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Just a few months ago we released Nano Banana, our Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model. From restoring old photos to generating mini figurines, Nano Banana was a big step in image editing that empowered casual creators to express their creativity. Today, we’re introducing Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image), our new state-of-the art image generation and editing model. Built on Gemini 3 Pro, Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini’s state-of-the-art reasoning and real-world knowledge to visualize information better than ever before.
How Nano Banana Pro helps you bring any idea or design to lifeNano Banana Pro can help you visualize any idea and design anything - from prototypes, to representing data as infographics, to turning handwritten notes into diagrams.With Nano Banana Pro, now you can:Generate more accurate, context-rich visuals based on enhanced reasoning, world knowledge and real-time informationWith Gemini 3’s advanced reasoning, Nano Banana Pro doesn’t just create beautiful images, it also helps you create more helpful content. You can get accurate educational explainers to learn more about a new subject, like context-rich infographics and diagrams based on the content you provide or facts from the real world. Nano Banana Pro can also connect to Google Search’s vast knowledge base to help you create a quick snapshot for a recipe or visualize real-time information like weather or sports.
An infographic of the common house plant, String of Turtles, with information on origins, care essentials and growth patterns.Prompt: Create an infographic about this plant focusing on interesting information.
Step-by-step infographic for making Elaichi Chai (cardamom tea), demonstrating the ability to visualize recipes and real-world information.Prompt: Create an infographic that shows how to make elaichi chai
We used Nano Banana Pro to pull in real-time weather via Search grounding to build a pop-art infographic.
Generate better visuals with more accurate, legible text directly in the image in multiple languagesNano Banana Pro is the best model for creating images with correctly rendered and legible text directly in the image, whether you’re looking for a short tagline, or a long paragraph. Gemini 3 is great at understanding depth and nuance, which unlocks a world of possibilities with image editing and generation - especially with text. Now you can create more detailed text in mockups or posters with a wider variety of textures, fonts and calligraphy. With Gemini’s enhanced multilingual reasoning, you can generate text in multiple languages, or localize and translate your content so you can scale internationally and/or share content more easily with friends and family.
A black and white storyboard sketch showing an establishing shot, medium shot, close-up, and POV shot for a film scene.
The word ‘BERLIN’ integrated into the architecture of a city block, spanning across multiple buildings.Prompt: View of a cozy street in Berlin on a bright sunny day, stark shadows. the old houses are oddly shaped like letters that spell out “BERLIN” Colored in Blue, Red, White and black. The houses still look like houses and the resemblance to letters is subtle.
Calligraphy inspired by meaning, showcasing the ability to generate expressive text with a wider variety of textures and fonts.Prompt: make 8 minimalistic logos, each is an expressive word, and make letters convey a message or sound visually to express the meaning of this word in a dramatic way. composition: flat vector rendering of all logos in black on a single white background
A beverage campaign concept showcasing accurate translation and rendering of English text into Korean.Prompt: translate all the English text on the three yellow and blue cans into Korean, while keeping everything else the same
Prompt: A vibrant, eye-catching “TYPOGRAPHY” design on a textured off-white background. The letters are bold, blocky, extra condensed and create a 3D effect with overlapping layers of bright blue and hot pink, each with a halftone dot pattern, evoking a retro print aesthetic. 16:9 aspect ratio
Blending text and texture in a creative way by integrating the phrase into a woodchopping scene.Prompt: Create an image showing the phrase “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood” made out of wood chucked by a woodchuck.
Consistency by design: With Nano Banana Pro, you can blend more elements than ever before, using up to 14 images and maintaining the consistency and resemblance of up to 5 people. Whether turning sketches into products or blueprints into photorealistic 3D structures, you can now bridge the gap between concept and creation. Apply your desired visual look and feel to your mockups with ease, ensuring your branding remains seamless and consistent across every touchpoint.
Maintaining the consistency of up to 14 inputs, including multiple characters, across a complex composition.Prompt: A medium shot of the 14 fluffy characters sitting squeezed together side-by-side on a worn beige fabric sofa and on the floor. They are all facing forwards, watching a vintage, wooden-boxed television set placed on a low wooden table in front of the sofa. The room is dimly lit, with warm light from a window on the left and the glow from the TV illuminating the creatures’ faces and fluffy textures. The background is a cozy, slightly cluttered living room with a braided rug, a bookshelf with old books, and rustic kitchen elements in the background. The overall atmosphere is warm, cozy, and amused.
