed to Andy's request to not disclose the findings. Unexpectedly, a third person, still unnamed, found the same bug using AI a few hours later. Anticipating that there would be more people finding the same bug, [he] decided to post the flaw on HackerOne. The project's GitHub page and all the related repositories are still there. Nothing has been archived as of today, and if you wanted to, you could start contributing to the PS5 Linux project by taking over any pending work or cooking up new improvements... The PS5 Pro support Andy was building never reached the repository, so you would have to start from scratch... While Andy's departure is a blow to the plan for supporting newer PS5 firmware and the PS5 Pro, other contributors have shown that they can deliver work on the loader without him, and I am hopeful more will follow.

Fake AI Intelligence Almost Made the US Military Start a War With China

19 Sep 2026, 17:34 by EditorDavid

U.S. military intelligence received an inaccurate report this spring that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program, reports CNN. "The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode." Armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship [according to two of the sources]. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of AI — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. The report, according to one of the sources, was "entirely false." But it also "almost started a war," the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations. Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains. But the episode underscores the profound risks of using this powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology for targeting in the middle of a war... Officials say the US can't afford to fall behind in integrating AI in case it must one day fight China or another adversary who would potentially be able to stay one step ahead of the US. In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released his agency's "Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy" in a bid to speed up the military's use of AI. "We will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI," Hegseth said in a speech announcing the strategy. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader stabiesoft for sharing the news.