A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.

“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”

“Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead,” the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer’s face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. “Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match,” the site says. 

rongzhi:

No smoking

English added by me :)

Marvel Studios has been ramping up its marketing efforts for The Fantastic Four: First Steps in recent weeks, culminating with the release of one last trailer before the film premieres next month. While prior efforts have focused on the (very cool) 1950s/Tomorrowland kitschy vibe of the film, this newest trailer emphasizes the family angle is chock-full of lots of good old-fashioned superhero action, as the quartet takes on a world-devouring cosmic being.

As previously reported, Marvel Comics' "First Family" hasn't been seen on the big screen since 2015's disastrous reboot of the moderately successful films from the 2000s. Per the film's official premise:

Set against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, The Fantastic Four: First Steps introduces Marvel’s First Family—Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Johnny Storm/Human Torch, and Ben Grimm/The Thing as they face their most daunting challenge yet. Forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, they must defend Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus and his enigmatic Herald, Silver Surfer. And if Galactus’ plan to devour the entire planet and everyone on it weren’t bad enough, it suddenly gets very personal.

Pedro Pascal plays Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic; Vanessa Kirby plays Sue Storm/Invisible Woman; Joseph Quinn plays Johnny Storm/Human Torch; Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Ben Grimm/The Thing; and Matthew Wood voices their robot companion HERBIE. Ralph Ineson plays the gigantic cosmic being Galactus, and Julia Garner plays the Silver Surfer. The cast also includes Mark Gatiss as talk show host Ted Gilbert; Sarah Niles as Lynne; and Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich, and Natasha Lyonne in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

The character of Mole Man is expected to appear, and there is a rumored post-credits scene featuring Robert Downey Jr. as Victor von Doom/Doctor Doom, the primary antagonist for Avengers: Doomsday (2026). Those who've seen Thunderbolts* already know that the quartet's arrival via spaceship is hinted at in a post-credits scene (although Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has said that the ship is not at all related to this version of the Fantastic Four).

A teaser dropped in February, showing us the Fantastic Four, already famous, living together in the Baxter Building, as well as giving us a brief glimpse of Ineson's Galactus, an ominous, shadowy figure looming over Manhattan. We learned from footage shown at the 2025 CinemaCon that Sue and Reed would be expecting a child—the resulting infant son, Franklin, is shown prominently in the final trailer—which also gave us our first look at the Silver Surfer. Most of that footage was released as a trailer in April.

Will the Fantastic Four survive the big showdown with Galactus and save Earth? We'll find out next month. The Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters on July 25, 2025. It's the first film in Phase Six of the MCU.

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Ubuntu users could see up to a 20 percent boost in graphics performance on Intel-based systems under a change that will turn off security mitigations for blunting a class of attacks known as Spectre.

Spectre, you may recall, came to public notice in 2018. Spectre attacks are based on the observation that performance enhancements built into modern CPUs open a side channel that can leak secrets a CPU is processing. The performance enhancement, known as speculative execution, predicts future instructions a CPU might receive and then performs the corresponding tasks before they are even called. If the instructions never come, the CPU discards the work it performed. When the prediction is correct, the CPU has already completed the task.

By using code that forces a CPU to execute carefully selected instructions, Spectre attacks can extract confidential data that the CPU would have accessed had it carried out the ghost instructions. Over the past seven years, researchers have uncovered multiple attack variants based on the architectural flaws, which are unfixable. CPU manufacturers have responded by creating patches in both micro code and binary code that restrict speculative execution operations in certain scenarios. These restrictions, of course, usually degrade CPU performance.

When the investment costs more than the return

Over time, those mitigations have degraded graphics processing performance by as much as 20 percent, a member of the Ubuntu development team recently reported. Additionally, the team member said, Ubuntu will integrate many of the same mitigations directly into its Kernel, specifically in the Questing Quokka release scheduled for October. In consultation with their counterparts at Intel, Ubuntu security engineers have decided to disable the mitigations in the device driver for the Intel Graphics Compute Runtime.

“After discussion between Intel and Canonical’s security teams, we are in agreement that Spectre no longer needs to be mitigated for the GPU at the Compute Runtime level,” Ubuntu developer Shane McKee wrote. He continued:

At this point, Spectre has been mitigated in the kernel, and a clear warning from the Compute Runtime build serves as a notification for those running modified kernels without those patches. For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance tradeoff.

McKee went on to say that as a result, “Users can expect up to 20% performance improvement.”

The developer acknowledged that the change could open security holes or introduce bugs but said that both Ubuntu and Intel have confidence that disabled versions will be safe.

Most of the researchers Ars consulted agreed. They reasoned that the mitigations built into the kernel are likely to protect against most if not all Spectre attack scenarios. They also noted that there are no known reports of Spectre attacks ever being actively used in the wild.

