Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.

Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.

Thames Valley police had used automated facial recognition software which matched him with footage of a suspect of a £3,000 burglary 100 miles away in Milton Keynes, according to documents shared with the Guardian by Liberty Investigates.

But the CCTV footage showed a noticeably younger man with different features apart from similar curly hair, said Choudhury, who was left confused about why he had been arrested.

Man, things sure are taking a weird route right now.

iam doing good tonight

why is my text so big how do i&disable this

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43578877

Four people riding in a speedboat registered in the U.S. were killed Feb. 25 in a gunfight with Cuban government forces after entering the country’s waters, according to the Cuban Embassy in the U.S.

Crewmembers aboard a speedboat registered in Florida entered Cuban waters and opened fire on Cuban Ministry of the Interior forces when they approached the American vessel, the Cuban Embassy said in a statement. Aboard the Florida-registered vessel, four were killed and six were injured in the gunfight; the commander of the Ministry of the Interior vessel was wounded in the gunfight, Cuba said.

"In the face of current challenges, Cuba reaffirms its determination to protect its territorial waters, based on the principle that national defense is a fundamental pillar of the Cuban State in safeguarding its sovereignty and ensuring stability in the region," Cuban authorities said. "Investigations by the competent authorities continue in order to fully clarify the events."

According to Cuban officials, the wounded crewmembers of the Florida-registered boat were evacuated for medical assistance.

oh wait this isn't c/sadposting

In new research, they've used abundant, inexpensive phosphorus as a catalyst in chemical reactions that usually require precious metals like platinum, one of the metals targeted in theft of the automotive components that convert chemicals in vehicle exhaust into less harmful forms.

This advance, however, will likely be more useful in the pharmaceutical industry and could one day help bring down the price of some drugs.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43576040

The quality of produced food is getting significantly worse. Lower quality ingredients. Fillers. Shrinkflation. They will push it as far as they can.

Amazon is telling people who use its wishlists feature to switch to post office boxes or non-residential delivery addresses if they want to ensure their home addresses remain private, as part of a change in how it processes gifts bought from third-party sellers. The change is especially concerning to many sex workers, influencers and public figures who use Amazon wishlists to receive gifts from fans and clients.

First spotted by adult content creators raising the alarm on social media, the changes open anyone who uses wishlists publicly to increased privacy risk unless they change how they receive packages.

In an email sent to list holders, Amazon said beginning March 25, it will reveal users’ shipping addresses to third-party sellers. The platform added that gift purchasers might end up seeing your address as part of this process, too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260225203949/https://www.404media.co/amazon-wishlist-address-private-third-party/

From Tom Scott's newsletter. The photos:

A wind farm near the Heidu Mountain Scenic Area in Qinghai Province. Weimin Chu

A solar farm in the Daliang Mountains, Sichuan Province. Weimin Chu

A solar farm built on a tidal flat in Xiangshan County, Zhejiang Province. Weimin Chu

Wind turbines near the Gahai Wetland Reserve in Qinghai Province. Weimin Chu

Sheep graze among solar panels in the Tala Desert, Qinghai Province. Weimin Chu

A solar plant in Alxa, Inner Mongolia. Weimin Chu

Wind turbines seen beyond the Ming Dynasty Huguo Temple in Guizhou Province. Weimin Chu

Rooftop solar arrays in Binzhou, Shandong Province. Weimin Chu

A thermal power station in Dunhuang, Gansu Province. Weimin Chu

A wind turbine in the karst mountains of Xingyi, Guizhou Province. Weimin Chu

The US will provide on-site consular services in two Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank for the first time, breaking with previous policy, in a move that has been criticised by Palestinian officials as “a clear violation of international law”.

In a post on X, the US embassy in Jerusalem said that as part of an initiative to mark the 250th anniversary of US independence, it would provide Americans with routine passport services in the West Bank settlement of Efrat on Friday “for one day only”.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, are illegal under international law. Efrat, about 7 miles (12km) south of Jerusalem, is home to about 12,000 Israelis.

The Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission said in a statement that the initiative “constitutes a clear violation of international law and a blatant favouring of the occupation authorities”, referring to Israel.

Mu’ayyad Shaa’ban, the head of the commission, said the step “entrenches a settlement reality that undermines the possibility of establishing an independent and sovereign Palestinian state”.

The FBI got a search warrant for X to provide details on the Grok prompts a man allegedly used to create more than 200 nonconsensual sexual videos of a woman he knew in real life, according to court records.

