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A surveillance company called Flock Safety has found itself on the wrong side of the lens. The firm, which makes automatic license plate readers used by police departments across the country, inadvertently exposed officers' search reasons and sometimes the specific plates they were looking up through common search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing. It's a reminder that the tools built to watch us are not always careful with what they reveal.
Shifting from surveillance to space science, NASA and the US Geological Survey recently sent a team of geologists into California's Mojave Desert near Barstow, following a mineral fingerprint detected by an airborne sensor from JPL flying overhead. The target was a deposit of topaz hydroxyl apophyllite on public land, and the mission is part of a broader push to use aerial remote sensing to locate critical minerals right here on Earth.
And in startup news, Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network blockchain infrastructure, has closed a three hundred fifty five million dollar funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with sovereign wealth funds and major Wall Street institutions also backing the deal. The raise signals continued institutional appetite for programmable financial infrastructure, even as the broader crypto market remains uneven.
That's your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
