Civil rights ac­tivist Dr. Patrick Breyer warns of an un­prece­dented “double-attack” on se­cure mes­sag­ing ahead of crit­i­cal Friday and Monday EU meet­ings.

Ahead of a highly crit­i­cal week­end for dig­i­tal civil rights in Europe, for­mer Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sound­ing the alarm. An un­prece­dented and out­ra­geous dou­ble-at­tack by European Parliament President Roberta Metsola (EPP) and EU gov­ern­ments threat­ens to im­pose mass sur­veil­lance and end anony­mous com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the EU. In re­sponse to this im­mi­nent threat, civil so­ci­ety has up­dated and re­launched the cam­paign plat­form fight­chat­con­trol.eu, en­abling cit­i­zens to im­me­di­ately email EU law­mak­ers and gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

Dr. Patrick Breyer, civil lib­er­ties ac­tivist and for­mer Member of the European Parliament, ex­plains:“What we are wit­ness­ing this week is a bla­tant dis­re­gard for de­mo­c­ra­tic processes and fun­da­men­tal rights. EP President Metsola is at­tempt­ing an un­prece­dented power play to res­ur­rect the ex­pired ‘Chat Control 1.0’ mass scan­ning regime, di­rectly over­rid­ing her own Parliament’s clear re­jec­tion from March. Her own EPP group op­posed in the fi­nal vote. This trick­ery be­trays European democ­racy. At the ex­act same time, the European Parliament is in the process of rush­ing a new scan­ning man­date, paving the way for fa­tal con­ces­sions in the tri­logue on Monday. EU cit­i­zens are fac­ing a dou­ble-at­tack on their right to pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence. We can­not let un­de­mo­c­ra­tic back­room deals de­stroy the safety, se­cu­rity, and con­fi­den­tial­ity of our dig­i­tal lives.”

The “Double Threat” This Weekend: What is at stake

Threat 1: Metsola’s Undemocratic Push for Chat Control 1.0 (Friday)EP President Metsola (EPP) is at­tempt­ing an un­prece­dented power play to res­ur­rect the tem­po­rary Chat Control 1.0 reg­u­la­tion. This move com­pletely ig­nores the fact that the European Parliament clearly re­jected it in its first read­ing in March and called on the Commission to with­draw the pro­posal. A re­cent leak re­veals that the Council is meet­ing this Friday to try and adopt a first-read­ing po­si­tion to force this through.

Threat 2: The Permanent CSAR Trilogue and Imminent Concessions (Monday, 29 June)Simultaneously, the fi­nal tri­logue ne­go­ti­a­tions on the per­ma­nent Chat Control 2.0 reg­u­la­tion (2022/0155) will take place this Monday. The European Parliament is set to rush a new man­date on de­tec­tion/​scan­ning on Monday morn­ing. Later that day, the tri­logue with the Council could see fa­tal con­ces­sions.

With EP lead­er­ship ac­tively med­dling, Breyer warns that the worst-case sce­nario cur­rently on the table for Monday is:

Mass scan­ning of pri­vate mes­sages: “Voluntary” mass scan­ning could be brought back, ef­fec­tively even made manda­tory as an en­force­able “risk mit­i­ga­tion” mea­sure.

Warrantless Scanning or­ders: Mandatory de­tec­tion or­ders could be agreed that are not ef­fec­tively tar­geted and lim­ited to crim­i­nal sus­pects and that do not re­quire a prior court or­der.

The End of Anonymous Communications: Mandatory age ver­i­fi­ca­tion for host­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices could be agreed, ef­fec­tively end­ing the right to com­mu­ni­cate anony­mously in Europe.

Relaunch of fight­chat­con­trol.eu: Citizens Called to Action

Because the EP is draw­ing up a new man­date on de­tec­tion/​scan­ning and the Council is try­ing to by­pass democ­racy, the civil so­ci­ety cam­paign fight­chat­con­trol.eu has been ur­gently re­launched to tar­get both the Member States and the Parliament’s lead ne­go­tia­tors.

The tool em­pow­ers cit­i­zens to con­tact their rep­re­sen­ta­tives with an email tem­plate sum­ma­riz­ing the le­gal and tech­ni­cal flaws of the cur­rent pro­pos­als, de­mand­ing ad­her­ence to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU Court of Justice’s de­ci­sions. These have been re­it­er­ated by the Council’s own le­gal ser­vice ear­lier this month.

Breyer con­cludes:“We have re­peat­edly shown that gen­uine child pro­tec­tion is pos­si­ble with­out de­stroy­ing the pri­vacy of 450 mil­lion Europeans. We need tar­geted, ev­i­dence-based in­ves­ti­ga­tions, se­cu­rity-by-de­sign, and the proac­tive dele­tion of ma­te­r­ial on the dark­net—not highly er­ror-prone al­go­rithms that crim­i­nal­ize in­no­cent fam­ily pho­tos. I urge all cit­i­zens, NGOs, and tech in­no­va­tors to make noise this week­end, use fight­chat­con­trol.eu, and tell their rep­re­sen­ta­tives to stand up for our rights.”

Further Information:

Campaign Website: https://​fight­chat­con­trol.eu

Politico Report on Metsola’s Push

Breyer’s 5-Point Action Plan for Genuine Child Protection

Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep

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Marfa Public Radio is lit­er­ally never asleep. It op­er­ates 24/7 (except when light­ning strikes) and there’s so much that goes on be­hind the scenes to make this hap­pen– fundrais­ing, com­pli­ance, pro­to­cols, emer­gency re­sponse, main­te­nance…the list goes on and on.

Do you lay awake won­der­ing what FCC com­pli­ance en­tails? Ever won­dered what NPR’s code of jour­nal­is­tic ethics in­volves for the news­room?

We may never be able to ex­plain what it takes to op­er­ate the sta­tion, but we can put you to sleep try­ing to.

For this fall mem­ber­ship drive we bring you Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep. It’s a sleep pod­cast wherein we read you the bor­ing doc­u­ments es­sen­tial to our jobs, in the hopes we might lull you into slum­ber.

We do ac­tu­ally hope that you fall asleep lis­ten­ing to this, but when you wake up, help us con­tinue to read our bor­ing doc­u­ments and keep Marfa Public Radio awake by do­nat­ing to the sta­tion at mar­fa­pub­l­i­cra­dio.org/​do­nate.

There’s a mo­ment in the movie Good Will Hunting which per­fectly sum­ma­rizes all the prob­lems with AI slop and on­line noise and in­fi­nite ad­vice con­tent.

Sean (played by Robin Williams) is sit­ting next to Will (Matt Damon) on a bench in Boston Public Garden. I live here, so I know it well. The area is im­pos­si­bly green, sur­rounded by wil­low trees and a sparkling pond and par­ents chas­ing their kids who are chas­ing some mal­lards who are chas­ing their duck­lings.

If you pause the movie scene at just the right mo­ment, you can ac­tu­ally see the ex­act spot my wife and I took our wed­ding pho­tos as we tor­tured 14 of our clos­est friends in 96-degree hu­mid­ity one July af­ter­noon.

In this par­tic­u­lar mo­ment of the film, Robin Williams de­liv­ers a leg­endary speech.

The en­tire thing is worth watch­ing (allow for five min­utes of sit­ting still af­ter­wards), but in ad­di­tion to the video, I’ve placed the tran­script be­low with my own em­pha­sis added.

If I asked you about art, you’d prob­a­bly give me the skinny on every art book ever writ­ten. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, po­lit­i­cal as­pi­ra­tions, him and the pope, sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never ac­tu­ally stood there and looked up at that beau­ti­ful ceil­ing. Seen that.If I asked you about women, you’d prob­a­bly give me a syl­labus of your per­sonal fa­vorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.​You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d prob­a­bly, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, look­ing to you for help.And if I asked you about love you prob­a­bly quote me a son­net. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been to­tally vul­ner­a­ble. Known some­one could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an an­gel on earth just for you, who could res­cue you from the depths of hell.And you would­n’t know what it’s like to be her an­gel and to have that love for her to be there for­ever. Through any­thing. Through can­cer. You would­n’t know about sleep­ing sit­ting up in a hos­pi­tal room for two months hold­ing her hand be­cause the doc­tors could see in your eyes that the term “visiting hours” does­n’t ap­ply to you.You don’t know about real loss, be­cause that only oc­curs when you love some­thing more than you love your­self. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love any­body that much.I look at you; I don’t see an in­tel­li­gent, con­fi­dent man; I see a cocky, scared shit­less kid. But you’re a ge­nius, Will. No one de­nies that. No one could pos­si­bly un­der­stand the depths of you. But you pre­sume to know every­thing about me be­cause you saw a paint­ing of mine and you ripped my fuck­in’ life apart.You’re an or­phan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are be­cause I read Oliver Twist? Does that en­cap­su­late you?Per­son­ally, I don’t give a shit about all that, be­cause you know what? I can’t learn any­thing from you I can’t read in some fuck­in’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fas­ci­nated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re ter­ri­fied of what you might say.Your move, chief.

