Tech

Pentagon Says US Military Personnel Targeted Using Commercial Location Data

Published

3 weeks ago

31 May 2026

U.S. forces deployed to war zones “have been targeted using commercially available location data,” reports Reuters, citing “reports fielded by military officials.”

Reuters calls it “an illustration of how the global surveillance economy is shaping the battlefield.”

In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.” The message, sent on April 14, offered no further specifics, but Centcom’s area of responsibility includes the Gulf, where U.S. forces are facing off against the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz.
The disclosure was the first official confirmation that U.S. forces had been targeted in an active war zone, Wyden and a bipartisan group of legislators said in a letter sent on Thursday to the Pentagon. “Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes,” the letter warned.

Wyden said in a statement that it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”

“The letter from U.S. lawmakers to the Pentagon said that, given what military officials know about the trade in location data, they should have acted faster to protect their personnel,” the artiles adds, “for example by disabling the unique advertising ID attached to military-issued devices, automatically turning off location sharing on smartphones in the field, and steering staff away from Google’s Chrome web browser toward more privacy-focused alternatives.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader JoeyRox for sharing the article.

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This Brazilian Armored Vehicle Is A 40,000 Pound Amphibious Beast

Published

11 minutes ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

Brazil, and South America as a whole, is home to some of the toughest terrain on earth. There are large swathes of rainforest, swamp, mountains, and whatever else you might think of. As a result, traversing that terrain with anything other than a huge military vehicle might be a tough ask.

Enter the Guarani, a six-wheel drive amphibious armored vehicle made with the help of Italian company Iveco and the Brazilian Army. Like other amphibious military vehicles, the Guarani is huge. Empty, it weighs 33,069 pounds. When it’s loaded and set up for amphibious operations, it can weigh up to 42,990 pounds. It is also over 22-and-a-half feet long.

It’s primarily used as an armored personnel carrier and in that configuration, it can carry a crew of three alongside eight additional soldiers. However, Brazil and Iveco designed the Guarani so it can be modular. That not only means different weapons can be mounted, but it can also be used for search and rescue and a mobile command center.

The Guarani is designed to go anywhere and do anything

Under the hood is an 8.7-liter turbo diesel inline-six that generates 375 horsepower. On land, that gives it a top speed of 56 miles per hour. In the water, through its pair of propellers, that speed drops a bit to just over 4 miles per hour.

As far as armament. It can carry whatever is mounted to the roof turret. That includes a .50-caliber machine gun, a 7.62-millimeter machine gun, a 30-millimeter cannon, a 40-millimeter grenade launcher, or even an anti-aircraft weapons system made by Saab.

On the armor end, it’s made of steel and hardened to withstand mines of improvised explosive devices. Additionally, all that heft gives it strength to tow “vehicle of same class”-worth of weight, according to Iveco. Meaning, that if another Guarani gets in a jam, you can tow one out. Iveco also notes that it can be transported within the cargo bay of a C-130 Hercules cargo plane, or the Brazilian-made Embraer KC-390 Millennium.

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Brewing Espresso With Ultrasonic Assistance

Published

25 minutes ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

There are as almost as many kinds of coffee as there are of coffee drinkers, with each method for preparing the beverage appealing to a different kind of palate: moka pots, filter coffee, pour-over coffee, French presses, cold brews, espresso, and more produce their own unique flavours by extracting different compounds from the grounds to different degrees. Now, a new method has joined the throng: ultrasonic-assisted extraction, which can produce even an espresso at room temperature.

Espresso is normally made by forcing hot water through tightly-packed, finely-ground coffee beans, quickly producing a concentrated extraction. Its one of the hardest kinds of coffee to consistently make well, since the outcome is influenced by everything from grind size and packing density to temperature, pressure, and more. Ultrasonic agitation helps here by creating cavitation bubbles, which form shock waves as they collapse, breaking open the bean structure and producing small, strong jets of water. The experimental apparatus was built into a modified espresso machine. An ultrasonic transducer delivers vibrations to the basket containing the room-temperature slurry of coffee grounds for two or three minutes.

To quantify the results, the researchers analysed total dissolved solids, extraction yield, pH, colour, volatile components, and caffeine and chlorogenic acid contents. By varying ultrasonic power and grind size, the extraction yield and dissolved solids could be adjusted to closely match traditional espresso or cold-brew coffee. The other metrics had no significant differences, and a survey of 100 coffee drinkers found no preference between this and traditional espresso. When the drinkers tried the cold-brew coffees, they preferred the version made with ultrasonic assistance. The experiment succeeded in its goal of reducing energy consumption: the ultrasonic-assisted coffee took about a quarter as much power to make.

