Similar to India’s?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn832y43ql5o
New digital ID will be mandatory to work in the UK
Digital ID will be mandatory in order to work in the UK, as part of plans to tackle illegal migration.
Sir Keir Starmer said the new digital ID scheme would make it tougher to work in the UK illegally and offer "countless benefits" to citizens.
However, opposition parties argued the proposals would not stop people crossing the Channel in small boats.
Is the US isolating itself?
Australia may have to choose between a Chinese TikTok and one owned by Trump’s billionaire backers
Would you rather a Chinese-owned TikTok or one run by a consortium of Trump-supporting billionaires?
That’s the choice Australia is being asked to consider.
Fool me once…
LexisNexis exec says it’s ‘a matter of time’ before attorneys lose their licenses over using open-source AI pilots in court
Courts across the country have sanctioned attorneys for misuse of open-source LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, which have made up “imaginary” cases, suggested that attorneys invent court decisions to strengthen their arguments, and provided improper citations to legal documents.
Experts tell Fortune more of these cases will crop up—and along with them steep penalties for the attorneys who misuse AI.
Damien Charlotin, a lawyer and research fellow at HEC Paris, runs a database of AI hallucination cases. He’s tallied 376 cases to date, 244 of which are U.S. cases.
… Entering sensitive information into the open-source models also risks breach of attorney-client privilege.
Tools & Techniques.
You can Google the world around you by video now for free - with Search Live
… On Wednesday, Google finally launched its Live Search feature, first unveiled at Google I/O in May.
The feature is straightforward in the same way you would use Google Lens to point to something and take a photo. Now there's a new option in which you can select the Search Live feature and activate a live video experience where you show it the world around you and ask questions using your voice.
Who benefits?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4w0d8zz22o
Secret Service disrupts telecom threat near UN General Assembly
The US Secret Service disrupted a network of telecommunications devices that could have shut down cellular systems as leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
The agency said on Tuesday that last month it found more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards that could have been used for telecom attacks within the area encompassing parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
"This network had the power to disable cell phone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City," said special agent in charge Matt McCool.
… The unidentified nation-state actors were sending encrypted messages to organised crime groups, cartels and terrorist organisations, he added.
The equipment was capable of texting the entire population of the US within 12 minutes, officials say. It could also have disabled mobile phone towers and launched distributed denial of service attacks that might have blocked emergency dispatch communications.
I’ve been waiting for this. It seemed inevitable after reading “The dynamo and the computer.”
Study Claims Over Half of Tech Firms Are Considering ‘Restructuring,’ Thanks to AI
Murmurs about a linkage between the rollout of new AI services and recent waves of layoffs within the tech industry have been ongoing for some time. Similarly, a recent cooling of the job market for coders has also been attributed to the rise of so-called “vibe coding,” in which less skilled technicians create websites and products with the help of an automated assistant.
Now, a new report from a firm that works with tech companies claims that a majority of its clients say they are considering big changes to accommodate greater integration of AI.
The report comes from Source, a consultant that provides services to media, tech, and telecom firms. The company found that some 55 percent of its clients expect to invest in organizational restructuring during the next 18 months. The report seems to attribute these changes to AI:
What could be worse than bogus citations?
https://www.bespacific.com/ai-models-are-using-material-from-retracted-scientific-papers/
AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers
MIT Technology Review: “Some AI chatbots rely on flawed research from retracted scientific papers to answer questions, according to recent studies. The findings, confirmed by MIT Technology Review, raise questions about how reliable AI tools are at evaluating scientific research and could complicate efforts by countries and industries seeking to invest in AI tools for scientists. AI search tools and chatbots are already known to fabricate links and references. But answers based on the material from actual papers can mislead as well if those papers have been retracted. The chatbot is “using a real paper, real material, to tell you something,” says Weikuan Gu, a medical researcher at the University of Tennessee in Memphis and an author of one of the recent studies. But, he says, if people only look at the content of the answer and do not click through to the paper and see that it’s been retracted, that’s really a problem. Gu and his team asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT, running on the GPT-4o model, questions based on information from 21 retracted papers about medical imaging. The chatbot’s answers referenced retracted papers in five cases but advised caution in only three. While it cited non-retracted papers for other questions, the authors note that it may not have recognized the retraction status of the articles. In a study from August, a different group of researchers used ChatGPT-4o mini to evaluate the quality of 217 retracted and low-quality papers from different scientific fields; they found that none of the chatbot’s responses mentioned retractions or other concerns. (No similar studies have been released on GPT-5, which came out in August.)