“Nobody bothers attacking these vulns because it takes a lot of engineering time to implement attacks against them to any useful level of rigor, and getting any interesting data back outside very targeted scenarios is very unlikely (plus it's noisy due to the number of iterations you need to do on these types of side-channels),” independent researcher Graham Sutherland wrote on Mastodon. “The economics just don't stack up for attackers, especially when there are so many lower-effort higher-reward attack approaches they can throw at stuff.”

“From the user perspective it’s risk/reward too,” a researcher going by the handle demize added. “Probably don’t disable side-channel mitigations on multitenant servers. ...” But for typical users, “you have a much higher threat from downloading malware that does literally anything else.”

Ultimately, cryptography engineer Sophie Schmieg said, the benefit of the mitigations isn't worth the performance costs to GPU performance, where predicting instruction branches is more critical than for CPU performance.

“The system can effectively parallelize a lot more actions without requiring expensive synchronization points between the cores,” Schmieg said. “If anything, something massively parallel like a GPU wants to do branch prediction even more liberally than a CPU.”

One thing Ubuntu users should know is that the change will only provide performance boosts when GPUs are handling workloads running the OpenCL framework or the OneAPI Level Zero interface. That likely means that people using games and similar apps will see no benefit.

Ubuntu users who run a custom Linux kernel without Spectre GPU mitigations should keep the compute runtime level mitigations on, a spokesman for Ubuntu developer Canonical said. These users can build a Compute Runtime themselves with the NEO_DISABLE_MITIGATIONS=false flag added.

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The data is striking:

The Supreme Court is now in open conflict with the lower courts over cases involving the Trump administration. Since May, federal district courts have ruled against the administration 94.3% of the time. The Supreme Court, however, has flipped that outcome, siding with the administration in 93.7% of its cases (15 out of 16).

District court judges, who see the evidence firsthand and hear directly from those affected, overwhelmingly find the administration’s actions unlawful. Circuit courts split more evenly but still lean against the administration. Then the Supreme Court—furthest from facts, closest to power—reverses almost automatically.

The federal judiciary’s multiple levels were designed to handle different types of cases and create orderly paths for appeal, with the Supreme Court as the final arbiter. But that system assumes good faith—that the highest court will exercise its power judiciously, reversing lower courts when they’ve erred, not simply when they rule against executive power.

In National TPS Alliance v. Noem, a district court blocked the administration from terminating Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan nationals, but the Supreme Court intervened to grant the government a stay, allowing the terminations to proceed. In J.G.G. v. Trump, after a district court issued a temporary restraining order to stop the summary removal of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, the Supreme Court again stepped in, vacating the lower court’s order.

The Supreme Court’s intervention in D.V.D. v. DHS exemplifies this pattern. Judge Brian E. Murphy confronted devastating evidence: DHS was deporting people to third countries with hours or minutes of notice, making it impossible to find lawyers or assert claims of persecution. Murphy crafted a narrow remedy—simply requiring advance written notice before deportation. The Supreme Court killed it with an unsigned midnight order, no explanation given. But the message–even left unsaid—was clear.

Federal judges now face coordinated assault from two directions. From the outside, the Trump administration treats court orders as suggestions while targeting judges personally. The president brands them “USA HATING JUDGES” and “MONSTERS.” His allies amplify these attacks into doxxing campaigns, death threats, and impeachment resolutions. From above, the Supreme Court systematically undermines their authority through these emergency reversals. As Justice Sotomayor has pointed out, the government is no longer required to prove its case to win these emergency requests. The Court isn’t correcting clear legal errors; it appears to be punishing lower courts for the act of constraining executive power.

Despite all the protesting-too-much from the Republican majority, this is precisely why the abuse of the shadow docket is so inconsistent with the rule of law in this context. Careful rulings protective of fundamental rights are being casually thrown out with not only no justification for how the balance of equities could favor the government so heavily as to justify an emergency stay but generally no reasoning at all. “Trump wins” is the only rule.

The next step is brutally logical:

Emboldened by the Supreme Court, the administration’s response was swift and unprecedented. On June 24, 2025—just one day after the Supreme Court’s order in D.V.D.—the Department of Justice sued the entire 15-judge bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Their supposed offense? Issuing a standing order that briefly pauses deportations for 48 hours to ensure a detainee’s last-minute appeal can actually be heard by a judge. This order came after the Maryland judges had watched DHS conduct midnight deportations while cases were pending, making judicial review impossible.

The DOJ’s lawsuit crosses a line that has stood for centuries. Federal judges have historically enjoyed absolute immunity from lawsuits over their judicial acts—a protection the government has always respected, until now. Most stunning is the DOJ’s core claim: that the mere act of pausing a deportation for 48 hours to allow for judicial review inflicts irreparable harm on the government. The administration is arguing that it is being injured by the very existence of judicial oversight.

The Supreme Court is already at war with the non-hardcore-MAGA parts of the federal judiciary; this is just the next step from the administration.

The post The Roberts Court is Trump’s personal Star Chamber appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.