Embattled surveillance technology company Flock Safety unveiled a “generous” severance package for voluntary employee departures on Friday, according to a report in Wired.

Flock reportedly expects a significant portion of its 1,500-person workforce to express interest in the buyouts, and said it will grant them to a majority of those who are interested. The company’s internal announcement described these packages as the “most generous” it has ever offered.

By letting employees depart voluntarily, Flock can say goodbye to team members demoralized by the ongoing backlash over the company’s license plate recognition technology. Wired also reports that without buyouts, the company would “almost certainly” need to lay off some staff.

In August, The Washington Post identified 46 cases where police officers have been accused of misusing Flock technology, including cases where they allegedly stalked their wives, girlfriends, or exes. Florida and Texas both said they will stop using the startup’s technology, and an anti-surveillance advocacy group identified 90 cities that dropped Flock in August alone — a fourfold increase from the previous month.

TechCrunch has reached out to Flock for comment. The startup’s CEO Garrett Langley recently told the All-In podcast that the “biggest damage” caused by the backlash has been to “internal morale.”

The big picture: Researchers in Hong Kong have developed a technique that uses injected radio signals to extract audio and other information from headphones, phones and smart-home devices. Called InjectEave, the method targets analog components that can leak signals too weak to capture through conventional electromagnetic eavesdropping. In testing, the researchers recovered understandable headphone audio from up to 30 meters away, including through walls.

The research comes from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The team presented its paper, “Injected and Leaked: Actively Inducing Side-Channel Leakage Using Electromagnetic Injection and Hardware Nonlinearity,” at USENIX Security 2026.

Traditional electromagnetic side-channel attacks rely on passively collecting radiation emitted by electronics. That’s often difficult with audio, since low-frequency signals produce weak emissions that get lost easily in background noise.

InjectEave takes a different route. An attacker transmits an electromagnetic signal toward a device at a frequency between 0 MHz and 9 MHz. The researchers did not disclose the precise settings needed for the attack.

The injected signal interacts with nonlinear parts inside the device, including amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters, power converters and switching MOSFETs. Those components can mix the injected RF signal with audio or other low-frequency activity. The device then emits a modified signal that nearby radio equipment can pick up and analyze.

The researchers used a USRP B210 software-defined radio, antennas, a Siglent SSA3075X Plus spectrum analyzer and a laptop. They also used an RF power amplifier in some tests to increase the range.

The team tested 11 commercial products. They included Sony ZX110AP wired headphones, Apple earbuds, UGreen MAX2 headphones, Philips TAH2020 headphones, HP H231R headphones and a Flyingvoice P23GW VoIP phone. The researchers also tested smart fans from Oidire and Xiaomi, as well as lamps from Jingzao and Xiaomi.

According to the paper, most tests worked at distances greater than two meters, including through walls. Device-specific ranges generally ran from one to six meters. With an RF amplifier, the researchers recovered intelligible headphone audio from up to 30 meters.

“Our new project, InjectEave, shows that RF signals can induce information leakage from everyday headphones, allowing an attacker to recover headphone audio from up to 30 meters away, including through walls,” Yan Long, an assistant professor at HKUST in Guangzhou, said in an email to The Register.

Long said the researchers confirmed the issue in devices made by Sony, HP and Philips, among others.

The team also tested scenarios involving equipment hidden in a suitcase, behind a hotel-room wall or inside office furniture. The experiments suggest the attack could be carried out outside a lab, although it still requires nearby radio equipment and knowledge of how a given device responds to the injected signal.

Headphones and phones are the most obvious targets because they may carry private conversations. But the technique could also reveal activity in a home or office. With smart lamps and fans, the team said it could capture control signals and power-use patterns that may indicate when devices are being used.

The researchers said conventional digital protections would not stop InjectEave because the leakage occurs in the analog hardware path, rather than in encrypted data or software.

“InjectEave is immune to digital defenses such as encryption, masking, and randomization, because the leakage comes from the analog path,” the researchers wrote.

