Tootfinder

A profile of Flock Safety, which operates 80K AI surveillance cameras across the US and hit a $7.5B valuation in March 2025, as it expands into US-made drones (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America
With more than 80,000 AI-powered cameras across the U.S., Flock Safety has become one of cops’ go-to surveillance tools. Now CEO Garrett Langley has both police tech giant Axon and Chinese drone maker DJI in his sights on the way to his goal: Preventing all crime in the U.S.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #RoundMidnight
Flock:
🎵 Capillary Waves
#Flock
https://open.spotify.com/track/6TjyU83aOzedrpHNBayulE

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
A Flock of Seagulls:
🎵 Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)
#AFlockofSeagulls
https://sankt-otten.bandcamp.com/track/sehnen-a-flock-of-seagulls-wishing-cover
https://open.spotify.com/track/41TpvOhSCOJOHuOUggy9sv

It's been about three weeks, but Metacurity's digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush is back!
This issue's selection covers
--Russian cybersecurity companies are tools for global expansion,
--Merrick Garland's fears of a judicial system cyberattack came true,
--Flock has plans for ubiquitous surveillance to stop crime,
--Misinformation from adversaries now runs ram…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 8/16/25, 8/23/25, and 8/30/25
Russian cybersecurity companies are tools for global expansion, Merrick Garland's fears of a judicial system cyberattack came true, Flock has plans for ubiquitous surveillance to stop crime, Misinformation from adversaries now runs rampant with no US pushback, AI can't capture personality, more

License plate reader company Flock launches new product that detects human voices https://therecord.media/flock-surveillance-technology-gunshot-voice-detection

This week’s #ThursdayFiveList, courtesy of @…, is #BeneathTheWaves.
1. Daneshevskaya, “Challenger Deep”—

It's time for San Francisco to follow Austin's and Evanston's lead and end its Flock contract.
https://m.ai6yr.org/@ai6yr/115273074215468855

California AG sues city for allowing out-of-state searches of license plate reader database https://therecord.media/california-lawsuit-el-cajon-police-out-of-state-searches-flock-database

It's good to have hobbies

A Flock of Seagulls had another song? #totp

Renters Flock to Cities While Buyers Turn to the Outskirts
Globe St - August 18
“As affordability challenges and economic uncertainty persist, more affluent tenants are increasingly choosing to rent within prime metropolitan markets.”
https://www.globest.com/2025/0…

Renters Flock to Cities While Buyers Turn to the Outskirts
The new landscape is a blend of different renter profiles.

Smoothness of extremizers for certain inequalities of the Radon transform
Taryn C. Flock
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00783 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00783

Smoothness of extremizers for certain inequalities of the Radon transform
The Radon transform is a bounded operator from $L^p$ of Euclidean space to $L^q$ of the manifold of all affine hyperplanes in $\mathbb{R}^n$ for certain exponents depending dimension. Extremizers have been determined for certain values of $q$ and $p$, but most remain open. We show that extremizers are infinitely differentiable whenever the exponents in the associated Euler-Lagrange equation, $q-1$ and $\frac1{p-1}$, are integers. The proof adapts the method of Christ and Xue, to the case wher…

Schools are next for Flock Safety’s automatic license place reader cameras https://therecord.media/flock-safety-raptor-technologies-schools-surveillance

Public records show AWS is aggressively promoting AI surveillance tech to law enforcement agencies, partnering with companies such as Flock Safety and ZeroEyes (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

Inside Amazon’s Aggressive Push To Get Cops Using AI Surveillance
Inside Amazon’s Aggressive Push To Get Cops Using AI

Flock: completed!
I haven't written about it for a while, but I had been playing Flock in small chunks since I started it back in December, until I reached a bit where I couldn't quite parse the instructions. Having identified and charmed the Emperor Cosmot and the Cloaked Rustic, the forests were unveiled and I explored, including the giant mushrooms of the Skyfish Caverns.

Eventually, AI-generated audiences will purchase NFTs offered by AI-generated programs using AI-generated money...
Amazon Invests In 'Netflix of AI' Start-Up Fable, Which Lets You Make Your Own TV Shows
https://slashdot.org/story/444998

Amazon Invests In 'Netflix of AI' Start-Up Fable, Which Lets You Make Your Own TV Shows - Slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Edward Saatchi isn't totally sure people will flock to Showrunner, the new AI-generated TV show service his company is launching publicly this week. But he has a vote of confidence from Amazon, which has invested in Fable, Saatchi's San Francisco-bas...

