Caution.

https://www.bespacific.com/like-lawyers-in-pompeii-is-legal-ignoring-the-coming-ai-infrastructure-crisis-parts-i-2-2/

Like Lawyers In Pompeii: Is Legal Ignoring The Coming AI Infrastructure Crisis? (Parts I & 2)

Via LLRX – Like Lawyers In Pompeii: Is Legal Ignoring The Coming AI Infrastructure Crisis? (Part I) – Stephen Embry and Melissa Rogo Rogozinski identify the multiple risk factors involved in the increasing usage of AI in the legal sector, including infrastructure gaps between chip capacity, demand for energy sources and building new data centers, as well as vendor dependencies, promises and deliverables.

Like Lawyers In Pompeii: Is Legal Ignoring The Coming AI Cost Crisis? (Part II) – Stephen Embry and Melissa Rogo Rogozinski challenge the assumption fueling the explosion of AI use in legal is that it will save gobs of time. These savings will inure to the benefit of lawyers and clients, will lead to fairer methods of billing like alternative fee structures, will get better results, improve access to justice, and lead to ‘world peace’. Well, maybe even the vendors would not go so far as to guarantee the last one. But vendors do seem to be guaranteeing everything but that.  And pundits talk as if AI will transform legal from the ground up.  Law firms are buying into the hype, investing in expensive systems that do things they barely understand.

A new slippery slope?

https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-greenland-cuba-571aac35e259857fd512c46f5af11e4d

After Maduro, who’s next? Trump spurs speculation about his plans for Greenland, Cuba and Colombia

A day after the audacious U.S. military operation in Venezuela, President Donald Trump on Sunday renewed his calls for an American takeover of the Danish territory of Greenland for the sake of U.S. security interests and threatened military action on Colombia for facilitating the global sale of cocaine, while his top diplomat declared the communist government in Cuba is “in a lot of trouble.”

The comments from Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the ouster of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro underscore that the U.S. administration is serious about taking a more expansive role in the Western Hemisphere.

With thinly veiled threats, Trump is rattling hemispheric friends and foes alike, spurring a pointed question around the globe: Who’s next?

“It’s so strategic right now. Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” Trump told reporters as he flew back to Washington from his home in Florida. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it.”

It’s complicated...

https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_21014.html?lang=en

Knowledge without a Subject: A Philosophical Reflection on the Epistemic Legitimacy of the Machine

The transformation of cognitive and ethical structures in the age of artificial intelligence confronts philosophy with a fundamental question: how does knowledge emerge, and where does responsibility reside when decision-making moves beyond the sphere of human consciousness into algorithmic networks? Focusing on the concept of subjectless knowledge, this study argues that intelligent systems have shifted knowledge from a mental capacity to a mediating process in which human agents, data, and algorithms jointly participate in the production of meaning. Employing a reflective-analytical methodology and examining cases in medicine, media, and law, the paper contends that epistemic validity in the digital era is no longer measured solely by truth, but by the transparency of processes, the capacity for explanation, and the possibility of accountability. Within this framework, social epistemology elucidates how belief is shaped in algorithmic environments, while the ethics of responsibility provides a structure through which the contribution of both human and machinic agents to outcomes can be traced. The proposed model integrates these two dimensions, conceiving knowledge as a mediating event where meaning arises through the interaction between human interpretation and computational reasoning. Accordingly, moral responsibility becomes a distributed property of a network in which every agent participates in the unfolding of cognition. This analysis suggests that maintaining epistemic and ethical legitimacy in intelligent systems requires a philosophical reorientation-from the individual subject toward the distributed architectures of knowing.

Self-driving rules developed by Mad Max?

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7590/6/1/5

According to Whose Morals? The Decision-Making Algorithms of Self-Driving Cars and the Limits of the Law

The emergence of self-driving vehicles raises not only technological challenges, but also profound moral and legal challenges, especially when the decisions made by these vehicles can affect human lives. The aim of this study is to examine the moral and legal dimensions of algorithmic decision-making and their codifiability, approaching the issue from the perspective of the classic trolley dilemma and the principle of double effect. Using a normative-analytical method, it explores the moral models behind decision-making algorithms, the possibilities and limitations of legal regulation, and the technological and ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence development. One of the main theses of the study is that in the case of self-driving cars, the programming of moral decisions is not merely a theoretical problem, but also a question requiring legal and social legitimacy. The analysis concludes that, given the nature of this borderline area between law and ethics, it is not always possible to avoid such dilemmas, and therefore it is necessary to develop a public, collective, principle-based normative framework that establishes the social acceptability of algorithmic decision-making.

