The Metropolitan Police has confirmed its first permanent installation of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras is coming this summer and the location will be the South London suburb of Croydon. From a report: The two cameras will be installed in the city center in an effort to combat crime and will be attached to buildings and lamp posts on North End and London Road. According to the police they will only be turned on when officers are in the area and in a position to make an arrest if a criminal is spotted. The installation follows a two-year trial in the area where police vans fitted with the camera have been patrolling the streets matching passersby to its database of suspects or criminals, leading to hundreds of arrests. The Met claims the system can alert them in seconds if a wanted wrong'un is spotted, and if the person gets the all-clear, the image of their face will be deleted.

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science.org: Whales sing, orcas squeal, and sea turtles croak. But sharks are more the strong, silent type. Now, researchers report the first evidence that sharks make sounds, too, described today in Royal Society Open Science. The animals may be making the sounds -- a series of clicking noises -- by snapping their flat rows of teeth, which are blunt for crushing prey. The sharks can hear mostly low-frequency noise, and the clicks they emit are higher pitched, which suggests they are not for communicating with other rigs. It's possible they are a defensive tactic. Marine mammals that eat rigs, such as leopard seals, can hear in the frequency range of the rig clicks, but the researchers question whether a few clicks would deter an attack. The sounds might be part of their response to being startled, the team says.

According to the Financial Times, Fidelity Investments is in advanced stages of developing its own stablecoin. Binance reports: The Boston-based financial services giant plans for the token to serve as a form of digital cash, according to the report, which cites two people close to the matter. The token would form part of company's strategy to enter the tokenized government bonds market. Stablecoins are a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a real-world asset such as the U.S. dollar or gold. They provide a convenient way for crypto traders to preserve their fiat value without having to cash out of the market.

The news emerges just days after Fidelity filed paperwork to register a blockchain-based version of its U.S. dollar money market fund. The company seeks to register an "OnChain" share class of its Treasury Digital Fund (FYHXX), which holds cash and U.S. Treasury securities and is available only to Fidelity's hedge fund and institutional clients. A Fidelity stablecoin could fill the role of cash in this fund. The report comes a day after World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by Donald Trump and his family, launched a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin called USD1.

Fortune reports that over 4 million Gen Zers are currently not in education, employment, or training (NEET), with experts blaming a broken educational system and "worthless degrees" for failing to deliver on promises of career readiness. From the report: While some Gen Zers may fall into this category because they are taking care of a family member, many have become frozen out of the increasingly tough job market where white-collar jobs are becoming seemingly out of reach. In the U.S., this translates to an estimated over 4.3 million young people not in school or work. Across the pond in the U.K., the situation is also only getting worse, with the number of NEET young people rising by over 100,000 in the last year alone.

A British podcaster went so far as to call the situation a "catastrophe" -- and cast a broad-stroke blame on the education system. "In many cases, young people have been sent off to universities for worthless degrees which have produced nothing for them at all," the political commentator, journalist and author, Peter Hitchens slammed colleges last week. "And they would be much better off if they apprenticed to plumbers or electricians, they would be able to look forward to a much more abundant and satisfying life." With millions of Gen Zers waking up each day feeling left behind, there needs to be a "wake-up call" that includes educational and workplace partners stepping up, Jeff Bulanda, vice president at Jobs for the Future, tells Fortune.

The U.S. has added 80 entities to its export blacklist to prevent China from acquiring advanced American chips for military development, including AI, quantum tech, and hypersonic weapons. The Verge reports: More than 50 of the new entities added to the list are based in China, with others located in Iran, Taiwan, Pakistan, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. BIS says the restrictions have been applied to entities that acted "contrary to US national security and foreign policy," and are intended to hinder China's ability to develop high-performance computing capabilities, quantum technologies, advanced artificial intelligence, and hypersonic weapons.

Six of the newly blacklisted entities are subsidiaries of Inspur Group -- China's leading cloud computing service provider and a major customer for US chip makers such as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel -- which BIS alleges had contributed to projects developing supercomputers for the Chinese military. The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence is another addition to the list, which has criticized its inclusion. "American technology should never be used against the American people," said Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security. "BIS is sending a clear, resounding message that the Trump administration will work tirelessly to safeguard our national security by preventing U.S. technologies and goods from being misused for high performance computing, hypersonic missiles, military aircraft training, and UAVs that threaten our national security."