Prompt: Combine these images into one appropriately arranged cinematic image in 16:9 format and change the dress on the mannequin to the dress in the image
Prompt: Combine these images into one appropriately arranged cinematic image in 16:9 format
A high-fashion editorial shot set in a desert landscape that maintains the consistency and resemblance of the people from the 6 input photos.Prompt: Put these five people and this dog into a single image, they should fit into a stunning award-winning shot in the style if [sic] a fashion editorial. The identity of all five people and their attire and the dog must stay consistent throughout but they can and should be seen from different angles and distances in [sic] as is most natural and suitable to the scene. Make the colour and lighting look natural on them all, they look like they naturally fit into this fashion show.
Studio-quality creative controls: With Nano Banana Pro’s new capabilities we are putting advanced creative controls directly into your hands. Select, refine and transform any part of an image with improved localized editing. Adjust camera angles, change the focus and apply sophisticated color grading, or even transform scene lighting (e.g. changing day to night or creating a bokeh effect). Your creations are ready for any platform, from social media to print, thanks to a range of available aspect ratios and available 2K and 4K resolution
Change the look and feel of an image for a range of platforms by adapting the aspect ratio.Prompt: change aspect ratio to 1:1 by reducing background. The character, remains exactly locked in its current position
Lighting and focus controls applied to transform a scene from day to night.
Obscure or enlighten a section of your image with lighting controls to achieve specific dramatic effects.
Prompt: Generate an image with an intense chiaroscuro effect. The man should retain his original features and expression. Introduce harsh, directional light, appearing to come from above and slightly to the left, casting deep, defined shadows across the face. Only slivers of light illuminating his eyes and cheekbones, the rest of the face is in deep shadow.
Bring out the details of your composition by adjusting the depth of field or focal point (e.g., focusing on the flowers).
How you can try Nano Banana Pro todayAcross our products and services, you now have a choice: the original Nano Banana for fast, fun editing, or Nano Banana Pro for complex compositions requiring the highest quality and visually sophisticated results.Consumers and students: Rolling out globally in the Gemini app when you select ‘Create images’ with the ‘Thinking’ model. Our free-tier users will receive limited free quotas, after which they will revert to the original Nano Banana model. Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers receive higher quotas. For AI Mode in Search, Nano Banana Pro is available in the U.S. for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. For NotebookLM, Nano Banana Pro is also available for subscribers globally.Professionals: We’re upgrading image generation in Google Ads to Nano Banana Pro to put cutting-edge creative and editing power directly into the hands of advertisers globally. It’s also rolling out starting today to Workspace customers in Google Slides and Vids.Developers and enterprise: Starting to roll out in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, and in Google Antigravity to create rich UX layouts & mockups; enterprises can start building in Vertex AI for scaled creation today and it’s coming soon to Gemini Enterprise.Creatives: Starting to roll out to Google AI Ultra subscribers in Flow, our AI filmmaking tool, to give creatives, filmmakers and marketers even more precision and control over their frames and scenes.
How to identify AI-generated images in the Gemini appWe believe it’s critical to know when an image is AI-generated. This is why all media generated by Google’s tools are embedded with our imperceptible SynthID digital watermark.Today, we are putting a powerful verification tool directly in consumers’ hands: you can now upload an image into the Gemini app and simply ask if it was generated by Google AI, thanks to SynthID technology. We are starting with images, but will expand to audio and video soon.
In addition to SynthID, we will maintain a visible watermark (the Gemini sparkle) on images generated by free and Google AI Pro tier users, to make images even more easy to detect as Google AI-generated.Recognizing the need for a clean visual canvas for professional work, we will remove the visible watermark from images generated by Google AI Ultra subscribers and within the Google AI Studio developer tool.You can find out more about how we’re increasing transparency in AI content with SynthID in our blog post.
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The U. S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.
The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.
Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.
Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.
The Border Patrol has recently grown even more powerful through collaborations with other agencies, drawing information from license plate readers nationwide run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, private companies and, increasingly, local law enforcement programs funded through federal grants. Texas law enforcement agencies have asked Border Patrol to use facial recognition to identify drivers, documents show.
This active role beyond the borders is part of the quiet transformation of its parent agency, U. S. Customs and Border Protection, into something more akin to a domestic intelligence operation. Under the Trump administration’s heightened immigration enforcement efforts, CBP is now poised to get more than $2.7 billion to build out border surveillance systems such as the license plate reader program by layering in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
The result is a mass surveillance network with a particularly American focus: cars.
This investigation, the first to reveal details of how the program works on America’s roads, is based on interviews with eight former government officials with direct knowledge of the program who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, as well as dozens of federal, state and local officials, attorneys and privacy experts. The AP also reviewed thousands of pages of court and government documents, state grant and law enforcement data, and arrest reports.