If I asked you about art, you’d prob­a­bly give me the skinny on every art book ever writ­ten. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, po­lit­i­cal as­pi­ra­tions, him and the pope, sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never ac­tu­ally stood there and looked up at that beau­ti­ful ceil­ing. Seen that.

If I asked you about women, you’d prob­a­bly give me a syl­labus of your per­sonal fa­vorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.​

You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d prob­a­bly, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, look­ing to you for help.

And if I asked you about love you prob­a­bly quote me a son­net. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been to­tally vul­ner­a­ble. Known some­one could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an an­gel on earth just for you, who could res­cue you from the depths of hell.

And you would­n’t know what it’s like to be her an­gel and to have that love for her to be there for­ever. Through any­thing. Through can­cer. You would­n’t know about sleep­ing sit­ting up in a hos­pi­tal room for two months hold­ing her hand be­cause the doc­tors could see in your eyes that the term “visiting hours” does­n’t ap­ply to you.

You don’t know about real loss, be­cause that only oc­curs when you love some­thing more than you love your­self. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love any­body that much.

I look at you; I don’t see an in­tel­li­gent, con­fi­dent man; I see a cocky, scared shit­less kid. But you’re a ge­nius, Will. No one de­nies that. No one could pos­si­bly un­der­stand the depths of you. But you pre­sume to know every­thing about me be­cause you saw a paint­ing of mine and you ripped my fuck­in’ life apart.

You’re an or­phan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are be­cause I read Oliver Twist? Does that en­cap­su­late you?

Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, be­cause you know what? I can’t learn any­thing from you I can’t read in some fuck­in’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fas­ci­nated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re ter­ri­fied of what you might say.

Your move, chief.

***

(Five min­utes of still­ness later…)

***

Okay, I’m ready to talk about it.

Without say­ing it, he’s say­ing it. There’s a dif­fer­ence.

There’s a dif­fer­ence be­tween ex­per­tise and wis­dom, be­tween the­ory and ex­pe­ri­ence, be­tween know­ing and liv­ing. Will has the first in spades. He’s the hu­man equiv­a­lent of ChatGPT, that’s for sure. That gives him a smug at­ti­tude that be­cause he’s read the books and knows the the­o­ries, he’s smart and ca­pa­ble and good. But Sean has some­thing Will lacks. Experience. He’s ac­tu­ally lived all those things first­hand. War, love, sick­ness, loss, hopes, dreams, fail­ures, suc­cesses. Meanwhile, Will has never been out­side Boston, and he’s scared to let him­self get close to any­one enough to get hurt.

That’s this mo­ment, summed up. That’s what WE do as hu­mans and why YOU mat­ter right now, ar­guably more than ever.

AI has read the in­ter­net. It can’t read the room. It has­n’t lived a life.

It knows. It does not feel nor ex­pe­ri­ence. Because it does not live.

But you do, and right now, there are end­less voices con­vinc­ing you to stop liv­ing, mostly so they can sell you their “secrets” to suc­cess or their “magic” tools which pro­fess to know the an­swers you could­n’t pos­si­bly know your­self.

We’ve reached a dan­ger­ous mo­ment. This mo­ment threat­ens to con­vince too many of us that our lived ex­pe­ri­ences do not mat­ter. I see it of­ten. An artist will claim some­thing like, “AI has never fallen in love. It has never failed then per­sisted, with scar tis­sue emerg­ing and dreams still in tact.” Then peo­ple roll their eyes. I get it. I hear it. I know it feels squishy and easy to dis­miss.

Like a gnat buzzing your ear on a park bench.

So let’s make it more con­crete, shall we?

There is a very real dif­fer­ence be­tween read­ing about war and be­ing in war. Can we agree?

Reading about love and be­ing in love are fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent things. Yes?

Reading Oliver Twist [giant “Not Equal To” sym­bol] be­ing an or­phan.

Knowing and liv­ing are dif­fer­ent. And right now, the mere idea of “knowing” is win­ning out, when it’s hi­lar­i­ously in­suf­fi­cient to do any­thing ef­fec­tive or mean­ing­ful or good. The in­ter­net and many voices us­ing it would have us con­vinced that be­cause there’s so much to know and be­cause some­one else knows more and be­cause a soft­ware tool can tell you things it “knows,” then all of that should cause you to sit down, shut up, stop feel­ing con­fi­dent in what you’ve done or seen or felt. Because what’s your life in the face of in­fi­nite knowl­edge?

Turns out, every­thing.

Okay fine, we’re still too the­o­ret­i­cal and artsy fartsy for some. I hate it, but I get it. Set aside Sean’s lines and look at Robin Williams’s per­for­mance. Step out of the story and ex­am­ine the act­ing. Robin Williams was given a script. Any other ac­tor could have been handed that script, but ZERO other ac­tors would have per­formed it like that.

The script has all the words, but he brought the words to life. What’s more, he did so by draw­ing on his own life. That’s how artists func­tion. That’s why they can pro­duce things that shock and as­tound and ter­rify and be­witch peo­ple (h/t to Bourdain for ​that line​). Actors and other artists make choices for how to em­body and con­vey the emo­tions of the thing, not just “correctly” arrange in­for­ma­tion for dis­sem­i­na­tion.

I’ve heard it said that sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery would hap­pen re­gard­less of who does it. Science is the search for truth about how the world works. Given enough time and re­sources, Scientist #2 would have dis­cov­ered the same truth that Scientist #1 dis­cov­ered.

Art is dif­fer­ent.

No two artists would pro­duce the same ex­act thing. Given enough time and re­sources, no two ac­tors would have in­de­pen­dently landed on the same ex­act cre­ation, nor even the same sub­tle el­e­ment or mo­ment in that scene or piece or pro­ject. Because it’s not about the search for ex­ter­nal truth. It’s about the syn­the­sis of that truth into mean­ing. It’s all in­ter­nal. And zero hu­mans have lived the same lives beat-for-beat.

That shit mat­ters in our work. I don’t care if you write blog posts for a Fortune 500, host a pod­cast about HR, write books about sto­ry­telling, or paint in your garage. It’s all art. Because art is about mak­ing sense of hu­man feel­ings and ex­is­tence by con­fronting the in­ter­nal, turn­ing it into mean­ing oth­ers can ac­cess. Teach a tac­tic in a so­cial feed or sculpt the next great statue for a mu­seum in Rome, it does­n’t mat­ter. It flows through YOU in ways big and small.

Ignore the “YOU” part at your own peril.

Robin Williams cer­tainly did­n’t.

Where did his per­for­mance come from? How did those mo­ments take shape? Only the ac­tor could tell you, and ac­tu­ally, he prob­a­bly could­n’t. It was sensed more than it was con­sciously con­sid­ered, but the alchemy re­quired his lived ex­pe­ri­ences. Maybe the pause came from a child­hood mem­ory of scuff­ing his knees as he wres­tled on the dri­ve­way with a friend. “Get tougher, Robin!” The glances away from Will might come from a lost love which the Hollywood Reporter never told us the man ex­pe­ri­enced. His face mus­cles weren’t trem­bling so much as echo­ing all the trauma he’d en­dured. He’s not re­mem­ber­ing his life. He’s re-liv­ing it.

So much work we en­counter on­line to­day feels like a script the cre­ator for­got to act. The words are there, but they’re life­less. Then the mar­ket said, “Here’s a tool to pro­duce more of that stuff, and re­mem­ber: you can’t do any­thing bet­ter than this. Because it’s hard, and some­thing that is hard is bad, and also you are bad—un­til you use our tools!”

They want to dis­till every­thing down to a sci­ence. It’s our job to el­e­vate it to an art.

It turns out AI and peo­ple both rely on LLMs as their foun­da­tions. AI has large lan­guage mod­els. People have lit­tle life mo­ments.

But we sim­ply don’t draw on ours con­sis­tently or con­fi­dently enough. Doing so would be their night­mare. They don’t know how to sell the dream to peo­ple too busy day­dream­ing. They can’t dom­i­nate our lives if we’re ac­tu­ally liv­ing.

