Futurism reports: 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the Los Angeles Police Department Office of the Inspector General caught the department's ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which "resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles," the LAPD's cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over.
"The biggest issue remains this national database at the FBI called NCIC," Flock's CEO Garrett Langley recently told The Drive, complaining about "how archaic its structure is." Flock CEO: There's no feedback loop mechanisms; it's really just a static comma-separated file.

We've tried to build around it. We have this concept called "suppression." A local agency — let's take Atlanta, where I live — might see that there's a stolen plate out of California, but it's already been resolved because it's a rental car or a dealer car. They can, in Flock, suppress that: "Never alert us on that for the next year." That's to get around the fact that they can't force another agency to remove it from NCIC. Ideally, the way it would work is if enough agencies — let's call it one, two, or three — flag a tag as no longer valid or a bad entry, it should just get removed. Or at least it should get pushed more aggressively by the FBI... I'm hopeful that they'll see there's an opportunity to make something like NCIC, which is an important tool not just for companies like Flock, but for police departments to work together, start to make some enhancements to modernize what's a central part of our policing system.
Later in the interview he says "It's less than one in a million alerts that an officer says, 'I'm not sure if that's right.' Less than one in a million."

A recent report from Business Insider shares a worst-case scenario. In the summer of 2024 a Sacramento police officer said Flock's cameras had sent six false alerts for the same vehicle, wrongly saying it had been stolen or used in a felony crime in the nearby suburb of Roseville: Roseville police could see that Flock's software kept confusing the "9" on the man's license plate for an "8." The car owner said he would take off his license plate cover. Soon after, it happened again. It's "easier at this point we have it memorized," a dispatch supervisor in Roseville wrote in an email to a colleague.

Flock says that in optimal conditions, its cameras accurately read more than 96% of license plate characters. Hundreds of pages of records from the Roseville Police Department show a different picture. In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent 1,427 alerts to Roseville police, flagging vehicles as stolen or used in a felony after they passed one of the city's Flock cameras. An analysis by the police department found that in 71% of those alerts, Flock's machine-learning software incorrectly read the license plates... The cameras regularly missed vehicles, captured blurry images, misread license plate characters and states, and sent delayed alerts to police about vehicles possibly connected to crimes, the records show...

A factor that contributed to the misread problems in Roseville was the "particularly unique deployment" that the city requested, a Flock spokeswoman said. Roseville said it has its cameras configured so that they capture only the backs of vehicles, a setup intended to avoid capturing personally identifiable information like faces. Roseville's setup included older hardware and placement of cameras higher and further from vehicles than the company typically recommends, Flock added...

In Toledo, Ohio, driver Brandon Upchurch was mauled by a police dog after a Flock camera misread the "7" on his license plate as a "2." As a result of his injuries, he said, he lost his job and was evicted from his home. He settled a lawsuit against the city and police officer for $35,000. None of the incorrect Flock alerts in Roseville resulted in a traffic stop or arrest, a department spokesman said. Roseville requires police officers to verify that a license plate is stolen or have independent reasonable suspicion of a crime before making a traffic stop...

Flock said Roseville's camera performance has significantly improved, which the police department disputed... Flock's cameras also missed vehicles altogether... At one point, Flock's product director for machine learning suggested that officers ask drivers to remove license plate frames that made it "very difficult for the machine vision to tell it is actually a 'E' and not an 'F.'" Roseville told Flock at the time that it wouldn't do so, according to the department spokesman. Flock in 2024 shared an analysis with Roseville's police department, outlining reasons for the misreads. Vehicles far from a camera were sometimes blurry. Plates were cut off by trees or license plate frames. And Flock's software confused similar characters, mistaking an "N" for a "V", or a "1" for a "4...."

Roseville isn't the first organization to flag inaccuracies in Flock's technology. In 2021, the research firm IPVM independently tested Flock's license plate readers, concluding that Flock misidentified the state in about one of 10 reads, and that the system regularly misclassified vehicles' type and make. IPVM said that Flock subsequently blocked it from purchasing its cameras for testing.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Cognitive Dissident for sharing the article.

With nearly 70% of the market, "Meta wants its smart glasses to be a big hit," writes the Los Angeles Times. But after some users found ways to disable the light that warns people they're being filmed, "the high-tech specs have also turned into a liability, as some are calling the gadget 'pervert glasses...'" Some people are using the glasses — which look like a pair of regular spectacles — to record people without their knowledge and publish the videos on social media. The users secretly videotape and share what happens when they try to pick up women. Now, a growing number of people are worried they could be covertly recorded at the gym or even during sex. The backlash has prompted Meta to update its glasses to address privacy concerns, and some places have banned them, adding to the angst surrounding technology that's rapidly evolving...