The Border Patrol has for years hidden details of its license plate reader program, trying to keep any mention of the program out of court documents and police reports, former officials say, even going so far as to propose dropping charges rather than risk revealing any details about the placement and use of their covert license plate readers. Readers are often disguised along highways in traffic safety equipment like drums and barrels.
The Border Patrol has defined its own criteria for which drivers’ behavior should be deemed suspicious or tied to drug or human trafficking, stopping people for anything from driving on backcountry roads, being in a rental car or making short trips to the border region. The agency’s network of cameras now extends along the southern border in Texas, Arizona and California, and also monitors drivers traveling near the U. S.-Canada border.
And it reaches far into the interior, impacting residents of big metropolitan areas and people driving to and from large cities such as Chicago and Detroit, as well as from Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Houston to and from the Mexican border region. In one example, AP found the agency has placed at least four cameras in the greater Phoenix area over the years, one of which was more than 120 miles (193 kilometers) from the Mexican frontier, beyond the agency’s usual jurisdiction of 100 miles (161 kilometers) from a land or sea border. The AP also identified several camera locations in metropolitan Detroit, as well as one placed near the Michigan-Indiana border to capture traffic headed towards Chicago or Gary, Indiana, or other nearby destinations.
Border Patrol’s parent agency, U. S. Customs and Border Protection, said they use license plate readers to help identify threats and disrupt criminal networks and are “governed by a stringent, multi-layered policy framework, as well as federal law and constitutional protections, to ensure the technology is applied responsibly and for clearly defined security purposes.”
“For national security reasons, we do not detail the specific operational applications,” the agency said. While the U. S. Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 miles of the border, it is legally allowed “to operate anywhere in the United States,” the agency added.
While collecting license plates from cars on public roads has generally been upheld by courts, some legal scholars see the growth of large digital surveillance networks such as Border Patrol’s as raising constitutional questions. Courts have started to recognize that “large-scale surveillance technology that’s capturing everyone and everywhere at every time” might be unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches, said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University.
Today, predictive surveillance is embedded into America’s roadways. Mass surveillance techniques are also used in a range of other countries, from authoritarian governments such as China to, increasingly, democracies in the U. K. and Europe in the name of national security and public safety.
“They are collecting mass amounts of information about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know … engaging in dragnet surveillance of Americans on the streets, on the highways, in their cities, in their communities,” Nicole Ozer, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, said in response to the AP’s findings. “These surveillance systems do not make communities safer.”
In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country.
Gutierrez Lugo was pulled over by a local police officer in Kingsville, a small Texas city near Corpus Christi that lies about 100 miles from the Mexican border. The officer, Richard Beltran, cited the truck’s speed of 50 mph (80 kph) in a 45 mph (72 kph) zone as the reason for the stop.
But speeding was a pretext: Border Patrol had requested the stop and said the black Dodge pickup with a white trailer could contain contraband, according to police and court records. U. S. Route 77 passes through Kingsville, a route that state and federal authorities scrutinize for trafficking of drugs, money and people.
Gutierrez Lugo, who through a lawyer declined to comment, was interrogated about the route he drove, based on license plate reader data, per the police report and court records. He consented to a search of his car by Beltran and Border Patrol agents, who eventually arrived to assist.
They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash. No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo and an effort by prosecutors to seize the cash, vehicle and trailer as contraband was eventually dropped.
Luis Barrios owns the trucking company, Paquetería El Guero, that employed the driver. He told AP he hires people with work authorization in the United States and was taken aback by the treatment of his employee and his trailer.
“We did everything right and had nothing to hide, and that was ultimately what they found,” said Barrios, who estimates he spent $20,000 in legal fees to clear his driver’s name and get the trailer out of impound.
Border Patrol agents and local police have many names for these kinds of stops: “whisper,” “intel” or “wall” stops. Those stops are meant to conceal — or wall off — that the true reason for the stop is a tip from federal agents sitting miles away, watching data feeds showing who’s traveling on America’s roads and predicting who is “suspicious,” according to documents and people interviewed by the AP.
In 2022, a man from Houston had his car searched from top to bottom by Texas sheriff’s deputies outside San Antonio after they got a similar tipoff from Border Patrol agents about the driver, Alek Schott.
Federal agents observed that Schott had made an overnight trip from Houston to Carrizo Springs, Texas, and back, court records show. They knew he stayed overnight in a hotel about 80 miles (129 kilometers) from the U. S.-Mexico border. They knew that in the morning Schott met a female colleague there before they drove together to a business meeting.
At Border Patrol’s request, Schott was pulled over by Bexar County sheriff’s deputies. The deputies held Schott by the side of the road for more than an hour, searched his car and found nothing.
