More than 200 arrested in raids, comedian and journalists jailed, gay-friendly cruise turned away and protests banned
Authorities in Turkey have widened a crackdown on public life, arresting more than 200 people during raids across Ankara last month, jailing a comedian and blocking a cruise ship carrying LGBTQ+ passengers from docking in the run-up to the Nato summit in the capital.
The arrests followed a ban on demonstrations in Ankara that was put in place until 10 July. Human Rights Watch (HRW) said this was evidence of Turkey’s “ruthless intolerance of freedom of speech and assembly”. The watchdog group said the Nato summit, which starts on Tuesday, was taking place in the context of intensifying violations of basic rights, “including far-reaching restrictions on the main political opposition party, the media, and freedom of expression in general”.
Техническое интервью — один из самых неоднозначных этапов инженерного найма. От него ждут точной оценки навыков, но часто всё упирается в опыт конкретного интервьюера: какие вопросы он задаёт, как трактует ответы, где проводит границу между грейдами и как потом формулирует фидбек.
Для кандидата это один этап. Для компании — процесс, который может меняться от встречи к встрече.
Летом 2024 года мы в Островке увидели это на практике: внутри одного направления технические интервью проходили по-разному. Дело было не в уровне собеседующих: встречи проводили люди, которые хорошо знают свои команды и роли. Просто навык интервьюирования долго передавался как инженерный фольклор — посиди рядом, послушай старшего, потом попробуй сам.
Мы решили собрать этот фольклор в систему и запустили внутреннюю школу технических интервьюеров. Цель — сделать подготовку собеседующих более предсказуемой по срокам и снизить зависимость интервью от личного стиля конкретного человека.
Под катом рассказываем, как мы проверяли проблему через кастдев, проектировали программу школы, разбирали спорные ситуации на интервью, учили писать фидбек и что изменилось после первых запусков.
Сделанная через нейросеть музыка — это уже не что-то странное. В 2026 году Suno v5.5 выдает треки с вокалом на уровне студийной записи, умеет клонировать голос и экспортировать до 12 раздельных дорожек — стемов — прямо в браузере. Более 100 миллионов пользователей уже создают песни в ИИ, и часть из них монетизирует их на стриминговых платформах. Технология вышла за пределы экспериментов.
Case of Mark Nelson, 46, is one of first since new measures were announced in last week’s immigration bill
A Jamaican man who has lived more than half his life in the UK is facing deportation to his home country in one of the first cases since new anti-immigration measures were announced in last week’s immigration bill.
Mark Nelson, 46, came to the UK in 2000 and set up his own car mechanic business. He has five British children and a British partner. In 2017, he received a four-year prison sentence for growing cannabis plants, something he said he did after his business experienced financial problems. He has not committed any further offences.
Ministers have been urged to toughen the City regulator’s powers to protect consumers against the potential risks of AI, according to a landmark review.
The Mills review by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which looked at how AI will reshape financial services from 2030 onward, found that companies are already starting to shift from human-led activities towards AI-enabled services for everyday consumers.
Authorities have shut down streets, airspace and daily life for the mourning, which began Saturday and will end Thursday as Khamenei, 86, is buried at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, his birthplace.
Russia launched waves of missiles and drones at Kyiv early Monday, killing at least 12 people in an attack that exposed widening gaps in Ukraine's air defenses, authorities said.
По всем Соединенным Штатам прошли праздничные мероприятия в честь 250-летней годовщины провозглашения независимости. Во многих городах торжества и парады осложнялись рекордной жарой. Президент США не терял бодрости и обещал рекордные толпы на главном юбилейном собрании, в Вашингтоне.
Министерство обороны Великобритании заявило, что российский противолодочный самолет Ту-142 «необоснованно близко» подлетел к британскому авианосцу Prince of Wales, сбросил гидроакустические буи и не отвечал на международных частотах. Лондон назвал такое поведение «небезопасным и непрофессиональным».
Watch how Erling Haaland's hometown of Bryne reacted to their hero scoring both goals as Norway knocked out Brazil to advance to the quarter-final of the World Cup.
Классический RAG часто ошибается не из‑за слабой embedding‑модели, а потому что чанки теряют связь с исходным документом. Разбираем, как Contextual Retrieval возвращает этот контекст перед индексацией и помогает точнее искать нужные фрагменты в корпоративных базах знаний.