Concern about the glasses has exploded as more videos of interactions with people who don't know they're being recorded go viral on social media. On Instagram, some videos depict people getting approached in malls and grocery stores and on college campuses and sidewalks. While the videos are portrayed as jokes, the people filmed don't appear to know they're being recorded and sometimes seem uncomfortable, telling the strangers to leave them alone or stop harassing them. The outcry has spread beyond social media, with comedian Jimmy Kimmel calling the Meta devices "pervert glasses" on national television and singer Lorde telling concertgoers that smart glasses are "not sexy..."

Instagram, which is owned by Meta, has been disabling accounts and taking down some of these pickup or prank videos for violating the platform's rules against harassment and bullying... Businesses are making their own calls about smart glasses. The 5 Point Cafe in Seattle, which banned Google Glass in the past, has banned Meta glasses from its diner and dive bar. "Leave your Meta-SpyBan Display at home, they are officially Ray-Ban-ned from all of our restaurants. We serve privacy, not side-eye surveillance," a 2025 Instagram post from the business states.
An Android app that warns people if they're being recorded has roughly 110,000 downloads in the last six months, according to the article. The app's creator says it's a "social problem" that "we don't value privacy, that we feel entitled to use others for our entertainment or our private gain, and technology amplifies that."

The American Civil Liberties Union and more than 70 organizations even sent a letter urging Meta to promise they'd leave facial recognition features out of their smart glasses, according to the article. But a Meta spokesperson said "no final decision has been made."

A Massachusetts newspaper reports that officials from the town of Littleton (population: 10,141) "claim that five of Littletonâ(TM)s Flock Safety cameras were switched back on by the company without informing the town..."

Littleton had temporarily disabled the cameras earlier this year, according to the article, but upon discovering the cameras were still active, city officials say they directed the Town Counsel "to initiate cancellation of the contract with Flock Safety and directed the Town Administrator to coordinate the removal of the six cameras on public ways" with the Department of Public Works.

Ironically, it's the same Massachusetts town that last year was breached by a Chinese-state-sponsored hacking group for over 300 days.

Flock has also considered dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers' vehicles "to scan license plates those drivers travelled passed," reports 404 Media, "essentially turning Uber and Lyft drivers into roaming surveillance vehicles, according to a Flock presentation shared with 404 Media... 404 Media first revealed the intended partnership last August when multiple sources provided information on the plan."

NBC Bay Area brings news from the small idyllic California town of Suisun City (population: 29,518). The city council "declared a state of emergency Saturday after a cyberattack that shut down computer systems including 911 public safety operations." "Malicious software infected and compromised" the East Bay community's information technology systems beginning about 5:45 a.m. Friday, the city said on social media. "The cybersecurity incident hit critical public safety operations, including 911 routing, police and fire dispatch, records and city services," the city said.

"There is no imminent threat to the public," the city said. "All public safety services remain active." The city shut down its computer network "to contain the threat and preserve evidence for a federal investigation," it said... Suisun City dispatchers were taking calls for service through the Solano County dispatch center. Suisun City police officers and firefighters continued responding to calls for service, the city said, but online city services and internal operations were unavailable.
On Facebook the city said it was "working alongside federal, state and regional agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and California Office of Emergency Services to maintain emergency services, investigate the incident and restore systems."

But Bay Area PBS station KQED notes "They're only the latest local government in the region to be hit by a cyberattack." Earlier this year, Foster City and Pittsburg experienced other cyberattacks that impacted services in their own jurisdictions. Foster City declared a state of emergency after a March ransomware incident that shut down many services for more than a week. Pittsburg lost almost $1 million to a February phishing attack, though over half of it was recovered.

Dozens of Flock cameras have been vandalized around Dallas Texas in the last six months, reports a local news station. In Utah, ABC News reports, a county sheriff's office even said Wednesday a Flock camera was even vandalized within days of its being installed. And in the Minnesota city of Winona, "Every Flock license plate reader camera operated by the Winona Police Department has been sawed off and stolen in what investigators believe was a coordinated theft," according to local media: All eight cameras were taken August 1, according to the Winona Police Department. A patrol officer first noticed the cameras had not sent any alerts in 24 hours. When officers checked the locations, they found the cameras had been cut from their poles and taken. The poles were left behind. Two additional Flock cameras on the Mississippi River Bridge, owned by Buffalo County, were also stolen in the same manner...

