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In an affront to creeps everywhere, Meta has started remotely bricking the smart glasses of wearers who try to secretly record other people.Earlier this month, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company said it would crack down on customers who modified the spectacles to disable or cover up their lights that indicate when they’re recording, amid incredible public backlash against how the glasses are being used to film people without their consent — girls and women especially — and harass them.Now, it looks like more than a few weirdos have gotten the ax. On Tuesday, Meta said it’s bricked the photo and video-taking…

The surveillance state costs money, people!Well, tell that to president Trump. On Thursday, he slapped a 100 percent tariff — he sure loves round numbers and levying imports — on larger foreign-made drones.Trump claimed that this “bolsters national security.” But, ironically, it could be undermining domestic security — at least according to surveillance-happy police departments who’ve gotten used to overlooking their subjects from above, according to a roundup of commentary from Ars Technica.Speaking to the New York Times, Scott Mlakar, chief of the Lake County Drone Unit outside Cleveland, called the tariffs financially onerous and lamented that it would prevent…

As Americans are being hailed as folk heroes for sawing down Flock surveillance cameras across the country, British home appliance company Dyson has come up with a form of video surveillance that we didn’t even know was possible.Yes: the company has launched a new AI-infused electric toothbrush that features a “100k pixel macro lens camera,” allowing users — brushers? — to “see what their dentist sees.”The appropriately named Dyson CameraJet claims to analyze 28 images per second and employ an “AI machine-learning algorithm” to identify and target “interdental gaps.” In case you’re wondering how it can take pictures in the…

While they’re seemingly still years away from completing actually useful tasks, like cleaning a messy apartment or doing the dishes, humanoid robots have developed plenty of capabilities over the past few years, from sprinting faster than any human ever to performing elaborate dance choreographies.They’ve also been taught how to punch and even kickbox for their human overlords’ amusement, as one man visiting a store in Russia appears to have learned the hard way.A viral CCTV video shows the individual lightly shoving what appears to be a Chinese Unitree G1 humanoid robot. After it recoils slightly, it suddenly starts playing cheesy…

A group of software engineers who say they were fired by their bosses because of AI are giving their former employers a taste of their own medicine. With the powers of spite and friendship, they’ve built “OpenExecutive,” an AI system designed to do the work of a CEO, if not the entire c-suite, TechRadar reports.“Work happens around the clock. Leadership doesn’t scale with it,” a demo video begins, as a stock music track called “Corporate Music Uplifting” plays in the background.The team describes their AI system, perhaps with their tongues in their cheeks, as a “senior advisor with Harvard MBA-level…

Automakers are having an increasingly difficult time convincing their customers that more in-car screens — and the often dodgy software that accompanies them — are a compelling reason to pay a major premium.Virtually every major car company is now installing increasingly enormous screens into the dashboards of its cars, frequently stretching far beyond the driver’s seat and into the passenger area as well.But what’s becoming more and more clear is that practically nobody actually wants any of those purported luxuries in their ride. As a new survey by consumer research firm JD Power goes to show, owners of 2026 model-year…

For seafood lovers, there are few things more appealing than a simple slab of raw tuna — a fish whose fatty, savory, and tender muscle tissue has been a delicacy for thousands of years.Unfortunately for those foodies, fresh raw fish comes with the distinct possibility of parasitic infection. Off the coasts of southern Brazil, that risk is rising, as hauls of the common skipjack tuna come with the near certainty of parasitic contamination.That’s not an exaggeration. According to a new report published in the journal Ocean and Costal Research and flagged by ScienceAlert, a whopping 96 percent of a recent…

A rising Gen Z indie musician known as Betty Hammerschlag has turned out to be a middle-aged man, in an elaborate — and dare we say a bit creepy — deception that fooled everyone from fans to music critics to the artist’s own collaborators.Music journalist Shawn Reynaldo blew open the charade in an exposé published Wednesday in his newsletter First Floor. By all appearances, Hammerschlag presented herself as a young woman still in art school, using pictures of women in her social media posts and promotional materials, and writing in a pointedly whimsical, all-lowercase and flowery emoji-laden style intended to evoke…

If you happen to live in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Kansas, you may soon notice a massive uptick in ads extolling the virtues of AI data centers. That’s not by accident. As Bloomberg reported this week, a group funded by tech industry billionaires called Build American AI is spinning up a massive campaign meant to sway public opinion around data centers in key battleground states.The ad blitz is described as being in the “millions of dollars” range, per Bloomberg, though Build American AI hasn’t disclosed an exact figure.Among the group’s backers are figures heavily invested in continuing the data center boom,…

After health officials in Pennsylvania found that two young children died from measles, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is refusing to count their deaths as being caused by the deadly virus.“This week’s measles outbreaks update will not include the two measles-associated deaths reported by the Pennsylvania Department of Health on Aug. 25,” the CDC posted on its website, in a high unusual announcement.It’s a precedent shattering action. The New York Times called it an “extraordinary move for the CDC,” breaking with the agency’s long-standing procedure of accepting data shared by states.The challenge by the CDC comes amid a…