If you still prefer a more traditional approach, we’ve covered some beautiful espresso machines before, including one made out of motorcycle engine parts.

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Tech

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for June 22

Published

52 minutes ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Only one clue really threw me off, and that was 8-Across, but filling in the others solved that one, too. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

completed-nyt-mini-crossword-puzzle-for-june-22-2026.png — The completed NYT Mini Crossword puzzle for June 22, 2026.
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NYT/Screenshot by CNET

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Like jerky and dried fruit
Answer: CHEWY

6A clue: Technology that Marconi introduced to the Vatican in 1931, in order to broadcast the pope’s blessings worldwide
Answer: RADIO

7A clue: Bring together as one
Answer: UNIFY

8A clue: Prefix with -path or -political
Answer: SOCIO

9A clue: Successful song
Answer: HIT

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Clobber
Answer: CRUSH

2D clue: Capital of Vietnam
Answer: HANOI

3D clue: Monarch’s official decree
Answer: EDICT

4D clue: In-flight “perk” that’s notoriously unstable
Answer: WIFI

5D clue: Toy on a string
Answer: YOYO

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Tech

Etzioni on AI: What the World Cup tells us about the best roles for humans and machines

Published

1 hour ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

Pregame ceremonies in Seattle on June 19, 2026, before the U.S.-Australia World Cup Group D match. (GeekWire Photo / John Cook)

In soccer, a single blown offside call can decide who advances and who goes home. But what can you do? Referees are only human.

Well, the 2026 World Cup has put computer vision and AI on the officiating crew: video review, a sensor inside the ball, semi-automated offside calls, cameras bolted into every rafter. And the tech has already decided a goal.

On June 15 in Monterrey, Sweden were busy thrashing Tunisia when Mattias Svanberg came off the bench and scored with his first touch. The linesman’s flag shot up. Offside. The goal was gone, until it wasn’t. Video review handed it back, because the ball itself had registered a touch the human eye missed: a faint flick off Alexander Isak that reset the play and left Svanberg onside. Yet the cameras missed the flick. The sensor inside the ball caught it.

How does a ball overrule a linesman? Start with what FIFA has actually wired into the tournament. Sony’s Hawk-Eye underpins the video review, the goal-line decisions, the semi-automated offside system, and a “last touch” feature that settles who knocked the ball out for a corner.

Chenliang Xu, a computer-vision researcher at the University of Rochester, told the university’s news service it’s “a very sophisticated system that glues together multiple computer vision techniques.” Underneath, that means calibrated cameras, models trained to spot the ball and the players and their poses, and a thin layer of logic that decides when a human should take a look.

Player and ball tracking run on neural networks trained on millions of labeled images, the same lineage of models behind face unlock and the perception stack in a self-driving car.

Xu compares the training to “teaching a child how to recognize things”: feed a model enough examples and it learns what matters. Sixteen cameras ring each stadium, because a single angle can be blocked or fooled, and many angles can be triangulated into a three-dimensional picture of the play. It works the way your eyes do.

“If you block one of your eyes,” Xu says, “it’s very hard to perceive depth.” Two eyes recover what one eye cannot. So do 16 cameras. The reconstruction lands in seconds, and a person signs off.

How is it so fast? The system is narrow. According to FIFA, the cameras throw off more than 150 million tracking points per match, more data than any all-purpose model could process in real time. The networks are tuned for one job, recognizing players and a ball, and stripped of everything else, which is precisely what makes them quick.

The narrowness is also a confession. The system measures the one thing a camera and a sensor can measure cleanly, a body’s position at the instant the ball is struck, and it stays out of the call that starts most arguments: whether an offside player was actually interfering with play. The machine gets the measurement. The referee keeps the judgment. A good reminder that currently AI is Assistive Intelligence, not more.

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}

But the quietest AI at this World Cup isn’t on the broadcast.

A torn hamstring can end a player’s World Cup, and a contender’s with it. Long before kickoff, clubs pour the data from GPS vests and motion sensors, the gear sold by firms like Catapult and Zone7, into models that flag when a player’s accumulated workload is bending toward injury, sometimes before the athlete feels a thing. It produces no spike on a graphic and no slow-motion replay. It produces a number that tells a coach to rest a hamstring for a day.

The cameras get the highlight, but the hamstring monitor keeps the players from being, well, hamstrung.