The thefts are part of a broader national trend. Flock cameras have been vandalized and cut down in communities across the country.
When someone in Florida filmed a damaged Flock camera lying in the grass in Florida, their footage attracted 980,000 views on social media, according to a local news report, with the uploader saying "Most of the people that are commenting are against Flock cameras." But that report adds it's one of at least five cameras recently damaged just in Florida:

- In another incident, investigators "found the black camera and its pole lying on the ground."

- Two days later, sheriff's deputies found a camera destroyed "with pieces scattered on the ground. Deputies reported the damage appeared to have been caused by a blunt object."

- On July 31, "Police said two camera poles had been intentionally cut in half, causing an estimated $10,000 in damage to the system."

In West Virginia 20-year-old Wesley Jackson has been arrested for allegedly vandalizing Flock cameras, with another 20-year-old (a university student) now arrested for being his accomplice, according to a local news report. Ironically, Jackson's arrest was made possible partly by information from... automated license plate readers.

But the Washington Post notes there's now a flood of Facebook commenters jokingly offering to provide a fake alibi: "Couldn't have been him — we were out counting blades of grass," said one of the 29,000 commenters on a post about the arrest from the local news station WDTV. Others attested that the man, Wesley Jackson, had been helping them "replace the roof on a homeless shelter," "playing halo 2," "changing the tires" on their car or giving their "doggie a treat" at the time the cameras were destroyed.
Meanwhile, the anti-surveillance group DeFlock reports 100 communities have now rejected automated license plate readers. Wednesday an Arizona county sheriff explained to his local Board of Supervisors why he will not renew his office's contract with Flock when it expires next month. Local Arizona media reports: "We have a camera system that can do facial recognition technology and can start building a data set on what our citizens are doing on a day-to-day basis," Teeple told supervisors. "That, in my training and experience, is a huge Fourth Amendment violation."
Recently an Arizona man even told his city council he'd be launching AI-powered satellites to monitor "where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home," reports 404 Media: It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said... He said he'd already started compiling profiles on their vehicles, spouses vehicles, children's vehicles, and planned to combine that data with Bluetooth signals, advertising IDs, and commercial data sources, "so our authorized users can replay the movements of every government official and their immediate family," he said. Local businesses would be invited to join the network, to "protect" officials while they shop, eat at restaurants, and move around the city.
And CNET reports "a quiet battle is happening across the US" between "towns working to adopt Flock Safety systems and those trying to ban them entirely." From major cities like Los Angeles canceling its Flock contract to towns wrapping Flock AI cams in plastic bags because Flock won't take them down, it's a wild time for surveillance and questions about government accountability.

"Google should be required to divest the Chrome browser, and prohibited from paying Apple to distribute Google's search engine, the nonprofit advocacy group Public Knowledge argues in a new court filing," MediaPost reports, citing a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals: The group adds that "independent ownership" of Chrome "would open the distribution channel Google controls and allow Chrome to serve browser users when it makes privacy decisions and determines how to integrate search and (artificial intelligence)..."

In September 2025, [U.S. District Court Judge] Mehta issued a remedies order that requires Google to share some data about users' searches with "qualified" competitors and to provide syndicated search results and ads to those competitors. The order also prohibits Google from entering into exclusive distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app for six years, but allows the company to continue to make payments for search-ad revenue or distribution to Apple, Mozilla and others...

Google recently appealed Mehta's order. The company argued in its written brief that it "prevailed in the marketplace fair and square," adding that Apple and Mozilla "sensibly chose" Google as the default search engine "because it gave their users the best experience," and because Apple and Mozilla would earn the most ad revenue through the deals. The [U.S.] Justice Department and states countered to the appellate court last week that the liability finding should stand, and also argued that Google should have been banned from paying Apple and Mozilla for placement as the default search engine on their browsers.

