A good start, but far from perfect.
https://www.bespacific.com/how-to-disappear/
How to Disappear
The Atlantic [no paywall] “Inside the world of extreme-privacy consultants, who, for the right fee, will make you and your personal information very hard to find. You could easily mistake Alec Harris for a spy or an escaped prisoner, given all of the tradecraft he devotes to being unfindable. Mail addressed to him goes to a UPS Store. To buy things online, he uses a YubiKey, a small piece of hardware resembling a thumb drive, to open Bitwarden, a password manager that stores his hundreds of unique, long, random passwords. Then he logs in to Privacy.com, a subscription service that lets him open virtual debit cards under as many different names as he wishes; Harris has 191 cards at this point, each specific to a single vendor but all linked to the same bank account. This isolates risk: If any vendor is breached, whatever information it has about him won’t be exploitable anywhere else…
Harris is the CEO of HavenX, a firm that provides its clients with extreme privacy and security services. It was spun off from Halo, which focuses on government clients, in 2023. HavenX customers, some of whom pay tens of thousands of dollars a month, typically face serious threats. Some are celebrities or ultra-wealthy families. Others are business executives—interest from this group has risen since the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year. The recent Signal leak, too, in which the editor in chief of this magazine was erroneously added to a high-level Trump administration group chat, triggered more than a few corner-office freak-outs. Many HavenX clients come from the cryptocurrency world: Some made a fast fortune and, because they can’t park their crypto in a bank, are unusually vulnerable; some run crypto companies and are seen, accurately or not, as controlling access to other people’s digital wealth. The recent crypto-market boom has brought a wave of kidnappings, in which some crypto owners have even been held for ransom or tortured into surrendering the keys to their coins. Harris said the first quarter of this year was HavenX’s busiest since the spin-off…”
Did I miss this earlier?
European Commission Publishes Q&A on AI Literacy
On May 7, 2025, the European Commission published a Q&A on the AI literacy obligation under Article 4 of the AI Act (the “Q&A”). The Q&A builds upon the Commission’s guidance on AI literacy provided in its webinar in February 2025, covered in our earlier blog here. Among other things, the Commission clarifies that the AI literacy obligation started to apply from February 2, 2025, but that the national market surveillance authorities tasked with supervising and enforcing the obligation will start doing so from August 3, 2026 onwards.
I thought there was an easy way to check bogus citations. Was I wrong?
https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/ai-hallucination-cases/
AI Hallucination Cases (via) Damien Charlotin maintains this database of cases around the world where a legal decision has been made that confirms hallucinated content from generative AI was presented by a lawyer.
That's an important distinction: this isn't just cases where AI may have been used, it's cases where a lawyer was caught in the act and (usually) disciplined for it.
It's been two years since the first widely publicized incident of this, which I wrote about at the time in Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused. At the time I naively assumed:
I have a suspicion that this particular story is going to spread far and wide, and in doing so will hopefully inoculate a lot of lawyers and other professionals against making similar mistakes.
Damien's database has 116 cases from 12 different countries: United States, Israel, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, Trinidad & Tobago.
20 of those cases happened just this month, May 2025!
I get the impression that researching legal precedent is one of the most time-consuming parts of the job. I guess it's not surprising that increasing numbers of lawyers are returning to LLMs for this, even in the face of this mountain of cautionary stories.
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