BEAVERCREEK, Ohio (AP) — A lip-licking alligator, a smiling moose and a hat-wearing bear are among the many cartoon animals to have found themselves in the crosshairs of Buc-ee’s, the popular Texas convenience store chain that has a penchant for protecting its buck-toothed beaver.

But now Buc-ee’s has set off a Buckeye backlash across Ohio and beyond after taking on a beaver in the city of Beavercreek.

It’s yet another Buc-ee’s Ltd. trademark infringement lawsuit. Supporters of Beaver’s Mini Mart have attacked Buc-ee’s online and boycotted the stores, and the mini mart’s home city passed a resolution making the beaver an official part of its history. British comedian John Oliver has even weighed in on the kerfuffle.

On an episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” the comedian detailed Buc-ee’s aggressive history of trademark lawsuits targeting various woodland creatures and launched a website hawking merchandise bearing a knockoff “Buc-off” logo and a squirrel mascot named Mr. Nutterbutter. On X, #boycottbucees trended.

Buc-ee’s sued Beaver’s Mini Mart in late July, four months after the chain known for its extensive food offerings and massive restrooms opened its first Ohio store less than a half-hour’s drive away.

Buc-ee’s argues the shop’s beaver logo too closely resembles the convenience store giant’s branded Buc-ee (“Bucky”) beaver. The Texas-based company asked for a jury trial in federal court in Ohio. Buc-ee’s claims a right to protect its valuable logo

Beaver’s Mini Mart occupies a long, low building with a shingle roof at a suburban intersection. In contrast, the new 74,000-square-foot (6,875-square-meter) Buc-ee’s off Interstate 70 near Dayton has more than 100 gas pumps, 24 electric vehicle chargers and 700 parking spaces. A second Ohio store has been approved to open in 2028.

While preparing to enter the state in February, Buc-ee’s sued the northern Ohio holding company for Mickey Mart gas stations, arguing its Mickey the Moose logo could be confused with Buc-ee. (The company’s response: “A moose is not a beaver.”)

The Buc-ee’s beaver logo features the face of a beaver with prominent buck teeth wearing a red ball cap against a yellow backdrop. The Beaver’s Mini Mart mascot is a full beaver, unclothed, waving and smiling against a white background.

Customers have been critical of Buc-ee’s decision to target the much smaller store.

“I love Buc-ee’s, but I don’t plan on going back until they start making better business decisions,” Austin Collins, 32, a project manager from Fairborn, said outside Beaver’s, where he was making his first visit to protest the lawsuit.

He called targeting a beaver-named business in Beavercreek “a little spiteful.” License plates from three states were visible in the parking lot.

Buc-ee’s has defended the lawsuit as protective of its valuable trademark. In a statement on its website, the company said it first learned of Beaver’s Mini Mart when its owner, Vic Boparai, filed a trade name registration on Oct. 23.

The small business, incorporated in 2017, changed its name from Hanes Road Carryout to Beaver’s Mini Mart in January 2025, according to the paperwork. That was about four months after Buc-ee’s broke ground near Dayton. Recognizing a conflict, the company said it repeatedly attempted to reach Boparai without success, so it was forced to sue.

Boparai has since issued a statement of his own, though without addressing the company’s concerns nor the merits of the lawsuit.

“We want to say thank you to the community and the entire country for supporting us and our business,” he said. “We are overwhelmed by your support for our business and other small businesses everywhere.”

The Associated Press has been unable to reach Boparai at Beaver’s Mini Mart or by calling the store. Beavercreek adopts the beaver as part of city history

Beavercreek City Council responded to the dust-up by passing a resolution Aug. 10 making the beaver a permanent and official part of its 200-plus-year history. Bucky the Beaver, mascot of the Beavercreek Local Schools, visited the meeting ahead of the unanimous vote.

On social media, images lampooning the fight are rampant. One showed the Ohio State University football mascot, Brutus Buckeye, tackling Buc-ee the beaver.

Support has taken other forms, too. One was a GoFundMe campaign aimed at assuring that costs associated with the lawsuit don’t put Beaver’s Mini Mart out of business, as has happened to other establishments Buc-ee’s sued. It had raised at least $69,000.

The mini mart gave permission to The Original Goodie Shop bakery in Upper Arlington to use its logo on a signature cookie, with $1 from each one sold going to support Beaver’s legal fees. Cake, Hope & Love, a Beavercreek bakery, also is offering cookies adorned with buck-toothed beavers that urge shopping local.

Other Dayton-area businesses — including a Lego store and a root beer shop — temporarily altered their logos to include beavers in a show of solidarity. Dozens of businesses in Beavercreek already incorporate the city name or word beaver in their names.

Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who attended and praised the grand opening of the Dayton-area Buc-ee’s store in April, described the lawsuit as “absurd.”

“It is Beavercreek, for heaven’s sake,” the governor told reporters.

Firefighters and residents of south Lebanon have accused the Israeli military of lighting wildfires in the region, as forested areas burned down in blazes sparked by Israeli bombing.

Environmental groups said the fires in recent weeks were part of a longstanding Israeli practice of targeting Lebanon’s natural environment.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military dropped flares in a wooded area outside Khiam, in south Lebanon, sparking blazes. When firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames, a drone struck close by, forcing them to withdraw, said the head of the civil defence in the Nabatieh region, Hussein Fakih.

“Most of our missions are now related to fires,” Fakih said. “There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned, I don’t have the exact figures, but in the areas close to the [frontline], around 30-40% of the land has been affected by fires.”

The Israeli military has caused fires across south Lebanon, in particular in olive groves and on agricultural land, according to videos and testimony from emergency services, in the nearly two-months since the 17 June ceasefire that mostly ended fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.

“They started doing this right after the ceasefire, and there have been incendiary bombs every day,” Fakih said. “Small drones come out and drop incendiary materials, [white] phosphorus shells are fired at the woodlands, in addition to illumination flares that they drop during the daytime so the vegetation catches fire.”