The details of the investigation are contained in an FBI affidavit about the alleged actions of Simon Tuck, who is accused of extensively harassing and threatening the woman’s husband. Tuck regularly worked out with and texted with the woman and, according to the affidavit, secretly filmed her while she was working out in his garage. Over the course of the last several months, Tuck swatted their home, made a series of anonymous reports to the man’s employer claiming that he was a child abuser and a drug addict, posed as the man and made a series of mass shooting and suicide threats. Tuck also made a series of other threats and bizarre actions, which included reaching out to a funeral home to say that the man would be dead soon and sending threats to the man while posing as a member of Sector 16, a Russian hacking crew.

The affidavit notes that, in January, the FBI got a search warrant for the man’s conversations with Grok. The FBI says that it received “prompts provided to GrokAI that generated approximately 200 pornographic videos of a woman who closely resembled VICTIM’s wife’s physical appearance.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20260225192408/https://www.404media.co/fbi-subpoenaed-x-to-get-grok-prompts-used-to-create-nonconsensual-porn/

Valve’s Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Dota Games Have Slot Machine-Like Features That Entice Users to Pay for the Chance to Win Rare Prizes That Can Be Exchanged for Money Lawsuit Alleges Valve’s In-Game “Loot Box” Feature Violates New York’s Gambling Laws and Can Lead to Serious Harms, Especially for Young People

Jamieson Greer tells CBC News that tariffs will feature even in renegotiated CUSMA

U.S. President Donald Trump's point man on trade talks says Canada needs to accept that tariffs will be a part of any deal with the administration, including renewal of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).

In interviews with two CBC News journalists on Capitol Hill just after Trump's state of the union address Tuesday night, U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer suggested Canada can't expect to land a trade agreement that is free of tariffs.

"When we go to other countries, and we make a deal with them ... they agree that we can have a tariff on them," Greer told CBC News correspondent Katie Simpson.

"If Canada wants to agree that we can have some level of higher tariff on them while they open up their markets to us on things like dairy and other things, then that's a helpful conversation."

It's the clearest signal yet from the Trump administration that it's aiming for a fundamental rewrite of the free-trade deals that have existed between the U.S., Canada and Mexico since NAFTA took effect in 1994.

MBFC
Archive

New York City police are investigating after officers were pelted with snowballs while responding to a massive snowball fight at Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

A video of the fracas shows two uniformed officers pacing a walkway in the park Monday as snowballs fly at them from all directions, hitting the officers and covering them in snow.

The officers, growing visibly frustrated, shoved at least two people to the ground as snowballs continued to whizz by. At one point, a person runs up behind an officer and mushes some snow onto his head. One of the officers can be seen rubbing his eye toward the end of the video.

In a statement Tuesday, the New York Police Department said multiple uniformed officers were struck in the face with snowballs and were "removed by EMS in stable condition" to a nearby hospital, but did not disclose additional information on their injuries.

With less than three months to go until the federal budget, you are going to be hearing a lot more about tax. It seems that something is finally going to be done to fix the capital gains tax, but already conservatives are working to give the richest another tax cut.

The new shadow treasurer, Tim Wilson, has followed up his line that unemployment is too low by arguing high-income earners need a tax cut – because, poor dears, they are taxed too much to bother working.

Tropical flowers are blooming months earlier or later than they used to because of climate breakdown, with potentially “cascading impacts across ecosystems”, according to a study of 8,000 plants dating back 200 years.

Researchers looked at flowers from a range of countries, including Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana and Thailand, home to the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, but also the most understudied.

The Brazilian amaranth tree flowers 80 days later than it did in the 1950s, while the Ghanaian rattlepod shrub’s flowering period shifted 17 days earlier between the 50s and 90s, according to a study of museum specimens.

It was previously thought that tropical regions – where temperatures fluctuate less over the course of the year – would not be so affected by the climate crisis in terms of the timing of flowering. This hypothesis has been proved wrong, said the lead researcher Skylar Graves from the University of Colorado Boulder, who added that “nowhere on Earth is unaffected by climate change”.

Every time negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. appear to gain momentum, Moscow introduces a new allegation — drone attacks, assassination attempts, nuclear plots, sabotage — that threatens to stall or derail the process.

Ukrainian officials and Western analysts say the pattern is no coincidence.

A high-level Ukrainian official familiar with the course of the negotiations told the Kyiv Independent that the "nonsense" Russia is spreading is intended to influence the talks and divert attention from Moscow’s unwillingness to seek compromise.

As Russian negotiators show little flexibility on concessions, the Kremlin appears to weaponize the diplomatic track — testing Washington's reactions, seeking leverage, and undermining Kyiv's credibility.

MBFC
Archive

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/36090963

🔗

No caption

No alt text

Disqus comments

Page couldn't be archived