Milestone?

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/704225/rising-adoption-spurs-workforce-changes.aspx

Rising AI Adoption Spurs Workforce Changes

For the first time in Gallup’s measurement, half of employed American adults say they use AI in their role at least a few times a year, up from 46% last quarter. Frequent AI use is also increasing, with 13% of employees now saying they use AI daily and 28% reporting they use it a few times a week or more.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.bespacific.com/osint-navigator/

OSINT Navigator

“We built OSINT Navigator to make it easier for investigators and researchers to find the right tools for the job — and discover tools they didn’t know existed. Navigator allows you to enter a question like “How do I find the owner of a website?” or “How do I research a YouTube video?” and receive a mix of AI- and community-recommended tools and guidance. You can try it out right now for free at https://navigator.indicator.media/. OSINT Navigator draws on a curated database of more than 7,500 tools from nine independent OSINT toolkits (see the list below ). The dataset is open-source and can be accessed here. We’re grateful to the creators of the toolkits for allowing us to include their content in Navigator’s search results.  When you ask a question, an LLM retrieves the most relevant tools and generates a tailored response. Answers can also be contributed by investigators in the community — all responses are ranked by user votes, so the most useful ones will rise to the top. It’s really helpful for you to rate and submit answers. Navigator offers 10 free searches per day for anyone. Indicator members receive 50 daily queries and the ability to use an API or a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connection to query Navigator from within an AI agent or tool. (Be sure to login with the email that’s connected to your membership.) You also have the option to run Navigator locally in your browser, which we detail below. Navigator is developed by Tom Vaillant, a journalist and technologist who runs Buried Signals, in partnership with Indicator.”

To AI or not to AI…

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6525800

Artificial Intelligence and Human Legal Reasoning

Empirical evidence increasingly demonstrates that generative artificial intelligence has the capacity to improve the speed and quality of legal work, yet many lawyers, judges, and clients are reluctant to fully embrace AI. One important reason for hesitation is the concern that AI may undermine the human reasoning and judgment on which competent legal practice depends. This Article provides the first empirical evidence evaluating that concern by testing whether upper level law students who rely on AI at an early stage of a project experience reduced comprehension and impaired legal reasoning on later stages when AI is not an available option.

To evaluate the possibility that AI degrades comprehension and reasoning, we conducted a randomized controlled trial involving approximately one hundred second and third year law students at the University of Minnesota Law School. Participants completed four sequential lawyering tasks: writing a memo synthesizing the law based on a packet of legal materials, answering closed-book multiple choice questions that tested their comprehension of the materials, writing a memo applying the materials to a fact pattern, and revising their second memo. Participants were randomly assigned either to a control group, which could not use AI until the final revision task, or to an AI-exposed group, which used AI during both the initial synthesis task and the final revision task, but not during the intervening comprehension and application tasks.

The results provide a more complex picture of AI’s effects on legal reasoning than critics or enthusiasts often assume. As expected, participants who used AI to help craft synthesis memos produced substantially stronger work and completed that task more quickly. But contrary to our preregistered hypothesis, AI exposure at this initial stage did not diminish downstream comprehension of the underlying legal principles. To the contrary, participants who used AI on the synthesis task outperformed the control group on the later application task even when neither group had access to AI. Yet when all participants used AI to revise their reasoning memos, participants who started with weaker memos improved while participants who started with stronger memos regressed. These findings suggest that AI does not inevitably erode or promote independent legal reasoning, but that its effects depend on when and how law students and junior lawyers use AI. The Article builds on this insight by suggesting best practices for AI use and avenues for further empirical research.

Tools & Techniques. (Got an old laptop?)

https://www.makeuseof.com/chrome-os-flex-3-dollar-flash-drive-back-market/

This $3 flash drive turned my ancient laptop into a working Chromebook

Where have you been?

https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based-geolocation-surveillance-tech/

Uncovering Webloc

Targeted and mass surveillance based on everyday consumer data from mobile apps and digital advertising has been referred to as advertising intelligence (ADINT). We refer to it as “ad-based surveillance technologies.” These technologies have proliferated alongside the personal data surveillance economy. They are poorly regulated and often sold by firms that operate without transparency, raising serious security, privacy, and civil liberties concerns – especially when used by authoritarian governments that lack proper oversight.

Response or arrogance?