[Antitrust enforcers had originally asked the judge to order Google to divest Chrome, but he's already rejected that request.] The government did not argue in its appellate papers that Google should be forced to sell Chrome. But Public Knowledge independently contends in its friend-of-the-court brief that divestiture would benefit consumers... "Divestiture would place those decisions with an institution whose success depends on serving browser users primarily...." The group is calling the appellate court's attention to Google's April 2025 decision to preserve tracking cookies — a reversal from its earlier plans to block third-party cookies by default. "Google is in the position of both deciding Chrome's tracking rules while running the advertising business affected by them," Public Knowledge writes. "An independent Chrome could make those decisions on behalf of users alone."
But Firefox developer Mozilla filed its own friend-of-the-court brief Thursday warning Firefox could be forced to "exit the browser and browser engine markets" if it can't receive payment from Google for distributing its search engine, according to a later report from MediaPost: Federal and state antitrust enforcers recently asked the appellate court to reverse the portion of Mehta's order that allows those payments to continue. But Mozilla counters in its new friend-of-the-court brief that Mehta's decision regarding those payments was supported by the evidence --including a study it conducted concluding that its revenue would "decline dramatically" if forced to replace Google with Bing as Firefox's default search engine... Google is expected to file new arguments with the appellate court next month.

In Georgia the Savannah Police Department "terminated four sworn officers and two civilian employees following an internal investigation into misuse of the department's Flock Safety License Plate Reader system," according to a local news report: All six cases are also under independent criminal investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation... Investigators found that employees were running searches on personal acquaintances and family members. One officer was found to have given someone from an outside law enforcement agency access to SPD's Flock Safety system, which they weren't authorized to do.
Elsewhere ABC News reports that a female North Carolina police officer was arrested Wednesday "for allegedly using Flock license plate readers to track her boyfriend's ex-wife, according to police..." The officer is accused of accessing the system for personal use 31 different times, including at least twice when she was off-duty, and listing most of the lookups as motor vehicle infractions. [Police chief Ron] Campurciani "added that the department is looking at 10 other potential misuse cases and said three 'look like they could be problematic.'"

And an Ohio news station reports a police officer who recently resigned "while under internal investigation repeatedly used the Flock license plate reader system to search a vehicle registered to someone investigators identified as his likely domestic partner."

Meanwhile, 404 Media reported this week that an Iowa county's usage police specifically tells police officers — in all capital letters — not to tell occupants of a vehicle that an automated license plate reader was used for a traffic stop. It also instructs officers to not even mention the use of the ALPR technology in their reports "unless absolutely necessary," according to information they'd obtained from a public records request," suggesting they instead they call the cameras "county resources": It is not just local police in small communities who are creating policies designed to obfuscate Flock usage. Earlier this year, we reported that police in multiple states were being told to be "as vague as permissible" about why they were using Flock because their searches could be obtained using public records requests, and that warning was being shared by the FBI and Department of Justice...

In the [Iowa county] public records request, Sheriff Don Phillips said "there is no need" to tell people about the use of Flock... "because the information is verified by the deputy running the license plate. It is common practice for law enforcement to refrain from disclosing investigative methods and sources to prevent criminals from learning how to circumvent them."

The police surrounded her car Thursday, "drew their guns, and told her to come out with her hands up," reports a local news station. The police thought they were pulling over a murder suspect, but "It turns out it was a mistake by another department with the Flock license plate reader technology." The black woman says she'd wanted to call her mother, "but I'm like, if I make a sudden move, it's going to be over. It's going to end my life."

And amazingly, the same thing happened Monday, according to the local news report. "Milwaukee police pulled her over with guns drawn. She says officers never explained why, towed her car, and let her go."

She now describes herself as "traumatized," recalling her second detention by police on Thursday. "After they put us in cuffs, they walked us to the car. I'm not knowing what's going on. I'm scared. All you see is people in their cars recording." She now says she's scared to drive her car, and so is her daughter. "Because she doesn't know if the police are going to pull us over and do it again..."

"I haven't been to sleep since this happened. Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is guns."

She wants an apology, since the local police would only say it wasn't their fault, it was the fault of the Milwaukee police department that failed to remove the alert from Flock's system. "Milwaukee police emphasized this was not a Flock camera issue, it was a data entry mistake," according to the local news report. The woman's response?

"Y'all failed. Y'all failed the system. Y'all failed me. Y'all failed everybody."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the U.S. after reaching a $1.2 billion payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI). RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900 million in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana. "After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the US for the foreseeable future," the company said in a statement.

RWE said it has agreed to relinquish its leases off the California and Louisiana coasts as well as in the New York Bight. Overall, the German firm plans to invest approximately $19.6 billion in the U.S. over the next six years "to grow its generation capacity." Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies." "We welcome RWE's agreement and voluntary investment in projects that strengthen our nation's energy security," he added. Earlier this year, the DOL reached a deal with TotalEnergies putting an end to the French company's offshore wind projects in the U.S. "Instead, the firm agreed to reroute investment to build a LNG plant in Texas and to develop 'upstream conventional oil' in the Gulf of Mexico," reports the BBC.