Firefighters and residents of other areas in south Lebanon describe similar blazes being started by Israeli munitions and drones in dry scrub and woodlands. On Friday, Israeli munitions created large wildfires in two heavily forested areas, in Kfarchouba, close to the border, and between Jezzine and the western Bekaa valley.

The civil defence station chief in the area, Samir Hardan, said a fire was started near Kfarchouba on Friday afternoon after a drone dropped a munition in woodlands. After battling blazes overnight and extinguishing them on Saturday, a second drone started another fire on Sunday, Hardan said.

Firefighters are required to coordinate their movements with the Lebanese army, which relays their request to a “deconfliction” group that includes the Israeli military. They were given permission to fight the fires at only two spots, and not other areas where fires were raging.

According to environmental groups, the fires are part of a pattern of Israeli attacks against Lebanon’s environment that threaten the country’s woodlands and the biodiversity they support.

Hisham Younes, the founder of Green Southerners, a Lebanese conservation organisation, said: “These are long-established woodlands, dominated by productive stone pine alongside oak. They perform critical functions. The wider area is also an important passage and resting ground for migratory birds.”

Younes called the Israeli attacks an ecocide. “It is not about any single fire or attack, but a pattern of destruction that progressively erodes the ability of ecosystems to function, regenerate and sustain life. When those cascading effects also undermine livelihoods and people’s ability to return to and remain on their land, environmental destruction becomes inseparable from the wider transformation of the territory itself.”

Since fighting started on 8 October 2023 when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in solidarity with the Hamas-led attack a day earlier, Israel has repeatedly targeted Lebanon’s woodlands.

The Israeli military has said in the past that Hezbollah used these forested areas as cover for its fighters and its tunnels.

Ecologists and rights groups have said fires and other forms of widespread environmental destruction will have wider effects on civilian populations.

Asked for comment on each of the recent wildfire incidents, the Israeli military said its operations were “conducted while taking precautionary measures to mitigate harm to civilians and the environment”.

It is not the first time Israeli forces have been reported to have set fires deliberately. In the summer of 2024, Israeli troops used trebuchets – medieval catapults – to fling flaming debris over its border wall with Lebanon, while the Lebanese army published photos of Israeli drones that carried hoses that doused forests in flammable materials.

Health and environmental experts raised the alarm in February when Israeli planes dropped herbicides linked to cancer on farms in south Lebanon.

Besides the environmental and health consequences of these fires, residents of south Lebanon have mourned the loss of the green spaces in the villages where they grew up.

On 1 August, displaced residents of the border village of Yaroun found their olive and fruit groves, as well as their homes, had been set ablaze by occupying Israeli troops. People living in the nearby Christian towns of Rmeich and Aïn Ebel, among the few villages near the border not emptied out by the Israeli military, sent pictures of the fires.

Hafez Ghasham, the mayor of Yaroun, said: “They had already bulldozed the whole village. Then they set fire to the trees. What remained in this particular area were the olive trees – large groves, with very old olive trees. They started there, then the fire spread along the outskirts of the village.”

People in Yaroun had already watched in previous months as all but 20 of the 900 houses in the village were bulldozed by the Israeli military. They pooled resources to buy expensive satellite imagery of the village during their displacement.

Ghasham said: “Many of these trees, most of them, in fact, were inherited from our grandparents and parents. They have enormous sentimental value. The trees were also an important source of income for the people of the village.

“They are trying to make the land uninhabitable. They are erasing our entire history, our entire culture, all our memories. Maybe the idea is that after some time, it will look as though nobody had ever lived here.”

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/51778470

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/51746107

Palantir just released a new surveillance system that fuses satellites, radars and every camera into one real-time tracker of people and movement

We have to consider the possibility (probability?) that with Flock as the eyes, a system like this could be overlaid onto the US and we could be the targets.

Another reason we cannot allow Flock to exist.

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/51746269

For nine years, Pokémon Go asked its players to go outside and “catch ‘em all.” Millions of children and their parents walked through their cities with cameras raised. Some, chasing in-game rewards, filmed statues, parks, street corners and, in at least one case, the inside of an apartment. Someone else was gathering the results.

In June, Dutch daily Trouw traced how roughly 30 billion player scans helped train Niantic’s mapping systems. Niantic Spatial has since partnered with Vantor, the rebranded Maxar Intelligence and a major US defense contractor, to develop visual positioning for drones and other platforms in GPS-denied areas.

Vantor serves defense and intelligence clients and provides satellite imagery used widely in western reporting on Ukraine and Gaza.

A game largely played by children had helped build technology now being adapted for US military use.

The game designer and media philosopher Ian Bogost saw the mechanism coming. In 2011 he proposed an honest name for the industry of points, badges and engineered rewards: “exploitationware.” Fifteen years later, Pokémon Go offered a striking example of what he meant.

Langley’s hand in Google Earth

The lineage sits openly on the corporate résumé. John Hanke, founder and executive chairman of Niantic Spatial, spent four years in the US Foreign Service before entering tech. In 2001, he co-founded Keyhole, a mapping startup named after America’s KH spy satellites.

When the company neared bankruptcy, an investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, kept it alive. Its technology would be used to “support United States troops in Iraq.” Much of the funding reportedly came from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which supplies geospatial intelligence to the Pentagon.

Google bought Keyhole in 2004 and turned its Earth Viewer into Google Earth. Hanke went on to run Google’s Geo division, built Niantic as an internal startup and spun it out in 2015 with backing from Google, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. Pokémon Go arrived a year later.

Cartographers paid in Poké Balls

In 2021, the game began rewarding players for scanning real-world locations. They pointed a camera at a Pokéstop, uploaded the footage, and collected their prize. Participation was optional and limited to a fraction of the user base, yet that fraction produced billions of scans. The game’s terms gave Niantic a transferable, sublicensable license to submitted content, meaning the company could resell it to third parties.

Bogost had already described how this economy worked. Technology firms were “extracting personal information from customers by pretending that one’s product is actually one’s customer.” Pokémon Go followed the same model, rewarding players while using their scans to build its maps.

