Weekly brief, 2026 week 40

This issue collects six stories from 15 to 29 September that do not make a full piece.

Live facial recognition at London stations

British Transport Police trialled live facial recognition at several major London stations from February to July, scanning more than 500,000 faces. According to documents obtained by the investigative outlet Liberty Investigates through a freedom of information request and reported by The Guardian, the trial cost about £320,000 and nearly 100 hours of police time, producing a single alert that was a false match and no arrests. Police announced in August a four-month extension covering Underground stations too. As of The Guardian's 29 September report, police said the extension had produced three confirmed matches, all involving people who were complying with court orders.

The Dutch government's NixOS work environment

According to It's FOSS, the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor lost access to Microsoft services after US sanctions on the court in early 2025, and the Dutch government decided in July 2026 to build DAWO, an autonomous digital work environment. DAWO runs on NixOS, with its code on a self-hosted Forgejo. As of the 25 September report, eight municipalities were testing it on laptops that would otherwise have been retired, and It's FOSS notes that NixOS runs on hardware Windows 11 does not support.

Wayback Machine access limits

The Internet Archive wrote on 15 September that the Wayback Machine has been hit by heavy automated traffic, and that the protections it added sometimes block real people, who see a 429 error. It asks anyone who thinks they were blocked by mistake to email [email protected] with their operating system, browser and IP address.

New Mexico's Cambridge Analytica verdict

A jury in the US state of New Mexico found on 25 September that Facebook misled users about privacy protections. A spokesperson for Facebook's parent company Meta told CBS News that Meta disagrees with the verdict and will keep defending itself. The case concerns a third-party personality quiz app that harvested data from about 87 million profiles and sold it to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

CBS News reports that a judge has yet to set the penalty, and the state asked for the maximum $5,000 per violation. The report adds that an August settlement between Meta and several states over child safety also released Meta from liability over Cambridge Analytica. As of the 25 September report, New Mexico was the only state still pursuing the case.

Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out

The BBC reported on 23 September that Australia's draft digital duty of care law would require platforms to let users switch off recommendation algorithms, with hefty fines for those that do not. The BBC described a submission by the US embassy in Canberra as rare. The submission says vague definitions of "harm" could lead to viewpoint-based censorship and that mandated design rules could affect users outside Australia. Australia's prime minister responded that the bill is about giving control back to individuals, not to governments.

Parley, a federated chat system

According to its project page, Parley is an MIT-licensed open-source chat system that works with ordinary IRC clients, with independently run servers finding each other through DNS and exchanging signed messages over HTTPS. As of 2 October, the listed limitations include server-level keys only and no end-to-end encryption, and its author describes it as a proof of concept that is not yet hardened. The latest release is v0.5.0 from 18 September.