Claude это полноценная интеллектуальная среда для работы с текстом, кодом, документами, исследованиями, файлами и многошаговыми задачами. Главное отличие Claude — спокойный стиль общения, высокая внимательность к контексту и умение не просто отвечать, а вести задачу по шагам.
В 2026 году интерес к Claude вырос еще сильнее из-за выхода новых моделей пятого поколения. 30 июня 2026 года Anthropic представила Claude Sonnet 5, а 9 июня выпустила Claude Fable 5 и Claude Mythos 5. Sonnet 5 стала универсальной моделью для повседневной работы, программирования и агентных задач, а Fable 5 — более мощным вариантом для сложной разработки, глубокого анализа и долгих автономных процессов.
Для русскоязычных пользователей особенно важен вопрос доступа.Claude нейросеть интересна бизнесу, разработчикам, маркетологам, студентам, авторам и предпринимателям, но в России прямой доступ к сервису обычно связан с ограничениями: сайт может не открываться с российского адреса, российская карта не подходит для оплаты, а регистрация требует поддерживаемого региона.
Villagers in Awoye in the Niger Delta say the ongoing pollution is causing sickness and environmental destruction, while pleas for help go unanswered
Perched on a narrow hospital cot across from her son, Bodunwa Orugbemi can hear the distant Atlantic Ocean and smell the stench of crude oil on the air drifting in from the shore. For days, her 21-year-old son has been lying in this hospital in the Niger Delta, swallowing small spoonfuls of food without being able to speak.
Seventy‑year‑old Orugbemi says Ijadopin started coughing one evening in May, inside their small wooden home in Awoye on Nigeria’s Atlantic coastline. After a few days his cough intensified, then he developed a skin irritation, followed by difficulty breathing.
Wildfires raging across southern Europe have forced thousands to flee their homes and prompted officials to ban spectators from a stage of the Tour de France, amid warnings of “powder keg” conditions after a record-breaking early summer heatwave.
Hundreds of firefighters are tackling blazes that have burned through almost 20,000 hectares (49,500 acres) in Portugal, Spain, France and Greece. Strong winds are forecast to fan the flames and temperatures are expected to rise again this week.
Базовый чат на chat.z.ai бесплатен для обычных пользователей. На 2026 год он открывается из России без VPN. Платные тарифы и доступ к API оплачиваются валютой, но для повседневных задач хватает бесплатного чата.
Разбираем, что умеет GLM, как в нем зарегистрироваться, какие есть реальные ограничения и как подключить API из России в рублях.
Так повелось, что игра DOOM является всевозможным тестовым полигоном компьютерного и околокомпьютерного оборудования. Когда мир облетела весть, что DOOM для MS-DOS отобразили на четырех экранах, это заставило меня встрепенуться. Как это сделать?
Сначала подумал, что игра запущена на одном процессорном блоке, а к нему подключены четыре монитора и четыре комплекта управления. Четыре клавиатуры к одному системнику? Пришло осознание, что здесь что-то не то. Использована «четырехголовая» видеокарта под MS-DOS? Хм, наверное, нет. Неее. В общем, я решил сделать всё сам и поделиться процедурой запуска. Чтобы никто не почувствовал себя обманутым, сразу поясню: в процедуре участвуют три отдельных компьютера, связанных между собой в сеть. Полученный результат запечатлен в виде ролика, присутствующего в статье.
По релизам первой половины 2026 года может показаться, что игровая индустрия выбирается из кризиса — за прошедшие 6 месяцев уже вышла годовая (если не двухлетняя) норма интересных игр. Этот период получился по-настоящему насыщенным на приключения. В январе мы карабкались по склону, буквально чувствуя каждый выступ на скале. В феврале пытались выбраться из лечебницы, заполненной разумными зомби. В марте пускались в философские изыскания на улицах странного фэнтезийного городка. В апреле сражались с произволом властей в неоновом мегаполисе и разбирались с восстанием роботов на Луне. В мае возвращались в Энрот за еженедельным урожаев существ и помогали юному Джеймсу Бонду заслужить статус агента 00. А в июне случился праздник на улице готоманов.
