Aggregator

One cluster of houses on Hosey Common Road, Westerham, fall under SES Water, which has no restrictions in place in the area despite the UK baking in its fourth heatwave.

Even as Hollywood performers protest and Hollywood studios sue "in their war on AI," reports the Los Angeles Times, "the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it." Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios' public postings suggest they have been recruiting people to build AI tools. They are also recruiting teams to defend their intellectual property against unauthorized AI use. "There are plenty of studios that are hiring [for AI] but never talk about it in public," said Yoland Yan, a co-founder of ComfyUI, a company that helps studios juggle different AI tools. Companies have been hesitant to detail how they use generative AI in film production — partly because they are concerned about consumer and union backlash. Some in Hollywood described AI use as the new cosmetic surgery, where everyone knows it is happening, but few will admit to it... Although some companies may be shy about sharing their AI plans, big stars who don't have to answer to others have been more open about their embrace of the new technology for storytelling. Rejecting AI is like picking a horse and buggy over a car, said "Star Wars" creator George Lucas. "Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he told a trade magazine earlier this year. "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future." Some in Hollywood have a softer stance on artificial intelligence, with studios cutting deals with AI companies, and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese backing AI companies. Ben Affleck launched an AI film tech company then sold it to Netflix for half a billion dollars. When launching InterPositive, Affleck said he wanted to keep "storytelling human" by building AI tools that could fix lighting, generate missing shots and other things while "keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists...." Disney, Netflix and Amazon had job postings that were about using AI on the creative side of the business. Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony had job ads suggesting they were also using AI but for marketing, distribution and audience analytics. The postings suggest the Disney, Netflix and Amazon studios are building repeatable AI workflows for visual effects, animation, sound and dubbing. The companies also seem to be building in-house teams to develop custom generative-AI models, while also using third-party software. None of the jobs advertised were to create AI that wrote scripts or created AI actors. Ironically, the Times used Claude Code to build a scraper to identify the job postings, their article acknowledges. Three Disney jobs were for "content security," assessing AI tools and guarding against piracy, watermarking and rights-protection work. But Disney is also hiring PhD-level talent "to study 'computer graphics and AI' for Pixar and Disney films," according to the article, and "people to 'bridge the gap between research and practical studio application.'" Disney-owned visual effects shops Industrial Light & Magic "was searching for supervisors to 'explore emerging technologies (including AI/Machine Learning)' to develop new production workflows." Audio post-production unit Skywalker Sound "seemed to be recruiting to build proprietary AI models for soundtracks, voice separation, and voice transfer, the process of taking a speaker's tone and pitch, and applying it to new content." Amazon "was hiring a principal AI executive to drive AI-tool adoption across production, plus roles in operations automation and LLM content classification."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plan have been submitted for multiple new signs at the empty unit

Redmond adds new items to its make-Windows-better list

Australian athletics is mourning the death of rising middle-distance runner Natasha Ward, just weeks after Stawell Gift finalist Jemma Stapleton was killed during a family holiday in Thailand

Tragic new details have emerged after a mum jumped off a cliff with her two young kids.

Footage showed the US president receiving a round of applause in front of the club leaderboard following the round, confirming he had collected two trophies on the day.

An independent investigation has raised concerns about mental health provision at Chelmsford Prison following the death of prisoner Steven Davidson in 2024.

The government’s decision to cancel the A12 widening scheme has cost taxpayers £212.5million so far, Department for Transport figures reveal.

A grieving daughter has spoken out after discovering that the final voicemail left by her father had been unexpectedly deleted by her mobile phone provider.

An independent investigation has raised concerns about mental health provision at Chelmsford Prison following the death of prisoner Steven Davidson in 2024.

The government’s decision to cancel the A12 widening scheme has cost taxpayers £212.5million so far, Department for Transport figures reveal.

They could have completely changed the landscape of the city

In the early '80s, the rising pop star met the rough-around-the-edges 'street kid' when she moved to New York City and they snuck around together for years.