The scans helped train Niantic’s Visual Positioning System. Where GPS asks a satellite for a location, VPS looks at what a camera sees and matches it against a 3D model of the world. Two recognizable reference points a few pixels wide can be enough to fix a position. The system becomes especially useful when satellite signals are jammed, spoofed, or unavailable.

Floris De Hingh, a Dutch player who downloaded the game on its first day, told Trouw he had scanned everything from public parks to his own living room. “I was just playing a game,” he said, unaware of where those images might eventually lead.

The legal and ethical problem lies in what players agreed to surrender. Niantic said their personal data “[has not] been sold to anyone,” while the uploaded scans were governed separately as user content. A room can expose possessions, habits, and intimate details even when no name appears in the frame. The consent form focused attention on identity while securing broad rights over the surroundings.

Riyadh gets the players, the Pentagon gets the map

In 2025, Niantic split itself in two. Its games and players went to Scopely for $3.5 billion, under Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group. The spatial technology and mapping assets remained with Niantic Spatial. According to Niantic’s announcement, its existing shareholders retained stakes in the new company, while Scopely invested another $50 million. Saudi state capital now had a stake in both companies.

The Vantor agreement followed in December. Its announcement names GPS “unavailability, spoofing, interference, and jamming” as the problem, with autonomous drones among the platforms. Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence, is deeply embedded in the US defense and intelligence establishment and serves as a principal contractor for the NGA’s geospatial intelligence system, which reaches more than 400,000 US government users.

The firms plan to combine Niantic’s ground-based VPS with Vantor’s aerial positioning software, allowing air and ground systems to share coordinates without satellite signals. Vantor is also deeply embedded in the US defense and intelligence establishment.

The NGA helped keep Keyhole alive in 2003. More than two decades later, one of its principal contractors is working with Niantic Spatial on technology built in part from billions of scans supplied free by players.

Mapping everywhere, restricting Palestine

For more than two decades, the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment restricted the resolution of US-licensed commercial satellite imagery over Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to two meters.

The Commerce Department eased the limit to 40 centimeters in 2020, but the country-specific restriction remains in US law. It long left evidence of occupation and destruction coarse on widely used imagery, even as commercial mapping systems gathered street-level detail elsewhere.

Children were encouraged to record the world at pavement level, while Washington imposed a special legal limit around the occupation state. US companies gathered ever more detail from ordinary users, but the law continued to restrict what could be seen over occupied Palestine.

The model survives the denial

The companies insist no game data is going into drones. Vantor told Trouw it will not use the Pokémon Go scans, then declined to confirm or deny whether its models had already been trained on them. Niantic Spatial had answered that question months earlier, when a spokesperson admitted the scans trained an “early version” of the very model on which the system is built. The raw imagery may stay out of Vantor’s hands, but its role in the model’s development cannot be neatly removed.

Jeroen van den Hoven, professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft, told Trouw why that distinction resists auditing. Once training data has been absorbed, individual contributions dissolve into patterns that cannot be traced or revoked. Van den Hoven said that “the people who thought they were playing a game have clearly been fooled.”

Bogost coined exploitationware for a swindle that exchanged badges for behavior, years before phone cameras were mapping playgrounds and living rooms for corporate AI. Pokémon Go extended that bargain across the physical world and carried the resulting technology into a military supply chain. The game told its players to catch ’em all. Its owners gathered far more.

He said most of the suspects were accused of deliberately burning land to clear areas for plantations at lower cost.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesian police on Sunday arrested 72 people suspected of starting some of the recent forest and peatland fires as huge blazes in central and western parts of the country triggered a harmful cloud known as a choking haze.

Indonesia has been battling fires driven by an intensifying El Nino pattern and a prolonged dry season, generating dense smoke that crossed into Malaysia, according to Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency, or BNPB.

Fires are a regular problem in the country and often strain relations with neighbors.

Plantation owners and traditional farmers often start fires to clear land for farming, said Mohammad Irhamni, director of special crimes at the National Police’s Criminal Investigation Agency.

The arson suspects were being investigated in connection with 89 forest and land fire cases across five provinces on the island of Borneo and four on Sumatra, Irhamni said.

He said most of the suspects were accused of deliberately burning land to clear areas for plantations at lower cost. Investigators were still tracing financial records to determine whether companies financed or ordered the land clearing, signaling the probe could expand beyond those arrested.

“We will not stop at the perpetrators on the ground,” Irhami said in a news conference Sunday in the capital, Jakarta. “We will determine who benefited from these activities and who was ultimately behind them.”

The suspects face charges that carry penalties ranging from hefty fines to prison terms of up to 15 years, he said.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto flew on Saturday to Central Kalimantan province, where more than 7,600 hectares (18,700 acres) have burned, to encourage authorities to get the haze cloud under control.

Prabowo promised government resources required to contain the fires, including helicopters and water pumps, and vowed to hold accountable any companies found to have contributed to the fires.

“I hope we can control this soon,” Prabowo said during the visit. “We have experienced worse forest and land fires in the past, and we were able to overcome them.”

Accompanying the president was Prasetyo Hadi, the head of State Secretariat. He said at least four companies in West Kalimantan province are under investigation for allegedly using fire to clear land. If they are proven to have intentionally set the fires, they could face sanctions, including the revocation of their operating permits, he added.

Smoke from the fires on Sunday blanketed parts of Borneo, the world’s third-largest island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. Indonesia administers about three-quarters of the island, where the country’s Environment Ministry recorded more than 3,700 hot spots on Sunday.

BNPB chief Suharyanto said fire activity had increased in West, Central and South Kalimantan provinces on Borneo, where many blazes worsen due to peatlands, prolonging the dangerous haze in several areas.

Fires that appear “extinguished on the surface may still contain embers underneath, so sufficient rainfall is crucial to rewet the peat and fully suppress the fires,” said Suharyanto, who, like many Indonesians, uses a single name.

The western island of South Sumatra also battled fires, with more than 1,700 hot spots detected on Sunday, causing a choked haze cloud and reducing visibility to only 10 meters (33 feet) in some areas, the ministry said.

