Tag: Looting

San Diego’s Police Are Using Video from ‘Smart’ Streetlights

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry is also senior editor at IEEE Spectrum, and brings a story about San Diego’s 3,300 “smart streetlights,” each one equipped with “an Intel Atom processor, half a terabyte of storage, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios, two 1080p video cameras, two acoustical sensors, and environmental sensors that monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, vibration, and magnetic fields.” San Diego’s smart streetlights…

Police Surveilled Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Leveraging close ties to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the protests that swept the country following the killing of George Floyd, tipping off police to social media posts with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept and a source…

Chicago Police Department Arrest API Shutdown is Its Own Kind of ‘Cover Up’

Asraa Mustufa and David Eads, reporting for Chicago Reporter: With Chicago reeling this week from a bloody July 4 weekend that saw more than 80 shootings claim the lives of at least 17 people, including young children, police Superintendent David Brown doubled down on his approach to stemming the violence at a press conference Monday. “We must keep violent offenders in…

To Keep Trump From Violating Its Rules…Facebook Rewrote the Rules

“Starting in 2015 Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook rewrote their rules in order to not sanction then-candidate Donald Trump,” writes Rick Zeman (Slashdot reader #15,628) — citing a new investigation by the Washington Post. (Also available here.) After Trump’s infamous “the shooting starts” post, Facebook deputies contacted the White House “with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or…

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (of Technology)

If our social platforms are going to be gatekeepers, then they need to acknowledge their role in the information ecosystems. It is knowing what to boost and what to ignore that makes a good platform, writes veteran technology journalist and now a venture capitalist Om Malik. From his essay: The battle of good email versus spam email has taken a long…

Facebook Moderators Join Criticism of Zuckerberg Over Trump Stance

Pressure from Facebook staff is continuing to mount on Mark Zuckerberg over his policies towards posts by Donald Trump, with moderators joining those criticizing their boss for his stance. From a report: The moderators penned an open letter to their colleagues in support of virtual walkouts that have broken out at the company, after Zuckerberg refused to take down posts by…