Специально для тех, кто хочет снова вспомнить лучшие игры с начала года или наверстать упущенное, мы составили подборку самого интересного.
Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, speaks in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 28. 2026. —Samir Jordamovic—Anadolu/Getty Images
Last month, I asked hundreds of young people from all over Europe what the internet would look like in 2036. For 46%, it was “something we can’t imagine yet.” This was the most common single answer, and it reflects how the technological revolution driven by artificial intelligence is moving faster than we can imagine it, let alone govern it.
What’s worse, AI is not arriving into a stable world. From Ukraine to Gaza, each unchallenged threat or use of force pushes the international legal order closer to what Prime Minister Mark Carney has called a “rupture.” The shared rules of international order that have held for 80 years are being torn up, at precisely the time when the one technology that most needs shared rules is growing more powerful and influencing every part of our lives.
A world that cannot agree on rules will hand AI to those who answer to no one. And that should worry anyone who still believes in accountability. Nowhere is this more evident than in the manipulation of what people see and take to be true. And AI has made this manipulation easier. Before last year’s Moldovan parliamentary elections, a Russian-funded network of just over 100 fake accounts racked up 50 million views in under three months, in a country of 2.4 million people. Disinformation campaigns like these have been targeting elections across Europe.
You no longer need to overturn an election to damage a democracy. All you need is to flood it with fakes and noise. Algorithms reward outrage. AI turns it into a weapon and often amplifies the sexism, racism and exclusion we have tackled for decades. Outrage cannot be the business model of democracy. What is at stake is not one election or one institution. It is the trust a free society runs on. And that is why the rise of AI is now a test of democratic security, a form of security built on rights, institutions, and law.
Without law, AI answers to no one. It decides who gets a loan, a job, or a medical treatment. It picks which family is turned back at the border, whose face the cameras track, what neighborhood the police are sent to. AI can turn any of them down over a name, an address, and the color of their skin. And no one is accountable for the result. Goodwill and self-regulation will not fix this. Only law will.
The challenge in establishing these laws is that they cannot apply only to the AI we know today. It must address the evolutions of AI still to come, such as autonomous agents. It has to protect people, whatever the technology.
Meanwhile, what humans need from the law is simple. People should have the right to know when a machine is deciding their fate, to understand why, and to challenge the decision. The technology will keep changing. These rights can’t.
The good news is that the hard part of this work is already done. Two years ago, a group of countries wrote down these rules. The result was the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the first of its kind. This binding international treaty commits states to AI systems that respect human rights, democracy and the rule of law. With 21 signatories, including all of the G7, and a first ratification by the European Union in May 2026, it offers the common base the world gathering at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva is looking for.
We can’t let geopolitical fragmentation claim AI governance too, with every major power and every region building its own rules and standards. It would carve the world into competing spheres and double standards, and leave behind those who stand to benefit the most.
That is the danger the AI Framework Convention was designed to address. It is open to any state in the world. This is not a bloc. The forum built around it already brings together almost a quarter of the United Nations member states from every continent, alongside partners working on responsible AI.
Going forward, we face two paths. One where technology protects, connects, and lifts people up. Another where it divides, exploits, and erodes trust. The AI Framework Convention doesn’t try to slow innovation or predict every future use of AI. It takes a risk-based approach and offers practical tools. And it is built for every country that believes in human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.
The first AI for Good summit opened in Geneva in 2017, a year after AlphaGo beat one of the greatest Go players alive, Lee Sedol. When the machine made a move with a 1 in 10,000 chance of being played, Sedol said: “Surely, AlphaGo is creative.”
That creativity still promises new breakthroughs in medicine, in science, and in all the problems we cannot crack alone. It can also be turned against the people it is meant to serve.
This week, the world returns to Geneva. We have a treaty. We now need the political will to use it.
This is what law does that force cannot. In a world order in rupture, international law remains the one language power still has to answer to.
Workers proud of their efforts to grow renewable energy say US president pursuing ‘personal vendetta’ at their expense
Donald Trump has blamed everything – from “national security” issues, the deaths of birds and whales, and cancer – in his decades-long campaign against windfarms. But as the Trump administration continues to undermine the industry, what worries workers most are their jobs.
