An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: As cities and states push to restrict the use of facial recognition technologies, some police departments have quietly found a way to keep using the controversial tools: asking for help from other law enforcement agencies that still have access. Officers in Austin and San Francisco — two of the largest cities where police are banned from using the technology — have repeatedly asked police in neighboring towns to run photos of criminal suspects through their facial recognition programs, according to a Washington Post review of police documents... Austin police officers received the results of at least 13 face searches from a neighboring police department since the city's 2020 ban — and appeared to get hits on some of them, according to documents obtained by The Post through public records requests and sources who shared them on the condition of anonymity. "That's him! Thank you very much," one Austin police officer wrote in response to an array of photos sent to him by an officer in Leander, Tex., who ran a facial recognition search, documents show. The man displayed in the pictures, John Curry Jr., was later charged with aggravated assault for allegedly charging toward someone with a knife, and is currently in jail awaiting trial. Curry's attorney declined to comment. "Police officers' efforts to skirt these bans have not been previously reported and highlight the challenge of reining in police use of facial recognition," the article concludes. It also points out that the technology "has played a role in the wrongful arrests of at least seven innocent Americans," according to the lawsuits they filed after charges against them were dismissed.

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Dabney Coleman has died. A veteran actor of stage and screen, with nearly 200 credits to his name, Coleman’s (frequently scowling, almost always mustachioed) face was a fixture of American film and TV from the 1960s forward. Renowned for his ability to play just the right kind of loathsome jerk—the kind who was…

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Warhammer fans and AEW wrestling fans will soon be doing the Predator hand-shaking meme thanks to an upcoming exhibition match where Claudio Castagnoli and Kip Sabian will compete using Age of Sigmar’s new Spearhead mode.

The bout is one part of the miniature wargame’s big preview of Age of Sigmar’s upcoming 4th Edition - Mortal Realms Reforged during the Dallas Open at the Arlington eSports Stadium on May 16th and 17th. Castagnoli and Sabian will take control of a Skaven and Stormcast Eternals army and battle it out using the recently announced Spearhead game mode.

Sitting somewhere between lightning-quick skirmishes and complex full army battles, Spearhead advertises a gateway to large-scale Warhammer played on a battlefield that’s only a quarter of the core game’s recommendation - and not coincidentally perfect for the kitchen table. Warhammer will be releasing Spearhead boxes for many of its existing factions, and existing Vanguard boxes will be rebranded going forward. Other changes include simplified Warscrolls, a Reinforcements keyword that brings certain defeated units back to the board and several other changes meant to streamline the four-round matches.

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Roger Corman, the iconic filmmaker and producer known for The Little Shop Of Horrors and Edgar Allan Poe adaptations like The Masque Of The Red Death, died last Thursday, according to weekend reports. In a statement, his family confirmed that Corman died in his Santa Monica home, per The Hollywood Reporter. He was 98…

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Slashdot reader quonset writes: The last floppy disk was manufactured in 2011. Despite no new supplies being available for over a decade, there are still people, and organizations, who rely on floppy disks. Each has their own story as to why they rely on what is essentially 1970s technology. From the BBC: Tom Persky, a US businessman, has been selling "new", as in, unopened, floppy disks for years and still finds the trade lucrative. He runs Floppydisk.com, which offers disks for about US$1 (£0.80) each, though some higher capacity versions cost up to US$10 (£8) per disk, he says. Persky has customers all over the world and you could split them roughly 50-50 into hobbyists and enthusiasts like Espen Kraft on one side, and industrial users on the other. This latter category encompasses people who use computers at work that require floppy disks to function. They are, essentially, locked in to a format that the rest of the world has largely forgotten. "I sell thousands of floppy disks to the airline industry, still," says Persky. He declines to elaborate. "Companies are not happy about when I talk about them." But it is well-known that some Boeing 747s, for example, use floppy disks to load critical software updates into their navigation and avionics computers. While these older aircraft might not be so common in Europe or the US these days, you might find one in the developing world, for instance, Persky hints. There are also pieces of factory equipment, government systems — or even animatronic figures — that still rely on floppy disks. And in San Francisco, the Muni Metro light railway, which launched in 1980, won't start up each morning unless the staff in charge pick up a floppy disk and slip it into the computer that controls the railway's Automatic Train Control System, or ATCS. "The computer has to be told what it's supposed to do every day," explains a spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transport Agency (SFMTA). "Without a hard drive, there is nowhere to install software on a permanent basis." This computer has to be restarted in such a way repeatedly, he adds — it can't simply be left on, for fear of its memory degrading. The article also includes this quote from a cybersecurity expert at Pen Test Partners. "If floppy was the only interface, the only way to get malware on to [the computer] would be via said floppy disk. That's quite a limiting factor for the attacker..."

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Search giant Baidu fires its head of public relations after she outraged Gen Z workers. From a report [non-paywalled link]: The head of public relations at a major Chinese tech firm gained hundreds of thousands of followers seemingly overnight after posting a series of viral videos laying out her unapologetically tyrannical management style. The videos also earned her a pink slip from her employer after they set off an explosion of criticism among Gen Z Chinese fed up with the intense work culture that prevails in their country's tech industry. "I'm not your mother-in-law. I'm not your mom," Qu Jing, a vice president at Chinese search giant Baidu, said in one widely excoriated clip, referring to a colleague who was struggling with a recent breakup. "I only care about your results." In other videos, she criticized employees who didn't want to work weekends and dismissed complaints from one subordinate that messages she sent to a group chat late at night had kept a crying child awake. "Why should it be my business that your child was crying?" she said. On Thursday, as public outrage soared, Qu removed the videos from her account on Douyin, TikTok's sister platform in China, and replaced them with an apology. She said she had tried to do a good job but had been too impatient and hadn't adopted "a proper approach." Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li was furious at Qu and fired her on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter. A top Baidu executive told employees that Qu's comments were "inappropriate and didn't represent and reflect the real culture and values of Baidu," the people said. The management also promised to review the company's corporate culture and working systems, they said. China's hard-charging tech industry relies heavily on a Darwinian work culture that demands near-total devotion to the workplace. Tech workers coined the term "996" to describe the typical schedule: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Half a decade ago, videos like Qu's were just as likely to garner a shrug as generate controversy. But younger Chinese, much like their counterparts in the U.S., are increasingly skeptical of the pressure to work themselves ragged in pursuit of financial success. They have coined their own terms -- "lying flat" and "letting it rot" -- to describe their antipathy to the grinding ethos of 996.

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