What strategy? (We can, therefore we must.)

https://www.businessinsider.com/top-general-details-us-military-raid-that-captured-venezuelas-maduro-2026-1

What the top US general revealed about how the surprise 'Absolute Resolve' raid to capture Maduro unfolded in Venezuela

… Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the "audacious" mission to extract Maduro — called "Absolute Resolve" — required months of meticulous planning and rehearsal, and involved forces from across the US military.

(Related)

https://www.businessinsider.com/economists-foreign-policy-experts-react-donald-trump-raid-venezuela-maduro-2026-1

Here's what the smartest people in foreign policy, business, and economics are saying about Trump's raid on Venezuela

President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that the US had conducted a raid on Venezuela, resulting in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and big names in business and foreign policy have been reacting as the aftermath unfolds.

Here's what they've been saying:

… Bremmer, founder of the political risk research and consulting firm, Eurasia Group, in a post on LinkedIn, wrote that the "US presumption is next Venezuelan leaders will now do what the Americans want because they've just seen the 'or else.'"

A voice from the other side… (Has AI ever asked for rights?)

https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-makers/ai-godfather-yoshua-bengio-warns-against-granting-rights-to-artificial-intelligence-86911.htm

AI godfather Yoshua Bengio warns against granting rights to artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence systems are advancing at a rapid pace, becoming significantly faster and more productive than they were just a year ago, reigniting debate over whether AI should eventually be granted legal rights similar to those of humans. However, AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio has warned that such a move could have catastrophic consequences for humanity.

Bengio, widely regarded as one of the three godfathers of artificial intelligence alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, has strongly opposed the idea of granting rights to AI systems. Speaking in an interview with The Guardian, Bengio compared the proposal to giving citizenship to hostile extraterrestrials and urged people to reconsider demands for legal recognition of artificial intelligence.

Amusing. Look for well fed crooks?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveweisman/2026/01/01/how-hackers-and-cargo-thieves-orchestrated-the-great-massachusetts-lobster-heist/

How Hackers And Cargo Thieves Orchestrated The Great Massachusetts Lobster Heist

… Setting the stage for the crime begins with sophisticated hackers compromising a freight broker’s load board account, which is an online marketplace where trucking loads are listed and bid on. As typical in many data breaches and other cyberattacks, the accounts are compromised through social engineering and spear phishing. After taking over a freight broker’s account, the criminals then post a fraudulent load listing offering an attractive shipment. When a legitimate trucking company or dispatcher responds to the phony load listing, the criminals reply with an email with malware contained in a link that appears to be a shipping document or contract. When the legitimate trucking company clicks on the link, remote monitoring and management (FMM) software is surreptitiously installed on the legitimate trucking company’s computer thereby giving the criminal full access to the legitimate company’s computer network enabling them to pose as the legitimate company and bid on deliveries or to pose as the legitimate company and send emails that appear to be from the legitimate company related to already contracted deliveries. The criminals invade the supply chain so that even when a truck is dispatched for a legitimate load, the criminals make sure they get there first. The thieves show up with trucks bearing the markings of the legitimate companies they pose as and pick up the items to be delivered. Once the loaded trucks leave the warehouse, they disable the GPS tracking used in shipments Cybersecurity company Proofpoint issued a report in November of 2025 that details how these thefts are accomplished.

There is thinking in the legal profession?

https://www.bespacific.com/impact-of-ai-on-critical-thinking-in-the-legal-profession/

Impact of AI on critical thinking in the legal profession

Thomson Reuters – Impact of AI on critical thinking – Challenges and opportunities for lawyers: “The increasing sophistication of AI, particularly “agentic AI,” presents both a risk of diminished critical thinking due to cognitive offloading and an opportunity to enhance critical thinking in the legal profession through intelligent design and application. The increasing sophistication of AI, particularly “agentic AI,” presents both a risk of diminished critical thinking due to cognitive offloading and an opportunity to enhance critical thinking in the legal profession through intelligent design and application.

Key insights:

• Cognitive offloading is a significant risk — The correlation between increased AI usage and decreased critical thinking, known as cognitive offloading, poses a threat to effective legal practice, especially with the rise of autonomous agentic AI.