Since taking office for the second term, Trump has issued an executive order aiming to halt all wind-energy leases and permits, attempted to issue stop-work orders on wind projects under construction, and paid more than $2.6bn in settlements to buy out wind energy leases. And hundreds of workers have been affected.
New report details slew of ventures between private equity and nonprofits and calls for greater government oversight
A watchdog group is calling for greater government oversight of joint ventures between private equity firms and non-profit healthcare providers, arguing that the arrangements could present “risks” to “patients, payers and employees”.
In a new report, Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP), a vocal critic of the industry, detailed more than 500 joint ventures between private equity and nonprofit healthcare providers – ranging from rural hospitals to major religiously affiliated health systems to hospice care providers. The group argued those risks could include extraction of profit and a decline in quality of care.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks to media as the G7 summit gets under way in Calgary, Alberta, Sunday, June 15, 2025. —Jason Franson—The Canadian Press/AP
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese apologized “unequivocally” on Monday for insinuating in a recent podcast that he would “shag”—a vulgar term that means to have sex with—pop star Kylie Minogue.
The Prime Minister’s office issued a brief statement Monday in response to backlash over Albanese’s appearance on a local comedian’s July 3 podcast episode, in which he was asked to answer which Australian entertainer he would “shag, marry, date” among Minogue, actress Nicole Kidman, and singer-actress Rhonda Burchmore.
Albanese, who married his partner, Jodie Haydon, in November 2025 and became the country’s first leader to marry while in office, initially appeared to evade the question, citing his recent wedding. But when pressed further, the Australian leader said, “Oh, Kylie, clearly.”
When podcast host Nikki Osborne clarified, “You’d marry Kylie, shag her, and date her?” Albanese replied, “All of the above.”
Osborne asks her other guests the same question, though the individuals offered as response options typically vary. Albanese’s exchange was met with criticism from Australian parliamentarians.
Zali Steggall, a member of the newly-formed Community Strong Australia party, told The Australian newspaper that it was “entirely inappropriate for the Prime Minister to participate in such a game,” adding that Albanese “needs to learn to push back, lead by example and call it out as sexist.”
In a statement on social media, Sarah Henderson, opposition Senator for the state of Victoria, said Albanese’s “whisky-fueled” comments were “disrespectful to women, embarrassing to Australians and demean the office of Prime Minister,” adding that the leader “got into the gutter with his grubby remarks.”
Another Senator from the opposition, Maria Kovacic, told Sky News Australia that Albanese’s remarks were a “pretty poor error in judgment” and that “there are so many more important things that we should be talking about.”
Meanwhile, Minogue herself has not publicly commented on the Albanese controversy, as of Monday.
Others, however, took to his defense. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles pointed out Albanese’s record on women-focused policies, and he claimed that the podcast interview was of a different nature than standard ones with the Prime Minister.
Marles told ABC Radio that Albanese’s government was “the first government in our nation’s history which has had an equality in terms of the numbers of men and women in cabinet.” In Albanese’s Cabinet, there are 12 women and 11 men, including him.
According to the 2025 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report, Australia under Albanese ranks 13th among 148 countries and territories in terms of achieving gender parity. Women also comprise almost half of the Australian parliament, at 49.6%.
Social services minister Tanya Plibersek also tried to contextualize Albanese’s statement. “If what the Prime Minister’s saying is that he’s a fan of Kylie Minogue, I guess that puts him in a group with millions of other Australians, including me. I’m a big fan of Kylie’s as well,” Plibersek told local broadcaster Seven on Monday.
But others have pointed out that the Prime Minister’s remarks on Minogue come after he criticized a campaign targeting the female premier of Victoria, saying in a social media post last month that “no matter who you support in politics, it is completely unacceptable to demean, objectify, belittle or offend women.”
Particular matter 2.5 (PM2.5) is a neurotoxin that has been linked to obesity, and Mt Sinai researchers say they have for the first time identified impulse control as a potential pathway. The study found that babies exposed to higher levels of PM2.5 during their first year of life were more likely to develop difficulties with controlling impulses later in childhood.
Fresh row erupts over Duke of Sussex’s trip, the buildup to which has been overshadowed by security dispute
Just as it seemed there might be a period of peace, yet another row has broken out between Prince Harry and his family, with one party saying he had accepted an invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace and the other countering within minutes that he would no longer be welcomed.