They said shielding, filtering and twisted-pair wiring can reduce the amount of RF energy that reaches vulnerable components. Those measures may make the attack harder to carry out, but the researchers said they do not guarantee protection.

President Donald Trump has responded in characteristic fashion to the recent debate around AI safety — by declaring that these concerns are part of a long line of hoaxes “generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country.”

On Saturday, Trump began his musings on AI by writing on his social network Truth Social that “many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence.” So he posted a poll where followers could vote on a new name for the technology — Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, or Supreme Intelligence.  (The poll is still ongoing as of publication time) 

A couple hours later, Trump followed up with a post claiming that attempts at “the decimation, or destruction, of AI” are one of “many” Democratic hoaxes, similar to “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, Global Warming, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, Men in Women’s Sports, [and] Transgender for Everyone.”

Trump then insisted that he “will not stand by and let this happen,” adding that this so-called hoax “began with an attack on our Data Centers, until people realized how wealthy and prestigious they were for the Communities in which they were built.” But after, in his telling, “the crazed Data Center attack has largely failed,” critics are “going straight at AI.”

Trump did not offer any evidence to back up his claim that widespread suspicion of AI and data centers is not organic and sincere. (Both Republicans and Democrats have taken aim at data centers, and New York recently became the first state to halt permits for large projects.)

The president’s post also echoes his comments at a golf tournament last weekend, when he said he’s open to “guardrails,” but also argued, “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up.”

On Saturday, Trump went on to say that he will “cherish [the AI industry,] help it, and watch over it, as it grows,” but he’s also forming an AI Force, similar to the Space Force that he established in his first term.

“To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI ‘Czar’ — Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!” he added.

The president did not say what the AI Force and AI czar’s duties will entail. Venture capitalist Daivd Sacks stepped down as Trump’s AI and crypto czar earlier this year, moving on to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The AI safety debate recently intensified after an AI researcher said he was quitting Anthropic over concerns that the leading AI companies “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and are “gambling with our lives.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei subsequently released a plan to “pace the frontier,” which was seemingly endorsed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Critics of the AI industry have suggested that many of these concerns around the technology’s supposed existential threat are a distraction from AI’s more immediate harms.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, meanwhile, called Trump on-stage during the All-In Summit (which Sacks co-hosts), agreed with the president that the AI backlash is a “hoax,” and insisted that “we’re not going to let” a slowdown happen.

Manus went back to being an independent business in September after China blocked Meta’s acquisition of the start-up.

AI start-up Manus is reportedly gearing up to double its valuation to $4bn in an upcoming fundraising round, after Meta’s acquisition of the company was forcibly unwound by Chinese authorities earlier this year.

According to Bloomberg, Manus’s fresh $500m round is set to close “soon”, after which the company could become China’s most valuable start-up in its sector. The talks are still in early stages and the outcome could change, sources told the publication.

Manus is behind a general AI agent called Manus AI that utilises multiple frontier models and operates in a complete sandbox environment to help users with multi-step tasks.

Meta acquired the Singapore-headquartered company (developed by China’s Butterfly Effect) late last December at a reported value of more than $2bn. This marked a fourfold jump from its valuation in April 2025, highlighting the perceived value of its general AI agent that took the industry by storm following its launch.

The acquisition, however, faced near-immediate scrutiny from Chinese authorities, which launched a probe shortly following the deal’s announcement.

According to national rules, the Chinese government, which is increasingly protective of its innovative technology and companies, needs to approve the export of certain technologies, including AI. Meta, at the time, said that the deal “complied fully with applicable law”.

Manus had already assimilated with Meta by the time the deal had to be unwound. Existing Manus investors, including Tencent Holdings, ZhenFund and HSG, had already received their acquisition proceeds, which needed to be reversed.

The Chinese start-up formally resumed operations as an independent business in September, months after the deal was struck down by China’s National Development and Reform Commission in April. Tech giant Tencent is now Manus’s largest external shareholder.

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