“The beautiful thing about the Texas Traffic Code is there’s thousands of things you can stop a vehicle for,” said Joel Babb, the sheriff’s deputy who stopped Schott’s car, in a deposition in a lawsuit Schott filed alleging violations of his constitutional rights.
According to testimony and documents released as part of Schott’s lawsuit, Babb was on a group chat with federal agents called Northwest Highway. Babb deleted the WhatsApp chat off his phone but Schott’s lawyers were able to recover some of the text messages.
Through a public records act request, the AP also obtained more than 70 pages of the Northwest Highway group chats from June and July of this year from a Texas county that had at least one sheriff’s deputy active in the chat. The AP was able to associate numerous phone numbers in both sets of documents with Border Patrol agents and Texas law enforcement officials.
The chat logs show Border Patrol agents and Texas sheriffs deputies trading tips about vehicles’ travel patterns — based on suspicions about little more than someone taking a quick trip to the border region and back. The chats show how thoroughly Texas highways are surveilled by this federal-local partnership and how much detailed information is informally shared.
In one exchange a law enforcement official included a photo of someone’s driver’s license and told the group the person, who they identified using an abbreviation for someone in the country illegally, was headed westbound. “Need BP?,” responded a group member whose number was labeled “bp Intel.” “Yes sir,” the official answered, and a Border Patrol agent was en route.
Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement shared information about U. S. citizens’ social media profiles and home addresses with each other after stopping them on the road. Chats show Border Patrol was also able to determine whether vehicles were rentals and whether drivers worked for rideshare services.
In Schott’s case, Babb testified that federal agents “actually watch travel patterns on the highway” through license plate scans and other surveillance technologies. He added: “I just know that they have a lot of toys over there on the federal side.”
After finding nothing in Schott’s car, Babb said “nine times out of 10, this is what happens,” a phrase Schott’s lawyers claimed in court filings shows the sheriff’s department finds nothing suspicious in most of its searches. Babb did not respond to multiple requests for comment from AP.
The Bexar County sheriff’s office declined to comment due to pending litigation and referred all questions about the Schott case to the county’s district attorney. The district attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
The case is pending in federal court in Texas. Schott said in an interview with the AP: “I didn’t know it was illegal to drive in Texas.”
Today, the deserts, forests and mountains of the nation’s land borders are dotted with checkpoints and increasingly, surveillance towers, Predator drones, thermal cameras and license plate readers, both covert and overt.
Border Patrol’s parent agency got authorization to run a domestic license plate reader program in 2017, according to a Department of Homeland Security policy document. At the time, the agency said that it might use hidden license plate readers ”for a set period of time while CBP is conducting an investigation of an area of interest or smuggling route. Once the investigation is complete, or the illicit activity has stopped in that area, the covert cameras are removed,” the document states.
But that’s not how the program has operated in practice, according to interviews, police reports and court documents. License plate readers have become a major — and in some places permanent — fixture of the border region.
In a budget request to Congress in fiscal year 2024, CBP said that its Conveyance Monitoring and Predictive Recognition System, or CMPRS, “collects license plate images and matches the processed images against established hot lists to assist … in identifying travel patterns indicative of illegal border related activities.” Several new developer jobs have been posted seeking applicants to help modernize its license plate surveillance system in recent months. Numerous Border Patrol sectors now have special intelligence units that can analyze license plate reader data, and tie commercial license plate readers to its national network, according to documents and interviews.
Border Patrol worked with other law enforcement agencies in Southern California about a decade ago to develop pattern recognition, said a former CBP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Over time, the agency learned to develop what it calls “patterns of life” of vehicle movements by sifting through the license plate data and determining “abnormal” routes, evaluating if drivers were purposely avoiding official checkpoints. Some cameras can take photos of a vehicle’s plates as well as its driver’s face, the official said.
Another former Border Patrol official compared it to a more technologically sophisticated version of what agents used to do in the field — develop hunches based on experience about which vehicles or routes smugglers might use, find a legal basis for the stop like speeding and pull drivers over for questioning.
The cameras take pictures of vehicle license plates. Then, the photos are “read” by the system, which automatically detects and distills the images into numbers and letters, tied to a geographic location, former CBP officials said. The AP could not determine how precisely the system’s algorithm defines a quick turnaround or an odd route. Over time, the agency has amassed databases replete with images of license plates, and the system’s algorithm can flag an unusual “pattern of life” for human inspection.