An anonymous reader shares a report: After years of decline, the number of applications to the country's two-year MBA programs rebounded in 2024 -- rising 19%, according to a survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council. The pandemic saw a blossoming of new ways to deliver an MBA, but tradition has reasserted itself: The biggest growth last year was in conventional two-year and part-time programs.

As in recent years, the great majority of student demand came from overseas, but applications from the US rose as well. While the two-year class graduating this spring included record levels of international students at many institutions, most of the top 20 schools as ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek welcomed classes last fall with a reduced international presence. Given the Trump administration's hostility to immigration, the graduating class of 2025 could prove to be the high-water mark for international MBA students in the US for at least the near future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: No matter the manufacturer, every Android phone has one thing in common: its software base. Manufacturers can heavily customize the look and feel of the Android OS they ship on their Android devices, but under the hood, the core system functionality is derived from the same open-source foundation: the Android Open Source Project. After over 16 years, Google is making big changes to how it develops the open source version of Android in an effort to streamline its development. [...] Beginning next week, all Android development will occur within Google's internal branches, and the source code for changes will only be released when Google publishes a new branch containing those changes. As this is already the practice for most Android component changes, Google is simply consolidating its development efforts into a single branch.

This change will have minimal impact on regular users. While it streamlines Android OS development for Google, potentially affecting the speed of new version development and bug reduction, the overall effect will likely be imperceptible. Therefore, don't expect this change to accelerate OS updates for your phone. This change will also have minimal impact on most developers. App developers are unaffected, as it pertains only to platform development. Platform developers, including those who build custom ROMs, will largely also see little change, since they typically base their work on specific tags or release branches, not the main AOSP branch. Similarly, companies that release forked AOSP products rarely use the main AOSP branch due to its inherent instability.

External developers who enjoy reading or contributing to AOSP will likely be dismayed by this news, as it reduces their insight into Google's development efforts. Without a GMS license, contributing to Android OS development becomes more challenging, as the available code will consistently lag behind by weeks or months. This news will also make it more challenging for some developers to keep up with new Android platform changes, as they'll no longer be able to track changes in AOSP. For reporters, this change means less access to potentially revealing information, as AOSP patches often provide insights into Google's development plans. [...] Google will share more details about this change when it announces it later this week. If you're interested in learning more, be sure to keep an eye out for the announcement and new documentation on source.android.com. Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman says Google is "committed to publishing Android's source code, so this change doesn't mean that Android is becoming closed-source."

"What will change is the frequency of public source code releases for specific Android components," says Rahman. "Some components like the build system, update engine, Bluetooth stack, Virtualization framework, and SELinux configuration are currently AOSP-first, meaning they're developed fully in public. Most Android components like the core OS framework are primarily developed internally, although some features, such as the unlocked-only storage area API, are still developed within AOSP."

The United States has won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine than any other nation, with the UK and Germany following in second and third place, according to an analysis of nearly 900 prize-winning publications.

Universities account for roughly three-fourths of Nobel Prize-winning research, with a small number of elite institutions producing a disproportionate share of winners. Cambridge University leads with 32 prizes, followed by Harvard (22) and Columbia (13). While prizes are concentrated among researchers from the US, UK, and Germany, 43 countries have produced at least one scientific Nobel laureate.

Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, Japan leads with 11 prizes, while Argentina, China, and India have only one or two each. The average age of Nobel Prize winners has steadily increased from about 45 in the 1920s to 65 in the 2010s, though the age at which scientists perform their groundbreaking work has remained relatively constant at around 40.

Transport for London will ban most e-bikes across its network from March 31 amid growing safety concerns over battery fires, the transport authority announced on Wednesday. The ban, covering London Underground, Overground, Elizabeth Line and DLR trains, exempts only folding e-bikes, which are considered less likely to have been modified and pose a reduced safety risk.

TfL implemented the measure following union strike threats after several incidents, including an e-bike that exploded into flames at Rayners Lane Underground platform last month. The train drivers' union Aslef said the incident could have caused mass casualties.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Scientists scrutinizing the seafloor beneath a calving iceberg found a remarkable array of living creatures, switching up notions of how the giant chunks of ice affect their immediate environs. The scientists investigated a region of seafloor recently exposed by the calving of a gigantic iceberg -- A-84 -- which is as large as Chicago. The team found a surprisingly vibrant community of critters on the seafloor below where A-84 was once attached to an ice shelf attached to Antarctica.