It’s that stuff which makes our work mat­ter and makes us each mat­ter too, and this mo­ment de­mands more of it from you and from me. The new­comer to a field or topic, the ex­pert with 40 years’ ex­pe­ri­ence, the un­known voice, the broadly known sto­ry­teller—it does­n’t mat­ter. Drawing on our lives and us­ing our own “LLMs” are what this world needs in an era de­fined by AI slop and strip-min­ing every cor­ner of life for eye­balls and dol­lars.

Plenty of oth­ers have sim­i­lar ex­per­tise and skills. Plenty of oth­ers talk about sim­i­lar top­ics. But how you SEE the world sep­a­rates you. Said bet­ter: how YOU see the world.

Everyone’s got a script, but very few un­der­stand how to bring the words to life.

Your au­di­ence can’t learn any­thing from you that they can’t read in a fuck­in’ book … or post or video or AI snip­pet.

Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. Then I’m fas­ci­nated. I’m in.

But you don’t wanna do that, do you? You’re ter­ri­fied of what you might say.

Your move, chief.

“You can’t get a breath of fresh air … with­out us know­ing.”

bluestork/​Shut­ter­stock

Thanks to the rise of AI, a new kind of sur­veil­lance cam­era has rapidly pro­lif­er­ated across the United States. Typically re­ferred to as au­to­mated li­cense plate read­ers, or ALPRs, they’re most of­ten mounted along road­ways, where they log the move­ments of cars which pass through their field of vi­sion. Though var­i­ous com­pa­nies of­fer them, the most well known come from Flock Security, and the com­pany has con­se­quently been a light­ning rod for pub­lic opin­ion. Shocking ex­actly no­body, there has been wide­spread pub­lic back­lash to cam­eras that track every­one, whether or not they’ve been sus­pected of a crime.

Although Flock cam­eras are of­ten re­ferred to as li­cense plate read­ers, that’s re­duc­tive. Reading li­cense plates is their pri­mary task, but they can be used to track just about any­one or any­thing. Even with­out a li­cense plate, law en­force­ment of­fi­cers can search for things such as, hy­po­thet­i­cally, “green sedan with American flag bumper sticker,” or, “pickup truck with paint scratches on left side and dirt bike in truck bed.” Reducing Flock ALPRs to li­cense plate read­ers is a bit like call­ing your own eyes “Engadget ar­ti­cle read­ers” sim­ply be­cause that’s what you’re us­ing them for at this par­tic­u­lar mo­ment. The com­pany also of­fers AI sur­veil­lance cam­eras which do track in­di­vid­u­als.

The is­sues with Flock Safety cam­eras are well doc­u­mented: Flock has been plagued by se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, ram­pant mis­use by law en­force­ment of­fi­cers and AI mal­func­tions which land in­no­cent peo­ple in trou­ble with the law. And once Flock cam­eras take root in a city, weed­ing them out can be nearly im­pos­si­ble. There are now over 100,000 ALPRs in­stalled na­tion­wide, with the vast ma­jor­ity com­ing from Flock.

How do Flock cam­eras work, and what do they do?

Smith Collection/gado/Getty Images

Flock Security cam­eras are, like most smart de­vices, small com­put­ers. They run a mod­i­fied ver­sion of Android and wire­lessly trans­mit footage to a data­base, where it is cat­a­loged us­ing AI for searched nat­ural lan­guage searches by any­one with ac­cess to the sys­tem. Flock con­tracts with cities, towns, neigh­bor­hoods and busi­nesses.

In ad­di­tion to Flock’s in­fa­mous ALPRs, the com­pany also of­fers AI se­cu­rity cam­eras, mo­bile se­cu­rity trail­ers, and  — just in case you’re a creep look­ing to point an AI cam­era into some­one’s back­yard  — quad­copter drones. All of them op­er­ate on the same prin­ci­ples. Just type what you’re look­ing for, and the sys­tem will show footage of any­thing it thinks matches your de­scrip­tion. This makes AI pow­ered cam­eras like Flock’s dis­tinct from tra­di­tional sur­veil­lance or traf­fic cams, which re­quire some­one to man­u­ally look over footage in or­der to find a spe­cific ve­hi­cle or in­di­vid­ual.

The Flock net­work can be re­stricted to a con­tracted area, but many de­part­ments join a na­tion­wide net­work. As the ACLU of Massachusetts pointed out, po­lice as far away from the state as Texas can search its Flock footage. While Flock does not have a di­rect con­tract with fed­eral law en­force­ment agen­cies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Homeland Security agen­cies are of­ten granted ac­cess to the sys­tem through data shar­ing pro­grams with lo­cal po­lice de­part­ments (a prac­tice which be­gan be­fore Flock ar­rived on the scene). In Denver, the ACLU of Colorado ob­tained logs show­ing that lo­cal po­lice had con­ducted over 1,400 searches on ICE’s be­half as of August.

That’s not to say the cam­eras never prove use­ful for crime-solv­ing. Flock has helped to solve at least one mur­der case and to take down a ve­hi­cle smash-and-grab op­er­a­tion. But its AI-enhanced ca­pa­bil­i­ties track every­one, in­no­cent or not.

Flock cam­eras have been rid­dled with se­cu­rity flaws

Flock ve­he­mently in­sists that its cam­eras are se­cure. The truth is that Flock can­not seem to go very long with­out vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties be­com­ing ex­posed. Many of the most crit­i­cal ex­ploits have been dis­cov­ered by Benn Jordan, a mu­si­cian and YouTuber with no for­mal back­ground in cy­ber­se­cu­rity re­search.

In December 2025, Jordan found that at least 70 Flock Safety cam­eras were ex­posed to the Internet and could be ac­cessed through a com­mer­cial search en­gine. No pass­word was re­quired to view live footage of chil­dren at parks, cou­ples hav­ing in­ti­mate ar­gu­ments, and other mo­ments peo­ple did not know were sur­veilled. Many ex­posed cam­eras be­longed to Flock’s Condor cam­eras which track peo­ple, not ve­hi­cles. Jordan was even able to record Flock’s flip­pant re­sponse to his pre­vi­ous in­ves­ti­ga­tions onto a Flock Condor cam­era and then down­load the footage to in­clude in his video.

That came af­ter Jordan had al­ready ex­posed nu­mer­ous se­cu­rity holes in a November ex­pose, many of which could be ex­ploited with equally sopho­moric tech­niques. With phys­i­cal ac­cess to the out­door cam­eras, Jordan and re­searcher John Gaines were able to press a phys­i­cal but­ton and con­nect to the cam­era over Wi-Fi, de­bug it with ba­sic Android de­vel­op­ment tools, and gain root ac­cess  — even in­stalling mal­ware. There were also ex­posed USB ports vul­ner­a­ble to a ma­li­cious USB drive. There were too many other find­ings to list, but Jordan’s video is com­pre­hen­sive.

Most tech com­pa­nies in­vite in­for­ma­tion about crit­i­cal ex­ploits with bug bounty pro­grams, or at least by cred­it­ing in­de­pen­dent re­searchers. Flock Safety, by con­trast, has re­sponded by smear­ing se­cu­rity re­searchers in­clud­ing Jordan as “activist groups who want to de­fund the po­lice, weaken pub­lic safety, and nor­mal­ize law­less­ness.”

Cops have mis­used Flock cam­eras

Matthew G Eddy/Shutterstock

How in­tox­i­cat­ing must it be, as a po­lice of­fi­cer, to gain ac­cess to the Flock net­work? Like Batman to­ward the end of The Dark Knight, you would in­stantly be able to spy on any in­di­vid­ual, the en­tire city bar­ing up its se­crets to you with a few key­strokes. But un­like Batman, some po­lice have used Flock to ha­rass and stalk women, while Flock em­ploy­ees used footage of preschool­ers to sell more cam­eras. That’s be­cause there are very few guardrails, if any, to pre­vent abuse. A war­rant is rarely re­quired for a data­base search, and there’s no pa­per­work.

As re­ported this month by 404 Media, there have been dozens of doc­u­mented in­stances in which cops have abused Flock to track the where­abouts of ex-girl­friends, cur­rent part­ners, and other in­di­vid­u­als. In most cases, the stalk­ing was only dis­cov­ered when a vic­tim searched their plate in HaveIBeenFlocked or a sim­i­lar tool and dis­cov­ered their where­abouts had been searched hun­dreds of times. That may sound bad, but it’s worse than it sounds. Since the only known cases are those where the of­fend­ing of­fi­cer was caught and ar­rested or fired, the true scope of abuse is likely much larger. Flock told 404 Media that “15 in­ci­dents of abuse” had sur­faced be­cause of “the trans­parency and ac­count­abil­ity fea­tures” built into its plat­form, adding that its Audit Assistance tool “proactively flags un­in­tended use.”