The Border Patrol also has access to a nationwide network of plate readers run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, documents show, and was authorized in 2020 to access license plate reader systems sold by private companies. In documents obtained by the AP, a Border Patrol official boasted about being able to see that a vehicle that had traveled to “Dallas, Little Rock, Arkansas and Atlanta” before ending up south of San Antonio.
Documents show that Border Patrol or CBP has in the past had access to data from at least three private sector vendors: Rekor, Vigilant Solutions and Flock Safety.
Through Flock alone, Border Patrol for a time had access to at least 1,600 license plate readers across 22 states, and some counties have reported looking up license plates on behalf of CBP even in states like California and Illinois that ban sharing data with federal immigration authorities, according to an AP analysis of police disclosures. A Flock spokesperson told AP the company “for now” had paused its pilot programs with CBP and a separate DHS agency, Homeland Security Investigations, and declined to discuss the type or volume of data shared with either federal agency, other than to say agencies could search for vehicles wanted in conjunction with a crime. No agencies currently list Border Patrol as receiving Flock data. Vigilant and Rekor did not respond to requests for comment.
Where Border Patrol places its cameras is a closely guarded secret. However, through public records requests, the AP obtained dozens of permits the agency filed with Arizona and Michigan for permission to place cameras on state-owned land. The permits show the agency frequently disguises its cameras by concealing them in traffic equipment like the yellow and orange barrels that dot American roadways, or by labeling them as jobsite equipment. An AP photographer in October visited the locations identified in more than two dozen permit applications in Arizona, finding that most of the Border Patrol’s hidden equipment remains in place today. Spokespeople for the Arizona and Michigan departments of transportation said they approve permits based on whether they follow state and federal rules and are not privy to details on how license plate readers are used.
Texas, California, and other border states did not provide documents in response to the AP’s public records requests.
CBP’s attorneys and personnel instructed local cities and counties in both Arizona and Texas to withhold records from the AP that might have revealed details about the program’s operations, even though they were requested under state open records laws, according to emails and legal briefs filed with state governments. For example, CBP claimed records requested by the AP in Texas “would permit private citizens to anticipate weaknesses in a police department, avoid detection, jeopardize officer safety, and generally undermine police efforts.” Michigan redacted the exact locations of Border Patrol equipment, but the AP was able to determine general locations from the name of the county.
One page of the group chats obtained by the AP shows that a participant enabled WhatsApp’s disappearing messages feature to ensure communications were deleted automatically.
The Border Patrol’s license plate reader program is just one part of a steady transformation of its parent agency, CBP, in the years since 9/11 into an intelligence operation whose reach extends far beyond borders, according to interviews with former officials.
CBP has quietly amassed access to far more information from ports of entry, airports and intelligence centers than other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. And like a domestic spy agency, CBP has mostly hidden its role in the dissemination of intelligence on purely domestic travel through its use of whisper stops.
Border Patrol has also extended the reach of its license plate surveillance program by paying for local law enforcement to run plate readers on their behalf.
A federal grant program called Operation Stonegarden, which has existed in some form for nearly two decades, has handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to buy automated license plate readers, camera-equipped drones and other surveillance gear for local police and sheriffs agencies. Stonegarden grant funds also pay for local law enforcement overtime, which deputizes local officers to work on Border Patrol enforcement priorities. Under President Donald Trump, the Republican-led Congress this year allocated $450 million for Stonegarden to be handed out over the next four fiscal years. In the previous four fiscal years, the program gave out $342 million.
In Cochise County, Arizona, Sheriff Mark Dannels said Stonegarden grants, which have been used to buy plate readers and pay for overtime, have let his deputies merge their mission with Border Patrol’s to prioritize border security.
“If we’re sharing our authorities, we can put some consequences behind, or deterrence behind, ‘Don’t come here,’” he said.
In 2021, the Ward County, Texas, sheriff sought grant funding from DHS to buy a “covert, mobile, License Plate Reader” to pipe data to Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector Intelligence Unit. The sheriff’s department did not respond to a request for comment.
Other documents AP obtained show that Border Patrol connects locally owned and operated license plate readers bought through Stonegarden grants to its computer systems, vastly increasing the federal agency’s surveillance network.
How many people have been caught up in the Border Patrol’s dragnet is unknown. One former Border Patrol agent who worked on the license plate reader pattern detection program in California said the program had an 85% success rate of discovering contraband once he learned to identify patterns that looked suspicious. But another former official in a different Border Patrol sector said he was unaware of successful interdictions based solely on license plate patterns.
