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A hacker collective has exposed just how much data a single Flock license plate camera can collect. After pulling one down and dumping its contents, researchers found one point six million images of fifty thousand vehicles captured in just twenty-one days. It's a stark reminder that surveillance infrastructure is often far more expansive than the public realizes, and far less secure.
Shifting to artificial intelligence, Mozilla's latest State of Open Source AI report finds Chinese open-weight models are now roughly four months behind leading US frontier systems, a gap that has closed dramatically. Those models trail the top closed systems by just a few benchmark points, while costing as little as thirty percent of the price. Competition, it seems, is doing what competition does.
And in the stablecoin world, Circle has unveiled a new blockchain called Arc, with CEO Jeremy Allaire calling it more consequential than USDC itself. Built for payments, tokenized assets, and institutional finance, the chain arrives as banks and payment giants are rushing into the stablecoin market. Whether Arc becomes infrastructure or ambition remains the open question.
That's your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