The public uses AI chatbots to ask for medical advice and diagnose health conditions. Students and scientists increasingly use science-focused AI tools to review existing scientific literature and summarize papers. That kind of usage is likely to increase. The US National Science Foundation, for instance, invested $75 million in building AI models for science research this August.
“If [a tool is] facing the general public, then using retraction as a kind of quality indicator is very important,” says Yuanxi Fu, an information science researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There’s “kind of an agreement that retracted papers have been struck off the record of science,” she says, “and the people who are outside of science—they should be warned that these are retracted papers.” OpenAI did not provide a response to a request for comment about the paper results. The problem is not limited to ChatGPT. In June, MIT Technology Review tested AI tools specifically advertised for research work, such as Elicit, Ai2 ScholarQA (now part of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s Asta tool), Perplexity, and Consensus, using questions based on the 21 retracted papers in Gu’s study. Elicit referenced five of the retracted papers in its answers, while Ai2 ScholarQA referenced 17, Perplexity 11, and Consensus 18—all without noting the retractions. Some companies have since made moves to correct the issue. “Until recently, we didn’t have great retraction data in our search engine,” says Christian Salem, cofounder of Consensus. His company has now started using retraction data from a combination of sources, including publishers and data aggregators, independent web crawling, and Retraction Watch, which manually curates and maintains a database of retractions. In a test of the same papers in August, Consensus cited only five retracted papers…”
Eventually, even lawyers will learn.
https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/09/chatgpt-lawyer-fine-ai-regulation/
California issues historic fine over lawyer’s ChatGPT fabrications
A California attorney must pay a $10,000 fine for filing a state court appeal full of fake quotations generated by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.
The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court and came with a blistering opinion stating that 21 of 23 quotes from cases cited in the attorney’s opening brief were made up. It also noted that numerous out-of-state and federal courts have confronted attorneys for citing fake legal authority.
“We therefore publish this opinion as a warning,” it continued. “Simply stated, no brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court should contain any citations— whether provided by generative AI or any other source—that the attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally read and verified.”
Perspective.
The 8 Biggest AI Trends For 2026 That Everyone Must Be Ready For Now
As I predicted last year, 2025 was the year that AI very much entered everyday life. Across work, play, learning, and just about everything we did, its impact was impossible to ignore.
So where do we go from here? I believe that in 2026, we’ll start to see the long-term effects begin to manifest.
This will continue to create fantastic opportunities, from improving standards of healthcare and education to boosting scientific discovery to simplifying and streamlining our lives in any number of ways.
At the same time, society will be forced to face up to problems such as its growing energy costs and social challenges, as well as issues around trust, privacy, and regulation.
Tools & Techniques. Replace “Charlie Kirk” with any name…
No Need to Hack When It’s Leaking: App for outing Charlie Kirk’s critics leaked its users’ personal data
Mikael Thalen reports:
An app for anonymously reporting individuals accused of speaking ill against conservative activist Charlie Kirk leaked personal data about its users. The app, known as “Cancel the Hate,” was taken offline on Thursday amid an investigation into the data leak by Straight Arrow News.
Launched in the wake of Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10, Cancel the Hate aims to “hold individuals accountable for their public words,” according to its website. It calls on users to “express concern” by submitting “intel” on alleged offenders, including their names, locations and employers.
Cancel the Hate says users who submit data on others will not have their own personal details made public. However, a social media-style app launched alongside the website appears to have been exposing just that.
The flaw in the app, discovered by the security researcher who identifies himself as “BobDaHacker,” enabled the exposure of user information such as email addresses and phone numbers. Although email addresses were included in profile bios by default, seemingly unbeknownst to many of the platform’s users, the data could still be exposed even if privacy settings were enabled to keep it hidden.