There have been is­sues in­side of Flock it­self, too. One par­tic­u­larly shock­ing re­port from 404 Media found that Flock em­ploy­ees had been watch­ing chil­dren swim­ming in the pool and dur­ing gym­nas­tics classes at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, and even show­ing those cam­era feeds to po­lice de­part­ments as part of a sales demo. Flock re­sponded bel­liger­ently, writ­ing in part, “The em­ploy­ees be­ing named on­line are well-in­ten­tioned em­ploy­ees who ac­cessed a cam­era net­work with the city’s ex­plicit per­mis­sion, as part of their job. They are now be­ing called preda­tors for it.”

Flock cam­eras keep get­ting in­no­cent peo­ple in trou­ble

Kali9/Getty Images

We can look to just one of the many cities Flock op­er­ates in to see how its cam­eras cre­ate is­sues, even with­out ex­plicit abuse. In May of 2024, Denver, Colorado in­stalled 111 cam­eras across the city. The con­tract was re­newed in 2025 when Mayor Mike Johnston over­ruled a unan­i­mous city coun­cil vote against the ex­ten­sion.

One Denver woman, fi­nan­cial ad­vi­sor Chrisanna Elser, was stunned when Columbine po­lice of­fi­cer Sgt. Jamie Milliman knocked on her door and de­liv­ered a sum­mons for theft. According to Milliman, she’d been caught on cam­era steal­ing a pack­age from a front door. “You know we have cam­eras in that town. You can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place with­out us know­ing,” the of­fi­cer can be heard say­ing in Ring door­bell footage from the September 2025 in­ci­dent. Elser was lucky. Her Rivian truck has cam­eras of its own, and she was able to de­liver footage from the day of the al­leged crime, prov­ing she had not stopped while dri­ving through the area from which the pack­age was stolen. The charges were even­tu­ally dropped.

Others haven’t been so lucky. Multiple Colorado dri­vers have been pulled over and treated as sus­pected crim­i­nals when Flock ALPRs mis­took a num­ber zero for a let­ter ‘O’, or vice versa. One dri­ver told the lo­cal 9News he feels his safety is at risk be­cause of­fi­cers are alerted every time a Flock cam­era sees his ve­hi­cle. Police claimed they were un­able to re­move him from their hotlist.

After wide­spread protest, in­clud­ing a packed town hall in October at­tended by city coun­cil mem­bers and na­tion­ally known pri­vacy ad­vo­cates, Denver can­celled its Flock con­tract… and awarded it to Axon, a com­pany which al­ready pro­vides body cam­eras to po­lice de­part­ments.

Why do cities keep giv­ing con­tracts to Flock?

Max Miller for Engadget

With so many alarm­ing is­sues around Flock Safety, it’s hard to un­der­stand why these AI sur­veil­lance cam­eras keep crop­ping up. There are a few rea­sons, rang­ing from cit­i­zen dis­en­fran­chise­ment to re­stric­tive Flock con­tracts.

While av­er­age cit­i­zens dis­like the tech­nol­ogy, es­pe­cially those from mar­gin­al­ized groups most likely to be tar­geted by AI sur­veil­lance, they of­ten have lit­tle to no say in the mat­ter. Flock mar­kets di­rectly to law en­force­ment, and if you’re a cop or pro-law-en­force­ment city of­fi­cial, it’s easy to see why blan­ket­ing your lo­cale in AI-powered cam­eras is a tan­ta­liz­ing prospect. Despite lit­tle ev­i­dence that Flock cam­eras ac­tu­ally re­duce crime, the com­pany mar­kets its prod­ucts as pow­er­ful crime-stop­ping and de­ter­rence tools.

In Denver, Mayor Johnston de­fended his de­ci­sion to re­tain Flock’s ser­vices by claim­ing in a 9News in­ter­view that the cam­eras had aided in solv­ing the mur­der of a trans­gen­der woman, Jax Gratton, whose body was found in the nearby town of Lakewood. The case had be­come a ral­ly­ing cry for LGBTQ safety in the Denver area. But the may­or’s claims were dou­bly false. Not only had Flock not as­sisted in the case, but no ar­rest had been made. Gratton’s mother pub­licly de­manded a forth­com­ing apol­ogy from the mayor.

Shooing Flock away is made more dif­fi­cult by its iron­clad con­tracts. When Dayton, Ohio and Evanston, Illinois wanted out of their Flock deals, they were un­sure whether re­mov­ing the cam­eras would con­sti­tute a breach of con­tract. Their so­lu­tion? Both cities cov­ered the Flock cam­eras with garbage bags. The only way to evoke a more heavy-handed metaphor would have been to cover them with lamp­shades.

To see whether any Flock cam­eras are lurk­ing near you, you can use the map cre­ated by DeFlock, an open-source tool track­ing the pro­lif­er­a­tion of ALPR cam­eras.

DNS Resolver Guide

Independent ref­er­ence

Pick what mat­ters to you, such as pri­vacy, mal­ware block­ing, parental con­trols, speed, IPv6, or a spe­cific ju­ris­dic­tion, and the finder nar­rows 30 global pub­lic re­solvers to the ones that fit. A full com­par­i­son table and re­search-backed de­ci­sion notes fol­low.

30public re­solvers

16jurisdictions

DoH / DoT / DoQencrypted trans­ports

12studies cited

Find a re­solver for your re­quire­ments

Check what mat­ters to you. Transport, DNSSEC, IPv6, ju­ris­dic­tion and op­er­a­tor type are hard fil­ters. The pri­or­i­ties are scored and ranked.

My pri­or­i­ties

Maximum pri­vacy and no log­ging­Min­i­mal or no query log­ging, pri­vacy-first op­er­a­tor Block mal­ware and phish­ingSe­cu­rity block­list on by de­fault or via a sim­ple vari­ant Block ads and track­er­sNet­work-wide ad and tracker fil­ter­ing Parental con­trols and adult-con­tent block­ing­Fam­ily or adult-con­tent fil­ter avail­able No fil­ter­ing (unaltered DNS)Returns an­swers ex­actly as pub­lished Fully cus­tomiz­able fil­ter­ing­Choose your own block­lists or rules via an ac­count Top-tier speed (global any­cast)Large low-la­tency any­cast net­work Non-commercial op­er­a­torNon­profit, reg­istry, com­mu­nity or pub­lic-in­ter­est, not a for-profit com­pany

Must sup­port en­crypted DNS

DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) DNS-over-TLS (DoT) DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) DNSCrypt

Other re­quire­ments

Must val­i­date DNSSEC Must of­fer IPv6Provides IPv6 re­solver ad­dresses Operator ju­ris­dic­tion

Operator type

EDNS Client Subnet (ECS)

Test DNS speed from your lo­ca­tion

This mea­sures DNS-over-HTTPS round-trip time from your browser to each DoH-capable re­solver, so you can see which is fastest where you ac­tu­ally are. Plain-DNS-only re­solvers can­not be tested this way. Results are a rel­a­tive guide and in­clude TLS and HTTP over­head, so run it a cou­ple of times. Your browser queries each re­solver di­rectly, which re­veals your IP ad­dress to them; noth­ing is sent any­where else.

Benchmarks the DoH-capable re­solvers, takes a few sec­onds.

Technique in­spired by the open-source DNS Speed Test by Silviu Stroe (GPL-3.0); this is an in­de­pen­dent im­ple­men­ta­tion. It runs only when this page is served over HTTPS. For re­solvers not testable here, that ded­i­cated tool bench­marks a wider DoH set.

All 30 global pub­lic re­solvers

Click a col­umn header to sort. Search by name, op­er­a­tor, ju­ris­dic­tion, or fea­ture. Filter-variant ad­dresses (malware, fam­ily, un­fil­tered) are listed in the Filtering cell.

How to de­cide: what the re­search says

Findings from peer-re­viewed DNS mea­sure­ment stud­ies that should shape the trade-offs above.

Speed: plain DNS has the low­est la­tency, but en­crypted keeps up

Encrypted trans­ports (DoH and DoT) add la­tency per query, yet whole-page load times are of­ten close to plain DNS, and DoH’s over­head is small in prac­tice. On lossy or high-la­tency links, plain Do53 still wins. Performance also varies by provider and re­gion, so the fastest re­solver de­pends on where you are.