The Duke of Sussex is to visit London and Birmingham for a series of charity engagements including promoting the Invictus Games. The buildup to the trip has been overshadowed by a dispute with the government over security, and a spokesperson for the prince saying on Sunday that the Duchess of Sussex and the couple’s children would not join him in London, but could do later when he visited Birmingham.
Handmade creations distributed to raise funds for charity prompt complaints to police
At first, the cute paper hedgehogs seemed like a kind gesture. An older man had crafted the little creations from donated books to raise money for charity, handing them to children in local shops.
But on closer inspection, some parents were horrified to discover the hedgehogs had been made from the pages of an erotic novel.
More than 200 arrested in raids, comedian and journalists jailed, gay-friendly cruise turned away and protests banned
Authorities in Turkey have widened a crackdown on public life, arresting more than 200 people during raids across Ankara last month, jailing a comedian and blocking a cruise ship carrying LGBTQ+ passengers from docking in the run-up to the Nato summit in the capital.
The arrests followed a ban on demonstrations in Ankara that was put in place until 10 July. Human Rights Watch (HRW) said this was evidence of Turkey’s “ruthless intolerance of freedom of speech and assembly”. The watchdog group said the Nato summit, which starts on Tuesday, was taking place in the context of intensifying violations of basic rights, “including far-reaching restrictions on the main political opposition party, the media, and freedom of expression in general”.
In today’s newsletter: a tree that has provided for the game over hundreds of years is now protecting it for the future
In those dog days of late June, when it was too hot to do anything but count down the hours until the sun went down, sport frazzled as well. Horse races were cancelled, a guest village provided shade at the Wimbledon qualifiers, and all around the UK school activities were wiped out, from sports days to the national rounders tournament.
At the third Test at Trent Bridge, where England’s men were playing New Zealand in what turned out to be Ben Stokes’s last hurrah, the England and Wales Cricket Board pressed the button on their extreme heat policy and did what they could to protect players and crowd from temperatures that an open ground in the Midlands was not built to deal with.
Cruz just thanked Donald Trump for “getting rid of that ridiculous red card” – apparently in reference to Folarin Balogun. The US striker received a straight red card from referee Raphael Claus after a video review, but Fifa have now lifted Bolagun’s one-match ban, making him now available to play for the USA in their knockout match against Belgium on Monday.
As my colleagues covering the World Cup note, despite the move being considered excessively harsh, Fifa’s disciplinary code does not permit appeals against straight red cards, with officials from the world governing body and US Soccer confirming after the game that the sanction could not be challenged.
Статью про язык программирования Оберон я не мог начать много раз.
Любое упоминание Оберона в непрофильных, а нередко и в профильных сообществах, приводит к таким «дракам», что камня на камне не остаётся!
Я видел смерть нескольких сообществ, посвященных Оберону, эпичнейшие сражения в комментариях и прочие атрибуты «религиозных войн». Дошло до того, что когда я упомянул в нашем сообществе «Ворчалки о программировании», что собираюсь писать эту статью, ко мне в личку пришел человек и попросил не писать!
Я долго не мог понять этот феномен, пока однажды не увидел воочию, как происходит обсуждение картины «Чёрный квадрат» Казимира Малевича. И тут пазл сложился.
Not everyone has a community, but nearly all of us have neighbors — which is why having good relationships with the people who live near you really matters.
Unfortunately, Americans aren’t doing great in this regard. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, only 26 percent of adults in the US say they know all or most of their neighbors, down from 31 percent in 2018. The good news is that overall trust is pretty high: 90 percent of adults say they trust some, most, or all of the people in their neighborhood. But the people who are most likely to know and trust their neighbors are generally older, higher-income white Americans living in rural or suburban areas who attend religious services regularly, which leaves a lot of us out.
So, there’s good reason to try to get these numbers up: As multiple experts told Vox, knowing your neighbors is critical for everyone’s mental and physical health. Having a strong local community can quite literally be lifesaving, something that isn’t theoretical in a moment when extreme weather events are increasingly common, and ICE raids have left many folks extremely vulnerable when they are at home. It’s also just nice! These low-stakes, casual connections can be incredibly easy, pleasant, and affirming. Done right, it can make living in close proximity to others feel like a classic sitcom.
