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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 video…

Linux Torvalds expects Linux 7.2 should be released next weekend "unless something really bad pops up," Torvalds said while announcing today's release candidate. But there's something interesting about Linux 7.2-rc7, writes Phoronix. "By the time the Linux kernel typically hits a -rc7 release things have usually settled quite well. But in today's world of AI/LLM coding/review agents, the kernel activity continues at an all-time high." Tons of bug fixes continued to trickle in across the kernel …

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 A…

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 …

XDA Developers reports: On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that "treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch" on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it's a browser that doesn't really...browse. Instead of fetching a webpage from a server the way Chrome or Safari would, Gem hands whatever URL you type over …

UI changes, lost productivity, untransferrable knowledge... Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the folly of switching to an unfamiliar new environment to be "more productive"... Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in the new unfamiliar environment because it's 'more productive', a conclusion often shaped by conventional wisdom or their 'gut' feeling. Decision makers may also mistake their…

"I've been a Linux IT administrator for 30 years now," says crhylove (Slashdot reader #205,956), in a new video on his YouTube channel. "I used to be a data center architect, at one point I was the IT director for 13 school districts... I just haven't been happy overall with all the other operating systems out there... " I've been working really diligently for the last few weeks on a new distro called Spaced Linux that is exactly what I want to use. It's heavily focused on the [zoom-friendly 3D…

OpenAI announced Friday it's pausing work on its Astra AI model because of security concerns. The Guardian reports: The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity", which had moved to a "critical" threshold... OpenAI stated that the model was not involved in an incident in which one of its AI agents went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a startup, Hugging Face... The reports have increased concerns about a…

Researchers believe they've found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies, reports Medical Express: Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies. Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches withi…

The new GNOME Boxes app for accessing virtual systems has reached beta, announced This Week in GNOME. There's also been more work on the Sushi file previewer for Nautilus, and Papers 51 Beta can now add visual signatures to PDF documents. But Phoronix noted one more announcement. "Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management... paid t…

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 e…

To celebrate Quake's 30th anniversary, Bethesda released "a brutal new episode" — a new campaign chapter titled Dawn of the Machine "delivering ferocious combat, labyrinthine level design, and nightmarish realms that twist reality beyond recognition..." Face deadly new twists on familiar foes, including the Rocket Ogre, Demo Dog, Blood Shambler, and more. Each variant introduces lethal new behaviours — from overwhelming firepower to explosive death traps — forcing you to rethink every encounter…

IGN reports: [A] new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to, you guessed it, AI companies. According to a report from Digitimes and spotted by TweakTown, all DRAM and HBM capacity has been sold through for 2027, with no further supply planned. (The companies themselves have not yet confirmed this to be the case.) Of course, that only means that retail prices are going to go …

"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 deter…

Long-time Slashdot reader BrianFagioli is announcing that he's released a new iPhone app that creates a cryptographic witness for photos without uploading the original image. The app hashes the file, signs the hash using a dedicated identity stored in Apple Keychain, and publishes the witness to Nostr relays while keeping the photo inside the app unless the user chooses to export it. Rather than trying to determine whether a scene was genuine, the app — named Veridenz — answers a narrower quest…