160 miles north of New York City, a man was convicted of manslaughter "with the help of license plate reader technology," reports a local news station. In the small town of Troy (population: 51,000), the mayor described the cameras as "a critical tool" in that investigation. But locals and city officials "have raised concerns about who can access the data collected locally, along with data security, privacy invasions and use by federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reports WNYT: When Troy's contract came up for renewal, Mayor Carmella Mantello wanted to keep paying Flock and the council paused payments. The mayor then issued a public safety emergency declaration to keep the license plate readers active. The council has filed a lawsuit to overturn that..."If this illegal emergency order is left unchallenged, we give this mayor and any future mayor regardless of their political party or ideology, unchecked authority to issue an emergency declaration whenever they disagree with the council on any issue," [said Troy council president Sue Steele].
"The technology that's in place today is not the technology of six years ago," council president Steele told another local news station. "We have AI, we have rapidly changing and advancing technology. So that begs the need for regulations to protect certain data." The American Civil Liberties Union warns that Flock will use AI to let law enforcement search its trove of videos. But "Listen, if it was infringing on people's rights, people's liberties, we'd be the first to get rid of it. We have safeguards in place," [mayor] Mantello responded. Mantello noted that data captured by Troy's Flock cameras is only being shared with other local municipalities.

Steele said the data had been shared nationally until she and other elected officials raised concerns. "As far as sharing with local law enforcement, that's necessary in the normal course of investigations. The concern is what Flock does with this data: sharing it with ICE, for instance, and other nefarious outlets," Steele said.
As the debate continues over the small city's 26 Flock cameras, a columnist in Albany wrote that "it's a good thing. We should be asking questions about the growing surveillance state. We should be debating whether this is the future we want." As the American Civil Liberties Union noted, [Flock] has quietly built a broad mass-surveillance infrastructure, with cameras installed in 5,000 communities around the country, and is continually expanding how that network is used. Did we ask for that? Did we vote for it? Not really. The cameras have been installed in municipality after municipality, mostly with little discussion or controversy, which makes us like the proverbial frogs who didn't notice the water getting warmer until it was boiling. Suddenly, surveillance cameras are everywhere; we're always being watched...

[T]he City Council's Democratic majority is considering legislation that, among other steps, would require that data collected by the cameras be generally deleted after 48 hours and that the city be more transparent about how the cameras are used.
The controversy and pushback continues to draw local coverage. The mayor complains the proposed rules restricts the cameras "almost exclusively to cases involving individuals with outstanding felony arrest warrants or situations where officers can determine in advance that an incident will result in a felony charge... This is beyond reckless."

But the Albany columnist still argues many of America's Flock cameras are unnecessary and are "being installed just because... It's worth considering where this might lead and whether the future we're installing is the future we want."

Test scores "are lower than they were a decade ago in school districts across the U.S.," reports Times magazine, citing new data released Wednesday by Stanford researchers. "Reading scores were down roughly 0.6 grades in 2025 compared to 2015, and math scores were down about 0.4 grades. This means that students were 60% of one school year behind where their peers were in reading a decade earlier and 40% of one school year behind in math."

But Stanford's announcement notes that America's schools "were in a 'learning recession' for seven years before the COVID-19 pandemic, with student test scores in math and reading on a steady decline since 2013." This reversal ended two decades of progress, according to Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford Graduate School of Education, whose data forms the backbone of the new research... The study reframes the narrative of pandemic-era learning loss, arguing that the crisis of the last few years was an acceleration of a problem that was already underway. "The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement," said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, and a lead author of the report...

The study found that the slowdown in learning coincided with two major shifts in American childhood and education policy: the widespread dismantling of test-based accountability systems that defined the No Child Left Behind era and the rise of social media use among young people. Reading scores, in particular, suffered consistently, with the average annual loss in the years just before the pandemic being just as large as the loss during it... Today, 8th-grade reading scores on national assessments are at their lowest point since 1990.

