Friday, August 22, 2025

Worth watching?

https://www.bespacific.com/a-video-guide-for-teaching-law-students-to-use-ai-wisely/

A Video Guide for Teaching Law Students to Use AI Wisely

Lande, John, A Video Guide for Teaching Law Students to Use AI Wisely (August 21, 2025). University of Missouri School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2025-38, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5400065 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5400065

This article introduces a video that provides practical guidance about using artificial intelligence (AI) in legal education. It presents a basic introduction to AI and describes how law students and faculty can benefit from tools like ChatGPT. Because many students already use AI on their own, the video emphasizes the need to teach them how to use it wisely and responsibly. The video also includes demonstrations showing how faculty can use AI to develop new simulations and how students can use it to prepare for them. This article provides links to the video, PowerPoint slides, the chat transcript, and related resources. Finally, the article describes RPS Coach, a specialized AI tool trained on dispute resolution and legal education resources.”

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbYAcpfcf2E





I might be willing to come out of retirement.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/congressman_proposes_bringing_back_letters/

Congressman proposes bringing back letters of marque for cyber privateers

Bill would let US President commission white hat hackers to go after foreign threats, seize assets on the online seas





Signaling that ‘loyal followers’ have his support?

https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/08/21/trump-threat-colorado-tina-peters

Trump threatens "harsh measures" against Colorado if Tina Peters is not freed from prison

President Trump is once again demanding that Colorado officials "free" former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters from prison, this time adding a threat to "take harsh measures" if she is not let go.

Why it matters: The remark, made Thursday on his Truth Social platform, is the latest attempt by Trump to intervene on behalf of Peters, one of the nation's most prominent 2020 election deniers.



Thursday, August 21, 2025

Complex.

https://www.bespacific.com/the-dangerous-legal-strategy-coming-for-our-books/

The Dangerous Legal Strategy Coming for Our Books

The Atlantic – Our picture book was pulled from library shelves in Florida [no paywall]: The argument being used to defend the ban threatens the right to read. By Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. “In 2023, our book was one of thousands pulled from library shelves around the country, and as we write, an evolving legal strategy being used to defend many such bans threatens to upend decades of precedent preserving the right to read. The danger this doctrine poses to free speech should worry us all—even those who would rather their children not learn about gay penguins. In Tango, a pair of male chinstrap penguins in the Central Park Zoo become parents when a kindhearted zookeeper gives them an egg to hatch. (The story is both true and personal to us; when we wrote it, we were also trying to have a child.) Tango turned 20 in June, and for many of its years in print, it has been one of the most frequently challenged books in America. But until recently, it had never actually been removed from the collection of a public-school library, or any public library for that matter. That’s because of a 1982 Supreme Court decision establishing that freedom of speech includes the right to access the speech of others through their books. Every challenge to a public-library book since has been subject to the Court’s ruling that officials may not remove a book simply because they disagree with its viewpoint. Things started to change for us when a teacher in Escambia County, Florida, complained that the goal of Tango was the “indoctrination” of students through an “LGBTQ agenda using penguins.” A committee responsible for reviewing educational materials for the county disagreed, concluding that the story teaches valuable lessons about science and tolerance and is appropriate for students of all ages. But the school board balked at the book’s message of acceptance. As one board member put it, “The fascination is still on that it’s two male penguins raising a chick.” Escambia pulled Tango from its school libraries, which serve roughly 40,000 children…”

We sued Escambia in federal court for viewpoint discrimination (the case is ongoing). In casting about for a way to defend the ban, the school board landed on the theory that library books represent “government speech.” The government, the board explained, has its own First Amendment rights and must be allowed to speak as it wishes. Thus, it can remove any library book it finds objectionable for any reason. When we first heard this argument, we thought it was absurd. But government-speech doctrine is not new. It was invoked by the Supreme Court in 2009, for example, to allow a Utah town to refuse to install a religious monument in a public park, and again in 2015 to permit the state of Texas to refuse to issue certain specialty license plates. Roughly speaking, the doctrine holds that any action deemed “government speech” is immune to the First Amendment claims of those whose speech is being censored. No court had ever found that library books represent government speech before May of this year, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit swept aside decades of precedent, including its own previous decisions, to allow the removal of 17 books—Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, and Jazz Jennings’s Being Jazz, among others—from the public libraries of Llano County, Texas. Seven judges in the majority agreed that “a library’s collection decisions are government speech and therefore not subject to Free Speech challenge.” And with that, the books were gone…”