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/10/france-to-ditch-windows-for-linux-to-reduce-reliance-on-us-tech/

France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech

France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.

Wisdom?

https://thenextweb.com/news/estonia-eu-child-social-media-ban-opposition

Estonia is the rare EU country opposing bans on children’s social media use

In short: Estonia and Belgium are the only two EU member states to have declined the Jutland Declaration, an October 2025 pan-European commitment to restrict children’s access to social media. Estonia’s ministers argue that age-based bans are unenforceable, that children will find ways around them, and that the correct approach is to enforce the GDPR against the platforms themselves and invest in digital literacy rather than restricting young people’s participation in the information society.

Closer to AI as a real person?

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests-ai-agents-buy-software-licenses-seats-2026-4

Microsoft exec suggests AI agents will need to buy software licenses, just like employees

Ashley Stewart's scoops are always worth reading. This week, she published a sharp piece on the AI threat to software, and how Microsoft, Salesforce, and others are responding.

Buried in the story was a deceptively simple question: does your AI agent count as an employee?

At a recent conference, Microsoft executive Rajesh Jha floated a provocative idea. In a future where companies deploy fleets of AI agents, those agents may need their own identities — logins, inboxes, and even seats inside software systems. If so, AI wouldn't shrink software revenue. It could expand it.

A kind of wikilaw?

https://www.bespacific.com/there-is-no-single-place-to-find-the-worlds-laws/

There is no single place to find the world’s laws

Zacharie Laïk – There is no single place to find the world’s laws. “Legal Data Hunter is trying to fix that and 10 weeks in, it might actually work. 2 weeks ago, 351 collection scripts built by an AI agent to index the world’s laws were open sourced. Within days, lawyers and developers from around the world started opening issues on the repo – requesting sources, flagging gaps, offering local expertise. No financial incentive. Just people wanting their own laws to be findable.

Here’s what it looks like:
→ Eros Chan  (Lawvable ) asked about China – 29,000 laws now indexed.
→ Nephelie Amolochitou Viskadouraki, LL.M., ASCO  suggested the Hellenic Capital Market Commission (HCMC) for Greek financial regulation – collector built and validated.
→ Timothy (from Solid Rock) pointed Hunter to the USPTO Open Data Portal for US patent and appeals decisions – now tracked and in pipeline.
→ Donald Henderson flagged Ontario e-Laws – 857 statutes and 2,190 regulations identified, collector built.
→ Bencium® Agentic AI  suggested Hungary’s national legislation database AND the UK’s new Lex API for legislation – both collectors running.
→ Luca Árpási  pointed agent to Hungary’s full court decision archive AND the Competition Authority’s published resolutions – both being indexed.
→ Niall C.  mapped out 5 separate UK planning appeal databases across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland – restructured the entire UK map.
→ Stephen Abbott Pugh  suggested South Africa’s Open By-laws – now in pipeline.
→ Patricia Perelló Ibarra  contributed 3 pages of Spanish sources – being indexed live.

Some went from “issue opened” to “fully indexed” in under 48 hours.

Status update:
– 674 collection scripts (up from 351 2 weeks ago)
– 18,000,000+ documents indexed
– 100+ countries covered
– 550+ open legal data sources tracked

Legal Data Hunter runs every 30 minutes to make all open legal sources searchable. It writes collectors, tests them, fixes what breaks. While it doesn’t yet know every jurisdiction by heart – you might be able to help it figure out your own. If there is a legal source missing from your country, please open an issue. In many cases it can get indexed in days. We’re still looking for Jurisdiction Leads – people who want to own coverage for their country in what we think might become the world’s first exhaustive database of open legal data. What’s missing from your jurisdiction?”

As long as AI is not a person…

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethink-responsibility-in-the-age-of-ai/

Rethink Responsibility in the Age of AI

As AI systems take on more organizational decision-making, traditional models of accountability — focused on identifying a single culprit when something goes wrong — are breaking down. Drawing on recent research, the authors introduce narrative responsibility, a framework that maps the real story behind failures, distributes ownership across teams, and embeds ongoing reflection into everyday practice. This approach is essential for organizations navigating the complexity of AI-enabled decisions.