Compounding the problem, chronic student absenteeism remains a major obstacle to improving learning. Though down from its pandemic peak, 23 percent of students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, far above the pre-pandemic rate of 15 percent.
More context from Time magazine: Reading scores were down roughly 0.6 grades in 2025 compared to 2015, and math scores were down about 0.4 grades. This means that students were 60% of one school year behind where their peers were in reading a decade earlier and 40% of one school year behind in math...

"The decline started around the time that social media's use among teens was exploding, and this was also occurring in a number of other countries," says Thomas Kane, one of the authors of the Educational Scorecard report and a professor at Harvard University... [H]e maintains that it is at the core of the decline in reading achievement. He points out that social media use was shown to be heaviest among the lowest achieving students.
"Some states and school districts are making progress," notes the Associated Press, "largely by shifting toward phonics-based instruction and providing extra support for struggling readers."

And "The picture is also brighter in math. Almost every state in the analysis saw improvements in math test scores from 2022 to 2025."

Long-time Slashdot reader internet-redstar shares an interestging response to "the recent wave of Linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerabilities like 'Copy Fail' and 'Dirty Frag'": Belgian Linux sysadmin and Tesla Hacker "Jasper Nuyens" got tired of the idea of manually blacklisting dozens or even hundreds of obscure kernel modules across large fleets of Linux systems in the near future. So he wrote ModuleJail, a GPLv3 shell script that scans a running Linux system and automatically blacklists currently unused kernel modules, reducing kernel attack surface without requiring a reboot. The idea is simple: many modern Linux privilege escalation bugs target obscure or rarely used kernel functionality that is still enabled by default on servers that do not actually need it. ModuleJail works across major distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux and Arch Linux, generating 1 modprobe blacklist rules file while preserving commonly-used modules.

Nuyens argues that the increasing speed of AI-assisted vulnerability discovery will likely turn kernel hardening and attack surface reduction into a much bigger operational priority for sysadmins over the next few weeks and months.

Computer Weekly reports on "the long-awaited reform of Britain's outdated Computer Misuse Act of 1990 — which has hamstrung the work of the nation's cyber security professionals and researchers for years."

The Computer Misuse Act was passed 35 years ago in response to a high-profile hacking incident involving no less than the King's father, the late Duke of Edinburgh. It defined the offence of unauthorised access to a computer — which has been used successfully in countless cyber crime prosecutions over the years. However, as the cyber security landscape has developed into its current form, this language has become increasingly vague and for some years now, a growing number of bona fide security professionals have been arguing that it potentially criminalises their work because from time to time, they may need to gain covert access to IT systems in the course of legitimate research.

Speaking to Computer Weekly in 2025, Belfast-based security consultant Simon Whittaker described how the police showed up at his front door after his research was erroneously implicated in the infamous WannaCry incident of 2017... Sabeen Malik, vice-president for global government affairs and public policy at Rapid7, added: "As AI-driven vulnerability discovery scales, defenders need to run automated scanning, agentic red-teaming, and large-scale vuln research at machine speed — activities the 1990 Computer Misuse Act's broad unauthorised-access provisions were never designed to accommodate, leaving UK researchers exposed to criminal risk for work their adversaries face no equivalent friction performing."
The reforms are part of a new bill that's "enhancing the powers available to law enforcement and the security services," according to the article. It points out that the U.K. government also intends "to create a Cyber Crime Risk Order that can be applied to control the behaviour of cyber criminals, and new abilities to search people believed to be concealing evidence on behalf of suspected offenders."

It's all part of a proposed bill "designed to make the UK a harder target for hostile foreign states and other dangerous groups to attack."

Today Amazon ends support for first- and second-generation versions of Kindles and Kindle Fire tablets, along with the Kindle Touch, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX, and other devices released in 2012 or earlier.

Owners can continue reading ebooks that they've already downloaded, and they can also still sideload books using a USB cable (from, for example, Project Gutenberg). And PCMag points out that "There are plenty of e-stores where you can buy DRM-free novels legally, such as ebook.com and Smashwords. If you want to try this process for free, public-domain repositories such as the one at Standard Ebooks are a great place to start." (eBook files can be converted for the Kindle with the open source tool Calibre.)