Read more at San.com
Another attempt to eliminate lawyers?
https://www.bespacific.com/the-divergence-of-law-firms-from-lawyers/
The divergence of law firms from lawyers
Via LLRX – The divergence of law firms from lawyers – Jordan Furlong contends right now it’s possible for an ordinary person to obtain from an LLM like ChatGPT-5 the performance of a legal task — the provision of legal analysis, the production of a legal instrument, the delivery of legal advice — that previously could only be acquired from a human lawyer. He further states he’s not saying a person should do that. The LLM’s output might be effective and reliable, or it might prove disastrously off-base. But many people are already using LLMs in this way, and in the absence of other accessible options for legal assistance, they will continue to do so. Furlong offers insights into the challenges such a paradigm shift pose as well as the consequences of not meeting the moment as the velocity of AI’s adoption permeates the legal profession.
Eventually, this will be figured out…
https://www.bespacific.com/new-bluebook-rule-on-citing-to-ai-generates-criticism/
New Bluebook Rule On Citing to AI Generates Criticism from Legal Scholars and Practitioners
LawSites: “Has there ever been a time since the advent of legal reporting systems when citations have been under greater attack? Driven by their unwitting reliance on AI to generate legal briefs, lawyers seem to have forgotten everything they ever learned in law school about how to research and cite the law. Standing as a bulwark against this attack, one would think, is The Bluebook, the uniform system of citation that is among the first things taught to a first-year law student, and to which virtually all lawyers are expected to abide, except where excused by local rules of court. Yet now that very bulwark is itself under attack, thanks to the release last May of its 22nd edition, which introduced Rule 18.3, The Bluebook’s first standardized format for citing to generative artificial intelligence content. While the addition of AI citation guidance would seem to reflect The Bluebook’s expected role of evolving to address new types and formats of sources, the new rule has sparked criticism from legal scholars and practitioners who argue it is fundamentally flawed in both conception and execution. As Cullen O’Keefe, director of research at the Institute for Law & AI, says in his analysis, “Citing AI in the New Bluebook,” “I’m afraid The Bluebook editors have fallen a fair bit short in the substance and structure of Rule 18.3.” Susan Tanner, associate professor of law at the University of Louisville, put it more bluntly: “This is bonkers.”…”
AI as viewed by the defense industry?
https://dsm.forecastinternational.com/2025/09/22/what-is-artificial-intelligence-a-primer/
What is Artificial Intelligence? A Primer
The problem with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that nobody is quite sure what it is.
Yet, the infusion of all things “AI” in defense makes some understanding of the technology imperative. We do this through a high-level review of the dominant approaches in the field of AI. The major benefits and shortcomings of these approaches are related to their suitability in mission-critical domains.
Tools & Techniques.
https://www.bespacific.com/legal-boolean-search-builder/
Legal Boolean Search Builder
Rebecca Fordon: “For years, I’ve taught Boolean searching with a slide deck (8 steps!) always thinking, “this could be way more interactive.” Well, AI’s got me thinking I can make any little website my heart desires, so I gave it a shot. The Legal Boolean Search Builder is a free tool designed to make crafting precise Boolean queries easier and (crucially) to help users understand how to create a good search. I wrote a quick post about the journey from concept to app, with a huge thank you to Charlie Amiot and Deborah Ginsberg for their excellent beta testing and feedback. This also builds on worksheets and fillable PDFs that have come before, as I note in the blog post.”
Law enforcement uses “bogus” cell towers, why not criminals?
https://www.wired.com/story/sms-blasters-scam-texts/
Cybercriminals Have a Weird New Way to Target You With Scam Texts
Scammers are now using “SMS blasters” to send out up to 100,000 texts per hour to phones that are tricked into thinking the devices are cell towers. Your wireless carrier is powerless to stop them.
Outsmarted by AI?
https://futurism.com/openai-scheming-cover-tracks
OpenAI Tries to Train AI Not to Deceive Users, Realizes It's Instead Teaching It How to Deceive Them While Covering Its Tracks
OpenAI researchers tried to train the company's AI to stop "scheming" — a term the company defines as meaning "when an AI behaves one way on the surface while hiding its true goals" — but their efforts backfired in an ominous way.
In reality, the team found, they were unintentionally teaching the AI how to more effectively deceive humans by covering its tracks.
"A major failure mode of attempting to 'train out' scheming is simply teaching the model to scheme more carefully and covertly," OpenAI wrote in an accompanying blog post.
As detailed in a new collaboration with AI risk analysis firm Apollo Research, engineers attempted to develop an "anti-scheming" technique to stop AI models from "secretly breaking rules or intentionally underperforming in tests."