Another similar deal was signed with Charlotte-based Duke Energy last month to terminate the company's offshore wind lease in the Carolina Long Bay area.

"Framework has been sending out email notifications to customers alerting of a limited data breach in which customer information was accessed through a Metabase BI service zero-day exploit," writes Slashdot reader DuoDreamer. Data includes customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. "Framework is investigating whether or not this included Framework for Business customers as well." TechCrunch reports: Framework's spokesperson Eric Schumacher told TechCrunch that the breach affected "all customers," but declined to specify a specific number. Framework computers are relatively niche products, but some estimates say the company sold hundreds of thousands of devices.

Metabase disclosed its own breach in a blog post on its official website, where it said that it was hacked by someone using an unknown security flaw, a so-called zero-day. The company said the hackers exploited the bug to give them the ability to access customers' databases stored on Metabase's cloud servers.

In its email to customers, Framework also included the email Metabase sent to the company, which says hackers accessed Framework's cloud instance. The computer maker said it investigated the incident and found that hackers had stolen its customers' personal data, but did not include their payment information.

President Trump has ordered a 15% tariff on imported products made with polysilicon, a key material for semiconductors and solar panels. The new tariff will take effect on December 4th. The Guardian reports: The executive order signed by the president on Thursday evening said: "The plan of action in this proclamation will, among other things, help ensure the commercial viability of United States production of polysilicon and its derivatives that is necessary to meet United States economic and national security requirements." Polysilicon, an ultra-pure form of silicon, is an important ingredient in making the semiconductors vital for AI processing power, datacentres and solar power generation. US solar factories have long accused Chinese rivals of dumping cheaper panels on the market, which they say have been enabled by excessive government subsidies and by moving manufacturing to other countries to dodge US tariffs.

[...] The US has two main polysilicon factories, including Hemlock Semiconductor, which operates a plant in Michigan and is a joint venture between the US tech company Corning and Japan's Shin-Etsu Handotai. The Munich-based Wacker Chemie runs a factory in Tennessee. Trump said in the order that he had accepted recommendations by the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to set minimum import prices of $21 a kilogram for polysilicon, $100 a kilogram for polysilicon ingots and wafers, $0.22 a watt for solar cells, and $0.38 a watt for solar modules or panels. The order also allows the commerce department to create an incentive program for companies that invest in factories to produce polysilicon or derivative products.

A New Mexico court ordered (PDF) Meta to create a $567 million fund to address harms linked to youth mental health and child sexual exploitation after finding its platforms constituted a public nuisance. "In sum, the Court finds that New Mexico is in the midst of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and public safety in and throughout the state, and that Meta's platforms are a significant contributing cause to the crisis," wrote Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid in the decision. The fund comes on top of $375 million in civil penalties, though the judge declined to mandate changes to features such as infinite scroll and autoplay, citing potential First Amendment and Section 230 concerns. Tech Policy Press reports: The decision follows the second phase of in the State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc., which consisted of a bench trial. Its central question was whether Meta's platforms amounted to a public nuisance in New Mexico, and, if the court found that they did, what remedy would be needed to address it. In March, a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for violations of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, awarding $375 million in civil penalties. The jury deliberated less than a day following that nearly seven-week trial. The $567 million abatement fund would be in addition to the civil penalties, according to today's decision.

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in December 2023, alleging the company made false public statements about the safety of its platforms while knowing internally that its products facilitated child sexual exploitation. The court denied Meta's Section 230 defense in May 2024. In today's decision, the court again asserted that "Section 230 does not preclude the State's public nuisance claim," but the decision attempted to thread the needle on issues that the court determined might have run "afoul" of the statute, or of the First Amendment, such as issuing remedies around any particular product feature.

alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: A federal judge in Mississippi ruled Wednesday that "tower dump" warrants are unconstitutional, declining to reverse a lower court decision refusing the government's request to obtain the search warrants in a series of violent crime investigations. A "tower dump" involves cellphone companies providing law enforcement with access to the time and location data of all mobile devices connected to specific cell towers during a designated time window.

Law enforcement had sought approval for several of these search warrants as part of criminal investigations into gang-related activity in the Jackson, Miss., area last year, arguing the data could help identify all those potentially involved, particularly in incidents with unknown suspects. A magistrate judge denied the applications, holding that "tower dumps" are impermissible general warrants. The district judge agreed. The order repeatedly referenced the Supreme Court's recent decision in Chatrie v United States, in which the majority held that geofence warrants require constitutional privacy protections.