Shepherding Miorita and its flock: A group of near-Earth asteroids driven by apsidal and von Zeipel-Lidov-Kozai secular resonances. A source of low-perihelion asteroids
R. de la Fuente Marcos, C. de la Fuente Marcos, O. V\u{a}duvescu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21251

Shepherding Miorita and its flock: A group of near-Earth asteroids driven by apsidal and von Zeipel-Lidov-Kozai secular resonances. A source of low-perihelion asteroids
Context. Secular resonances can control the dynamical evolution of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and, in some cases, lead to increased orbital stability. Asteroid 622577 Miorita (2014 LU14 ) was the first NEA found by the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and exhibits unusual dynamical traits although it approaches Venus, Earth, and Mars at relatively close range. Aims. Here, we investigate the orbital context of Miorita and search for possible dynamical analogs within the NEA population. Methods.…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
A Flock of Seagulls:
🎵 Space Age Love Song
#AFlockofSeagulls
https://djrapha.bandcamp.com/track/a-flock-of-seagulls-space-age-love-song-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/0xzn2U71zNWLeJbE4Zat4C

Fearful of Russian aggression, Poles flock to military training (Barbara Erling/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/fearful-russian-aggression-poles-flock-military-training-2025-09-13/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250913/p8#a250913p8

This seems like a pretty good rundown on Flock cameras. Also, I like his style.
https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ
Edit: oh hey, he's on Mastodon: @…

Summer is drawing to a close

Globally Coupled Particle Swarm Optimization
Liguo Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21721 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21721

Globally Coupled Particle Swarm Optimization
All things in the world are interconnected, the only difference is the strength of their connections.Particle swarm optimization(PSO) simulates the foraging behavior of a flock of birds, information is transmitted to quickly find the location of food. This is a process of information exchange, where birds influence each other, constantly adjusting their position and speed values,and updating the optimal position information.In this paper, we propose a globally coupled particle swarm ptimization…

I wonder how long before we start to respond to the maga-nazi's this way, from the Bellini opera "Norma"..
It is in Italian, the lyrics are quite bloody:
To battle! to battle! In the forest of Gaul
Brave warriors outnumber the trees.
As hungry wolves fall upon the flock,
We shall strike at the soldiers of Rome.
Blood! Blood! The Gallic axes
Are bathed in the blood of the Roman...
Over the impure waters of the Liguri
It gushes with…

CBP Had Access to More than 80,000 Flock AI Cameras Nationwide https://www.404media.co/cbp-had-access-to-more-than-80-000-flock-ai-cameras-nationwide/

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
Flock of Dimes:
🎵 Afraid
#FlockofDimes
https://flockofdimes.bandcamp.com/track/afraid
https://open.spotify.com/track/7JWB5SERTCpz9IJCau2C9R

The Johnson Amendment is not exactly a difficult law to parse.
To keep their sweet tax-exempt status, religious groups can’t endorse political candidates.
But evangelicals want to have their cake and eat it too. -- They don’t want to pay taxes, but they do want ministers to be able to climb into the pulpit and tell their flock who to vote for.
The "Alliance Defending Freedom", the hard-right law firm with a truly staggering track record of getting the United St…

Goodbye, separation of church and state
Churches now have extra special speech rights, thanks to Trump.

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
A Flock Of Seagulls:
🎵 Space Age Love Song
#NowPlaying #AFlockOfSeagulls
https://djrapha.bandcamp.com/track/a-flock-of-seagulls-space-age-love-song-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/0xzn2U71zNWLeJbE4Zat4C

'Very true,' said the Duchess: 'flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is — "Birds of a feather flock together."'
...
Only mustard isn't a bird,' Alice remarked.
...
'It's a mineral, I think,' said Alice.
'...said the Duchess...there's a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that is — "The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours."'
--Lewis Carroll

A flock of blue-and-yellow tanagers is sitting in the tree outside, flying back and forth to a privet to load up on food.