Making takeovers less valuable?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/20/trump-golden-share-us-steel.html
Trump wields ‘golden share’ to halt U.S. Steel plant shutdown, WSJ reports
The Trump administration stepped in to stop U.S. Steel from idling operations at its Granite City, Ill., plant, exercising new powers tied to the company’s recent takeover, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The steelmaker had informed nearly 800 workers that the plant would close in November, noting however that they would still be paid. But after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned CEO Dave Burritt the administration wouldn’t allow it, U.S. Steel reversed course on Friday, saying the facility would keep rolling slabs into sheet steel, the Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
The intervention marked Trump’s first use of so-called “golden share” rights, a condition of the $14.1 billion takeover by Japan’s Nippon that cleared in June. The national-security agreement gave the White House veto power over plant closures, offshore production shifts and other strategic decisions.
The 800 pound gorilla at the negotiating table?
U.S. Government Is Expected to Get Multibillion-Dollar Fee in TikTok Deal
The Trump administration is expected to collect a multibillion-dollar fee from investors as part of the complicated transaction to take control of TikTok’s U.S. operations, the latest in a string of lucrative government deals with the private sector.
Investors in the TikTok deal would pay the government the fee in exchange for negotiating the agreement with China, people familiar with the matter said. President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping approved a preliminary framework for the deal Friday.
The final structure and amount of the payment haven’t been finalized as deal talks continue but the fee could end up totaling billions of dollars, the people said. The government recently agreed to become Intel’s largest shareholder and take 15% of the sales from an Nvidia artificial-intelligence chip made for the Chinese market in exchange for granting export licenses.
I like it, but I’m not sure this is enough. Why not have offenders pay for the time wasted checking their work by others.
https://futurism.com/judge-humiliating-punishment-lawyers-using-ai
Judge Gives Humiliating Punishment to Lawyers Caught Using AI in Court
AI tools have become a hit with lawyers. But judges have shown they have little patience for when their experiments with the tech go wrong.
When combing over a document submitted by two defense lawyers from the firm Cozen O'Connor, district judge David Hardy found at least 14 citations of case law that appeared to be fictitious, Reuters reported. Others were misquoted or misrepresented.
After being confronted, the two defense lawyers soon pleaded guilty: one of them had used ChatGPT to draft and edit the document.
Where other judges have sanctioned lawyers for committing similar sins, judge Hardy offered a humiliating ultimatum last week that's borderline cruel and unusual.
The two stooges could pay $2,500 each in monetary sanctions, face removal from the case, and be referred to the state bar.
Or, instead, they could swallow their pride and write to their former law school deans and bar officials explaining how they screwed up — plus volunteer to speak on topics like AI and professional conduct.
Those who do not study history…
https://www.bespacific.com/president-says-broadcasters-should-lose-licenses-for-criticizing-him/
President Says Broadcasters Should Lose Licenses for Criticizing Him
The New York Times Archive – Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime: BERLIN, Feb. 4, 1939: “Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five “Aryan” actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich’s Chamber of Culture on the grounds that “in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades.” The five include perhaps the best known German stage comedians who survived previous Chamber of Culture purges and still dared to indulge in political witticisms—namely, Werner Finck, Peter Sachse and “The Three Rulands,” represented by Helmuth Buth, Wilhelm Meissner and Manfred Dlugi. Their expulsion means that they are henceforth forbidden to appear before the public in Germany. Besides motivating this action in an official communiqué, Dr. Goebbels also publishes a long article in the Voelkischer Beobachter in which he denounces them as “brazen, impertinent, arrogant and tactless” and generally imitators and successors to Jews. Simultaneously he denounces the “society rabble that followed them with thundering applause—parasitic scum, inhabiting our luxury streets, that seems to have only the task of proving with how little brains people can get along and even acquire money and prominence.” As regards the details of the “crimes” of which the five are accused, Dr. Goebbels mentions that they made political witticisms about the colonial problem, the Four-Year Plan and Chancellor Hitler’s monumental building program and one of them even raised the question of whether there was any humor left in Germany today. What amused the public most, however, and presumably roiled the National Socialist authorities most—although Dr. Goebbels does not mention it—is that they deftly, but unmistakably, caricatured some gestures, poses and physical characteristics of National Socialist leaders—sometimes with bon mots that made the rounds of the country. Dr. Goebbels says that the National Socialists proved during their struggle for power that they had a keen sense of humor that could kill opponents with ridicule. But as National Socialism proposes to remain in power 2,000 years it has neither the time nor the patience to apply that method to the “miserable literati.” If the anti-German press of Paris, London and New York, Dr. Goebbels says, or the democratic governments in Western Europe, should now again complain about the lack of freedom of opinion in Germany it does not matter, “for after all during the last year the Fuehrer reconquered 10,000,000 Germans for the Reich.”