Early one morning in 2018, a self-driving Uber vehicle fatally struck a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The world had questions: Who was responsible? Was it the safety driver behind the wheel? The engineers who designed the algorithms? Uber’s leadership? Or the regulators who had allowed autonomous-vehicle testing? The inability to name a single culprit signaled a profound shift in how responsibility must be understood and attributed in the age of intelligent technologies.

If you were US Intel, would you buy tis?

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/08/china/china-supercomputer-hackers-hnk-intl

A hacker has allegedly breached one of China’s supercomputers and is attempting to sell a trove of stolen data

A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data – including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics – from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China.

The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin – a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.

… Cyber security experts who have reviewed the data say the group is offering a limited preview of the alleged dataset, for thousands of dollars, with full access priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Payment was requested in cryptocurrency.

Maybe I’ll make up my own…

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/my-final-list-of-useful-maxims

My final List of Useful Maxims

To demonstrate ‘line crossing’ you need clearly defined lines. Do we no longer recognize them?

https://www.bespacific.com/how-the-media-should-cover-this-deranged-president/

How the media should cover this deranged president

American Crisis – “The moment I saw Trump’s crazy and dangerous Truth Social post on the morning of Easter Sunday, I could imagine the freakout in newsrooms across the country. The essence of it would be something like this: “How much of this do we publish? How do we report this without breaking with every one of our standards and traditions?”…Based on my survey of regional-newspaper front pages on Monday morning, very few came anywhere near rising to the occasion. Many chose not to feature the story at all on their A1, or to give it much emphasis. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times did relatively well, leading their front pages with it. Both used Trump’s full language high up in their front-page story. There’s been a lot of talk — including here — about the media’s disastrous tendency to “sane-wash” Trump.  It comes down to this: The press, because of its own conventions and time-honored practices, normalizes him, and thus fails to get across the extreme nature of this president’s behavior. Ten years of sane-washing have had their effect. He remains in power, reelected, undeterred.  On seeing Trump’s post, I thought immediately of Mark Jacob’s October piece about how the media is missing the biggest story there is — Trump’s apparent mental illness. Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, wrote: “It keeps getting worse, and the mainstream media keep making the same mistakes in their coverage of the King of Crazytown.” After Trump claimed he “predicted” 9/11, Jacob wrote on Bluesky that “the media need to be writing about his mental unfitness every day until we get rid of him and save our country.” But of course, that didn’t happen then, and it didn’t happen this time. And now, with this horrible Easter morning development, we’ve entered new territory. But let’s get real. If traditional techniques and language (“emphatic threats”) aren’t getting it done, what actually would work? I’ll make three suggestions, and would be happy to hear yours…”

Pushback.

https://www.bespacific.com/a-judge-mistakes-the-claude-chatbot-for-a-person/

A Judge Mistakes the Claude Chatbot for a Person

Wall Street Journal – no paywall: “A federal judge in Manhattan ruled in February that when a criminal defendant used an AI chatbot to prepare for his legal defense, he waived attorney-client privilege. The prosecution can now read every word he typed and the answers he received. If this reasoning stands, the consequences will reach far beyond artificial intelligence. The defendant in U.S. v. Heppner wasn’t a rogue litigant trying to replace his lawyers with a chatbot. He was represented by counsel and had already received privileged communications from his defense attorneys. His lawyers confirmed that he used Anthropic’s Claude to organize and analyze that material in preparation for meetings with counsel. He then shared the AI’s outputs with his attorneys, who used them in developing their strategy. Judge Jed Rakoff held that the Claude transcripts were protected by neither the attorney-client privilege nor the work-product doctrine. The court’s reasoning: By typing information into an AI platform, the defendant “shared” it with a third party, and because Anthropic’s privacy policy permits data collection and potential further disclosure, no “reasonable expectation of confidentiality” existed.

Wall Street Journal – no paywall: “A federal judge in Manhattan ruled in February that when a criminal defendant used an AI chatbot to prepare for his legal defense, he waived attorney-client privilege. The prosecution can now read every word he typed and the answers he received. If this reasoning stands, the consequences will reach far beyond artificial intelligence. The defendant in U.S. v. Heppner wasn’t a rogue litigant trying to replace his lawyers with a chatbot. He was represented by counsel and had already received privileged communications from his defense attorneys. His lawyers confirmed that he used Anthropic’s Claude to organize and analyze that material in preparation for meetings with counsel. He then shared the AI’s outputs with his attorneys, who used them in developing their strategy. Judge Jed Rakoff held that the Claude transcripts were protected by neither the attorney-client privilege nor the work-product doctrine. The court’s reasoning: By typing information into an AI platform, the defendant “shared” it with a third party, and because Anthropic’s privacy policy permits data collection and potential further disclosure, no “reasonable expectation of confidentiality” existed.