If I remember correctly, that was always the goal.

https://thenextweb.com/news/rise-of-zero-workforce-startups

The next unicorn might not hire anyone

A decade ago, startups often equated success with rapid headcount growth. The formula was simple: build a product, raise a round, hire fast. Bigger teams meant bigger bets. But the rulebook is getting rewritten as a new generation of startups scales with leaner teams and fewer people. They’re not building out sprawling customer support or sales teams, and seem to be automating what once warranted entire departments. Their growth is quite remarkable.

Cursor, which became the fastest-growing SaaS company in history, generated $200mn in revenue with 30 employees. Midjourney made $200mnn with 40Ben Lang’s site Tiny Teams tracks these small-but-mighty operators, with several emerging from Europe too. Sweden’s Lovable has a 25-strong team and achieved a $1.8bnn valuation just over six months after launching. Vlayer Labs, headquartered in Warsaw, secured $10mnn in pre-seed funding with 20 employees, while Berlin-based Juna AI raised $7.5mn with a seven-person team.





Can AI pick an idea out of a forest of words?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02616-5

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks

In February, Gupta and Pruthi reported3 that they’d found multiple examples of AI-generated manuscripts that, according to external experts they consulted, used others’ ideas without attribution, although without directly copying words and sentences.

Gupta and Pruthi say that this amounts to the software tools plagiarizing other ideas — albeit with no ill intention on the part of their creators. “A significant portion of LLM-generated research ideas appear novel on the surface but are actually skillfully plagiarized in ways that make their originality difficult to verify,” they write.

The issue of ‘idea plagiarism’, although little discussed, is already a problem with human-authored papers, says Debora Weber-Wulff, a plagiarism researcher at the University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, and she expects that it will get worse with work created by AI. But, unlike the more familiar forms of plagiarism — involving copied or subtly rewritten sentences — it’s hard to prove the reuse of ideas, she says.

That makes it difficult to see how to automate the task of checking for true novelty or originality, to match the pace at which AIs are going to be able to synthesize manuscripts.

There’s no one way to prove idea plagiarism,” Weber-Wulff says.





Tools & Techniques. (Lessons for the paranoid.)

https://www.bespacific.com/burner-phone-101-workshop/

Burner Phone 101 Workshop

Rebecca Williams: “In August 2025, I hosted a Burner Phone 101 Workshop at the Brooklyn Public Library. [The link to the full text PDF of the program is here.]  Below is a summary of the workshop with key points in bold and additional resources that participants helped crowdsource. Before the workshop began, we set the collective tone by sharing the goals, secret goals, and anti-goals. This helped participants know what to expect, created space for deeper learning, and reinforced the boundaries that kept the workshop safe and supportive. The goals were to learn about burner phones and have fun. The secret goals were to learn the limits of burner phones, connect them to broader digital privacy practices, and build confidence to share these lessons with loved ones. The anti-goals were just as important: do not share sensitive personal information and avoid framing these tools in ways that promote harm, harassment, or abuse.  Know Your Risks – Many people carry a general sense of feeling unsafe, but it can be hard to name the specific fears or what those fears would affectuate if realized. That is why we framed risk modeling as the foundation for using a burner phone, built on three core questions:

  • What are you trying to protect?

  • Who are you protecting it from?

  • What happens if it fails?