Hounsel et al., WWW 2020; Böttger et al., IMC 2019; Chhabra et al., IMC 2021.

Encrypted DNS re­sists tam­per­ing, not just snoop­ing

The largest end-to-end study of en­crypted DNS found queries are far less likely to be in­ter­cepted or al­tered in tran­sit than plain DNS, with only mi­nor over­head. Operator qual­ity varies, though: about 25% of DoT providers in that study served in­valid TLS cer­tifi­cates, so favour well-run providers.

Lu et al., IMC 2019.

Encryption hides queries from the net­work, not from the re­solver

Whichever provider you choose still sees every do­main you look up. If that wor­ries you, pre­fer no-log­ging op­er­a­tors, or an obliv­i­ous de­sign (ODoH) where a proxy sep­a­rates your iden­tity from your queries so no sin­gle party sees both. Cloudflare and Apple have de­ployed ODoH.

Schmitt, Edmundson & Feamster, PoPETS 2019; Singanamalla et al., 2021.

DNSSEC val­i­da­tion is what stops forged an­swers

Only a val­i­dat­ing re­solver pro­tects you from spoofed records. Google, Cloudflare and Quad9 all val­i­date, and they han­dled the first root-key (KSK) rollover with­out break­ing users. If in­tegrity mat­ters, treat DNSSEC val­i­da­tion as a must.

Müller et al., IMC 2019.

ECS trades speed for pri­vacy

EDNS Client Subnet sends part of your IP to CDNs for bet­ter geo-rout­ing. Google and OpenDNS send it for sharper CDN map­ping; Cloudflare and stan­dard Quad9 leave it off for pri­vacy. Pick based on which you value more.

“A Look at the ECS Behavior of DNS Resolvers”, IMC 2019.

Jurisdiction and cen­tral­iza­tion mat­ter too

The op­er­a­tor’s le­gal home gov­erns what can be com­pelled or logged, and a hand­ful of providers now carry a large share of the world’s re­cur­sive traf­fic. The U.S. NSA has also warned that ex­ter­nal re­solvers by­pass in­ter­nal DNS fil­ter­ing and in­spec­tion, so weigh con­trol against con­ve­nience.

Moura et al., IMC 2020; NSA guid­ance, 2021.

DNS-over-QUIC is now the fastest en­crypted trans­port

A 2022 mea­sure­ment of DoQ found it al­ready beats both DoT and DoH on re­sponse time, though about 40% of hand­shakes were slowed by QUIC’s ad­dress-val­i­da­tion limit. Where your client and re­solver both sup­port it (Quad9, AdGuard, NextDNS, Control D, Mullvad, UncensoredDNS, and the Chinese ma­jors here), DoQ is the en­crypted op­tion to pre­fer.

Kosek et al., PAM 2022.

DNSCrypt: the old­est en­crypted op­tion, and the hard­est to mea­sure

DNSCrypt pre­dates DoH, DoT, and DoQ (version 2 dates to 2013). It en­crypts from the first packet us­ing a re­solver’s pre-shared pub­lic key, so there is no plain­text host­name lookup and no de­pen­dency on cer­tifi­cate au­thor­i­ties, and its Anonymized DNS mode (2019) also hides client IPs. Among the re­solvers here it is of­fered by Quad9, OpenDNS, AdGuard, NextDNS, Control D, and Yandex. Reliable us­age num­bers are scarce, though: pop­u­la­tion-scale mea­sure­ments such as APNIC Labs track DoH and DoT but not DNSCrypt, so there is no trust­wor­thy pub­lic fig­ure for how many peo­ple use it.

DNSCrypt Project; APNIC Labs en­crypted-DNS mea­sure­ment.

Encryption does not hide which sites you visit

Even over DoH, traf­fic analy­sis can iden­tify the do­mains you visit with high ac­cu­racy, and the stan­dard EDNS padding does not fully pre­vent it. If that threat model ap­plies to you, pair en­crypted DNS with Tor or an obliv­i­ous de­sign rather than re­ly­ing on padding.

Siby et al., NDSS 2020.

Public re­solvers do not be­have the same way

A 2023 study of Extended DNS Errors across ma­jor re­solvers found they dis­agreed on di­ag­nos­tic er­ror re­port­ing in 94% of test cases, with Cloudflare the most pre­cise. Implementation qual­ity and stan­dards com­pli­ance dif­fer be­tween providers, which af­fects trou­bleshoot­ing and re­li­a­bil­ity.

Nosyk, Korczyński & Duda, IMC 2023.

References

A. Hounsel et al., “Comparing the Effects of DNS, DoT, and DoH on Web Performance”, WWW 2020 (arXiv:1907.08089).

T. Böttger et al., “An Empirical Study of the Cost of DNS-over-HTTPS”, ACM IMC 2019.

R. Chhabra, P. Murley, D. Kumar, M. Bailey, G. Wang, “Measuring DNS-over-HTTPS Performance Around the World”, ACM IMC 2021.

C. Lu et al., “An End-to-End, Large-Scale Measurement of DNS-over-Encryption: How Far Have We Come?”, ACM IMC 2019.

M. Kosek et al., “One to Rule Them All? A First Look at DNS over QUIC”, PAM 2022 (arXiv:2202.02987).

S. Siby et al., “Encrypted DNS => Privacy? A Traffic Analysis Perspective”, NDSS 2020 (arXiv:1906.09682).

P. Schmitt, A. Edmundson, N. Feamster, “Oblivious DNS: Practical Privacy for DNS Queries”, PoPETS 2019 (arXiv:1806.00276).

S. Singanamalla et al., “Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH)”, arXiv:2011.10121.

M. Müller et al., “Roll, Roll, Roll your Root: Analysis of the First Ever DNSSEC Root KSK Rollover”, ACM IMC 2019.

“A Look at the ECS Behavior of DNS Resolvers”, ACM IMC 2019.

G. Moura, S. Castro, W. Hardaker, M. Wullink, C. Hesselman, “Clouding up the Internet: how cen­tral­ized is DNS traf­fic be­com­ing?”, ACM IMC 2020.

Y. Nosyk, M. Korczyński, A. Duda, “Extended DNS Errors: Unlocking the Full Potential of DNS Troubleshooting”, ACM IMC 2023.

Smaller, com­mu­nity-run, and re­gional re­solvers

Niche, hobby, com­mu­nity, or coun­try-spe­cific ser­vices that are not in the com­par­i­son above. Worth know­ing about, but check their cur­rent sta­tus and poli­cies be­fore re­ly­ing on them. The European en­tries are cat­a­logued by European Alternatives. Resolvers based in heav­ily cen­sored or sanc­tioned re­gions may en­force lo­cal con­tent rules or, con­versely, ex­ist mainly to by­pass geo-blocks, so treat those with ex­tra care.

DNS4all (194.0.5.3): European re­solver fo­cused on neu­tral­ity and per­for­mance; un­fil­tered.

BlahDNS: open-source hobby ad-block­ing pro­ject with DoH, DoT, and DoQ, run on small re­gional servers.

LibreDNS: com­mu­nity re­solver by LibreOps with ad-block­ing and a no-log­ging pol­icy; DoH and DoT.

Dismail.de: pri­vacy-fo­cused German com­mu­nity re­solver with no log­ging; DoH and DoT.

Foundation for Applied Privacy (Austria): non-profit, no-log­ging; DoH and DoT.

Freifunk München (FFMUC) (Germany): com­mu­nity non-profit, open source; plain­text plus DoH and DoT.

Restena (Luxembourg): the Restena Foundation na­tional re­search net­work; DoH and DoT.

Digitale Gesellschaft (Switzerland): non-profit with DNSSEC, DoH and DoT (German-language site).

dns­forge (Germany): com­mu­nity re­solver that fil­ters ads, track­ing, and mal­ware; open source.

Digitalcourage and Artikel10 (Germany): pri­vacy-fo­cused non-profit re­solvers with DoH and DoT (German-language sites).

FDN (France): long-run­ning as­so­cia­tive ISP with a no-log­ging, no-cen­sor­ship open re­solver.

IIJ Public DNS (Japan): pub­lic DoH and DoT re­solver from Internet Initiative Japan, a ma­jor op­er­a­tor; blocks child-abuse (CSAM) do­mains.

CNNIC sDNS (China): the Chinese reg­istry’s pub­lic re­solver (the well-known 1.2.4.8); sub­ject to lo­cal reg­u­la­tions.