Of course, neighbor connections aren’t all hunky-dory; when things go wrong, they can really go wrong. Because these relationships are so connected to our private domains (and, thus, our sense of privacy, security, and identity), conflicts can escalate quickly and get very weird. Learning to navigate them with grace and empathy is especially important when technology makes it easier for us to see and make contact with the people next door — for better or for worse.
This week, Even Better is exploring the many ways we relate to the people who live in close proximity to us and how we can turn neighbors into friends (or, at least, better ensure they don’t become enemies). We’ll dig into what doorbell camera surveillance is doing to our collective psyche; explore the art of the often-hostile, often-futile neighbor note; share ways to actually get to know your neighbors; and more. We hope this collection of stories inspires you to give a friendly wave, introduce yourself, ask to borrow a cup of sugar, or otherwise reach out. Knock-knock!
This class of doorbell cameras, which includes Amazon-owned Ring, Google Nest Doorbell, and SimpliSafe, is marketed as a convenient means of seeing who’s at your door, a tool to catch burglars and trespassers and maybe even find your lost dog. In actuality, its uses are often more nefarious. | Laura Simonati for Vox
In 2022, a father and son in Florida received notifications from their Ring doorbell camera: Someone was at their door. The pair quickly jumped into action, scouring their apartment complex for a would-be intruder. The scene they happened upon was a woman checking her phone in her car. They fired seven shots at her as she drove away.
The woman, who survived, had never approached their door. The person who was captured on camera turned out to be a neighbor dropping off a package that had been mistakenly delivered to his home.
This class of doorbell cameras, which includes Amazon-owned Ring, Google Nest Doorbell, and SimpliSafe, is marketed as a convenient means of seeing who’s at your door, a tool to catch burglars and trespassers and maybe even find your lost dog. In actuality, its uses are often more nefarious. Hundreds of local law enforcement and government agencies nationwide have joined Ring’s social app Neighbors, a platform where anyone, regardless of whether they own a Ring camera, can post a tip about crime or safety in their neighborhood, and where investigators can request footage from Ring users. And doorbell cameras are popular; 62 percent of respondents in a 2025 US News survey said they installed an outdoor security camera at home. Americans have turned their yards and porches into their own tiny surveillance states.
In addition to the obvious legal and privacy concerns, there isscant evidencethat doorbell camerasactually reduce crime — but there is reason to believe they are having an impact on our neighborly relationships. Research has shown that knowing we’re being watched makes us subconsciously more aware of others, which, in turn, may make us paranoid. Another paper found “the awareness of being watched can intensify existing distrust, paranoia, and fear.” This suspicion colors how we perceive and interact with each other.
“Being a good neighbor does not mean spying on your neighbors,” Will Owen, the communications director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Vox. “We do need to change our thinking around neighborhood surveillance and not buy into the big tech that is creating fear and distrust among neighbors.”
How cameras undermine trust
Even as more people outfit their homes with surveillance technology, ironically, Americans hold their neighbors in high regard. A recent report from the Survey Center on American Life found that 72 percent of Americans maintain some level of trust in their neighbors, a stark contrast to the just 30 percent of Americans who said they trusted others more broadly, according to last year’s World Happiness Report. These findings suggest people feel like they belong in their communities, even if they don’t regularly interact with their neighbors, Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Vox.
So, if we generally believe the people who surround us can be trusted, then who exactly are the cameras for? “If you already trust your neighbors…you can infer that the camera is there to deter people from outside your neighborhood from stealing,” Peter Kim, a professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business and author ofHow Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken and Repaired, told Vox. But if you don’t have actual relationships with your neighbors, you may become suspicious of them, too. Suddenly, everyone is a potential suspect.
Americans tend to consider their homes as their own domain that they alone are responsible for protecting. Instead of relying on communal support (Can I give you a spare key in case I ever get locked out? Do you need me to water your plants while you’re out of town? You’d let me know if you saw someone stealing my package, right?) we lean into individualistic forms of protection like personal security cameras. What this signals to the wider community is that, absent a camera, people cannot be trusted to not steal each other’s packages. And, sure, the camera maybe deters a few people from petty theft, but at what cost? “It’s no longer about those [good] behaviors being the result of your neighbors being trustworthy. Instead the inference becomes, they’re doing this because of this monitoring system, this real disincentive that’s in place,” Kim said. “People can behave in a trustworthy manner, but ironically, you can have less trust in them because you believe that if it were not for that system, they wouldn’t behave in a trustworthy way.”