• Agentic AI risks and opportunities — The next generation of agentic AI poses significant challenges to lawyers’ critical thinking skills, but it also offers opportunities for lawyers to enhance their analytical rigor and human insight.

• Agentic AI can enhance critical thinking when properly leveraged — When designed by lawyers, for lawyers and used to augment human judgment in legal workflow tasks — such as discovery, contract analysis, and drafting — agentic AI can improve efficiency, deepen analysis, and allow legal professionals to focus on higher-value critical thinking tasks.

Another year-end summary.

https://www.theverge.com/policy/851664/new-tech-internet-laws-us-2026-ai-privacy-repair

Meet the new tech laws of 2026

Coming into force this year: AI regulations galore, a teen social media lockdown, and “Taylor Swift” laws.

A New Year prediction.

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/new-yorks-death-wish/

New York’s Death Wish

Zohran Mamdani garnered a bit more than 50 percent of the vote in the recent New York City mayoral election. Have voters learned nothing from history? Apparently not. As Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek quipped, “if socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.”

In the past six months, I count no fewer than twelve pieces in The Daily Economy that discuss — directly or indirectly — Mamdani’s socialist policies.  Rent controls will decrease the quantity and quality of housing. Millionaire taxes would accelerate the exodus to more friendly states, to the great glee of Texas and Florida real estate agents. City-owned grocery stores would end in a bungle of Soviet proportions, increasing food deserts and raising prices. The drop in tax revenue from increased taxes (Laffer Curve, anyone?), combined with increased expenditures, would lead to another debt crisis. 

Imagine similar fakes during the next election.

https://www.euronews.com/2025/12/30/ai-generated-videos-showing-young-and-attractive-women-promote-polands-eu-exit

AI-generated videos showing young and attractive women promote Poland's EU exit

They are beautiful, eloquent — and do not exist. AI-generated girls from the 'Prawilne_Polki' profile called for Polexit and preached right-wing views. The TikTok account has been deleted, but disinformation and propaganda in Poland persist.

AI-generated videos promoting Poland's exit from the European Union have appeared on Polish-language social media, featuring non-existent, attractive young women advocating for "Polexit".

One TikTok account called "Prawilne Polki" published content showing women dressed in T-shirts bearing Polish flags and patriotic symbols, European analytics collective Res Futura said. The content targeted audiences aged 15 to 25.

Clearly a concern.

https://pogowasright.org/privacy-in-2026-will-ai-further-supercharge-surveillance/

Privacy in 2026: Will AI further supercharge surveillance?

Mikael Thalen writes:

The tug of war between widespread data collection and data privacy has only intensified, with disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence supercharging both. Going into 2026, experts say that trends in privacy are at once reassuring and alarming. The increase in data collection, often in the form of domestic surveillance, has sparked debate across the country. But the level of pushback doesn’t seem to have outpaced the current surveillance rollout.

Experts feel that many of the privacy trends witnessed in 2025 will expand in the coming year. Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology, believes the hasty adoption of AI by law enforcement agencies will prove even more controversial in 2026.

“The ramp of immigration surveillance in a variety of ways has been alarming, with the government vacuuming up data from a huge range of sources and pushing for more reckless deployment of surveillance technologies in the field,” Laperruque told Straight Arrow News. “The rapid integration of AI into surveillance and policing is also a big concern — lots of AI technologies have not proven their efficacy or at best only work under very precise and controlled scenarios, yet unvetted and unregulated technologies are being built into surveillance and policing in ways that could lead to errors with extremely serious consequences for individuals.”

Read more at SAN.

Can you spot the hallucinations? (That’s a joke, I think.)

https://www.bespacific.com/aba-task-force-on-law-and-artificial-intelligence/

ABA Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence

ABA Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence Addressing the Legal Challenges of AI Year 2 Report on the Impact of AI on the Practice of Law, December 2025. This report focuses on the future of AI and the law. One of the most high-profile and transformative developments of our time, complex and multi-faceted AI technologies have ubiquitous societal impacts and present far-reaching implications for the practice of law. As the national voice for the legal profession, the ABA is uniquely positioned to assess the opportunities and challenges that AI presents and to help ensure its integration is ethical and responsible and serves the public good.