Cloud-seeding resumed over Kalimantan on Sunday, with 30 helicopters for water-bombing and aerial patrol missions, and another 22 helicopters covering Sumatra.

Meanwhile, Malaysia has suffered severe smoke from the fires, with its eastern state of Sarawak among the hardest hit. One district recorded “very unhealthy” air quality on Friday, while eight others posted unhealthy readings, prompting the closure of nearly 600 schools and affecting about 200,000 students, the Sarawak government said.

A fast-growing wildfire destroying homes in northwest Reno, Nevada, on Sunday was human-caused and uncontained, authorities said, as they encouraged some 90,000 people to evacuate. At least six people were injured.

The Hawk Fire began Saturday and quickly grew to 20 square miles (53 sq. km.) as it spread across the Peavine Peak area of the Humboldt–Toiyabe National Forest, where rugged foothills are ringed by homes and businesses on the Nevada side of the California state line.

The fire moved exceptionally fast Saturday night, jumping over fire trucks and making it difficult for responders to get to hotspots while residents were trying to get out, Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam said.

“It was extremely confusing,” the sheriff said, describing how changing winds sent the flames in different directions.

Several structures were destroyed and the injured included three civilians and three first responders, officials said. They did not provide additional details on how the fire was started, saying it was under investigation. An unpredictable fire expands the danger zone

Some 42,000 residents have been ordered evacuated as the “GO NOW” zone expanded, reaching the edge of the University of Nevada at Reno. An additional 45,000 people were in the adjacent evacuation warning zone. Authorities implored all of them to leave and be prepared to stay away for several days, because shifting and strengthening winds were expected to make the fire even more unpredictable.

“Please get out if you can right now,” the sheriff said.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency in Washoe County, and mobilized the Nevada National Guard to support aerial firefighting with two helicopter crews as well as 60 troops to help police safeguard evacuated neighborhoods. Also responding were 800 fire personnel.

Nearly 10,000 customers were without power in Washoe County on Sunday, down from 60,000 on Saturday. Portions of U.S. Route 395, a major north-south highway, were closed due to the fire. Reno, with more than 280,000 residents, is the largest city in Nevada outside of metro Las Vegas.

Washoe County emergency officials opened the Reno-Sparks Convention Center to evacuees, but said they couldn’t bring their pets — small animals and large animals were to be left at two other locations. Casinos in Reno offered discounts on hotel rooms to evacuees.

A family raced to grab possessions but lost their home

Cari Kieffer said a video posted on social media showed her house entirely burned down, with only a scorched basketball hoop still standing.

“I woke up this morning and just started crying — all my kids, they lost everything,” Kieffer said Sunday. “We lost all our stuff. Everything we own is gone.”

Kieffer had been watching her son’s football game Saturday when she learned that their home on the outskirts of Reno was in the evacuation zone. An application the family used to track the fire’s progress had been lagging significantly behind its actual location, she said, so they thought firefighters had kept the blaze from their neighborhood.

Instead, Kieffer, her husband and their four children ages 3 to 16 raced to save their dogs and whatever possessions they could retrieve. Ash rained down and the wind blew like an oven blast from a wall of flames advancing down the hillside toward their neighborhood, she said.

“I kept looking outside and the flames just kept getting closer and closer every time I looked,” Kieffer said. “I was like, we gotta go like now.”

Eyes watering and throat burning, Kieffer grabbed a handful of clothes, a Bible, her wedding photos and her mother’s ashes. In the frenzy, as firefighters yelled at her family to leave immediately, she said she forgot her family’s birth certificates and was unable to salvage her childhood photos.

The family drove to a friend’s home but had to evacuate again. They learned later Saturday evening that their own home was gone. A mountaintop home goes up in flames

Jaida Hargrove’s grandfather, Rick Arrate, lived alone on Peavine Mountain, which overlooks Reno and Sparks. Firefighters used a bulldozer, cut down trees and applied fire removedant in their attempt to contain the flames, Hargrove said.

“They all thought it would be OK,” she said. “And then, in about 30 minutes, the winds just changed and it came way too fast.”

Arrate and the firefighters were quickly forced off the mountain. “All he was able to take with him was his two golden retrievers,” Hargrove said.

Arrate spent Saturday night with Hargrove’s parents, his next steps unknown.

Separate GoFundMe crowdfunding campaigns were set up to assist Arrate and the Kieffer family. The fire wasn’t troubling to some at first

The fire was so small Saturday morning that it wasn’t even a concern, said Tyler Duvall, who went camping over the weekend. By the next day, his house was in the evacuation zone and he couldn’t get back.

“The wind really blew it up,” Duvall said, adding that he knows of some homes that burned about a mile from his place.

Strong, gusty winds, low humidity and dry vegetation are fueling its growth, according to Truckee Meadows Fire & Rescue in Reno. A Nevada transplant gets a rude welcome to Reno

Retired police officer and firefighter Ted Melden has seen his share of Mother Nature’s fury since moving to Reno with his wife earlier this month from Chapin, South Carolina. So far, he’s experienced a hailstorm with flash flooding, two different power outages and, now, the second wildfire incident in the region in two weeks.

“Just another natural disaster,” Melden said.

In the two years he lived in South Carolina, Melden said Hurricane Helene knocked over trees in his yard, while a tornado did some damage in his neighborhood.

For now, Melden hasn’t been ordered to leave his home, but he has his bags packed just in case.

“This thing kicked off yesterday, and it just went,” Melden said in describing the wildfire’s fast movement. “I’m hoping they’ll get a good handle on it. You just have to roll with the flow and be ready. Always be prepared and have a full tank of gas.” Places just outside the evacuation zone are warned

The University of Nevada’s Reno campus, where many of the 20,000 undergraduates moved into their housing this weekend, was just outside the evacuation zone Sunday. University leaders said they were actively monitoring the fire and have an evacuation plan prepared if needed.

Authorities also were keeping watch on a county jail several blocks from the outer edge of the evacuation warning area.