Without the 197-square-mile (510-square-kilometer) iceberg in the way, the team was able to scrutinize the seafloor at depths of 4,265 feet (1,300 meters) using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) SuBastian. The team found large corals and sponges supporting other lifeforms, including icefish, giant sea spiders, and octopus. [...] With the icebergs covering the seafloor, organisms below the shelf cannot get nutrients for survival from the surface. The team hypothesized that ocean currents are a critical driver for life beneath the ice sheets. The team also collected data on the larger ice sheet, whose shrinking size spells concern for the animals that live beneath it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures -- adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic -- Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies. Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to."

Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.

Kevin Fenzi, a member of the Fedora Pagure project's sysadmin team, reported on his blog that the project had to block all traffic from Brazil after repeated attempts to mitigate bot traffic failed. GNOME GitLab implemented Iaso's "Anubis" system, requiring browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing content. GNOME sysadmin Bart Piotrowski shared on Mastodon that only about 3.2 percent of requests (2,690 out of 84,056) passed their challenge system, suggesting the vast majority of traffic was automated. KDE's GitLab infrastructure was temporarily knocked offline by crawler traffic originating from Alibaba IP ranges, according to LibreNews, citing a KDE Development chat. While Anubis has proven effective at filtering out bot traffic, it comes with drawbacks for legitimate users. When many people access the same link simultaneously -- such as when a GitLab link is shared in a chat room -- site visitors can face significant delays. Some mobile users have reported waiting up to two minutes for the proof-of-work challenge to complete, according to the news outlet.

According to Convergence Research, an estimated 46% of Canadian households didn't have a TV subscription with a cable, satellite, or telecom-based provider in 2024. MobileSyrup reports: In its latest annual "Couch Potato" report (PDF) on the streaming market, the firm notes that this was a four per cent increase from 2023 and that the number is expected to continue to rise to 54 per cent by 2027. Convergence notes that this marks a greater shift towards subscription video on demand services (SVOD) like Netflix and Disney+. To that point, the firm found that Canadian streaming subscription revenue grew 15 per cent year-over-year to $4.2 billion in 2024. At the same time, linear TV subscription revenue dropped five per cent to around $6.5 billion.

Some other interesting findings from the report:
- The 10 leading streaming providers raised prices in Canada by an average of six percent last year
- Ad-enabled memberships are cost 39 percent less on average compared to ad-free options
- Canadians subscribe to an average of 2.6 streaming platforms per household

Boeing is seeking to withdraw an earlier agreement to plead guilty in a long-running criminal case that blamed the company for deceiving regulators before two deadly crashes of 737 MAX jets, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The aerospace giant is seeking more lenient treatment from the Justice Department, which under the Trump administration is reviewing numerous pending criminal cases that haven't yet gone to trial or been approved by courts. Boeing nearly sealed its fate last year, agreeing in July to plead guilty to defrauding the Federal Aviation Administration. But a federal judge in Texas rejected the proposed deal in December, pushing the resolution beyond the Biden administration.

Now Boeing stands to benefit from fresh eyes at Trump's Justice Department, which is inclined to at least modify parts of the agreement, some of the people said. Allowing Boeing to rescind its plea agreement, or lightening the company's punishment, would mark one of the most prominent examples of the Trump administration's lighter-touch approach to some white-collar enforcement. There were 346 people killed in the two 737 MAX crashes, in 2018 and 2019. The two sides are still negotiating how to propose changes to the deal, expected by April 11, to U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, who oversees the case. One possible change under discussion: whether Boeing can forgo hiring an outside monitor to ensure its compliance with the law, the people said.

Meta is considering a paid subscription in the UK that would remove advertisements from its platform. The BBC reports: Under the plans, people using the social media sites could be asked to pay for an ad-free experience if they do not want their data to be tracked. Meta already provides ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram users in the EU, starting from euros (5 pounds) a month. A spokesperson for the firm said the company was "exploring the option" of offering a similar service in the UK.