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/lawyers-caught-misusing-ai-fuel-emerging-legal-education-sector/

Lawyers Caught Misusing AI Fuel Emerging Legal Education Sector

Bloomberg Law [no paywall]: “When a federal judge asked California solo practitioner William Becker Jr. to explain why a motion seemed to be riddled with AI-hallucinated citations, he knew what he needed to do. Becker, representing a defendant in a case involving former NFL punter Chris Kluwe, informed the judge that he’d taken “affirmative steps” to learn about professional responsibility issues around the use and misuse of AI, and that he attended a continuing legal education class on AI ethics for lawyers, promising to take another class soon. “I take the Court’s admonitions seriously,” said Becker in his Oct. 29 declaration. “I found it highly instructive and am integrating its guidance into my practice.” State bar and law firm leaders say attorneys such as Becker, and the growing number who have gotten into trouble for misusing AI like him, need to take greater responsibility for their AI use, and specifically when using generative AI programs like ChatGPT. Legal industry veterans are developing a broad range of AI-focused educational programs to help lawyers avoid embarrassing pitfalls and more effectively harness transformative tech that’s already streamlining lawyer workflows. “Lawyers are seeking more guidance, and we haven’t been giving them enough,” said Judge Xavier Rodriguez of the US District Court for the District of West Texas. “State bars are now recognizing that we need to do a better job,” said Rodriguez, who’s also a CLE instructor. After OpenAI introduced a more advanced iteration of ChatGPT in November 2022, the rise in misuse of generative AI chatbots in legal filings was modest and gradual from 2023 to 2024, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis. But with litigants’ use of the technology becoming increasingly common, instances of litigants’ misuse exploded in 2025, from 31 in the first quarter to 167 in the third. AI-focused CLE course offerings are proliferating, as pro se litigants, solo practitioners, small-firm lawyers, and “Big Law” attorneys increasingly face consequences for presenting courts with hallucinated, GenAI-devised citations and non-existent cases. Although tech advocates say CLE is a belated fix, it comes as scores of federal judges have issued standing orders and sanction orders meant to govern and guide AI use, according to BLaw data…”

And with cell phones, we all carry a surveillance device.

https://www.bespacific.com/the-new-surveillance-state-is-you/

The New Surveillance State Is You

Wired [no paywall ]: “Privacy may be dead, but civilians are turning conventional wisdom on its head by surveilling the cops as much as the cops surveil them. The Department of Homeland Security secretary has spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that identifying roving bands of masked federal agents is “doxing” — and that revealing these public servants’ identities is “violence.” Noem is wrong on both fronts, legal experts say, but her claims of doxing highlight a central conflict in the current era: Surveillance now goes both ways. Over the nearly 12 months since President Donald Trump took office for a second time, life in the United States has been torn asunder by relentless arrests and raids by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and federal, state, and local authorities deputized to carry out immigration actions. Many of these agents are hiding their identities on the administration-approved basis that they are the ones at risk. US residents, in response, have ramped up their documentation of law enforcement activity to seemingly unprecedented levels. “ICE watch” groups have appeared across the country. Apps for tracking immigration enforcement activity have popped up on (then disappeared from) Apple and Google app stores. Social media feeds are awash in videos of unidentified agents tackling men in parking lots, throwing women to the ground, and ripping families apart. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors and passersby have pulled out their phones to document members of their communities being arrested and vanishing into the Trump administration’s machinery…”

Un-muddying the waters?

https://www.bespacific.com/scholar-nudged-supreme-court-toward-its-troop-deployment-ruling/

How a scholar nudged the Supreme Court toward National Guard troop deployment ruling

The New York Times Gift Article: “Accepting an argument from a law professor that no party to the case had made, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a stinging loss that could lead to more aggressive tactics. The Supreme Court’s Accepting an argument from a law professor that no party to the case had made, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a stinging loss that could lead to more aggressive tactics. The Supreme Court’s refusal on Tuesday to let the Trump administration deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area was in large part the result of a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by a Georgetown University law professor named Martin S. Lederman. The argument Professor Lederman set out, and the court’s embrace of it, could help shape future rulings on any further efforts by President Trump to use the military to carry out his orders inside the United States. Professor Lederman’s brief said that the government had misunderstood a key phrase in the law it had relied on, which allows deployment of the National Guard if “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.” The administration said “the regular forces” referred to civilian law enforcement like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Professor Lederman argued that the great weight of historical evidence was to the contrary. The regular forces, he wrote, was the U.S. military. And, he added, “there is no basis for concluding that the president would be ‘unable’ to enforce such laws with the assistance of those forces if it were legal for him to direct such a deployment.” Professor Lederman wrote his brief over a weekend. “I hesitate to acknowledge that,” he said on a podcast last month, “but it’s really true that I didn’t have like some great background knowledge in this statute.” A veteran of the Office of Legal Counsel, the elite Justice Department unit that advises the executive branch on the law, Professor Lederman identified what he called a glaring flaw in the administration’s argument. “None of the parties were paying attention to it,” he said. But the justices were. A week after Professor Lederman filed his brief, the court ordered the parties to submit additional briefs on the issue he had spotted. They did, and almost two months passed. In the end, the majority adopted the professor’s argument, over the dissents of the three most conservative justices. It was the Trump administration’s first major loss at the court in many months. During that time, the court granted about 20 emergency requests claiming broad presidential power in all sorts of other settings…”