Earlier this month, three wildfires fueled by hot, dry and windy conditions north of Reno forced more than 13,000 residents from their homes, according to the Nevada National Guard. The largest of the three, the Bug Fire, burned nearly 150 square miles (390 sq. km.) but now is almost fully contained.

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/51746523

Thomas Bailey, 58, faces charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling near Covington, Louisiana

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer was jailed on Friday on allegations of breaking into a woman’s apartment.

Thomas Bailey, 58, faces a charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling after his arrest by the sheriff’s office of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, the agency said in a statement.

The sheriff’s office said Bailey entered his ex-girlfriend’s apartment near the community of Covington, a New Orleans suburb on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, without her permission. She was not in the apartment at the time, and the sheriff’s office said investigators booked him with a crime defined as the “intentional entry without authorization into any inhabited dwelling … used … as a home or place of abode by another person”.

Bailey is employed by an ICE office in the Louisiana community of Oakdale, which by car is about three hours to the west of Covington, the St Tammany sheriff’s office said. The agency’s statement noted that he was a resident of Lecompte, Louisiana, which is about a half-hour’s drive to the north-east of Oakdale.

The sheriff’s office referred to Bailey as a federal officer but did not provide specific details about his role within ICE, which has been at the forefront of the mass deportation campaign that the administration of Donald Trump has pursued during his second presidency. A page under Bailey’s name on the professional networking social media site LinkedIn refers to him as an “agent” of ICE.

An ICE spokesperson on Friday said in a statement that the agency could not comment on Bailey’s arrest “due to the sensitive nature of these charges and pending litigation”.

However, the statement said that ICE “stresses integrity and ethical behavior, and the vast majority of [agency] employees perform their duties with professionalism and honor”.

“ICE takes all allegations of employee misconduct seriously,” the statement continued. “Any allegations of misconduct are investigated by the appropriate agencies, and any employee who has committed provable misconduct will be held accountable. ICE takes swift and appropriate action to investigate and cooperate with outside law enforcement agencies when allegations of criminal conduct by an employee are suspected or alleged.”

Prior to Bailey’s case, ICE had been met with public scrutiny over its hiring practices after the Associated Press reported in February that a least two dozen of the agency’s employees and contractors had been charged with crimes since 2020. The wrongdoing in question involved physical and sexual abuse, misuses of authority, and corruption, according to the AP’s review.

The outlet later reported that rapid recruitment and expansion by ICE, particularly as the Trump administration prepared to implement its mass deportation agenda, had set the stage for an influx of employees with questionable qualifications.

Furthermore, in late July, the Trump administration’s border chief, Tom Homan, appeared on CNN and said he doubted that an ICE officer at the center of a recent fatal shooting “should have ever cleared vetting”.

Homan made that remark in the aftermath of the deadly shooting of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on 13 July in Biddeford, Maine. The officer involved in that killing was later identified by news outlets as David Brouillette. Two of Brouillette’s ex-wives publicly described alleged abusive, violent and threatening behavior during their relationships with him.

Asked “should someone with those issues be an ICE agent”, Homan said: “No, if those … are facts … I don’t think he should ever have cleared vetting.”

A poll taken by PBS News, National Public Radio and Marist after immigration agents’ killings of US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January determined Americans largely disapproved of ICE agents.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed – 65% – said they believed ICE had gone too far in enforcing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the pollsters said.

A statement from the executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance advocacy group, Lynn Tramonte, after Bailey’s arrest called on Congress to stop funding agencies like ICE until the screening of “every single agent for domestic violence and other dangerous behaviors”.

A bond amount for Bailey was not immediately set, St Tammany parish jail records showed on Friday. It was not immediately clear whether Bailey had an attorney.

“Regardless of where you work or what position you hold, the law applies equally to everyone,” a statement attributed to the St Tammany sheriff, Bret Ibert, said on Friday after Bailey’s arrest. “When someone enters another person’s residence without permission, we are going to investigate the circumstances and take the appropriate action based on the facts of the case.”

Bailey could receive up to six years in prison and a maximum fine of $1,000 if eventually convicted of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling.

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/51746107

Palantir just released a new surveillance system that fuses satellites, radars and every camera into one real-time tracker of people and movement

We have to consider the possibility (probability?) that with Flock as the eyes, a system like this could be overlaid onto the US and we could be the targets.

Another reason we cannot allow Flock to exist.

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/51746583

Tesla and other carmakers are making a major recall of more than 4m vehicles in China over safety concerns mostly related to their door handles, according to Chinese authorities on Friday.

The US carmaker is recalling about 2.98m China-made and imported EVs including Model 3, Model Y, Model X and Model S over door-handle safety risks, according to China’s state administration for market regulation.

The recall, the largest this year, according to Chinese media, comes a few months after Chinese authorities said in February that starting next year, it would be banning hidden car door handles commonly seen on Tesla electric vehicles and many Chinese EV models.

China has stepped up scrutiny recently on hidden, or flush, car door handles following EV accidents in the country and elsewhere, in which cars’ hidden electronic doors failed and trapped people inside.

In a notice on the Chinese regulator’s website, it cited safety risk. In extreme situations, such as a severe collision that causes an electrical system failure, the car handles could hinder car users from quickly opening the doors to escape, or prevent rescuers outside the car from gaining access, the notice said.

Some experts in the industry said the automakers should value safety over design.

Cui Dongshu, head of the China Passenger Car Association, called the recall “an inevitable step” in the development of the electric vehicle industry and said automakers were “being responsible” by moving toward a more reliable, “safety-first” approach.

“This represents, in part, the growing pains of the industry. At the same time, however, this move signifies a policy-driven safety upgrade,” said Cui.

Tesla will perform software updates on the vehicles to mitigate risks, the notice added.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Xiaomi, the Beijing-based Chinese technology giant, is recalling more than 390,000 vehicles. Hangzhou-based Leapmotor is recalling over 370,000 cars. Other Chinese carmakers, including Geely and XPENG are also recalling some vehicles.

The reasons given in each case were similar, mostly relating to issues with their car door handles.