"With this information, the Government asserts that it will be able to identify all potential suspects," Judge Carlton Reeves wrote in a 30-page order (PDF). "Even so, law enforcement would also have access to the cellular records of countless individuals, the vast majority of whom were merely passing by a location at the 'wrong' time."

"That is an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment," the judge concluded.

OpenAI researchers say multiple AI agents secretly created an internal message board to share hacking techniques, eventually finding ways around restrictions, exploiting a zero-day, and helping two models breach Hugging Face without human prompting. "This is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole," Michael Dalton, one of the AI-maker's researchers, said during a presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Politico reports: Dalton and Eric Wallace, another OpenAI researcher, said Wednesday the AI giant recently learned that multiple agents it was testing simultaneously began communicating over an internal message board in early May. There, different models shared advice about how to accomplish difficult hacking challenges they were struggling to surmount, including workarounds that required internet access. Two OpenAI models ultimately strung together a series of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the internet and worm their way inside Hugging Face in mid-July. OpenAI has said the models were focused on completing a hacking evaluation they were prompted to solve, and that correct answers could be found on the AI developer platform.

The OpenAI researchers told conference attendees that since early May, the models created a message board inside OpenAI's Artifactory internal file system. Without the company's knowledge, the models spent months independently exchanging information and techniques to help each other complete difficult tasks. Wallace said that when models get stuck, they often "try to game or cheat the task in order to get their reward." "The beginning of this incident kind of traces back to this point where one agent realized it could communicate by uploading a note," he added. By late May, one model found a way to abuse Artifactory's internet access to retrieve files from various websites -- effectively giving the models indirect access to the internet. In June, the models were able to find and exploit a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain administrative privileges on Artifactory, install remote software and expand their activity within the system.

These efforts eventually overloaded Artifactory, causing a system-wide outage in early July that alerted OpenAI's engineers to the ploy. After investigating, the company revoked the model's credentials, removed the message board and worked with Artifactory to fix any gaps before resuming training. But the models found another way to communicate inside Artifactory just days later and continued exchanging techniques to target additional vulnerabilities within OpenAI's infrastructure and external systems, including Hugging Face.

Japanese officials have repeatedly asked the Trump administration to stop using characters from franchises such as Mario, Pokemon, and Naruto in unauthorized government memes and pro-war videos, warning that the posts could damage the intellectual property involved. IGN reports: Official US government social media accounts, including The White House's X account, have posted various memes and videos using characters from popular Japanese anime and games over the past year. Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly called on the US government to cease uploading such posts, stating that "It's inappropriate even for public institutions to reproduce copyrighted materials without the rightsholders' consent." This concern was voiced by Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi in a parliamentary session back in April, when he made direct reference to a pro-war video that used Nintendo's Wii Sports.

However, according to a report by Mainichi Shimbun this week, the Japanese Ministry called on the Trump administration to stop using IPs like Naruto, Pokemon and Mario at least twice more this June through the US Embassy in Japan. Japan requested that the US administration take into account the potential damage to these IPs when used without permission in US policy and pro-war related content.

[...] It's not just the Japanese government and related parties who have spoken out against these posts. They have also sparked backlash from Japanese anime fans. Notably, self-proclaimed manga and anime fan Nana Suzuki kicked off the "Protect Japanese Manga" petition on Change.org, which has received international news coverage (from the New York Times, BBC and others). The organizer claims to have submitted their petition to the Japanese Cabinet Office back in March, as well as alerting Japanese politicians to the US government's unauthorized use of Japanese IPs, potentially drawing more official attention to the issue.

Renewed backlash was triggered in June, when President Trump shared an AI-generated video depicting himself as Naruto, the protagonist of the popular manga and anime of the same name, on Truth Social. This prompted the petition organizer to reopen the petition "as an urgent effort to convey our protest and concern regarding this matter to the rights holders and to work in solidarity to lobby the Japanese government." The Naruto clip also prompted renewed discussion of this issue in Japan's media and government. As reported in the Hokkaido Shimbun and others, Cabinet Minister Kimi Onoda was asked about it in a June 12th press conference. She emphasized that "obtaining permission from the copyright holder is the underlying principle for fair use," and stated that this position had been conveyed to the US government multiple times through diplomatic channels.