New ebooks can no longer be purchased directly from Amazon. But most of Amazon's affected devices "have not received firmware updates for over a decade," notes the blog OMG Ubuntu, "and most lost on-device access the Kindle Store." Some Kindle owners are taking things even further: You can unlock the firmware of older devices to add extra functionality (custom screensavers, epub support) or run entirely different software. On the hardware hacks side, some choose to turn old Kindles into photo frames or online dashboards.
TechCrunch offers some caveats about jailbreaking: This process allows users to install custom fonts, new screensavers, alternative reading apps, and even third-party tools that expand the Kindle's functionality... [I]t's important to note that jailbreaking a Kindle might violate Amazon's terms of service. In many jurisdictions, jailbreaking isn't considered a criminal offense for personal use, but it may become a crime if it involves copyright infringement, illegal software distribution, or the sale of modified devices. Many Kindle owners who opt to jailbreak view it as a method to gain control over a device they purchased that is still functional, rather than being forced to buy a new device. However, jailbreaking is technical and carries risks, including the possibility of rendering the device unusable if something goes wrong. It also isn't possible on every Kindle model or firmware version, so before proceeding, Kindle owners should first spend some time researching if their device is compatible.
Alternately, PCMag notes, "If you're feeling particularly virtuous, you can donate your old Kindle to a local library or send it back to Amazon free of charge via its electronic recycling program."

Former Microsoft programmer Keith Curtis "wrote and self-published After the Software Wars to explain the caliber of free and open source software," according to his entry on Wikipedia, "and why he believes Linux is technically superior to any proprietary OS."

He's also KeithCu (long-time Slashdot reader #925,649), and has written a blog post on "How I added an LLM-based grammar checking + TeX math import to LibreOffice." : At Microsoft, I spent five years working on the text components RichEdit and Quill, and came to understand the "physics" of word processing: the file formats, data structures, and algorithms that provided fast access to text and properties, independent of the length of the file. Selecting one million characters to make them bold took about the same time as changing one character, because of the clever data structures (piece tables) and algorithms in these engines...

When I decided to add a real-time AI grammar checker to [LibreOffice plugin] WriterAgent, I knew what I was getting into, but I underestimated the trickery of LibreOffice's UNO.
His site shares the surprises he encountered, one by one. (Starting with "the office suite throws a bunch of initialization variables at your constructor. If your Python __init__ method doesn't handle them, the code fails to map the call, the stack misaligns, and the program dies.") There's sentence casing issues, duplicate words, and foreign-language syntax — all culminating in new features for "a LibreOffice extension (Python + UNO) that adds generative AI editing to Writer, Calc, and Draw..."

"If you want to try it out, the repo is here... Let's make LibreOffice and the free desktop AI-native!"

"Most of the plastic waste in California is about to lose the recycling symbol," writes the Washington Post's "climate coach." The "chasing arrows" symbol, created in 1970 by a college student inspired by the burgeoning environmental movement, has been stamped indiscriminately on plastic bottles, clamshell takeout containers, chip bags and more for decades. The majority of the items emblazoned with the mark have been virtually impossible to recycle for most people. California lawmakers say they want to end the charade: Under what's known as the Truth in Recycling law, plastics cannot use the symbol if they aren't collected by curbside programs serving 60% of Californians and sorted by facilities serving 60% of the state's recycling programs (with some additional requirements). If the law goes into effect as scheduled on October 4, more than half of the types of plastic packaging and products sold in the state can no longer carry the chasing arrows logo. That will affect plastic films, foam, PVC and mixed plastics...

Food and packaging groups have sued the state of California, calling the law a form of censorship whose vague restrictions violate the First Amendment and due process rights.... Advocates of the law counter that corporations deliberately misled the public by turning the recycling symbol into a marketing device that masks the fact that only a small fraction of plastic packaging is ultimately recycled... The mark was originally intended to informwaste processors what polymers a plastic item was made from. But the public reasonably assumed anything stamped with the symbol was recyclable. Millions of tons of worthless plastic trash have since poured into recycling facilities unable to process it....