Comss.one DNS (Russia): ad-block­ing re­solver pop­u­lar in the Russian-speaking com­mu­nity.

Shecan, Electro, Begzar, and 403.online (Iran): widely used in­side Iran mainly to reach de­vel­oper and cloud ser­vices that block Iranian IP ad­dresses; spe­cial-pur­pose, with lim­ited pub­lished pol­icy.

Andrews & Arnold (United Kingdom): non-fil­ter­ing, no-log­ging, DNSSEC DoH from a re­spected UK ISP.

SWITCH (Switzerland): DoH from the Swiss na­tional re­search-and-ed­u­ca­tion net­work and .ch reg­istry; mal­ware pro­tec­tion, no ad block­ing.

Njalla (Sweden): no-log­ging DoH from the pri­vacy-fo­cused do­main reg­is­trar.

DNS for Family: free fam­ily-fil­ter­ing DoH (blocks adult, gam­bling, mal­ware, ads and track­ers, with safe search), no logs, DNSSEC.

Safe Surfer (New Zealand): fam­ily-safety DoH block­ing adult con­tent and CSAM; free with paid tiers (logs anonymized).

Legacy or dis­con­tin­ued ser­vices to avoid: Oracle Dyn, Level3 (4.2.2.x), Freenom World, dns0.eu (use DNS4EU or NextDNS in­stead), and Norton ConnectSafe ap­pear in older lists but are legacy, un­of­fi­cial, or dis­con­tin­ued.

Within the next week, Congress is prepar­ing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawl­ing pack­age of leg­is­la­tion that seeks to con­trol Americans’ web brows­ing and pri­vate mes­sag­ing. The pack­age in­cludes a re­vised ver­sion of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, com­bined with a col­lec­tion of other in­ter­net bills, study bills, re­port­ing re­quire­ments, and new reg­u­la­tions. Instead of de­bat­ing any of these pro­pos­als on their mer­its, law­mak­ers are at­tempt­ing to move them all at once un­der an ul­tra-ex­pe­dited process.

The pack­age of cob­bled-to­gether bills is a mess, with dif­fer­ent age-gat­ing schemes for dif­fer­ent ser­vices, us­ing dif­fer­ent stan­dards. It’s a lot of com­plex­ity, and a lot of le­gal risk. Faced with that, many com­pa­nies will con­clude that the safest op­tion is re­stric­tive age-check­ing prac­tices across their en­tire plat­forms.

Buried in­side the KIDS Act are pro­vi­sions that will push on­line ser­vices to ver­ify all users’ ages, re­quire gov­ern­ment-di­rected mod­er­a­tion poli­cies for on­line speech, and even cre­ate new rules about pri­vate and en­crypted com­mu­ni­ca­tions. While sup­port­ers con­tinue to claim this bill pro­tects mi­nors on­line, its re­quire­ments come at the ex­pense of pri­vacy, free ex­pres­sion, and the abil­ity of peo­ple of all ages to use the in­ter­net with­out re­veal­ing sen­si­tive data.

Take ac­tion

Tell Congress to re­ject this age-gat­ing bill

The KIDS Act Pressures Platforms to Check Everyone’s Age

Supporters of KOSA have said the bill does­n’t re­quire age ver­i­fi­ca­tion. And tech­ni­cally, the KOSA sec­tion of the bill does say that KOSA should­n’t be read to re­quire age ver­i­fi­ca­tion.

But if you read the rest of the bill, that dis­claimer starts to look hol­low.

Throughout the KOSA sec­tion of the leg­is­la­tion, spe­cial pro­tec­tions, con­trols, mes­sag­ing set­tings, and parental tools are re­quired when­ever a web­site or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as any­one un­der 13) or a teen (defined as any­one be­tween 13 and 16 years old).

The prob­lem is a web­site op­er­a­tor does­n’t need ac­tual knowl­edge that a user is a mi­nor to get in le­gal trou­ble. It ap­plies when a plat­form “knows or should have known” a user’s age—a low, neg­li­gence-style stan­dard of knowl­edge. If an on­line ser­vice gets it wrong, it’s go­ing to be up to courts and reg­u­la­tors to de­cide, af­ter the fact, if an on­line ser­vice “should” have known a user was 16.

To try to avoid li­a­bil­ity, ser­vices will have to de­ter­mine which users are teenagers and which are not. Most won’t be able to sim­ply trust their users. They’ll have to col­lect more in­for­ma­tion about age, be­fore any law­suit or gov­ern­ment ac­tion arises. Some com­pa­nies may re­spond by re­quest­ing dri­ver’s li­censes or pass­ports. Others will rely on age-es­ti­ma­tion sys­tems that at­tempt to guess users’ ages by look­ing at ex­ist­ing ac­tiv­ity or do­ing fa­cial scans. Existing es­ti­ma­tion sys­tems make mis­takes when es­ti­mat­ing chil­dren’s ages cor­rectly, which is a big prob­lem when that is the pop­u­la­tion KOSA is try­ing to pro­tect. And the sys­tems fail more fre­quently for peo­ple of color, peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties, and trans and non­bi­nary peo­ple.

The bil­l’s au­thors seem to know this is a prob­lem. On the one hand, the new KOSA sec­tion says age ver­i­fi­ca­tion is not re­quired. On the other, it re­peat­edly im­poses oblig­a­tions that de­pend on know­ing whether a user is un­der 17. But a dis­claimer does­n’t mag­i­cally elim­i­nate le­gal risk, es­pe­cially for smaller ser­vices and star­tups that can’t af­ford to de­fend law­suits or fight reg­u­la­tors.

Take ac­tion

The “KIDS Act” Is an Age Surveillance Bill

KOSA is not the only part of this pack­age that cre­ates age-ver­i­fi­ca­tion pres­sure. The SAFE BOTS Act, like KOSA, goes back to the stan­dard that if a ser­vice “knows or should have known” that a user is a mi­nor it can’t of­fer cer­tain chat­bot fea­tures.

The SCREEN Act re­quires ser­vices that host sex­u­ally ex­plicit con­tent to de­ter­mine whether users are “more likely than not” un­der the rel­e­vant age limit, be­fore al­low­ing ac­cess to cer­tain con­tent.

The con­se­quences of this li­a­bil­ity will not be lim­ited to mi­nors. If web­sites and apps are ex­pected to re­li­ably iden­tify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults. The re­sult is a less pri­vate in­ter­net for every­one.

The KIDS Act Pressures Platforms To Police Lawful Speech

The new ver­sion of KOSA re­moves the bil­l’s in­fa­mous “duty of care” pro­vi­sion, a sig­nif­i­cant change. The re­vised KOSA re­quires cov­ered plat­forms to “establish, im­ple­ment, main­tain, and en­force” poli­cies and pro­ce­dures ad­dress­ing sev­eral cat­e­gories of con­tent and con­duct.

Some cat­e­gories, such as true threats and sex­ual ex­ploita­tion, in­volve un­law­ful ac­tiv­ity. Others are much broader. The bill specif­i­cally re­quires poli­cies ad­dress­ing the “sale or use” of nar­cotic drugs, to­bacco prod­ucts, cannabis prod­ucts, gam­bling, and al­co­hol. It also re­stricts dis­cus­sions around fi­nan­cial fraud.

Sounds straight­for­ward enough. Then you re­mem­ber how peo­ple ac­tu­ally talk—on­line and off. Can teens dis­cuss ad­dic­tion and re­cov­ery? Can a 15-year-old post that she’s wor­ried she has a friend who is drink­ing too much? Can they seek ad­vice about a par­en­t’s gam­bling prob­lem, or get help if they or a fam­ily mem­ber have been scammed? Can they par­tic­i­pate in harm-re­duc­tion com­mu­ni­ties or dis­cuss sub­stance abuse treat­ment? All of these young peo­ple would be en­gag­ing in law­ful speech when dis­cussing top­ics cov­ered by KOSA’s enu­mer­ated harms.

The bill does not di­rectly ban those con­ver­sa­tions. But it places plat­forms un­der huge pres­sure to cre­ate and en­force mod­er­a­tion poli­cies around broad cat­e­gories of law­ful speech. Faced with le­gal risk, many ser­vices will in­evitably choose to re­move that speech or re­strict those dis­cus­sions to spaces where they know only adults can par­tic­i­pate. We’ve seen this movie be­fore. When le­gal risk goes up, plat­forms will take down more speech.

The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too

Several pro­vi­sions of the bill cre­ate new rules around di­rect mes­sages, dis­ap­pear­ing or “ephemeral” mes­sages, and AI chat ser­vices.