Keith Urban is said to be heartbroken after learning that his former wife Nicole Kidman has reportedly moved on with a new man.

A Georgia mother desperately cried out for help after realizing her car had been stolen with her two-year-old daughter still in the back seat.

The 2023 promotional clip posted by TikTok user Nicolas Nuvan had circulated on the social media platform as of late, amid ongoing legal developments in the case involving the musician.

The 36-year-old Australian actress was set to reprise her role as the beloved doll, with 45-year-old co-star Ryan Gosling joining, but negotiations at Warner Bros. have reportedly left the project in limbo.

A woman found her police officer ex-boyfriend had used Flock's camera system 600 times to look up the location of her and her daughter, reports the Washington Post (Alternate URL here). (She found out through Have I Been Flocked, described as "a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.") But it turns out dozens more police officers have also misused Flock... Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent, a Post analysis of police and court records found. In 26 of these cases, police investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes' new partners or women they wanted to meet. In other cases, police or prosecutors have not specified the alleged surveillance targets. Flock's system was used in 46 of the cases analyzed by The Post, while the other cases involved competing products... After The Post relayed its findings to Flock, the company said in a statement it "will soon be announcing better filters and tools to stop abuse before it happens...." In April, the company rolled out a new voluntary "audit assistance" feature, which agencies can choose to enable, that automatically scans officers' searches for suspicious activity, such as queries repeatedly targeting the same vehicle or run by officers off the clock. In an interview with The Post, Flock chief executive Garrett Langley said misuse of its systems is inevitable and that the company is focused on providing tools to catch perpetrators after the fact... "We're not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions," Langley said. "What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable...." Through automated license-plate reader systems, or ALPRs, officers could trace the rhythms and travels of their subjects' daily lives, leading in some instances to violent confrontations, moments of psychological manipulation, and threats of coercion and control, the analysis found. - In Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly used Flock to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic, according to a police affidavit for a case set for trial this month. - In Kansas, a police chief who tracked his ex through Flock sneaked up on her while she was intimate with another man, a state police certification body alleged, leading to his firing. - In Florida, a deputy speeding to stop a young actress he'd added to a watch list for a license-plate tool called Guardian nearly caused a head-on crash, according to a police report and video from his dashboard camera. The deputy was arrested in March, and his attorney declined to comment. - And in California, prosecutors said a former deputy, Alexander Vanny, used Flock as part of a months-long campaign of "stalking" and "humiliating" his former fiancée that also involved following her around town and installing a hidden camera in her roommate's bathroom, according to a sentencing brief... While some of the searches resulted in officers' firings, prosecutions and prison sentences, police departments in other cases allowed officers to continue using the systems even after receiving warnings that they were being misused... An array of privacy advocates has argued that Flock could deter bad actors by making simple changes to its product, such as requiring officers to label every search with a criminal case number. Some policing experts also warned that agencies' inconsistencies in developing and enforcing standard procedures for license-plate readers could lead to further misconduct. With no federal laws governing use and only a patchwork of state laws, many of the country's roughly 18,000 police agencies are left to decide their rules on their own... Langley, Flock's chief, has dismissed pushes by activists for the company to further limit how officers use its product. "No one elected me the police chief of America," he told Forbes last year, adding, "I don't think it's our job to police the police." The Post also got this quote from an officer was fired and sentenced to probation after pleading no contest to charges of computer-system misuse, stalking and battery. "Pretty much everybody uses that computer system" improperly in the department, he said, and "they don't audit it [nearly] as much as they should." Flock told The Post it now has over 120,000 cameras in more than 6,000 communities, recording 20 billion license plate scans every month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Archie Beston was fatally stabbed in the heart in Kingston-upon-Thames by habitual knife carrier Tyrone Bryan, 20, a one-man crimewave nicknamed 'Red Alert'.