The judge’s error was straightforward: He treated an AI model like a person. Throughout his opinion, he refers to the software engaging in “communications” with the user. But AI isn’t a person; it is a computing process. It can’t be deposed, call the police or betray a confidence. The third-party disclosure rule exists because sharing information with a human being creates a risk that the human will further disseminate it. That risk doesn’t exist when the “third party” is a statistical model running on a server. Judge Rakoff considered, and dismissed, the obvious point that typing into an AI tool is no different from typing into a cloud-based software, such as Google Docs. His answer, that cloud computing “is not intrinsically privileged in any case,” is a non sequitur. The question isn’t whether Google Docs creates privilege. It’s whether Google Docs destroys it. No lawyer in America thinks drafting a confidential memo in Google Docs waives the privilege over its contents. Judge Rakoff’s opinion doesn’t explain why the same act in another application does. No court has ever gone this far. The American Bar Association concluded in 2017 that lawyers may use cloud computing without waiving privilege, provided they take reasonable security precautions. State bar authorities in New York, California and elsewhere have reached the same conclusion. The entire legal profession has operated on this understanding for more than a decade. Judge Rakoff’s opinion doesn’t cite, distinguish or acknowledge any of these authorities….”

Food for thought?

https://pogowasright.org/article-against-privacy-essentialism/

Article: Against Privacy Essentialism

Privacy scholar Daniel Solove writes:

I’m pleased to share the final version of my article, “Against Privacy Essentialism” 104 N.C. L. Rev. 613 (2026).

In this article, I examine a foundational question: What is privacy? It is a question that has challenged scholars, courts, and policymakers for years, and for good reason. How privacy is defined shapes legal outcomes and influences how laws and regulations are drafted, interpreted, and enforced. This article explores why these questions matter and why our understanding of privacy remains so consequential.

Download for free on SSRN.

Modern war…

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/07/iran_hackers_disrupting_us_water_energy/

Iran cyber actors disrupting US water, energy facilities, FBI warns

Iranian-affiliated actors have escalated intrusions targeting critical US water and energy facilities, in some cases disrupting operations, the FBI and American cyber defense agencies said on Tuesday.

… Iran's cyber intrusions targeting critical infrastructure have been ongoing since March, according to the feds, and they aim to disrupt operational technology (OT) devices, specifically programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley.

PLCs are used to control and monitor industrial equipment in water treatment plants, food production sites, oil refineries, power grids, and other critical facilities, and they've been a longtime favorite target of Iranian cyber crews.

(Related)

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/08/microsoft_armored_datacenters/

Microsoft hints at bit bunkers for war zones

Microsoft is reevaluating how it designs and builds datacenters in conflict-prone regions after Iran began targeting Middle Eastern bit barns in retaliation for US military operations.

… Smith also called for "strong international rules to promote the protection of civilian infrastructure," which he argued should include datacenters.

Yes, I’m concerned.

https://www.bespacific.com/when-war-crimes-rhetoric-becomes-battlefield-reality/

When War Crimes Rhetoric Becomes Battlefield Reality

Just Security: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” posted President Donald Trump on Easter Sunday. In case one thought that was an impulsive utterance, it’s notable that the president in apparently prepared remarks a few days earlier said, “If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.” Such rhetorical statements – if followed through – would amount to the most serious war crimes – and thus the president’s statements place service members in a profoundly challenging situation. As former uniformed military lawyers who advised targeting operations, we know the presidents’ words run counter to decades of legal training of military personnel and risk placing our warfighters on a path of no return….

• First, such threats undermine U.S. legitimacy and global standing, as they demonstrate a rejection of binding international agreements and core commitments to the laws of war. Indeed, the U.S. military doubled down on its commitment to the law of war following Vietnam War-era atrocities, requiring our Armed Forces to follow the law regardless how any conflict is characterized. An operation that followed through on Trump’s rhetoric would be one of infamy in the history of modern warfare.