See also The New York Times: “Networks threatened: President Trump said he believed federal regulators should revoke broadcast licenses over late-night hosts who speak overly negatively about him, a day after ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” after pressure from the Federal Communications Commission chairman. Congressional Democrats said they planned to introduce long-shot legislation to bolster legal protections for people targeted by the president for speaking freely…”
See also Axios: The New York Times is confident it can defeat President Trump’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit, the paper’s executive editor Joseph Kahn said Thursday at an Axios Media Trends Live event. The paper is aggressively defending itself at a time critics accuse some other media organizations of not standing up to the administration. “Well he’s wrong on the facts. He’s wrong on the law and we’ll fight it, and we’ll win,” he told Axios’ Sara Fischer. “I don’t think the president of the United States should be suing media organizations for libel, full stop. I think that’s wrong,” Kahn said. “But I especially think it’s wrong when he’s wrong on the facts, when he’s wrong about the story, when he misunderstands the protections that the law offers to media organizations under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of libel law, and I think it’s incumbent on us to fight that to the end.”
See also Politico: “Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from the late-night airwaves has thrust lawmakers, government officials and the president to the forefront of the debate over free speech while also deepening the partisan divide amid the fallout over conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing. Since Disney announced Wednesday night that it would pull Kimmel’s show indefinitely over the comedian’s comments about Kirk’s slaying, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr — who last night pressured ABC and local broadcasters to “to take action” against Kimmel — on Thursday morning defended his decision and accused the late-night show host of misleading Americans; House Democratic leadership in turn called on him to resign; and President Donald Trump told reporters in the U.K. that Kimmel was fired over bad ratings.”
See also Washington Post Gift Article – Kimmel’s suspension confirms what many suspected after Colbert’s cancellation. Media companies must punish Trump critics if they want their mega-mergers approved.
Here’s looking at you, kid.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/surveying-the-global-spyware-market.html
Surveying the Global Spyware Market
The Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: “Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market.”
Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items:
First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the past year, when compared with the sample size of the spyware market captured in the first Mythical Beasts project. In the first edition, the United States was the second-largest investor in the spyware market, following Israel. In that edition, twelve investors were observed to be domiciled within the United States—whereas in this second edition, twenty new US-based investors were observed investing in the spyware industry in 2024. This indicates a significant increase of US-based investments in spyware in 2024, catapulting the United States to being the largest investor in this sample of the spyware market. This is significant in scale, as US-based investment from 2023 to 2024 largely outpaced that of other major investing countries observed in the first dataset, including Italy, Israel, and the United Kingdom. It is also significant in the disparity it points to the visible enforcement gap between the flow of US dollars and US policy initiatives. Despite numerous US policy actions, such as the addition of spyware vendors on the Entity List, and the broader global leadership role that the United States has played through imposing sanctions and diplomatic engagement, US investments continue to fund the very entities that US policymakers are making an effort to combat.
Second, the authors elaborated on the central role that resellers and brokers play in the spyware market, while being a notably under-researched set of actors. These entities act as intermediaries, obscuring the connections between vendors, suppliers, and buyers. Oftentimes, intermediaries connect vendors to new regional markets. Their presence in the dataset is almost assuredly underrepresented given the opaque nature of brokers and resellers, making corporate structures and jurisdictional arbitrage more complex and challenging to disentangle. While their uptick in the second edition of the Mythical Beasts project may be the result of a wider, more extensive data-collection effort, there is less reporting on resellers and brokers, and these entities are not systematically understood. As observed in the first report, the activities of these suppliers and brokers represent a critical information gap for advocates of a more effective policy rooted in national security and human rights. These discoveries help bring into sharper focus the state of the spyware market and the wider cyber-proliferation space, and reaffirm the need to research and surface these actors that otherwise undermine the transparency and accountability efforts by state and non-state actors as they relate to the spyware market.
Really good work. Read the whole thing.