The cynicism actually leads to a cycle of bad behavior. When cameras are turned onto others, people readily admit to spying on their neighbors, watching back footage to overhear conversations, research found. (Two different participants in the study said they eavesdropped semi-regularly, even though they don’t typically talk to their neighbors in person.) What’s more, when we suspect others won’t abide by the standard neighborly social contract — don’t vandalize, don’t steal — we are less likely to abide by those unspoken rules, too, Kim said. “It becomes more of a, ‘I’m looking out for myself and to hell with all of you,’” Kim added.
How being surrounded by cameras makes us feel
In a 2022 study, participants were instructed to set up cameras and film themselves in various scenarios in their homes. Knowing they were being recorded, many participants reported feeling self-conscious, which impacted how they acted. They actually held back from showing affection to their partner, or from talking.
Other research has found that when people know they’re being watched, they’re able to detect human faces on a computer quicker than people who aren’t under surveillance. “It suggests that our brain might be in this hyper-alert state when we’re being surveilled to detect others in our environment and possibly threat in our environment,” Kiley Seymour, an associate professor of neuroscience and behavior at the University of Technology Sydney and the study’s lead author, told Vox. And participants weren’t even aware of how being on camera affected their response time. “They were like, ‘Oh no, we forgot the cameras were even there.’ … And, despite that, it’s really influencing how they respond to the stimuli that are put in front of them,” Seymour said.
In a neighborhood setting, constant surveillance could make us more sensitive to what our neighbors say, or we could perceive them as more threatening than they actually are, Seymour said. Being perpetually on the lookout for threats puts everyone on edge, ready for a fight.
Home security cameras are often marketed as a form of community connection, but they are ultimately used as a means of isolation and community policing — and the negative consequences disproportionately impact minorities, according to Neilly Tan, a PhD researcher studying human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington. One study from MIT’s Media Lab analyzed public posts from users in Los Angeles on Ring’s social app Neighbors and found that “users actively frame video subjects as criminal and suspicious, that the race of a neighborhood has a significant impact on posting rates, and…that Neighbors may be used as a racial gatekeeping tool, particularly by white neighborhoods that border non-white areas in Los Angeles.”
“This idea of whiteness is apparent with using this technology,” Tan said, adding that one study participant talked about how filming someone with a security camera reminded them of the “Karen” archetype.
To be a good neighbor, spy less and talk more
Trusting our neighbors and resisting the urge to give in to paranoia or spy on them requires vulnerability, Kim said. Letting our guards down, perhaps by ditching the cameras, fosters goodwill when we realize we haven’t been taken advantage of.
To do so, we need to invest time in getting to know our neighbors. In his research, Cox has found that Americans consider a “good” neighbor someone who minds their own business and doesn’t get involved in your life. But the value in being part of a community is knowing each other. “It requires us to be more comfortable with our neighbors getting involved in our affairs and us getting involved in theirs,” Cox said.
The only way to do that is through genuine conversation. Start by simply saying hello when you cross paths in the hallway or while walking the dog, then transition to small talk. (Some possible conversation topics: the weather, events in your town, recommendations for a plumber.) “Neighborly small talk collectively really matters in instilling trust and understanding of your community,” Cox said. “We under-appreciate how important regular, routinized social interactions are either in the workplace or in our neighborhoods.”
With time, you’ll become an established part of each other’s days — a familiar face you see around the neighborhood, someone to ask a favor of, someone to do a favor for. Someone who isn’t a threat or someone to spy on, but another person living their lives in proximity to yours.
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Keir Starmer is likely to face a diplomatic row at his final major international summit this week after Washington’s ambassador to Nato called for alliance members who are “lagging behind” on defence spending to step up.
The prime minister is due to arrive in Ankara on Tuesday for the annual Nato summit, where the UK commitment will be under scrutiny following the release of the government’s defence investment plan (Dip) last week.