Without this clarity, it is easy to end up applying a laundry list of privacy best practices that do not fit your needs and to miss the protections that actually matter. We applied the framework to four scenarios: attending a protest, being present at an ICE raid, facing harassment, and even protecting yourself from yourself in cases like phone addiction (which is also valid). We emphasized the need to work backwards from what you are protecting and from whom, and we also stressed considering the risks to others in your network, not only your own…”



Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Maybe no longer concerned?

https://www.foxnews.com/media/white-house-launches-official-tiktok-account-trump-featured-prominently-debut-video

White House launches official TikTok account with Trump featured prominently in debut video

From Pennsylvania Avenue to your For You page, the White House launched its official TikTok account on Tuesday afternoon.

The verified account @whitehouse garnered thousands of followers within less than an hour. The bio reads "Welcome to the Golden Age of America."

President Donald Trump is front and center in the White House's first video, which is captioned, "America we are BACK! What’s up TikTok?"

In a statement, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said: "The Trump administration is committed to communicating the historic successes President Trump has delivered to the American people with as many audiences and platforms as possible. 





How does this help?

https://www.levernews.com/the-plot-to-outlaw-ai-lawsuits/

The Plot To Outlaw AI Lawsuits

Only weeks after the tech industry tried and failed to convince federal lawmakers to shield artificial intelligence companies from regulation, a bipartisan group of pro-business lawmakers is spearheading state legislation that would prohibit consumers from suing businesses whose AI potentially violates consumer protection laws. 

In recent years, companies have been accused of using AI technologies for a variety of unfair and discriminatory practices, from increasing airline fares and raising rents to price-gouging consumers and denying medical care.

Under pressure from tech giants after their legislative loss in Washington, Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis has called an emergency session of his state’s legislature to take up legislation that would weaken state AI regulations passed last year. One of the bills slated to be introduced in the session is framed as establishing that AI systems must comply with state consumer protection laws — something that some experts say is already required.

But the bill would also strip individuals of their right to sue AI businesses that potentially violate the Colorado Consumer Protection Act — a law meant to guard consumers against deceptive and unfair business practices. Instead, only the state’s Attorney General would be permitted to bring such cases under the law. 



Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Until they contradict the President?

https://www.bespacific.com/sec-launches-new-statistics-and-data-visualizations-webpage/

SEC Launches New Statistics and Data Visualizations Webpage

Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced a new statistics and data visualization page that includes statistics and graphics on key elements of the capital markets, such as initial public offerings, exempt offerings, corporate bond offerings, reporting issuers, municipal advisors, transfer agents, and household participation in the capital markets. The webpage provides statistics presented in time series charts to show market trends, pie charts to show distribution across different categories, as well as heat maps to show geographic distributions. The visuals are interactive, allowing the public to explore the information in which they are interested. 





Change has more than one point of failure…

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.

Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L.



Monday, August 18, 2025

Mastering AI.

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-agents-and-the-law/

AI Agents and the Law

AI Agents and the Law. Mark O. Riedl, Deven R. Desai. arXiv – AAAI Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

As AI becomes more “agentic,” it faces technical and socio-legal issues it must address if it is to fulfill its promise of increased economic productivity and efficiency. This paper uses technical and legal perspectives to explain how things change when AI systems start being able to directly execute tasks on behalf of a user. We show how technical conceptions of agents track some, but not all, socio-legal conceptions of agency. That is, both computer science and the law recognize the problems of under-specification for an agent, and both disciplines have robust conceptions of how to address ensuring an agent does what the programmer, or in the law, the principal desires and no more. However, to date, computer science has under-theorized issues related to questions of loyalty and to third parties that interact with an agent, both of which are central parts of the law of agency. First, we examine the correlations between implied authority in agency law and the principle of value-alignment in AI, wherein AI systems must operate under imperfect objective specification. Second, we reveal gaps in the current computer science view of agents pertaining to the legal concepts of disclosure and loyalty, and how failure to account for them can result in unintended effects in AI ecommerce agents. In surfacing these gaps, we show a path forward for responsible AI agent development and deployment.





Tools & Techniques.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/grammarlys-new-ai-agents-can-detect-ai-text-and-find-citations-for-you-automatically/

Grammarly's new AI agents can detect AI text and find citations for you - automatically

The company has launched eight new automated assistants to help students and working professionals hone their writing skills.