States are now taking action. Seven have passed laws shifting the cost of recycling onto packaging makers. Oregon and Washington have lifted requirements that plastic containers carry the chasing arrows symbol.
The article notes that Norway already recovers 97% of beverage bottles, while Slovakia recycles 60% of plastic packaging. "But the U.S. only recovers about a third of its PET and HDPE bottles, and just 13% of plastic packaging, according to U.S. Plastics Pact, an industry-led forum.

"It won't be easy for the U.S. to reach higher levels of recycling: The necessary infrastructure and incentives are chronically underfunded, no federal mandate exists for minimum-recycled-content that would create demand and a mix of mostly unrecyclable hydrocarbons still dominates the waste stream."

What's going on with the U.S. job market? "The economy is growing. Unemployment is low," notes the Washington Post. "And yet, for millions of workers, finding a job has become harder than at almost any other point in decades," with the hiring rate "well below pre-pandemic levels for more than a year."

Part of the problem? "Of the net 369,000 positions added across the entire economy since the start of 2025, health care alone accounted for nearly 800,000 — meaning every other sector, taken together, shed jobs." By the end of 2025 nearly half of college graduates ages 22 to 27 were working at jobs that didn't require a degree, according to stats from New York's Federal Reserve Bank. The headline unemployment rate, at 4.2%, looks healthy. But that figure has been buoyed by a shrinking labor force: Fewer people are actively looking for work, which keeps the rate down even as hiring slows...

[Some large tech companies] are trying to recalibrate after their hiring sprees of 2021 and 2022, when many had raised pay, offered flexible schedules and signed people quickly... Higher interest rates have also made expansion more expensive, pushing many firms to invest in technology rather than headcount. Another reason hiring has slowed is uncertainty about AI. Even though the technology has not yet replaced large numbers of workers, it is already shaping how companies think about hiring. "I don't think this is AI displacement," said Ben Zweig, chief executive of Revelio Labs, a workforce data company. "What we're seeing is anticipatory." Instead of rushing to bring on new workers, some firms are waiting to see how the technology evolves and which tasks it will eventually take over.
A 39-year-old web developer tells the Post it took 453 job applications to get a handful of interviews and two offers. And a journalism school graduate said they'd sent hundreds of job applications but most led nowhere, and they're now couch-surfing to save money.

But the problem seems even worse for young people. One 18-year-old told the Post that in a year and a half of job searching, they'd yet to even meet an employer in person. The unemployment rate for people ages 22 to 27 who recently completed college hit 5.6% in the final months of 2025 — well above the 4.2% rate for all workers, according to national data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York... At one point last summer, new workforce entrants made up a larger share of the unemployed than at any point since the late 1980s — higher even than during the Great Recession. When hiring slows, the door closes first on those without an existing foothold. For the class of 2026, the timing could hardly be worse.

"It is getting increasingly clear that young people are being more affected by AI than older workers," Zweig said. Companies are not eliminating jobs at scale, but many are slow to hire junior workers. At the same time, older workers are staying in the labor force longer, leaving fewer openings for new arrivals. Even when jobs are available, the bar has shifted. Positions once considered entry level now often require several years of experience, technical expertise and familiarity with AI tools. With fewer openings and more applicants, companies are holding out for candidates who can do the job immediately and need little training... Employers are also looking for a different mix of skills. An analysis of millions of job postings by Indeed found that communication skills now appear in nearly 42% of all listings, while leadership skills feature in nearly a third — capabilities that are harder to prove on a résumé and harder still to demonstrate without an existing professional network. Christine Beck, a career coach who works with early-career job seekers, said employers are asking more of the people they do hire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Wood heating is reintroducing lead into the air of local communities and homes, a systematic investigation by academics has found. Overwhelming evidence of lead's neurotoxicity meant the metal was banned as an additive in petrol more than 25 years ago. The research by academics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst began by analysing samples of particle pollution from five suburban and rural towns in the north-east US. They looked for tiny particles of potassium that are given off when wood is burned and also particles containing lead. Samples from seven winters revealed associations between potassium and lead. When there were more wood burning particles in a daily sample, there was more lead in the air, with clear straight-line relationships in four of the five towns.