A report published by the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist party, said the large-scale recall “serves as a unified safety upgrade” for existing vehicle models ahead of the 2027 implementation of the ban on hidden car door handles.

“For the rapidly evolving NEV (new energy vehicle) industry, competition should be defined not only by the pace of technological innovation but also by the high standards set for safety,” the newspaper said.

Tesla and other carmakers are making a major recall of more than 4m vehicles in China over safety concerns mostly related to their door handles, according to Chinese authorities on Friday.

The US carmaker is recalling about 2.98m China-made and imported EVs including Model 3, Model Y, Model X and Model S over door-handle safety risks, according to China’s state administration for market regulation.

The recall, the largest this year, according to Chinese media, comes a few months after Chinese authorities said in February that starting next year, it would be banning hidden car door handles commonly seen on Tesla electric vehicles and many Chinese EV models.

China has stepped up scrutiny recently on hidden, or flush, car door handles following EV accidents in the country and elsewhere, in which cars’ hidden electronic doors failed and trapped people inside.

In a notice on the Chinese regulator’s website, it cited safety risk. In extreme situations, such as a severe collision that causes an electrical system failure, the car handles could hinder car users from quickly opening the doors to escape, or prevent rescuers outside the car from gaining access, the notice said.

Some experts in the industry said the automakers should value safety over design.

Cui Dongshu, head of the China Passenger Car Association, called the recall “an inevitable step” in the development of the electric vehicle industry and said automakers were “being responsible” by moving toward a more reliable, “safety-first” approach.

“This represents, in part, the growing pains of the industry. At the same time, however, this move signifies a policy-driven safety upgrade,” said Cui.

Tesla will perform software updates on the vehicles to mitigate risks, the notice added.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Xiaomi, the Beijing-based Chinese technology giant, is recalling more than 390,000 vehicles. Hangzhou-based Leapmotor is recalling over 370,000 cars. Other Chinese carmakers, including Geely and XPENG are also recalling some vehicles.

The reasons given in each case were similar, mostly relating to issues with their car door handles.

A report published by the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist party, said the large-scale recall “serves as a unified safety upgrade” for existing vehicle models ahead of the 2027 implementation of the ban on hidden car door handles.

“For the rapidly evolving NEV (new energy vehicle) industry, competition should be defined not only by the pace of technological innovation but also by the high standards set for safety,” the newspaper said.

Cross posted from https://lemmy.ml/post/51746269

For nine years, Pokémon Go asked its players to go outside and “catch ‘em all.” Millions of children and their parents walked through their cities with cameras raised. Some, chasing in-game rewards, filmed statues, parks, street corners and, in at least one case, the inside of an apartment. Someone else was gathering the results.

In June, Dutch daily Trouw traced how roughly 30 billion player scans helped train Niantic’s mapping systems. Niantic Spatial has since partnered with Vantor, the rebranded Maxar Intelligence and a major US defense contractor, to develop visual positioning for drones and other platforms in GPS-denied areas.

Vantor serves defense and intelligence clients and provides satellite imagery used widely in western reporting on Ukraine and Gaza.

A game largely played by children had helped build technology now being adapted for US military use.

The game designer and media philosopher Ian Bogost saw the mechanism coming. In 2011 he proposed an honest name for the industry of points, badges and engineered rewards: “exploitationware.” Fifteen years later, Pokémon Go offered a striking example of what he meant.

Langley’s hand in Google Earth

The lineage sits openly on the corporate résumé. John Hanke, founder and executive chairman of Niantic Spatial, spent four years in the US Foreign Service before entering tech. In 2001, he co-founded Keyhole, a mapping startup named after America’s KH spy satellites.

When the company neared bankruptcy, an investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, kept it alive. Its technology would be used to “support United States troops in Iraq.” Much of the funding reportedly came from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which supplies geospatial intelligence to the Pentagon.

Google bought Keyhole in 2004 and turned its Earth Viewer into Google Earth. Hanke went on to run Google’s Geo division, built Niantic as an internal startup and spun it out in 2015 with backing from Google, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. Pokémon Go arrived a year later.

Cartographers paid in Poké Balls

In 2021, the game began rewarding players for scanning real-world locations. They pointed a camera at a Pokéstop, uploaded the footage, and collected their prize. Participation was optional and limited to a fraction of the user base, yet that fraction produced billions of scans. The game’s terms gave Niantic a transferable, sublicensable license to submitted content, meaning the company could resell it to third parties.

Bogost had already described how this economy worked. Technology firms were “extracting personal information from customers by pretending that one’s product is actually one’s customer.” Pokémon Go followed the same model, rewarding players while using their scans to build its maps.

The scans helped train Niantic’s Visual Positioning System. Where GPS asks a satellite for a location, VPS looks at what a camera sees and matches it against a 3D model of the world. Two recognizable reference points a few pixels wide can be enough to fix a position. The system becomes especially useful when satellite signals are jammed, spoofed, or unavailable.

Floris De Hingh, a Dutch player who downloaded the game on its first day, told Trouw he had scanned everything from public parks to his own living room. “I was just playing a game,” he said, unaware of where those images might eventually lead.

The legal and ethical problem lies in what players agreed to surrender. Niantic said their personal data “[has not] been sold to anyone,” while the uploaded scans were governed separately as user content. A room can expose possessions, habits, and intimate details even when no name appears in the frame. The consent form focused attention on identity while securing broad rights over the surroundings.

Riyadh gets the players, the Pentagon gets the map

In 2025, Niantic split itself in two. Its games and players went to Scopely for $3.5 billion, under Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group. The spatial technology and mapping assets remained with Niantic Spatial. According to Niantic’s announcement, its existing shareholders retained stakes in the new company, while Scopely invested another $50 million. Saudi state capital now had a stake in both companies.

The Vantor agreement followed in December. Its announcement names GPS “unavailability, spoofing, interference, and jamming” as the problem, with autonomous drones among the platforms. Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence, is deeply embedded in the US defense and intelligence establishment and serves as a principal contractor for the NGA’s geospatial intelligence system, which reaches more than 400,000 US government users.