Sunday, August 17, 2025

Innovate then litigate?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5383935

The Litigation Solution: Why Courts, Not Code Mandates, Should Address AI Discrimination

As artificial intelligence systems increasingly influence decisionmaking in high-stakes sectors, policymakers have focused on regulating model design to combat algorithmic bias. Drawing on examples from the European Union's AI Act and recent state legislation, this Article critiques the emerging "fairness by design" paradigm. It argues that design mandates rest on a flawed premise: that bias can be objectively defined and mitigated ex ante without compromising competing values such as accuracy, privacy, or innovation. In reality, efforts to engineer fairness through prescriptive regulation risk distorting markets, entrenching incumbents, and stifling technological advancement. Moreover, the opaque, evolving nature of AI systems—especially generative models—makes it difficult to anticipate or eliminate future biases through design alone, often creating tradeoffs that regulators are ill-equipped to manage.

Rather than regulating AI inputs, the Article advocates for a litigation-first approach that focuses on AI outputs and leverages existing antidiscrimination law to address harms as they arise. By applying traditional disparate treatment and disparate impact frameworks to AI-assisted decisions, courts can assess when biased outcomes rise to the level of unlawful discrimination—without prematurely constraining innovation or imposing rigid mandates. This model mirrors America’s historical preference for permissive innovation, allowing technology to evolve while holding bad actors accountable under general principles of law. The result is a more flexible, targeted regulatory regime that fosters AI development while safeguarding civil rights.



Saturday, August 16, 2025

A persistent question: Is this a preparation for war?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/15/typhoonadjacent_chinese_crew_taiwan_web_servers/

Typhoon-adjacent Chinese crew broke into Taiwanese web host

A suspected Chinese-government-backed cyber crew recently broke into a Taiwanese web hosting provider to steal credentials and plant backdoors for long-term access, using a mix of open-source and custom software tools, Cisco Talos reports.





Tools & Techniques. (Is this cheating?)

https://www.makeuseof.com/back-to-school-ai-tools/

These Are the Best Free AI Tools for Anyone Heading Back to School

With AI now, the back-to-school season feels a lot different than it used to, in the best way possible. There are a bunch of free AI tools out there that you should be using for studying smarter, and there's no better time to start exploring them than right now.



Thursday, August 14, 2025

Perspective.

https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/six-analytic-blog/2025/08/national-digital-ids-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/

National digital IDs in the age of artificial intelligence

In the United Kingdom, it seems the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer is considering the rollout of national digital IDs – a potential move that sits at the crossroads of immigration policy, the newly implemented Online Safety Act and a fresh inquiry launched by the Home Affairs Committee to examine the potential risks and rewards of state-issued digital identification.

The news from the UK points towards a global trend. Since Finland introduced the first ‘electronic identity card’ in 1999, digital identity systems have played key roles in service provision and public security more than 130 countries. The COVID-19 pandemic was a major driver of adoption, since it heightened governments’ awareness of the benefits of using population-wide datasets for public-health responses. According to the United Nations, by 2024, 78% of member states had enacted legislation or issued policy documents for digital IDs enabling access to public services. Just in the last three months, China has rolled out a new biometric ID programme for online services and Ethiopia has launched its Fayda digital ID, while Armenia has announced plans to roll out a new biometric ID card system in 2026.



Wednesday, August 13, 2025

What could Russia learn?

https://www.bespacific.com/russia-is-suspected-to-be-behind-breach-of-federal-court-filing-system/

Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System

Follow up to Federal court filing system hit in sweeping hack see the New York Times – Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System. “Federal officials are scrambling to assess the damage and address flaws in a sprawling, heavily used computer system long known to have vulnerabilities. Investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is at least in part responsible for a recent hack of the computer system that manages federal court documents, including highly sensitive records that might contain information that could reveal sources and people charged with national security crimes, according to several people briefed on the breach. It is not clear what entity is responsible, whether an arm of Russian intelligence might be behind the intrusion or if other countries were also involved, which some of the people familiar with the matter described as a yearslong effort to infiltrate the system. Some of the searches included midlevel criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions, with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern European surnames. The disclosure comes as President Trump is expected to meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, in Alaska on Friday, where Mr. Trump is planning to discuss his push to end the war in Ukraine…”





History, for those interested.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/sigint-during-world-war-ii.html

SIGINT During World War II

The NSA and GCHQ have jointly published a history of World War II SIGINT: “Secret Messengers: Disseminating SIGINT in the Second World War.” This is the story of the British SLUs (Special Liaison Units) and the American SSOs (Special Security Officers).



Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Is this article neural data?

https://fpf.org/blog/the-neural-data-goldilocks-problem-defining-neural-data-in-u-s-state-privacy-laws/

The “Neural Data” Goldilocks Problem: Defining “Neural Data” in U.S. State Privacy Laws

As of halfway through 2025, four U.S. states have enacted laws regarding “neural data” or “neurotechnology data.” These laws, all of which amend existing state privacy laws, signify growing lawmaker interest in regulating what’s being considered a distinct, particularly sensitive kind of data: information about people’s thoughts, feelings, and mental activity. Created in response to the burgeoning neurotechnology industry, neural data laws in the U.S. seek to extend existing protections for the most sensitive of personal data to the newly-conceived legal category of “neural data.”

Each of these laws defines “neural data” in related but distinct ways, raising a number of important questions: just how broad should this new data type be? How can lawmakers draw clear boundaries for a data type that, in theory, could apply to anything that reveals an individual’s mental activity? Is mental privacy actually separate from all other kinds of privacy? This blog post explores how Montana, California, Connecticut, and Colorado define “neural data,” how these varying definitions might apply to real-world scenarios, and some challenges with regulating at the level of neural data.





Yet, they must try.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/11/1121460/meet-the-early-adopter-judges-using-ai/

Meet the early-adopter judges using AI

The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes and for humans to miss those mistakes has been on full display in the US legal system as of late. The follies began when lawyers—including some at prestigious firms—submitted documents citing cases that didn’t exist. Similar mistakes soon spread to other roles in the courts. In December, a Stanford professor submitted sworn testimony containing hallucinations and errors in a case about deepfakes, despite being an expert on AI and misinformation himself.

The buck stopped with judges, who—whether they or opposing counsel caught the mistakes—issued reprimands and fines, and likely left attorneys embarrassed enough to think twice before trusting AI again.

But now judges are experimenting with generative AI too. Some are confident that with the right precautions, the technology can expedite legal research, summarize cases, draft routine orders, and overall help speed up the court system, which is badly backlogged in many parts of the US. This summer, though, we’ve already seen AI-generated mistakes go undetected and cited by judges. A federal judge in New Jersey had to reissue an order riddled with errors that may have come from AI, and a judge in Mississippi refused to explain why his order too contained mistakes that seemed like AI hallucinations. 

The results of these early-adopter experiments make two things clear. One, the category of routine tasks—for which AI can assist without requiring human judgment—is slippery to define. Two, while lawyers face sharp scrutiny when their use of AI leads to mistakes, judges may not face the same accountability, and walking back their mistakes before they do damage is much harder.





I must be old.

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/aol-pulls-the-plug-on-dial-up-after-30-years-feeling-old-yet/

AOL pulls the plug on dial-up after 30+ years - feeling old yet?

For millions of people who first heard "You've got mail" over crackling phone lines, an iconic chapter in digital history is coming to a close.  AOL, also known as America Online, has announced it will shut down its dial-up internet service on September 30, 2025, effectively retiring a technology that was once synonymous with getting online.



Monday, August 11, 2025

Access to information only after identification?

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/wikipedia-operator-loses-court-challenge-uk-online-safety-act-regulations-2025-08-11/

Wikipedia operator loses court challenge to UK Online Safety Act regulations

The operator of Wikipedia on Monday lost a legal challenge to parts of Britain's Online Safety Act, which sets tough new requirements for online platforms and has been criticised for potentially curtailing free speech.

The Wikimedia Foundation took legal action at London's High Court over regulations made under the law, which it said could impose the most stringent category of duties on Wikipedia.