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Tech

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints, Answers for June 22 #637

Published

1 hour ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Are you watching the World Cup? Today’s Connections: Sports Edition includes one related category. If you’re struggling with the puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Cape is another one.

Green group hint: Play ball!

Blue group hint: I’m taking my talents to South Beach.

Purple group hint: Neat on your feet.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: First words of World Cup countries, in English.

Green group: MLB stadiums.

Blue group: LeBron-era Heat stars.

Purple group: Adidas shoes.

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The completed NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for June 22, 2026.
NYT/Screenshot by CNET

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is first words of World Cup countries, in English. The four answers are Bosnia, Ivory, South and United.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is MLB stadiums. The four answers are Comerica, Kauffman, Nationals and Wrigley.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is LeBron-era Heat stars. The four answers are Allen, Bosh, James and Wade.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is Adidas shoes. The four answers are Samba, Stan Smith, Superstar and Ultraboost.

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Tech

Someone Forked systemd Over Its New Birth Date Field

Published

2 hours ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

The blog Linuxiac reports:
A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd’s recently added support for storing a user’s birth date in JSON user records.

The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverting the change that added the new optional birthDate field.

Importantly, this is not a new init system, a wider redesign of systemd, or a general-purpose alternative to the upstream project. Its stated purpose is to remain close to upstream systemd while removing what the author describes as “surveillance enablement”… The author recommends testing the fork in a virtual machine before using it on real hardware and warns nightly builds are more likely to be unstable than named releases.

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Tech

Toy Story 5 Is A Surprisingly Thoughtful Critique Of Technology

Published

2 hours ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

After five films, digital technology has finally arrived in the cloth-and-plastic world of Toy Story. But the film, directed by franchise veteran Andrew Stanton and McKenna Grace, mostly avoids the easy trope of making technology inherently bad. Instead, it’s a disruptive force that can be either helpful or harmful, depending on how it’s used. The film makes the case that parents need to take a hands-on approach to help kids manage their gadgets, especially when it comes to managing screen time or dealing with bullying.

Slight spoilers ahead for Toy Story 5.

Toy Story 5 centers on Bonnie, a young girl struggling to make friends who was gifted Woody, Buzz and Andy’s other toys from the first three films. She’s the only kid in her neighborhood not using a Lilypad tablet — instead, she prefers to play the old fashioned way, by crafting scenarios purely out of her imagination. Her parents reluctantly decide to get her a Lilypad (played by Greta Lee) as a way to connect with other kids.

Like a McKinsey consultant storming into a quaint local business, Lilypad decides she knows the best way for Bonnie to make friends. The tablet sends friend requests to several girls Bonnie knows, and she miraculously gets an invite to a sleepover. But instead of playing together, all of the girls just zone out endlessly on their Lilypads, barely saying a word to each other. Those same girls later start bullying Bonnie for playing with older toys, which leads to Bonnie’s parents wisely disabling the Lilypad’s social network access.

Pixar

It might seem crazy that parents even have to worry about social networking for 8-year-olds, but platforms like Zigazoo and JusTalk Kids already exist. They market themselves as safe spaces where kids can chat with close friends and family members, but there’s still room for awful social dynamics. Kids will be kids, and many of them are little jerks.

While Lilypad stumbles to help Bonnie connect, older toys like Cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack) also realize they’re out of touch with the way kids play today. When Jessie tries to sneak her way into Bonnie’s sleepover, she immediately becomes a source of shame.

Research shows a relationship between managing anxiety and imaginative play in kids, and Toy Story’s main cast make convenient messengers for that information. But the film surprised me by finding ways to make room for Lilypad and other new devices. A messageboard app on Lilypad helps Bonnie connect with Blaze, another young girl who still plays with toys the old fashioned way. Without Lilypad, they probably never would have met.

It’s hokey, but it works in the context of the film. And it’s also the reality parents have to live with today. Despite their potential harms, it’s helpful for kids to sometimes watch TV on the go. There are tons of educational games on iPadOS and Android, and both platforms also have a bevy of video chatting apps for staying in touch with friends and relatives. The key is moderation and parental supervision.

Toy Story 5 would be even more of an insightful critique if it made room for new types of play. Lilypad just has a few basic games for kids. But these days, any iPad can play Minecraft, a game that is appealing precisely because it so closely mirrors imaginative play. It’s also complex enough to grow with kids into adulthood, more so than the likes of Woodie and Buzz Lightyear.