Polarization at millimeter wavelengths caused by drifting grains in protoplanetary disks
Moritz Lietzow-Sinjen, Stefan Reissl, Mario Flock, Sebastian Wolf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24594

Polarization at millimeter wavelengths caused by drifting grains in protoplanetary disks
During the evolution of protoplanetary disks, dust grains start to grow, form larger particles, settle to the midplane, and rearrange the disk, mainly by the inward radial drift. Because of this, dust pebbles with an irregular shape usually align mechanically and thus cause polarization signatures in their thermal radiation due to dichroic emission or absorption. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the potential to trace the impact of mechanical grain alignment in protoplanetary disks on the …

Volunteers flock to immigration courts to support migrants arrested in the hallways (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-court-arrests-ice-bd145fae56c0d493ba52418cc66ef3b7
http://www.memeorandum.com/250720/p27#a250720p27

This is the perfect expression of a theme that never shows up in mass media:
Police are running out of legitimate work and are willing to invent new work solely to keep their jobs.
Crime rates have dropped precipitously over the past few decades, with some spikes around the financial crisis and pandemic. In a sane society, we would have also been reducing police budgets and headcounts
(See also: #Freikorps

#ShamelesslyStolenFromTumblr

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #RadcliffeAndMaconie
Flock of Dimes:
🎵 Long After Midnight
#FlockofDimes
https://flockofdimes.bandcamp.com/track/long-after-midnight
https://open.spotify.com/track/1CZjmxYbeorwFzl4Ls4tnc

Console, which uses AI agents in Slack to resolve lower-level IT support tickets, raised a $23M Series A led by DST Global Partners and Thrive Capital (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/console-ai-for-it-raises-series-a

Console, AI For IT Startup, Raises $22 Million From DST, Thrive
One-year-old startup Console works with Ramp, Flock Safety and Scale AI. CEO Andrei Serban has raised a $23 million Series A to go beyond IT into HR and finance.

Learning general pair interactions between self-propelled particles
J\'er\^ome Hem, Alexis Poncet, Pierre Ronceray, Daiki Nishiguchi, Vincent D\'emery
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13667

Learning general pair interactions between self-propelled particles
Synthetic active matter systems, such as active colloids, often have complex interactions, which can be of hydrodynamic, chemical or electrostatic origin and cannot be computed from first principles. Here, we use Stochastic Force Inference to learn general pair interactions, including transverse forces and torques, between self-propelled Janus particles from experimental trajectories. We use data from two experiments: one where the particles flock, and one where the system remains disordered. T…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Flock of Dimes:
🎵 Long After Midnight
#FlockofDimes
https://flockofdimes.bandcamp.com/track/long-after-midnight
https://open.spotify.com/track/1CZjmxYbeorwFzl4Ls4tnc

Feds Used Local Cop's Password to Do Immigration Surveillance With Flock Cameras https://www.404media.co/feds-used-local-cops-password-to-do-immigration-surveillance-with-flock-cameras/

The real reason they are fighting, aside from obviously gaining huge media attention… is the huge media attention.
Once the insanity stops, they will have the cull, then take the eggs that they have from the flock and grow new birds plus get birds from elsewhere that also came from their flock.
It’s not rocket science, these people are just using the publicity to further their financial prospects. More Culture War grifters.
The screenshots are from the wayback machine, 2021 before they took down their website, for obvious reasons.
#charlatans #fools #antivax #grifters #ostrich #covid #birdflu

Replaced article(s) found for nlin.AO. https://arxiv.org/list/nlin.AO/new
[1/1]:
- A geometric condition for robot-swarm cohesion and cluster-flock transition
Casiulis, Arbel, van Waes, Lahini, Martiniani, Oppenheimer, Zion

Dynamical Analysis of the HD 169142 Planet-Forming Disk: Twelve Years of High-Contrast Polarimetry
Miles Lucas, Michael Bottom, Ruobing Dong, Myriam Benisty, Mario Flock, Maria Vincent, Jonathan Williams, Kyohoon Ahn, Thayne Currie, Vincent Deo, Olivier Guyon, Tomoyuki Kudo, Lucinda Lilley, Julien Lozi, Maxwell Millar-Blanchaer, Barnaby Norris, Sebasti\'an P\'erez, Boris Safonov, Peter Tuthill, Taichi Uyama, S\'ebastien Vievard, Manxuan Zhang