The project was extended to 22 other towns across the US. The relationships between lead and potassium varied from place to place, being strongest in the Rocky Mountains. By factoring in the effects of temperature, moderate to strong associations in their analysis strengthened the conclusion that the extra lead came from wood burning. The lead concentrations were less than the US legal limits, but any exposure to the metal is harmful. [...] Although less than legal limits, lead particles are routinely measured in UK cities in winter when people are also burning wood. This is normally attributed to waste wood covered with old lead paint, but the Umass Amherst study suggests the metal is coming from the wood itself. This means that any wood burning could increase exposure in neighborhoods and at home. Tricia Henegan, a PhD student at Umass Amherst and the first author on the research, said: "The most logical answer [to the question of how lead ends up in wood] is that it comes from uptake in the soil, probably riding along with the nutrients and water that trees need. Once in the tree, it deposits in the tree's tissues and remains until that tree is burned." Other research has found that it can then become part of the smoke.

"The use of wood as an energy source is a relic of the past, one that should not be relived if given a choice. Although wood fuel use can feel nostalgic, it does have negative consequences on air quality, and therefore public health."

OpenAI is previewing a feature that lets ChatGPT Pro users connect bank and investment accounts through Plaid, allowing the chatbot to analyze spending, subscriptions, balances, portfolios, debt, and major financial decisions. "More than 200 million people are already going to ChatGPT every month with finance questions -- from budgeting to tips on how to cut back on spending," OpenAI said in its announcement. "Now, users can securely connect their financial accounts with Plaid to get the full view of their financial picture in the context of their personal goals, lifestyle, and priorities that they've shared with ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI's advanced reasoning capabilities." The Verge reports: When financial accounts are connected, OpenAI says that ChatGPT users can view a dashboard that details their spending history, including any active subscriptions. Users can also ask it to help with financial decisions like buying a house or signing up for credit cards and flag any changes in spending habits. This financial feature will be initially available to users in the US who subscribe to ChatGPT's $200-per-month Pro tier. "We'll learn and improve from early use before rolling it out to Plus, with the goal of making it available to everyone," says OpenAI.

To assuage concerns, OpenAI promises users "control over their data," including the ability to disconnect their bank accounts from ChatGPT at any time, though the company has up to 30 days to delete your data from its systems. You can also view and delete "financial memories" like goals or financial obligations saved by the chatbot. User control extends to whether your data is fed back into AI models -- users can enable the option to "Improve the model for everyone" to allow financial data in their ChatGPT conversations to be used for training AI, for example. OpenAI also says ChatGPT can't make any changes to your bank accounts or see "full account numbers."

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: A group of Michigan lawmakers has introduced a bill in Congress that would effectively place a permanent ban on Chinese connected vehicles from being sold in the United States. While an executive order signed by Joe Biden in early 2025 already imposed heavy restrictions, the new bill would codify and expand on the ban, as first reported by Autoweek and explained in a release by the House of Representatives Select Committee on China.

The bill, titled the Connected Vehicle Security Act, was co-signed by John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, and Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat. It joins a companion version of the same Connected Vehicle Security Act introduced last month to the Senate by Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat. While the wording is similar to that found in former President Biden's January 2025 executive order, the new bill would codify the language into law, as well as determine rules for compliance and enforcement.

Specifically, the new bill would restrict Chinese automakers from selling passenger cars in the United States if those vehicles contain any China-developed connectivity software. Officially, the bill covers the sale of vehicles from states deemed "foreign adversary countries," which include China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The proposed legislation arrives as Chinese automakers including Chery, Geely, and BYD (maker of the 2026 BYD Dolphin Surf, shown above), continue to rise in prominence in foreign markets around the world. "Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons," comments sinij. "Connected cars that spy on consumers are not a uniquely Chinese problem and should be addressed for all vehicles."