They said the firm was "engaging constructively" with the UK data watchdog about the subscription service, following a consultation in 2024. The Information Commissioner's Office previously said it expected Meta to consider data protection concerns before it launched an ad-free subscription. Meta says personalized advertising allows its platforms to be free at the point of access.

Guidance issued by the regulator in January states that users must be presented with a genuine free choice. Social media platforms such as Meta heavily rely on ad revenues, and the company says personalised advertising allows its platforms to be free. Advertising accounted for more than 96% of its revenue in its latest quarterly financial results.

FaunaDB, a serverless database combining relational and document features, will shut down by the end of May due to unsustainable capital demands. The company plans to open source its core technology, including its FQL query language, in hopes of continuing its legacy within the developer community. The Register reports: The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 and boasted that 25,000 developers worldwide were using its serverless database. However, last week, FaunaDB announced that it would sunset its database services. FaunaDB said it plans to release an open-source version of its core database technology. The system stores data in JSON documents but retains relational features like consistency, support for joins and foreign keys, and full schema enforcement. Fauna's query language, FQL, will also be made available to the open-source community. "Driving broad based adoption of a new operational database that runs as a service globally is very capital intensive. In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently," the leadership team said.

"While we will no longer be accepting new customers, existing Fauna customers will experience no immediate change. We will gradually transition customers off Fauna and are committed to ensuring a smooth process over the next several months," it added.

The Pentagon has canceled its troubled Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System after years of delays and budget overruns, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. The project, launched in 2018 with a one-year timeline and $36 million budget, ultimately ran eight years and exceeded costs by $280 million, reaching 780% over budget. "We're not doing that anymore," Hegseth said in a video announcing the cancellation. Officials have 60 days to develop a new plan to modernize DoD's civilian HR systems. The cuts are part of a broader $580 million spending reduction that includes $360 million in diversity, climate change and COVID-19 grant programs, plus $30 million in consulting contracts with Gartner and McKinsey.

Long-time Slashdot reader invisik reminds us that the "fish doorbell" is still going strong, according to the Associated Press. "Now in its fifth year, the site has attracted millions of viewers from around the world with its quirky mix of slow TV and ecological activism." The central Dutch city of Utrecht installed a "fish doorbell" on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht's Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a website. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through.
"Much of the time, the screen is just a murky green with occasional bubbles, but sometimes a fish swims past. As the water warms up, more fish show up..."

"There's no shortage of videos showing Steam running on expensive ARM single-board computers with discrete GPUs," writes Slashdot reader VennStone. "So I thought it would be worthwhile to make a guide for doing it on (relatively) inexpensive RK3588-powered single-board computers, using Box86/64 and Armbian." The guides I came across were out of date, had a bunch of extra steps thrown in, or were outright incorrect... Up first, we need to add the Box86 and Box64 ARM repositories [along with dependencies, ARMHF architecture, and the Mesa graphics driver]...
The guide closes with a multi-line script and advice to "Just close your eyes and run this. It's not pretty, but it will download the Steam Debian package, extract the needed bits, and set up a launch script." (And then the final step is sudo reboot now.)

"At this point, all you have to do is open a terminal, type 'steam', and tap Enter. You'll have about five minutes to wait... Check out the video to see how some of the tested games perform." At 720p, performance is all over the place, but the games I tested typically managed to stay above 30 FPS. This is better than I was expecting from a four-year-old SOC emulating x86 titles under ARM.

Is this a practical way to play your Steam games? Nope, not even a little bit. For now, this is merely an exercise in ludicrous neatness. Things might get a wee bit better, considering Collabora is working on upstream support for RK3588 and Valve is up to something ARM-related, but ya know, "Valve Time"...
"You might be tempted to enable Steam Play for your Windows games, but don't waste your time. I mean, you can try, but it ain't gonna work."

The latest Facebook whistleblower, a former international lawyer, "cannot grant any of the nearly 100 interview requests she has received from journalists from print and broadcast news outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom," reports the Washington Post (citing "a person familiar with the matter").