The bill in­cludes lan­guage stat­ing that cer­tain KOSA re­quire­ments should not be con­strued to over­ride strong en­cryp­tion. But the pro­tec­tion is in­com­plete. The carve-out ap­plies to cer­tain fea­tures and mes­sag­ing con­trols, but does­n’t ap­ply to KOSA’s sep­a­rate re­quire­ment that plat­forms “address” a list of harms to mi­nors.

The KIDS Act never an­swers an ob­vi­ous ques­tion: how ex­actly is a plat­form sup­posed to ad­dress those ac­tiv­i­ties if they’re in­side en­crypted com­mu­ni­ca­tions that it can’t read? That will cre­ate pres­sure for providers to weaken pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions or limit fea­tures on en­crypted pri­vate ser­vices.

That ap­proach is es­pe­cially trou­bling when it comes to ephemeral mes­sag­ing. Disappearing mes­sages are not a “loophole” or a dan­ger­ous de­sign trick. They are a use­ful pri­vacy fea­ture that al­lows on­line con­ver­sa­tions to func­tion more like or­di­nary real-world con­ver­sa­tions, which are not pre­served for­ever in a per­ma­nent data­base.

Like many other parts of the KIDS Act, these pri­vate mes­sag­ing pro­vi­sions also de­pend on web­sites and apps know­ing who is a mi­nor and who is not. The re­sult is more age checks, more re­stric­tions, and less pri­vacy on­line.

Take ac­tion

Tell con­gress: no on­line age check­points

Ford has ad­mit­ted to re­hir­ing hun­dreds of hu­man work­ers af­ter its ag­gres­sive AI adop­tion strat­egy back­fired.

The US au­tomaker hired over 350 vet­eran en­gi­neers, re­ferred to in­ter­nally as “gray beards”, over the past three years in or­der to ad­dress mis­takes made by au­to­mated sys­tems.

The staff will lead qual­ity re­views af­ter the au­toma­tion is­sues cost the com­pany bil­lions of dol­lars, Bloomberg re­ported, while some work­ers will also help im­prove and train the AI sys­tems.

“We had been re­ly­ing more and more on au­to­mated qual­ity sys­tems and not get­ting the de­sired re­sults,” said Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer.

“We brought back tech­ni­cal spe­cial­ists and they hunt for fail­ure points be­fore a part ever reaches the plant floor.”

Ford had been in­creas­ingly re­ly­ing on AI-driven in­spec­tion sys­tems to stream­line pro­duc­tion and ad­dress qual­ity con­trol is­sues, how­ever the firm ac­knowl­edged that AI lacked the nu­anced judge­ment when it came to com­plex prob­lems.

After re­hir­ing ex­pe­ri­enced en­gi­neers, Ford ex­pe­ri­enced a marked im­prove­ment in its qual­ity stan­dards.

According to the lat­est J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey, an an­nual au­to­mo­tive bench­mark that mea­sures the qual­ity of new ve­hi­cles, Ford ranked top among main­stream brands — the first time it has achieved that mile­stone in 16 years.

Ford con­tin­ues to have qual­ity is­sues with its older ve­hi­cles, and re­mains the most re­called au­tomaker in the US, though ex­ec­u­tives blamed this on past is­sues in­volv­ing au­toma­tion, rather than the re­hir­ing of hu­mans.

The com­pany said it would not aban­don its use of AI, but plans to now use it in con­junc­tion with hu­man over­sight and ex­pe­ri­ence.

“Artificial in­tel­li­gence is a fan­tas­tic tool, but it’s only as good as the in­for­ma­tion you use to train it,” said Charles Poon, Ford’s vice pres­i­dent of ve­hi­cle hard­ware en­gi­neer­ing.

“Over prior years, we did­n’t pay as much at­ten­tion as we should have to the ex­pe­ri­ence of our most knowl­edge­able en­gi­neers that have been with us through many prod­uct cy­cles.

“Mistakenly, we thought that by just in­tro­duc­ing ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and in­gest­ing the de­sign re­quire­ments that we had, that that would pro­duce a high-qual­ity prod­uct.”

AMD Strix Halo RDMA Cluster Setup Guide

This guide de­tails how to con­fig­ure a two-node AMD Strix Halo clus­ter linked via Intel E810 (RoCE v2) for dis­trib­uted vLLM in­fer­ence us­ing Tensor Parallelism.

Table of Contents

TL;DR (Quick Start)

Concepts & Architecture

Hardware Prerequisites

Host Configuration (Fedora)

4.1 Install Packages 4.2 Check Native Firmware 4.3 Network Configuration 4.4 BIOS & Kernel Configuration 4.5 Firewall Rules

4.1 Install Packages

4.2 Check Native Firmware

4.3 Network Configuration

4.4 BIOS & Kernel Configuration

4.5 Firewall Rules

Toolbox Installation & Network Verification

5.1 Prerequisites: Passwordless SSH 5.2 Installation 5.3 Verify RDMA Connection

5.1 Prerequisites: Passwordless SSH

5.2 Installation

5.3 Verify RDMA Connection

Running the Cluster

6.1 Setup & Verify 6.2 Launching vLLM

6.1 Setup & Verify

6.2 Launching vLLM

Troubleshooting

References & Acknowledgements

1. TL;DR (Quick Start)

On Both Nodes:

Preparation:

Install/Update Fedora 43 and the E810 NICs (Check firmware: eth­tool -i <iface>). BIOS/Kernel: Set iGPU to 512MB and ap­ply ker­nel params (iommu=pt, pci=re­al­loc, etc.). SSH: Configure pass­word­less SSH be­tween nodes.

Install/Update Fedora 43 and the E810 NICs (Check firmware: eth­tool -i <iface>).

BIOS/Kernel: Set iGPU to 512MB and ap­ply ker­nel params (iommu=pt, pci=re­al­loc, etc.).

SSH: Configure pass­word­less SSH be­tween nodes.

Networking: Assign sta­tic IPs (192.168.100.1 & .2), set MTU 9000, and trust the in­ter­face in fire­wall.

Install Toolbox: Run ./refresh_toolbox.sh (this au­to­mat­i­cally in­stalls the con­tainer with RDMA sup­port and the cus­tom li­br­ccl.so patch).

Run Cluster:

Run start-vllm-clus­ter. Select “2. Start Ray Cluster” (Follow prompts us­ing the TUI). Select “4. Launch VLLM Serve” and choose your model. (Export HF_TOKEN first for gated mod­els!)

Run start-vllm-clus­ter.

Select “2. Start Ray Cluster” (Follow prompts us­ing the TUI).

Select “4. Launch VLLM Serve” and choose your model. (Export HF_TOKEN first for gated mod­els!)

Key Note: The re­fresh_­tool­box.sh script de­tects your Infiniband/RDMA de­vices and au­to­mat­i­cally con­fig­ures the con­tainer to ex­pose them.

2. Concepts & Architecture

To fully uti­lize the Strix Halo clus­ter, it is help­ful to un­der­stand the tech­nolo­gies in­volved:

vLLM: A high-per­for­mance in­fer­ence en­gine. To run mod­els larger than a sin­gle GPU (or APU) can han­dle, it splits the model us­ing Tensor Parallelism (TP).

Ray: A dis­trib­uted com­put­ing frame­work. vLLM uses Ray to or­ches­trate the clus­ter, man­age the “worker” processes on each node, and en­sure they start up cor­rectly. Ray han­dles the con­trol plane (issuing com­mands).

RCCL (ROCm Collective Communication Library): The AMD equiv­a­lent of NVIDIA’s NCCL. This li­brary han­dles the data plane—specif­i­cally, the ex­tremely fast syn­chro­niza­tion of ten­sor data be­tween GPUs. When TP=2, the two nodes must ex­change par­tial re­sults af­ter every sin­gle layer of the neural net­work. This hap­pens thou­sands of times per sec­ond.

RoCE v2 (RDMA over Converged Ethernet): The pro­to­col that al­lows RCCL to write data di­rectly from one Node’s mem­ory to the other Node’s mem­ory, by­pass­ing the CPU and OS ker­nel.

Without RDMA: Latency is ~70 – 100µs (TCP/IP over­head). With RDMA: Latency is ~5µs. Why it mat­ters: For in­ter­ac­tive to­ken gen­er­a­tion, high la­tency kills per­for­mance. RoCE makes the two nodes feel like a sin­gle ma­chine.

Without RDMA: Latency is ~70 – 100µs (TCP/IP over­head).

