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Flock Safety's license plate cameras are facing serious scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where witnesses testified about feeling surveilled without cause — stopped, questioned, and flagged by automated systems simply for driving near a camera. Critics say the technology has expanded far faster than any oversight framework designed to govern it, raising hard questions about who these tools actually protect.
Shifting to artificial intelligence, a developer has published findings suggesting that GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI's latest model, holds back its reasoning unless explicitly prompted to give full effort. That's a curious design choice, and it points to a broader tension in how these systems are tuned — optimizing for speed and cost rather than defaulting to their best possible output, unless a user knows to ask.
And finally, Japan is moving to significantly tighten immigration rules for foreign residents, a shift that's throwing the futures of thousands of long-term expats into genuine uncertainty. While this is primarily a policy story, its ripple effects on the global tech workforce are real — Japan has been actively recruiting international talent in recent years, and that calculus may now be changing.
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