In Trump’s second term, Border Patrol has extended its reach and power as border crossings have slowed to historic lows and freed up agents for operations in the heartland. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, for example, was tapped to direct hundreds of agents from multiple DHS agencies in the administration’s immigration sweeps across Los Angeles, more than 150 miles (241 kilometers) from his office in El Centro, California. Bovino later was elevated to lead the aggressive immigration crackdown in Chicago. Numerous Border Patrol officials have also been tapped to replace ICE leadership.
The result has been more encounters between the agency and the general public than ever before.
“We took Alek’s case because it was a clear-cut example of an unconstitutional traffic stop,” said Christie Hebert, who works at the nonprofit public interest law firm Institute for Justice and represents Schott. ”What we found was something much larger — a system of mass surveillance that threatens people’s freedom of movement.”
AP found numerous other examples similar to what Schott and the delivery driver experienced in reviewing court records in border communities and along known smuggling routes in Texas and California. Several police reports and court records the AP examined cite “suspicious” travel patterns or vague tipoffs from the Border Patrol or other unnamed law enforcement agencies. In another federal court document filed in California, a Border Patrol agent acknowledged “conducting targeted analysis on vehicles exhibiting suspicious travel patterns” as the reason he singled out a Nissan Altima traveling near San Diego.
In cases reviewed by the AP, local law enforcement sometimes tried to conceal the role the Border Patrol plays in passing along intelligence. Babb, the deputy who stopped Schott, testified he typically uses the phrase “subsequent to prior knowledge” when describing whisper stops in his police reports to acknowledge that the tip came from another law enforcement agency without revealing too much in written documents he writes memorializing motorist encounters.
Once they pull over a vehicle deemed suspicious, officers often aggressively question drivers about their travels, their belongings, their jobs, how they know the passengers in the car, and much more, police records and bodyworn camera footage obtained by the AP show. One Texas officer demanded details from a man about where he met his current sexual partner. Often drivers, such as the one working for the South Carolina moving company, were arrested on suspicion of money laundering merely for carrying a few thousand dollars worth of cash, with no apparent connection to illegal activity. Prosecutors filed lawsuits to try to seize money or vehicles on the suspicion they were linked to trafficking.
Schott warns that for every success story touted by Border Patrol, there are far more innocent people who don’t realize they’ve become ensnared in a technology-driven enforcement operation.
“I assume for every one person like me, who’s actually standing up, there’s a thousand people who just don’t have the means or the time or, you know, they just leave frustrated and angry. They don’t have the ability to move forward and hold anyone accountable,” Schott said. “I think there’s thousands of people getting treated this way.”
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When it comes to sharing moments between family and friends, what device you have shouldn’t matter — sharing should just work. But we’ve heard from many people that they want a simpler way to share files between devices.
Today, we’re introducing a way for Quick Share to work with AirDrop. This makes file transfer easier between iPhones and Android devices, and starts rolling out today to the Pixel 10 family.
We built this with security at its core, protecting your data with strong safeguards that were tested by independent security experts. It’s just one more way we’re bringing better compatibility that people are asking for between operating systems, following our work on RCS and unknown tracker alerts.
We’re looking forward to improving the experience and expanding it to more Android devices. See it in action on the Pixel 10 Pro in this video, and try it out for yourself!
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Preserving code that shaped generations: Zork I, II, and III go Open Source
A game that changed how we think about play
Today, we’re preserving a cornerstone of gaming history that is near and dear to our hearts. Together, Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT License. Our goal is simple: to place historically important code in the hands of students, teachers, and developers so they can study it, learn from it, and, perhaps most importantly, play it.
A game that changed how we think about play
When Zork arrived, it didn’t just ask players to win; it asked them to imagine. There were no graphics, no joystick, and no soundtrack, only words on a screen and the player’s curiosity. Yet those words built worlds more vivid than most games of their time. What made that possible wasn’t just clever writing, it was clever engineering.
Beneath that world of words was something quietly revolutionary: the Z-Machine, a custom-built engine. Z-Machine is a specification of a virtual machine, and now there are many Z-Machine interpreters that we used today that are software implementations of that VM. The original mainframe version of Zork was too large for early home computers to handle, so the team at Infocom made a practical choice. They split it into three games titled Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III, all powered by the same underlying system. This also meant that instead of rebuilding the game for each platform, they could use the Z-Machine to interpret the same story files on any computer. That design made Zork one of the first games to be truly cross-platform, appearing on Apple IIs, IBM PCs, and more.
Game preservation takes many forms, and it’s important to consider research as well as play. The Zork source code deserves to be preserved and studied. Rather than creating new repositories, we’re contributing directly to history. In collaboration with Jason Scott, the well-known digital archivist of Internet Archive fame, we have officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III. Those pull requests add a clear MIT LICENSE and formally document the open-source grant.