Now that tablets have entered the world of Toy Story, it’s unclear where the franchise can go next. Pixar has already wrung the series’ core concept dry. We’ve explored the inner lives of toys, we’ve seen them wrestle with the meaning of their existence and they’ve even confronted death directly. (Toy Story 3 must have traumatized an entire generation.) Toy Story 5 isn’t nearly as essential as the original trilogy, but at least it’s a reminder to parents that they can’t just sit back and relax when it comes to tech.

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When A Favicon Becomes The Entire Website

Published

2 hours ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

Putting hidden data in places where few expect it can be a fun hobby or even a professional career. In the case of [Tim Wehrle] it’s just the former. His most recent project in this area uses a favicon image for storing a HTML-based website and rendering its contents within the browser after the favicon has been downloaded.

To pull this off, a very basic HTML page was turned into a series of UTF-8 encoded bytes that were then declared to be a standard PNG image. The original 208 byte payload plus 4-byte PNG header only used part of a 9×9 pixel favicon. With a larger favicon image as typically used you could thus easily store more data, whether as visual noise like here or a bit more hidden.

Of course there’s a catch, and in this case it’s the Typescript code to unpack the bytes from the “image” and render them; you have to load that separately. But still, in these days of all-singing, all-dancing websites that take forever to render, it’s refreshing to see what you can do with so few bytes that they fit in a favicon.

As for the purpose of such an approach, that’s left as an exercise for the reader, but you’re more than welcome to take a poke at the GitHub project and the demonstration site..

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Apple’s new home product releases will stretch into 2028

Published

2 hours ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

Apple’s home automation updates and new product roadmap powered by Siri AI will kick off in 2026 with HomePod and Apple TV updates, but if you’re excited for the robotic arm for a Home Hub, you’re going to be waiting a while.

It’s no secret that Apple’s new AI push will include several new products like the long-rumored Home Hub. However, the timing of some of those products’ releases remains in question.

According to the “Power On” newsletter from Bloomberg, the new Apple TV and HomePod mini could arrive at any time in 2026, while the robotic arm attachment for HomeHub won’t be ready for some time yet.

The Home Hub itself is expected in 2026 as well, which means an Apple Home-focused release cycle or event could occur in the fall. That device should launch as a standalone display that can be paired with various mounts like speakers, wall mounts, and articulating arms.

The new Apple TV is expected to support Apple Intelligence in some specific capacity and may have a new Siri Remote. The HomePod mini would also gain access to Siri AI, but that’s likely the only major feature of the product.

The robotic arm accessory for the Home Hub, which may include an upgraded AI-focused version of the tablet device, isn’t expected until 2027 or 2028. That device has always been more of a moonshot, with the Pixar Lamp-like device with a personality still in early testing.

It’s sure to be a busy hardware season for Apple given the three new iPhones, two new Apple Watches, and a slew of Macs expected by the end of the calendar year.

It’s not really a question of if these products are coming, but when. With everything else releasing, Apple will need to find time to reveal its new Home Hub product category and sell people on why the new Apple TV and HomePod mini are necessary.

The September keynote will already be packed as it is, and I don’t think these products will fit the “just drop a press release” model. My expectation is that there will be a lengthy Apple Home segment during a primarily Mac-focused keynote in October.

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SmallRun.net Enters The Marketplace Market

Published

3 hours ago

22 June 2026

NewsAdmin

So you have a project that you love, and everyone else loves too. People start saying “you should sell this” but where? Well, there’s a new marketplace you might want to consider called called SmallRun, aiming at makers and their, well, small production runs.

SmallRun will absolutely host your custom PCBs, on-demand 3D prints, and other traditional maker products — but they’ll also happily sell your merch, too. Along with electronics and hardware, they aim to allow you to sell products in categories like tabletop gaming, sciences, and yes, accessories/apparel.

For sellers, they offer automatic payouts and promise to take care of the taxes by integrating with Stripe. That said, they’re still working on getting the whole VAT thing set up for products imported to the EU. EU to EU sales are apparently OK. They’ll host build logs, which may drive engagement with your product. There’s even a handy tool to import your existing listings from eBay, Tindie, Lectronz, Etsy, Shopify, or Crowd Supply if you’re already in the biz. They make their money by taking a cut of your sales: eight percent, plus forty cents per listing.

Depending on your perspective, you might wonder if we need another marketplace, To that we can only say: “Let a thousand flowers bloom!” Competition should drive these marketplaces to continuously improve and we all win.

If you’re selling online, even packaging can become a project. If you’re not, but are interested in starting, our “From Project to Kit” series from ten years back remains surprisingly relevant.

Thanks to [Aron] for the tip!

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