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 40.  Ben 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…”