Accompanying documentation where available, such as build notes, comments, and historically relevant files.
Clear licensing and attribution, via MIT LICENSE.txt and repository-level metadata.
This release focuses purely on the code itself. It does not include commercial packaging or marketing materials, and it does not grant rights to any trademarks or brands, which remain with their respective owners. All assets outside the scope of these titles’ source code are intentionally excluded to preserve historical accuracy.
More than forty years later, Zork is still alive and easier than ever to play. The games remain commercially available via The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games. For those who enjoy a more hands on approach, the games can be compiled and run locally using ZILF, the modern Z-Machine interpreter created by Tara McGrew. ZILF compiles ZIL files into Z3s that can be run with Tara’s own ZLR which is a sentence I never thought I’d write, much less say out loud! There are a huge number of wonderful Z-machine runners across all platforms for you to explore.
Here’s how to get started running Zork locally with ZILF. From the command line, compile and assembly the zork1.zil into a runnable z3 file.
Then run your Z3 file in a Zmachine runner. I’m using Windows Frotz from David Kinder based on Stefan Jokisch’s Frotz core:
Or, if you’re of a certain age as I am, you can apply a CRT filter to your Terminal and use a CLI implementation of a Zmachine like Matthew Darby’s “Fic” written in Python:
We will use the existing historical repositories as the canonical home for Zork’s source. Once the initial pull requests land under the MIT License, contributions are welcome. We chose MIT for its simplicity and openness because it makes the code easy to study, teach, and build upon. File issues, share insights, or submit small, well-documented improvements that help others learn from the original design. The goal is not to modernize Zork but to preserve it as a space for exploration and education.
Zork has always been more than a game. It is a reminder that imagination and engineering can outlast generations of hardware and players. Bringing this code into the open is both a celebration and a thank you to the original Infocom creators for inventing a universe we are still exploring, to Jason Scott and the Internet Archive for decades of stewardship and partnership, and to colleagues across Microsoft OSPO, Xbox, and Activision who helped make open source possible.
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Read the original on www.microsoft.com »
Chrono Divide is a fan-made project which aims to recreate the original “Red Alert 2” from the “Command & Conquer” series using web technologies. The result is a game client that runs in your web browser, with no additional plugins or applications installed.
The project initially started out as an experiment and was meant to prove that it was possible to have a fully working, cross-platform RTS game running in a web browser. Now, with a playable version already available, the end-goal is reaching feature parity with the original vanilla “Red Alert 2” engine.
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Read the original on chronodivide.com »
40 years ago — on November 18, 1985 — a new comic strip appeared in the newspaper: Calvin and Hobbes.
Hobbes was a stuffed tiger, but in the mind of 6-year-old Calvin he was a wryly observant companion for his day-to-day challenges and wildly imaginative adventures.
Adventures of the beloved duo lasted just a decade. Their creator — cartoonist Bill Watterson — walked away from Calvin and Hobbes at the height of its popularity.
Watterson — who has given few interviews — seamlessly combined the silly, the fantastic and the profound in his strip. That slightly demented quality captured editor Lee Salem, who spoke with NPR’s Renee Montagne in 2005.
The following exchange has been edited for length and clarity.
Lee Salem: I remember it when I first read it, and it all… it literally took my breath away. And I circulated it in the office, and the response was immediate. It was fresh, it was funny, the art was strong, and here’s this archetypal little boy living a life that some of us lived or wanted to live or remembered living. …
One of the single favorites that I have is actually on my wall in the office, and it shows Calvin in bed, obviously with a fever or something. He’s got a thermometer in his mouth. You hear the words from a television. He’s watching a soap opera — you know, “If you leave your spouse and I’ll leave mine and we can get married.” And it goes on and on and on, as lurid soap operas sometimes do. And Calvin turns to the reader with a big grin on his face, and he says, “Sometimes, I learn more when I stay home from school than when I go.” And I just thought that was so funny. And, amazingly, when it ran, we actually got complaints from readers who said, “Well, you know, you’re advocating that children stay home and watch adult soap operas.” And somehow, the whole sense of irony was lost in that, but I don’t think it was lost on me. I love that strip.
Renee Montagne: You know, I describe him as a little boy with his tiger friend, but there’s so much more to it than that. So there’s one where they’re sitting philosophizing, as they often do, on the grass, this time under a tree. Hobbes is looking at the sky and saying, “Do you think there’s a god?” And they’re both gazing and thinking, and then in the fourth panel, Calvin thinks about it. And then do you remember what he says?
Salem: Yeah. “Yeah, well, someone is out to get me.”
Montagne: Calvin was preceded into existence by some pretty famous little boys: Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace. What made him different?