See also Steve Vladeck – Four Takeaways From the National Guard Ruling. A deep dive into last Tuesday’s ruling in which a 6-3 majority of the Court stopped the Trump administration from deploying federalized National Guard troops into and around Chicago.

Worth considering.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/are-we-ready-to-be-governed-by-artificial-intelligence.html

Are We Ready to Be Governed by Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) overlords are a common trope in science-fiction dystopias, but the reality looks much more prosaic. The technologies of artificial intelligence are already pervading many aspects of democratic government, affecting our lives in ways both large and small. This has occurred largely without our notice or consent. The result is a government incrementally transformed by AI rather than the singular technological overlord of the big screen.

Let us begin with the executive branch. One of the most important functions of this branch of government is to administer the law, including the human services on which so many Americans rely. Many of these programs have long been operated by a mix of humans and machines, even if not previously using modern AI tools such as Large Language Models.

A salient example is healthcare, where private insurers make widespread use of algorithms to review, approve, and deny coverage, even for recipients of public benefits like Medicare. While Biden-era guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) largely blesses this use of AI by Medicare Advantage operators, the practice of overriding the medical care recommendations made by physicians raises profound ethical questions, with life and death implications for about thirty million Americans today.

… We are not going to be fully governed by AI anytime soon, but we are already being governed with AI—and more is coming. Our challenge in these years is more a social than a technological one: to ensure that those doing the governing are doing so in the service of democracy.

Where there is interest there are scammers… (It’s easy to remove the redaction, so do it yourself.)

https://databreaches.net/2025/12/25/hackers-unredact-epstein-files-what-you-need-to-know/?pk_campaign=feed&pk_kwd=hackers-unredact-epstein-files-what-you-need-to-know

Hackers Unredact Epstein Files — What You Need To Know

There is tremendous public interest in the Epstein files. But be careful. Davey Winder of Forbes reports:

Updated December 25 with warnings about malware associated with some Epstein Files distributions, as well as recommendations on how to prevent people from accessing redacted information in PDFs after documents from the official Department of Justice Epstein Files dump were unredacted using a well-known and straightforward hack.

The Department of Justice released a total of 11,034 documents on Monday, Dec 22, as part of the latest Epstein files dump. As expected, many of these were heavily redacted before publication. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, is the fact that some of these documents were quickly hacked to reveal the hidden information contained within.

Brian Krassenstein, political commentator and journalist, tweeted the day the DOJ released the latest batch of Epstein files, providing the evidence in a series of posts that showed the highly redacted documents as well as the unredacted versions, and explaining precisely how the Epstein files could be hacked.

While it is common to read about hackers using PDFs in attacks, the portable document format is susceptible to attack itself. The shocking truth is that it was ridiculously easy, employing straightforward methods that have been known for years.

[…]

Danger, Will Robinson!

Beware Unofficial Distributions Of The Epstein Files

With the inevitable online furore over certain documents from the Epstein files being unredacted via the PDF layers removal hack, especially on social media platforms such as X, it is equally inevitable that unofficial archives will spring up, allowing people to download the unredacted versions. Anyone thinking of doing so should, however, take care and be very sure of the trustworthiness of the source before opening any such documents. As reported November 17, 2025, security specialists at Black Trace Analytics were able to review earlier files related to Epstein that had been made available online, and discovered that several variations of them “were laced with malware.” Threat actors will always exploit an opportunity to distribute malicious content, and the Epstein files is certainly that. I would recommend, therefore, going straight to the source of the redacted documents.