With RDMA: Latency is ~5µs.

Why it mat­ters: For in­ter­ac­tive to­ken gen­er­a­tion, high la­tency kills per­for­mance. RoCE makes the two nodes feel like a sin­gle ma­chine.

3. Hardware Prerequisites

Nodes: 2x Framework Desktop Mainboards with AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ “Strix Halo”, 128GB of Unified Memory.

Network Cards: Intel Ethernet Controller E810-CQDA1 (or sim­i­lar 100GbE QSFP28).

Connection: Direct Attach Copper (DAC) ca­ble (e.g., QSFPTEK 100G QSFP28 DAC). No switch re­quired for 2 nodes.

PCIe Note: The Framework moth­er­board PCIe slot is phys­i­cally x4, so a riser is re­quired to plug in a 16x card (e.g., CY PCI-E Express 4x to 16x Extender). Test Setup Note: One of the boards in this setup has a mod­i­fied PCIe slot (cut by Framework us­ing an ul­tra­sonic knife) to ac­cept x16 cards di­rectly. This is not rec­om­mended for users. Risers are the cheaper, safer, and eas­ier so­lu­tion. Performance is iden­ti­cal (~50Gbps band­width, ~5µs la­tency).

4. Host Configuration (Fedora)

Perform these steps on the Host OS (Fedora 43) of both nodes.

Tested Host Configuration:

Note: These spe­cific ker­nel ver­sions were ver­i­fied to work. Fedora 43 is rec­om­mended.

Note: These spe­cific ker­nel ver­sions were ver­i­fied to work. Fedora 43 is rec­om­mended.

4.1 Install Packages

Install the core RDMA user­space tools. You do not need pro­pri­etary Intel dri­vers; the in-ker­nel dri­vers work per­fectly.

Ethernet Driver: ice

RDMA Driver: irdma (Unified dri­ver for RoCE v2 & iWARP)

sudo dnf in­stall rdma-core li­bib­verbs-utils perftest

rdma-core: The user­space com­po­nents for the RDMA sub­sys­tem (libraries, dae­mons, and con­fig­u­ra­tion tools).

li­bib­verbs-utils: Utilities for query­ing RDMA de­vices (e.g., ib­v_dev­info).

perftest: A suite of bench­marks (e.g., ib_write_bw, ib_send_lat) to ver­ify RDMA band­width and la­tency.

4.2 Check Native Firmware

Use eth­tool to check the cur­rent firmware ver­sion of your Intel E810 card.

eth­tool -i en­p194s0np0

Recommended Firmware: Ensure your firmware is at least as new as the ver­sion shown be­low (Firmware 4.91…). If your firmware is older, please up­date it us­ing the Intel® Ethernet NVM Update Tool for E810 Series.

Example Output:

dri­ver: ice ver­sion: 6.18.5 – 200.fc43.x86_64 firmware-ver­sion: 4.91 0x800214b5 1.3909.0 ex­pan­sion-rom-ver­sion: bus-info: 0000:c2:00.0 sup­ports-sta­tis­tics: yes sup­ports-test: yes sup­ports-eep­rom-ac­cess: yes sup­ports-reg­is­ter-dump: yes sup­ports-priv-flags: yes

4.3 Network Configuration

This guide as­sumes a sub­net of 192.168.100.0/30.

Identify your in­ter­face: Run ip link to find your 100GbE card (e.g., en­p194s0np0).

Node 1 (Head - 192.168.100.1):

# Bring link up sudo ip link set en­p194s0np0 up

# Assign IP sudo ip addr add 192.168.100.1/30 dev en­p194s0np0

# Set MTU (Jumbo Frames) sudo nm­cli con­nec­tion mod­ify “rdma0” eth­er­net.mtu 9000 sudo nm­cli con­nec­tion up “rdma0″

Node 2 (Worker - 192.168.100.2):

# Bring link up sudo ip link set en­p194s0np0 up

# Assign IP sudo ip addr add 192.168.100.2/30 dev en­p194s0np0

# Set MTU sudo nm­cli con­nec­tion mod­ify “rdma0” eth­er­net.mtu 9000 sudo nm­cli con­nec­tion up “rdma0″

Verify Routing: Ensure the route ex­ists on both:

sudo ip route add 192.168.100.0/30 dev en­p194s0np0

Verify Link:

rdma link # Output should show: state ACTIVE phys­i­cal_s­tate LINK_UP used_usec X …

4.4 BIOS & Kernel Configuration

1. BIOS Settings: Set the iGPU Memory Allocation to the min­i­mum pos­si­ble (512MB). We will use the GTT (Graphics Translation Table) to dy­nam­i­cally al­lo­cate sys­tem mem­ory as “Unified Memory” for the GPU.

2. Kernel Parameters: Update GRUB to en­able uni­fied mem­ory, op­ti­mize RDMA per­for­mance, and fix PCI re­source al­lo­ca­tion.

Edit /etc/default/grub and ap­pend to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX:

iommu=pt pci=re­al­loc pcie_aspm=off amdgpu.gtt­size=126976 ttm.pages_limit=32505856

Explanation of Parameters:

iommu=pt: Sets IOMMU to “Pass-Through” mode. This is crit­i­cal for per­for­mance, re­duc­ing over­head for both the RDMA NIC and the iGPU uni­fied mem­ory ac­cess.

pci=re­al­loc: Reallocates PCI BARs. Often needed on con­sumer plat­forms to prop­erly map large ad­dress spaces for de­vices like the E810 or Strix Halo.

pcie_aspm=off: Disables PCIe Active State Power Management. Prevents la­tency spikes and link ne­go­ti­a­tion is­sues on the 100GbE con­nec­tion.

amdgpu.gtt­size=126976: Caps the GPU GTT size to ~124GiB (126976MB). This de­fines how much sys­tem RAM the GPU can ad­dress as its own “VRAM”.

ttm.pages_limit=32505856: Limits the Translation Table Manager to ~124GiB (in 4KB pages), match­ing the GTT size.

3. Apply Changes:

By

Paula Wethington

Web Producer

Paula Wethington is a dig­i­tal pro­ducer at CBS Detroit. She pre­vi­ously held dig­i­tal con­tent roles at NEWSnet, Gannett/USA Today net­work and The Monroe News in Michigan. She is a grad­u­ate of the University of South Carolina.

Read Full Bio

June 24, 2026 / 2:03 PM EDT / CBS Detroit

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A bill is pend­ing in the Michigan Legislature that would set rules on when and for what rea­son an em­ployer could con­tact an em­ployee out­side of a nor­mal work sched­ule.

Senate Bill 948, which was in­tro­duced by Sen. Erika Geiss, D-Taylor, has been re­ferred to the Labor Committee. The bill is also known as the Workplace Employee Boundaries Act.

“In an in­creas­ingly ‘always-on, al­ways avail­able’ econ­omy, we must take ac­tion to pro­tect work­ers and cre­ate stronger bound­aries,” Geiss said when in­tro­duc­ing the bill. “Too many work­ers are ex­pected to be con­stantly avail­able, an­swer­ing emails, mes­sages, and calls long af­ter their work­day ends. That pres­sure erodes well-be­ing, un­der­mines fam­ily life, and dis­pro­por­tion­ately im­pacts work­ing par­ents and care­givers. It is a mat­ter of fair­ness, dig­nity, and ba­sic re­spect.”

A bill analy­sis dated June 18 ex­plains that an em­ployee could be com­pen­sated in their con­tract for on-call avail­abil­ity. Another op­tion is that the em­ployee could set hours of avail­abil­ity, dur­ing which they would be able to ac­cess and re­spond to work-re­lated mat­ters.

Messages re­gard­ing a state or fed­eral emer­gency that af­fected busi­ness op­er­a­tions also would be al­lowed.

But in gen­eral, should this bill be­come law in Michigan, an em­ployer could not re­quire an em­ployee to ac­cess or re­spond to work-re­lated mat­ters out­side of their as­signed hours. This in­cludes emails, text mes­sages or so­cial me­dia mes­sages re­gard­ing em­ploy­ment du­ties or sched­ul­ing fu­ture work shifts, the bill analy­sis ex­plains.

Violations could be re­ported to the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, with fines to the com­pany and/​or over­time pay to the em­ployee among the pos­si­ble re­sults.

The po­ten­tial costs, ac­cord­ing to the bill analy­sis, in­clude the ad­min­is­tra­tive work re­quired by the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity to cre­ate train­ing ma­te­ri­als and process any com­plaints that may be filed.

In:

Employment

Michigan