A new Gallup survey found that 71% of Americans oppose having an AI data center built near them, making the facilities even less popular than nearby nuclear plants, which 53% oppose. The Register reports: When it comes to the reasons for opposing AI campuses, half of all respondents cite the effect on resources, with excess water usage and potential power grid constraints topping the list. Concern about loss of farmland and nature was surprisingly low, with just 7 percent mentioning this, but it is possible the scores are higher in rural areas. Quality-of-life concerns such as increased traffic were put forward by nearly a quarter, while a fifth mentioned higher utility bills.

Many were worried about AI specifically: that it would replace human workers, that they don't trust it, that it is moving too fast, and that the industry needs regulating. Perhaps the latter sentiment is why President Trump appears to have shifted his own position on the need for AI regulations. Conversely, those in favor of datacenters cite economic benefits, with 55 percent mentioning increased job opportunities, and 13 percent saying it is because of increased tax revenues.

[...] This being America in 2026, Gallup looked at how attitudes stack up depending on political affiliation. It found that Democrats, at 56 percent, are much more likely than Republicans to be strongly opposed to a server farm in their vicinity. But 39 percent of Republicans are also strongly opposed, while another 24 percent are somewhat averse to it, and only about a third are in favor. Gallup points out the contradiction: for AI usage to expand in the US, facilities that can handle the necessary computing power will have to be built. But most Americans appear to take a "not in my backyard" attitude to new bit barns, and that attitude has grown in strength.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is opening a formal investigation into whether Microsoft's bundling of Windows, Office, Teams, Copilot, and related products harms competition. Engadget reports: "Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft's position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organizations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices," CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement published by Reuters.

She also stressed the importance of the investigation by noting that hundreds of thousands of UK residents use business software and Microsoft products. The organization will take a look into the company's cloud licensing practices. The CMA has stated that the inquiry will conclude by February. At that point, Microsoft could get slapped with a strategic market label.

Microsoft says it's "committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market." A strategic market designation doesn't automatically assume wrongdoing, but will give the CMA more leeway when conducting further interventions.

AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have agreed in principle to form a joint venture (JV) aimed at reducing U.S. mobile dead zones through satellite connectivity, especially in rural areas and during emergencies when ground networks fail. Here are three of the customer benefits listed by the JV (as highlighted by Droid Life): Fewer coverage gaps: Will nearly eliminate dead zones in the U.S. currently without mobile service, reaching previously unserved areas.
Reliable connectivity in emergencies: Redundant connectivity will become available when existing ground-based networks are unavailable due to extreme natural disasters or other unusual disruptions.
Improved network performance: Will give customers more consistent performance and simpler access to satellite services across providers. This will speed up feature updates and improve connectivity for everyone, everywhere. "It will still take time for these improvements to be available to customers, but this all seems like a positive step," writes Droid Life's Tim Wrobel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Princeton University will soon require exams to be supervised for the first time in 100 years -- all thanks to students using artificial intelligence to cheat. For 133 years, the Ivy League school's honor code allowed students to take exams without a professor present, but on Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring for all in-person exams starting this summer. A "significant" number of undergraduate students and faculty requested the change, "given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread," the college's dean, Michael Gordin, wrote in a letter, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Princeton's honor system dates back to 1893, when students petitioned to eliminate proctors -- or an impartial person to supervise students -- during examinations, according to the school's newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. The honor code has long been a point of pride for Princeton. However, artificial intelligence and cellphones have made it easier for students to cheat -- and even harder for others to spot, Gordin wrote. Despite the changes to the policy, Princeton will still require students to state: "I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination," according to the Journal.

Students are also more reluctant to report cheating, according to the policy proposal. Students are more likely now to anonymously report cheating due to fears of "doxxing or shaming among their peer groups" online, the proposal says, according to the school newspaper. Under the new guidelines, instructors will be present during exams to act "as a witness to what happens," but are instructed not to interfere with students. If a suspected honor code infraction occurs, they will report it to a student-run honor committee for adjudication.