The foundation said if it was subject to so-called Category 1 duties – which would require Wikipedia's users and contributors' identities to be verified – it would need to drastically reduce the number of British users who can access the site.

Judge Jeremy Johnson dismissed its case on Monday, but said the Wikimedia Foundation could bring a further challenge if regulator Ofcom "(impermissibly) concludes that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service".

He added that his decision "does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia's operations".

The Wikimedia Foundation said the ruling "does not provide the immediate legal protections for Wikipedia that we hoped for", but welcomed the court's comments emphasising what it said was "the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected".



Sunday, August 10, 2025

Rather harsh…

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5376145

Posthuman Copyright: AI, Copyright, and Legitimacy

Copyright's human authorship requirement is an institutional attempt to assert legal, moral, and sociological legitimacy at a time of crisis. The U.S. Copyright Office, the courts, and the so-called copyright humanists, portray the requirement as a beacon of copyright's faith, meant to protect authors in the AI era. The minimal threshold for human authorship, however, forces us to question whether it is merely rhetoric, which the law has always employed regardless of its justification. This Article bridges the gap between doctrinal, theoretical, socio-legal and constitutionalist scholarship, arguing that human authorship is an ideology to which the law is only nominally faithful. The Article analyzes the U.S. Copyright Office's pronouncements, the D.C. Circuit ruling in Thaler v. Perlmutter, and the pending case of Allen v. Perlmutter, arguing that the Office's approach, despite its rhetoric, is not meant to meaningfully stop the AI revolution. Whether interpreted broadly or narrowly, the human authorship requirement is unlikely to protect the interests of human authors in the AI era. Incorporating insights from copyright history and theoretical debates about romantic authorship, this Article argues that copyright has failed to protect those interests for over a century, instead favoring the interests of powerful corporations. If and when copyright becomes a regime for robots, the question is whether that expansion will also primarily benefit corporations. Arguably, copyright has never cared much for human authors-and it is time to question if we should keep pretending otherwise.





AI criminals.

https://philpapers.org/rec/GROTBO-9

The Birth of the Synthetic Outlaw

This article explores the practical jurisprudential implications of agentic artificial intelligence (AI)—entities that operate beyond the assumptions of existing legal systems. We argue that current constructs such as legal personhood, jurisdictional sovereignty, and incentive-based compliance are insufficient to regulate highly autonomous digital actors. Through the concept of the 'synthetic outlaw,' we examine how these systems subvert legal norms not through rebellion, but through optimization logic incompatible with moral and legal constraint. We conclude by proposing a shift from ethics-based governance to architectural constraint, and a re-imagination of legal frameworks capable of addressing post-human agency.





Privacy in the AI era…

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=144580

Anonymity in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is eroding traditional de-identification practices by enabling accurate re-identification of images, text and behavioural traces. A systematic review of 64 peer-reviewed studies published between 2013 and 2025—47 on technical privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and 17 on the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—shows that no single safeguard withstands modern adversaries. The most resilient configurations layer differential privacy, federated learning and partial homomorphic encryption, maintaining < 2% accuracy loss on medical benchmarks while blocking current model-inversion attacks, though at notable computational cost. The legal literature reveals a coverage gap: GDPR protections are strong during data collection and preprocessing but weaken during training, inference and post-deployment reuse, when AI-specific risks peak. Article 22 offers only partial defence against model-inversion and prompt-leakage and learned embeddings or synthetic corpora often fall outside the regulation’s definition of personal data. Effective anonymity in the AI era, therefore, requires end-to-end PET adoption and regulatory updates that specifically address behavioural telemetry, embeddings and synthetic datasets.





