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…”