That's because of an independent arbiter's ruling that "also bars her from talking with lawmakers in the U.S., London and the EU, according to a legal challenge she lodged against the ruling..." On March 12, an emergency arbiter — a dispute resolution option outside the court system — sided with Meta by ruling that the tech giant might reasonably convince a court that Wynn-Williams broke a non-disparagement agreement she entered as she was being fired by the company in 2017. The arbiter also said that while her publisher Macmillan appeared for the hearing on Meta's motion, Wynn-Williams did not despite having received due notice. The arbiter did not make any assessments about the book's veracity, but Meta spokespeople argued that the ruling meant that "Sarah Wynn Williams' false and defamatory book should never have been published."

Wynn-Williams this week filed an emergency motion to overturn the ruling, arguing that she didn't receive proper notice of the arbitration proceedings to the email accounts Meta knows she uses, according to a copy of the motion seen by The Post. Wynn-Williams further alleged that her severance agreement including the non-disparagement provisions are unenforceable, arguing that it violates laws that protect whistleblowers from retaliation, among other points. In a statement, legal representatives for Wynn-Williams said they were "confident in the legal arguments and look forward to a swift restoration of Ms. Wynn-Williams' right to tell her story."
That book — Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism — is currently #1 on the New York Times best-seller list (and #3 on Amazon.com's best-selling books list). And the incident prompted an article by Wired editor at large Steven Levy titled "Meta Tries to Bury a Tell-All Book." ("Please pause for a moment to savor the irony," Levy writes. "Meta, the company that recently announced an end to fact-checking in posts seen by potentially millions of people, is griping that an author didn't fact-check with them?")

And this led to a heated exchange on X.com between the Wired editor at large and Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bozworth:

Steven Levy: Meta probably realizes that all-out war on this book will only help its sales. But they are furious that an insider--who signed an NDA!--is going White Lotus on them, showing what it's like on the inside.

Meta CTO Bozworth: Except that it is full of lies, Steven. Shame on you.

Steven Levy: Boz, it would be helpful if Meta called out what it believes are the factual inaccuracies, especially in cases where it calls the book "defamatory."

Meta CTO Bozworth: Sorry you don't get to make up a bunch of stories and then put the burden on the person you lied about. Read the accounts from former employees who have gone through several of the anecdotes and said flatly they did not happen as written and then extrapolate.

Steven Levy: I would love for Sheryl, Mark and Joel to speak out on those anecdotes and give their sides of the story. They are the key subjects of those stories and their direct denial of specific incidents would matter.

Meta CTO Bozworth: Did you read what I wrote? I'm sure you would love to have more fuel for your "nobody wants you to read this" headline, but that's a total bullshit expectation. It isn't unreasonable to expect a journalist like you to do basic diligence. I'm sure you have our comms email!

Steven Levy: Believe me I was in touch with your comms people...

In 30 minutes the Free Software Foundation holds a live auction of memorabilia to celebrate their upcoming 40th anniversary. "By moving out of the FSF office, we got to sort through all the fun and historically important memorabilia and selected the best ones," they announced earlier — and 25 items will up for bids. (To participate in the live auction, you must register in advance.)

"This is your chance to get your very own personal souvenir of the FSF," explains an 11-page auction booklet, "from original GNU art to a famous katana and the Internet Hall of Fame medal of the FSF's founder." That's right... a katana. Once upon a time, this 41-inch blade turned heads at the FSF's tech team office. Donated by FSF friends and fans of the XKCD webcomic #225, it became a lighthearted "weapon" in the war for user freedom. As RMS himself is anti-violence, he made a silly joke by examining the katana closely instead of brandishing it, symbolizing that software freedom can be defended with wit. In a legendary photo, this was perceived as if he sniffed the blade. Between the etched dragon on the scabbard and the wavy hamon on the blade, it's as flashy as it is symbolic — especially if you like taking on proprietary software with style (and a dash of humor).
The auction is intended "to entrust some of the historically important free software memorabilia that were in the FSF's office and archive to the free software community instead of locking them away in a storage unit where no one can enjoy them.

"Hopefully, this way some of these unique items will be displayed in galleries or on the walls of free software enthusiasts. All auction proceeds will go towards the FSF's mission to promote computer user freedom."

And speaking of user freedom, here's how they described the Internet Hall of Fame medal: When Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the FSF, was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, it was the ultimate nod to free software's immense impact on the Internet... The medal is shiny, and the frame is fancy, but the real radiance is the recognition that the Internet might look much more locked down and dull without those original free software seeds. Hang it on your wall, and you'll be reminded that hacking for user freedom can change the world.