The firms plan to combine Niantic’s ground-based VPS with Vantor’s aerial positioning software, allowing air and ground systems to share coordinates without satellite signals. Vantor is also deeply embedded in the US defense and intelligence establishment.

The NGA helped keep Keyhole alive in 2003. More than two decades later, one of its principal contractors is working with Niantic Spatial on technology built in part from billions of scans supplied free by players.

Mapping everywhere, restricting Palestine

For more than two decades, the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment restricted the resolution of US-licensed commercial satellite imagery over Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to two meters.

The Commerce Department eased the limit to 40 centimeters in 2020, but the country-specific restriction remains in US law. It long left evidence of occupation and destruction coarse on widely used imagery, even as commercial mapping systems gathered street-level detail elsewhere.

Children were encouraged to record the world at pavement level, while Washington imposed a special legal limit around the occupation state. US companies gathered ever more detail from ordinary users, but the law continued to restrict what could be seen over occupied Palestine.

The model survives the denial

The companies insist no game data is going into drones. Vantor told Trouw it will not use the Pokémon Go scans, then declined to confirm or deny whether its models had already been trained on them. Niantic Spatial had answered that question months earlier, when a spokesperson admitted the scans trained an “early version” of the very model on which the system is built. The raw imagery may stay out of Vantor’s hands, but its role in the model’s development cannot be neatly removed.

Jeroen van den Hoven, professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft, told Trouw why that distinction resists auditing. Once training data has been absorbed, individual contributions dissolve into patterns that cannot be traced or revoked. Van den Hoven said that “the people who thought they were playing a game have clearly been fooled.”

Bogost coined exploitationware for a swindle that exchanged badges for behavior, years before phone cameras were mapping playgrounds and living rooms for corporate AI. Pokémon Go extended that bargain across the physical world and carried the resulting technology into a military supply chain. The game told its players to catch ’em all. Its owners gathered far more.

Thomas Bailey, 58, faces charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling near Covington, Louisiana

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer was jailed on Friday on allegations of breaking into a woman’s apartment.

Thomas Bailey, 58, faces a charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling after his arrest by the sheriff’s office of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, the agency said in a statement.

The sheriff’s office said Bailey entered his ex-girlfriend’s apartment near the community of Covington, a New Orleans suburb on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, without her permission. She was not in the apartment at the time, and the sheriff’s office said investigators booked him with a crime defined as the “intentional entry without authorization into any inhabited dwelling … used … as a home or place of abode by another person”.

Bailey is employed by an ICE office in the Louisiana community of Oakdale, which by car is about three hours to the west of Covington, the St Tammany sheriff’s office said. The agency’s statement noted that he was a resident of Lecompte, Louisiana, which is about a half-hour’s drive to the north-east of Oakdale.

The sheriff’s office referred to Bailey as a federal officer but did not provide specific details about his role within ICE, which has been at the forefront of the mass deportation campaign that the administration of Donald Trump has pursued during his second presidency. A page under Bailey’s name on the professional networking social media site LinkedIn refers to him as an “agent” of ICE.

An ICE spokesperson on Friday said in a statement that the agency could not comment on Bailey’s arrest “due to the sensitive nature of these charges and pending litigation”.

However, the statement said that ICE “stresses integrity and ethical behavior, and the vast majority of [agency] employees perform their duties with professionalism and honor”.

“ICE takes all allegations of employee misconduct seriously,” the statement continued. “Any allegations of misconduct are investigated by the appropriate agencies, and any employee who has committed provable misconduct will be held accountable. ICE takes swift and appropriate action to investigate and cooperate with outside law enforcement agencies when allegations of criminal conduct by an employee are suspected or alleged.”

Prior to Bailey’s case, ICE had been met with public scrutiny over its hiring practices after the Associated Press reported in February that a least two dozen of the agency’s employees and contractors had been charged with crimes since 2020. The wrongdoing in question involved physical and sexual abuse, misuses of authority, and corruption, according to the AP’s review.

The outlet later reported that rapid recruitment and expansion by ICE, particularly as the Trump administration prepared to implement its mass deportation agenda, had set the stage for an influx of employees with questionable qualifications.

Furthermore, in late July, the Trump administration’s border chief, Tom Homan, appeared on CNN and said he doubted that an ICE officer at the center of a recent fatal shooting “should have ever cleared vetting”.

Homan made that remark in the aftermath of the deadly shooting of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on 13 July in Biddeford, Maine. The officer involved in that killing was later identified by news outlets as David Brouillette. Two of Brouillette’s ex-wives publicly described alleged abusive, violent and threatening behavior during their relationships with him.

Asked “should someone with those issues be an ICE agent”, Homan said: “No, if those … are facts … I don’t think he should ever have cleared vetting.”

A poll taken by PBS News, National Public Radio and Marist after immigration agents’ killings of US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January determined Americans largely disapproved of ICE agents.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed – 65% – said they believed ICE had gone too far in enforcing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the pollsters said.

A statement from the executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance advocacy group, Lynn Tramonte, after Bailey’s arrest called on Congress to stop funding agencies like ICE until the screening of “every single agent for domestic violence and other dangerous behaviors”.

A bond amount for Bailey was not immediately set, St Tammany parish jail records showed on Friday. It was not immediately clear whether Bailey had an attorney.

“Regardless of where you work or what position you hold, the law applies equally to everyone,” a statement attributed to the St Tammany sheriff, Bret Ibert, said on Friday after Bailey’s arrest. “When someone enters another person’s residence without permission, we are going to investigate the circumstances and take the appropriate action based on the facts of the case.”

Bailey could receive up to six years in prison and a maximum fine of $1,000 if eventually convicted of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling.

or "Humans create silly little machines that can go faster than humans"

AI = Accept a slaves wage because we got silly gizmos... Don't choo laugh at my gizmo!!!

Ohhh hahah I am not the only one

u/RedPanda_Explorer 1d ago

Forklift surpasses record for human deadlifting

For nine years, Pokémon Go asked its players to go outside and “catch ‘em all.” Millions of children and their parents walked through their cities with cameras raised. Some, chasing in-game rewards, filmed statues, parks, street corners and, in at least one case, the inside of an apartment. Someone else was gathering the results.