Salem: You know, we saw Calvin living in a world he never made, populated by adults and teachers, and he was trying to deal with that and accomplish what he could. I think Calvin has a bit more perhaps Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in him than Charlie Brown. Hobbes I see almost as the alter ego of Calvin. He’s a balancing act that allows Calvin to exist. He provides commentary on some of Calvin’s crazy adventures and attitudes.
Montagne: Hobbes goes from being a stuffed tiger when there’s any other person in the room, to the real Hobbes we know and love. Is Hobbes real or not?
Salem: He is to me, and obviously he is to Calvin. Whether he is to the other characters or not is an open question. But I think one of the things Bill brought to the art board was this wonderful ability to take a child’s imagination and fantasy life and make it real. It really is irrelevant whether Hobbes has an existence as we would define it. For Calvin, he is there. He’s a buddy, he’s a companion, he’s a friend.
Lee Salem edited Calvin and Hobbes until the comic strip ended in 1995. Creator Bill Watterson said at the time that he wanted to explore a canvas beyond the four panels of a daily newspaper, and to work at what he called “a more thoughtful pace,” but has produced little public work since then.
...
Read the original on text.npr.org »
40 years ago — on November 18, 1985 — a new comic strip appeared in the newspaper: Calvin and Hobbes.
Hobbes was a stuffed tiger, but in the mind of 6-year-old Calvin he was a wryly observant companion for his day-to-day challenges and wildly imaginative adventures.
Adventures of the beloved duo lasted just a decade. Their creator — cartoonist Bill Watterson — walked away from Calvin and Hobbes at the height of its popularity.
Watterson — who has given few interviews — seamlessly combined the silly, the fantastic and the profound in his strip. That slightly demented quality captured editor Lee Salem, who spoke with NPR’s Renee Montagne in 2005.
The following exchange has been edited for length and clarity.
Lee Salem: I remember it when I first read it, and it all… it literally took my breath away. And I circulated it in the office, and the response was immediate. It was fresh, it was funny, the art was strong, and here’s this archetypal little boy living a life that some of us lived or wanted to live or remembered living. …
One of the single favorites that I have is actually on my wall in the office, and it shows Calvin in bed, obviously with a fever or something. He’s got a thermometer in his mouth. You hear the words from a television. He’s watching a soap opera — you know, “If you leave your spouse and I’ll leave mine and we can get married.” And it goes on and on and on, as lurid soap operas sometimes do. And Calvin turns to the reader with a big grin on his face, and he says, “Sometimes, I learn more when I stay home from school than when I go.” And I just thought that was so funny. And, amazingly, when it ran, we actually got complaints from readers who said, “Well, you know, you’re advocating that children stay home and watch adult soap operas.” And somehow, the whole sense of irony was lost in that, but I don’t think it was lost on me. I love that strip.
Renee Montagne: You know, I describe him as a little boy with his tiger friend, but there’s so much more to it than that. So there’s one where they’re sitting philosophizing, as they often do, on the grass, this time under a tree. Hobbes is looking at the sky and saying, “Do you think there’s a god?” And they’re both gazing and thinking, and then in the fourth panel, Calvin thinks about it. And then do you remember what he says?
Salem: Yeah. “Yeah, well, someone is out to get me.”
Montagne: Calvin was preceded into existence by some pretty famous little boys: Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace. What made him different?
Salem: You know, we saw Calvin living in a world he never made, populated by adults and teachers, and he was trying to deal with that and accomplish what he could. I think Calvin has a bit more perhaps Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in him than Charlie Brown. Hobbes I see almost as the alter ego of Calvin. He’s a balancing act that allows Calvin to exist. He provides commentary on some of Calvin’s crazy adventures and attitudes.
Montagne: Hobbes goes from being a stuffed tiger when there’s any other person in the room, to the real Hobbes we know and love. Is Hobbes real or not?
Salem: He is to me, and obviously he is to Calvin. Whether he is to the other characters or not is an open question. But I think one of the things Bill brought to the art board was this wonderful ability to take a child’s imagination and fantasy life and make it real. It really is irrelevant whether Hobbes has an existence as we would define it. For Calvin, he is there. He’s a buddy, he’s a companion, he’s a friend.
Lee Salem edited Calvin and Hobbes until the comic strip ended in 1995. Creator Bill Watterson said at the time that he wanted to explore a canvas beyond the four panels of a daily newspaper, and to work at what he called “a more thoughtful pace,” but has produced little public work since then.
...
Read the original on www.npr.org »
Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.
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Read the original on www.phoronix.com »
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Read the original on arxiv.org »
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