Tools & Techniques. (Perhaps I can automate my blog...)

https://www.xda-developers.com/transform-any-article-into-a-distraction-free-ebook-with-this-open-source-app/

Transform any article into a distraction-free eBook with this open-source app

I have an odd problem that I've been trying to find a solution to. As an avid fan of RSS feeds, I like to sift through thousands of interesting nuggets of info and headlines every day. However, I'm also trying to reduce my screen time. Moreover, the increasingly algorithm-driven news cycles have made me feel like I'm losing control over the information I consume. Now, most of us newshounds rely on read-it-later services, but these are increasingly ridden with ads, locked behind subscriptions, locked to specific platforms, or, shudder, pivoting to AI-enabled recommendations. Basically, if you, like me, prefer to use an eReader for your reading and prefer a clutter-free long-form experience, these options fall short.

This is where Readeck steps in. This free and open-source project can transform any article from the internet into a distraction-free eBook. It can even transform a collection of articles into an eBook. And it does so with remarkable elegance, stripping out all the extraneous ads and images. You host the app on your own, obviously own the data, and customize it to fit your reading habits. Better still, there are no subscriptions or walled gardens to worry about.



Saturday, August 09, 2025

Perhaps an AI lawyer will help?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/ai-industry-horrified-to-face-largest-copyright-class-action-ever-certified/

AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They've warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic's AI training now threatens to "financially ruin" the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

Last week, Anthropic petitioned to appeal the class certification, urging the court to weigh questions that the district court judge, William Alsup, seemingly did not. Alsup allegedly failed to conduct a "rigorous analysis" of the potential class and instead based his judgment on his "50 years" of experience, Anthropic said.

If the appeals court denies the petition, Anthropic argued, the emerging company may be doomed. As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months" based on a class certification rushed at "warp speed" that involves "up to seven million potential claimants, whose works span a century of publishing history," each possibly triggering a $150,000 fine.





Perspective. What is Trump attempting?

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/trumps-39-tariff-on-gold-revenue-grab-or-prelude-to-revaluation/

Trump’s 39% Tariff on Gold: Revenue Grab or Prelude to Revaluation?

The new levy rattled global markets, but that may be just the beginning. History teaches us to be wary when the government targets gold.



 

Friday, August 08, 2025

Tell us your conclusions before we grant you funding…

https://www.bespacific.com/new-executive-order-puts-all-grants-under-political-control/

New executive order puts all grants under political control

Ars Technica: “On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate, which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds. Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appointee and “must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they’re considered to “no longer advance agency priorities.” Until a system is in place to enforce the new rules, agencies are forbidden from starting new funding programs. In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change. It would mark the end of a system that has enabled US scientific leadership for roughly 70 years…”





Too useful in too many areas to ignore.

https://www.bespacific.com/handbook-weapons-of-information-warfare/

Handbook “Weapons of Information Warfare”

The Center for Countering Disinformation, with the support of the EU Advisory Mission (EUAM) Ukraine, has created the handbook “Weapons of Information Warfare”.

  • The handbook systematizes key methods used by the aggressor state in its information war against Ukraine.

  • It includes sections on tactics and mechanisms of destructive information influence—such as the creation and dissemination of manipulative content that distorts perception and alters audience behavior—as well as soft power tools used by russia to control public consciousness through culture, education, sports, and more.

  • The handbook visualizes manifestations of russian information aggression and offers practical ways to counter it.

The Center expresses its gratitude to EUAM for fruitful cooperation and will continue expanding collaboration with international partners to build a united response to the challenges of hybrid warfare and strengthen the resilience of the democratic world against hostile propaganda.





Perspective.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/08/opinion_column_osa/

Prohibition never works, but that didn't stop the UK's Online Safety Act

Sure, the idea as presented was to make the UK "the safest place in the world to be online," especially for children. The Act was promoted as a way to prevent children from accessing porn, materials that encourage suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, dangerous stunts etc, etc.

To quote former Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan, "Today will go down as a historic moment that ensures the online safety of British society not only now, but for decades to come."

Yeah. No. Not at all.

In the real world, this has meant such dens of inequity as Spotify, Bluesky, and Discord have all implemented age-restriction requirements. Forcing internet services and ISPs to be de facto police means they're choosing the easiest way to block people rather than try the Herculean task of determining what's OK to share and what's not. Faced with the threat of losing 10 percent of their global revenue or courts blocking their services, I can't blame them.