In June, Dutch daily Trouw traced how roughly 30 billion player scans helped train Niantic’s mapping systems. Niantic Spatial has since partnered with Vantor, the rebranded Maxar Intelligence and a major US defense contractor, to develop visual positioning for drones and other platforms in GPS-denied areas.

Vantor serves defense and intelligence clients and provides satellite imagery used widely in western reporting on Ukraine and Gaza.

A game largely played by children had helped build technology now being adapted for US military use.

The game designer and media philosopher Ian Bogost saw the mechanism coming. In 2011 he proposed an honest name for the industry of points, badges and engineered rewards: “exploitationware.” Fifteen years later, Pokémon Go offered a striking example of what he meant.

Langley’s hand in Google Earth

The lineage sits openly on the corporate résumé. John Hanke, founder and executive chairman of Niantic Spatial, spent four years in the US Foreign Service before entering tech. In 2001, he co-founded Keyhole, a mapping startup named after America’s KH spy satellites.

When the company neared bankruptcy, an investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, kept it alive. Its technology would be used to “support United States troops in Iraq.” Much of the funding reportedly came from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which supplies geospatial intelligence to the Pentagon.

Google bought Keyhole in 2004 and turned its Earth Viewer into Google Earth. Hanke went on to run Google’s Geo division, built Niantic as an internal startup and spun it out in 2015 with backing from Google, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. Pokémon Go arrived a year later.

Cartographers paid in Poké Balls

In 2021, the game began rewarding players for scanning real-world locations. They pointed a camera at a Pokéstop, uploaded the footage, and collected their prize. Participation was optional and limited to a fraction of the user base, yet that fraction produced billions of scans. The game’s terms gave Niantic a transferable, sublicensable license to submitted content, meaning the company could resell it to third parties.

Bogost had already described how this economy worked. Technology firms were “extracting personal information from customers by pretending that one’s product is actually one’s customer.” Pokémon Go followed the same model, rewarding players while using their scans to build its maps.

The scans helped train Niantic’s Visual Positioning System. Where GPS asks a satellite for a location, VPS looks at what a camera sees and matches it against a 3D model of the world. Two recognizable reference points a few pixels wide can be enough to fix a position. The system becomes especially useful when satellite signals are jammed, spoofed, or unavailable.

Floris De Hingh, a Dutch player who downloaded the game on its first day, told Trouw he had scanned everything from public parks to his own living room. “I was just playing a game,” he said, unaware of where those images might eventually lead.

The legal and ethical problem lies in what players agreed to surrender. Niantic said their personal data “[has not] been sold to anyone,” while the uploaded scans were governed separately as user content. A room can expose possessions, habits, and intimate details even when no name appears in the frame. The consent form focused attention on identity while securing broad rights over the surroundings.

Riyadh gets the players, the Pentagon gets the map

In 2025, Niantic split itself in two. Its games and players went to Scopely for $3.5 billion, under Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group. The spatial technology and mapping assets remained with Niantic Spatial. According to Niantic’s announcement, its existing shareholders retained stakes in the new company, while Scopely invested another $50 million. Saudi state capital now had a stake in both companies.

The Vantor agreement followed in December. Its announcement names GPS “unavailability, spoofing, interference, and jamming” as the problem, with autonomous drones among the platforms. Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence, is deeply embedded in the US defense and intelligence establishment and serves as a principal contractor for the NGA’s geospatial intelligence system, which reaches more than 400,000 US government users.

The firms plan to combine Niantic’s ground-based VPS with Vantor’s aerial positioning software, allowing air and ground systems to share coordinates without satellite signals. Vantor is also deeply embedded in the US defense and intelligence establishment.

The NGA helped keep Keyhole alive in 2003. More than two decades later, one of its principal contractors is working with Niantic Spatial on technology built in part from billions of scans supplied free by players.

Mapping everywhere, restricting Palestine

For more than two decades, the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment restricted the resolution of US-licensed commercial satellite imagery over Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to two meters.

The Commerce Department eased the limit to 40 centimeters in 2020, but the country-specific restriction remains in US law. It long left evidence of occupation and destruction coarse on widely used imagery, even as commercial mapping systems gathered street-level detail elsewhere.

Children were encouraged to record the world at pavement level, while Washington imposed a special legal limit around the occupation state. US companies gathered ever more detail from ordinary users, but the law continued to restrict what could be seen over occupied Palestine.

The model survives the denial

The companies insist no game data is going into drones. Vantor told Trouw it will not use the Pokémon Go scans, then declined to confirm or deny whether its models had already been trained on them. Niantic Spatial had answered that question months earlier, when a spokesperson admitted the scans trained an “early version” of the very model on which the system is built. The raw imagery may stay out of Vantor’s hands, but its role in the model’s development cannot be neatly removed.

Jeroen van den Hoven, professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft, told Trouw why that distinction resists auditing. Once training data has been absorbed, individual contributions dissolve into patterns that cannot be traced or revoked. Van den Hoven said that “the people who thought they were playing a game have clearly been fooled.”

Bogost coined exploitationware for a swindle that exchanged badges for behavior, years before phone cameras were mapping playgrounds and living rooms for corporate AI. Pokémon Go extended that bargain across the physical world and carried the resulting technology into a military supply chain. The game told its players to catch ’em all. Its owners gathered far more.

Palantir just released a new surveillance system that fuses satellites, radars and every camera into one real-time tracker of people and movement

We have to consider the possibility (probability?) that with Flock as the eyes, a system like this could be overlaid onto the US and we could be the targets.

Another reason we cannot allow Flock to exist.

Carmakers keep loading new cars with driver aids, but a surprising share of owners never turn the fanciest ones on

• A study found 25.9 percent of car owners don’t use adaptive cruise control.
• Many car owners also don’t like using augmented reality head-up displays.
• Just 27.3 percent of car owners regularly change their car’s driving mode.