Dynamical Analysis of the HD 169142 Planet-Forming Disk: Twelve Years of High-Contrast Polarimetry
We present a dynamical analysis of the HD 169142 planet-forming disk based on high-contrast polarimetric imaging over a twelve-year observational period, offering insights into its disk evolution and planet-disk interactions. This study explores the evolution of scattered-light features and their relationship with millimeter continuum emission. Archival visible-to-near-infrared scattered-light observations from NACO, SPHERE, and GPI combined with new observations from SCExAO reveal persistent n…

How Surveillance Firms Use ‘Democracy’ As a Cover for Serving ICE and Trump https://www.404media.co/how-surveillance-firms-use-democracy-as-a-cover-for-serving-ice-and-trump/

Instabilities and turbulence in extensile swimmer suspensions
Purnima Jain, Navdeep Rana, Roberto Benzi, Prasad Perlekar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06239 h…

Instabilities and turbulence in extensile swimmer suspensions
We study low Reynolds number turbulence in a suspension of polar, extensile, self-propelled inertial swimmers. We review the bend and splay mechanisms that destabilize an ordered flock. The suspension is always unstable to bend perturbations. Using a minimal 1D model, we show that the splay-stable to splay-unstable transition occurs via a supercritical Hopf bifurcation. We perform high-resolution numerical simulations in 2D to study the varieties of turbulence present in this system transitioni…

Sharp endpoint extension inequalities for the moment curve on finite fields
Chandan Biswas, Emanuel Carneiro, Taryn C. Flock, Diogo Oliveira e Silva, Betsy Stovall, James Tautges
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08377

Sharp endpoint extension inequalities for the moment curve on finite fields
We investigate the sharp endpoint extension inequality for the moment curve in finite fields. We determine the optimal constant and characterize the maximizers in two complementary regimes: (i) low dimensions $d\leq 20$; (ii) large field cardinality $q\geq \frac{d(d-1)}{2 \log 6} + \frac{(2d-1)}{3}$. Our proof strategy relies on an intriguing interplay between analysis, algebra and combinatorics.

Hydrodynamical simulations of the vertical shear instability with dynamic dust and cooling rates in protoplanetary disks
Yuya Fukuhara, Mario Flock, Satoshi Okuzumi, Ryosuke T. Tominaga
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11156

Hydrodynamical simulations of the vertical shear instability with dynamic dust and cooling rates in protoplanetary disks
Turbulence in protoplanetary disks affects dust evolution and planetesimal formation. The vertical shear instability (VSI) is one of the candidate turbulence-driving mechanisms in the outer disk region. Since the VSI requires rapid gas cooling, dust grains in disks can influence and potentially control VSI-driven turbulence. However, VSI-driven turbulence has strong vertical motion, causing vertical dust diffusion. As a result, it remains unclear how turbulent structures and dust distributions …

ICE accede a una red nacional de cšmaras con inteligencia artificial, según datos https://www.404media.co/ice-accede-a-una-red-nacional-de-camaras-con-inteligencia-artificial-segun-datos/

Multi dust species inner rim in magnetized protoplanetary disks
Mario Flock, Ond\v{r}ej Chrenko, Takahiro Ueda, Myriam Benisty, Jozsef Varga, Roy van Boekel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04254

Multi dust species inner rim in magnetized protoplanetary disks
The inner regions of protoplanetary disks, within ten astronomical units, are where terrestrial planets are born. By developing a new class of multi-dust radiative magnetized inner rim models, we can gain valuable insights into the conditions during planet formation. Our goal is twofold: to study the influence of highly refractory dust species on the inner rim shape and to determine how the magnetic field affects the inner disk structure. The resulting temperature and density structures are ana…

Podcast: Why Are DHS Agents Wearing Meta Ray-Bans? https://www.404media.co/podcast-why-are-dhs-agents-wearing-meta-ray-bans/

Replaced article(s) found for astro-ph.EP. https://arxiv.org/list/astro-ph.EP/new
[1/1]:
- Shepherding Miorita and its flock: A group of near-Earth asteroids driven by apsidal and von Zeip...
R. de la Fuente Marcos, C. de la Fuente Marcos, O. V\u{a}duvescu

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Flock of Dimes:
🎵 Afraid
#FlockofDimes
#newRelease 🆕 single
https://flockofdimes.bandcamp.com/track/afraid
https://open.spotify.com/track/7JWB5SERTCpz9IJCau2C9R

Home Depot and Lowe's Share Data From Hundreds of AI Cameras With Cops https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from-hundreds-of-ai-cameras-with-cops/