Read more at Forbes.

Ho, Ho, Ho!

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/santa-the-economic-terrorist/

Santa The Economic Terrorist

The bearded menace is sneakily importing $13 billion worth of gifts, exploiting elves, destroying jobs, and flouting borders, all to make us “merry.”

President Trump has accused virtually every country, including those inhabited only by penguins of ripping us off when it comes to trade. But there’s one region that the President has neglected to protect us from: the North Pole. By every metric that the Trump administration has used, Good Saint Nick should really be considered an economic terrorist. Consider the following:

Have they pointed out something Trump said?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/business/europe-us-online-censorship-free-speech.html?unlocked_article_code=1._E8.yzBO.Xo1V767pxO9o&smid=url-share

They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.

The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States.

Texans like to talk?

https://ccianet.org/news/2025/12/judge-blocks-texass-app-store-accountability-act-as-unconstitutional-speech-restriction/

Judge Blocks Texas’s App Store Accountability Act as Unconstitutional Speech Restriction

A federal court has granted the Computer & Communication Industry Association’s request for a preliminary injunction blocking Texas SB2420, the App Store Accountability Act, from being enforced against any entity pending a final decision on the merits of the case. Judge Robert Pitman agreed with arguments that the law likely violates the First Amendment by being vague, overly broad, and a restraint of the protected speech of both app stores and app developers.

Tools & Techniques. (I thought we had solved this problem years ago…)

https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/epstein-files-some-of-the-redacted-material-can-be-easily-recovered-heres-how/4087411/

Epstein Files: Some of the redacted material can be easily recovered. Here’s how

… Amid huge row over the recently released batch of documents from US Department of Justice’s extensive Jeffrey Epstein files, a new report by The New York Times has revealed that some of the redacted material in the documents can easily be recovered. More than 11,000 files, totalling nearly 30,000 pages of photos, court records, FBI and DOJ documents, emails, news clippings, videos and other records related to Epstein were released on Monday, in the latest batch of documents related to the investigation of late financier and convicted sex offender.

… According to NYT, much of the information was not properly redacted digitally and some censored information could easily revealed by copying and pasting blacked-out text into a separate file.

Someone may be interested…

https://www.bespacific.com/we-created-a-searchable-database-for-the-epstein-files/

Searchable database for the Epstein Files – Only Fraction of Files Released

Below the Belt – We created a searchable database for the Epstein Files, including everything the DOJ wants hidden. “The repository will continue to grow as the Trump administration releases hundreds of thousands more documents from the investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. The US Department of Justice on Friday [December 19, 2025] published a heavily redacted portion of the documents from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking operation, and then summarily began deleting portions that could implicate President Donald Trump. Prior to the DOJ’s attempt to walk back what little transparency was to be found, COURIER retrieved every item from the initial release and published it in a searchable database that is available to the public. Anyone interested can utilize the database here. Included in the database are court filings, images, video, audio, and two sets of transcriptions of conversations between US Deputy Attorney General Todd Balnche and Epstein accomplice Ghislane Maxwell.

A hint at Trump’s next cut?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/21/denmark-postnord-postal-delivery-letters-society

Danish postal service to stop delivering letters after 400 years

The Danish postal service will deliver its last letter on 30 December, ending a more than 400-year-old tradition.

… Describing Denmark as “one of the most digitalised countries in the world”, the company said the demand for letters had “fallen drastically” while online shopping continued to increase, prompting the decision to instead focus on parcels.

… Danes will still be able to send letters, using the delivery company Dao, which already delivers letters in Denmark but will expand its services from 1 January from about 30m letters in 2025 to 80m next year. But customers will instead have to go to a Dao shop to post their letters – or pay extra to have it collected from home – and pay for postage either online or via an app.

Tools & Techniques.

https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/how-to-spot-ai-hallucinations-like

How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian

… ChatGPT doesn’t lie, exactly. It patterns matches. When you ask for a “cited article about remote work productivity,” it knows what citations look like. Author name, year, compelling title, respectable journal. It assembles these patterns into something that feels right. Like a dream where everything makes sense until you wake up.

The tell isn’t that fake citations look wrong. It’s that they look too right. Too convenient. Too perfectly aligned with whatever point the AI is making.

… In library school, they taught us something called “citation chaining,” but I’ve adapted it for the age of AI hallucinations. Think of it as three increasingly paranoid levels of verification.