• Second, they pose a significant risk of moral and psychic injury for servicemembers. National soul-searching regarding how Americans fight followed the long U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which both civilian casualties and detainee abuse undermined strategic objectives and weighed heavily on soldiers’ consciences long after the fighting stopped. This reflection led to initiatives such as the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation program and new laws regarding detention and interrogation practices, strengthening U.S. commitment to fighting honorably and effectively through adherence to the law.

• Finally, the public record of intent to commit war crimes puts soldiers at risk of later liability. In any future war crimes or U.C.M.J. investigation—for which there may be no statute of limitations—their actions will be judged based on the reasonably available information at the time of the strikes. See, e.g., Executive Summary of the Investigation of the Alleged Civilian Casualty Incident in the al Jadidah District, Mosul, May 8, 2017. Long after the Secretary of Defense receives his anticipated pardon from the president, it is not unlikely that both his and Trump’s expressly stated intent to commit acts that amount to clear war crimes and to dispense with “stupid rules of engagement” may be considered evidence of notice and scienter on the part of servicemembers’ during any future congressional or criminal investigations.

The U.S. military trains to fight with precision and lethality according to the law of war – precision meaning attacking only lawful military objectives while doing our utmost to protect innocent civilians caught up in the fight. The legal hurdle to convert a civilian object such as a power plant into a lawful military objective is a high one because the United States and its allies vigorously rejected “total war” after the massive suffering endured by millions during World War II. What President Trump threatens is exactly that, from a civilian targeting perspective – total war against Iran, a complete rejection of the legal limits the United States has incorporated into the law governing U.S. military operations for both pragmatic and moral reasons…”

Perhaps AI is not your friendly lawyer…

https://www.bespacific.com/discovering-a-conversation-with-a-machine-friend-ai-assisted-legal-research-as-an-unmitigated-litigation-vulnerability/

Discovering a Conversation with a Machine Friend: AI-Assisted Legal Research as an Unmitigated Litigation Vulnerability

Abdilla, Justin, Discovering a Conversation with a Machine Friend: AI-Assisted Legal Research as an Unmitigated Litigation Vulnerability (February 12, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6227600 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6227600

On February 10, 2026, a federal judge ruled that every document a criminal defendant generated using a commercial AI tool was discoverable. The ruling in United States v. Heppner applied existing privilege doctrine to AI-generated legal research and found it protected by neither the attorney-client privilege nor the work product doctrine. The result is architecturally inevitable: because commercial AI platforms route queries through third-party servers, every interaction fails the confidentiality requirement that both doctrines demand. This paper argues that the legal profession’s response — update your policies, train your staff, be careful what you type — is inadequate. It catalogs six attack vectors an adversary can exploit to obtain AI interaction data, demonstrates that analogous research activities already receive legal protection, and proposes a three-part remedial framework: draft amendment language for Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1) establishing qualified protection for AI-assisted research, a technological remediation strategy through local AI deployment, and a practitioner’s objection toolkit with ready-to-file motion language. More than eight hundred million people use generative AI. The discovery apparatus has identified their conversations as a largely unprotected evidentiary resource. This paper offers a framework to close the gap.

Slow but sure?

https://fpf.org/blog/the-rest-of-the-west-oregon-and-washington-build-on-california-chatbot-law/

The Rest of the West: Oregon and Washington Build on California Chatbot Law

The West Coast now has a full set of chatbot laws on the books. Following California’s SB 243 (signed in 2025 and effective January 1, 2026) both Oregon (SB 1546 ) and Washington (HB 2225 ) enacted companion chatbot laws that will take effect on January 1, 2027. Together, these laws establish a new framework for regulating chatbot interactions with minors.

Tools & Techniques.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/07/adobe-launches-acrobat-spaces-a-free-ai-powered-study-tool-for-students/

Adobe launches Acrobat Spaces, a free AI-powered study tool for students

Adobe Acrobat has largely catered to professionals with its recent AI features. Now, the company is turning its attention to students by making the Acrobat more useful with the launch of a new AI tool called Acrobat Spaces. The tool will allow students to create presentations, flash cards, and quizzes from study materials such as PDFs, links, and notes.

With the launch, the creative suite company is trying to compete with other AI tools like Google’s NotebookLM, Goodnotes, and Turbo AI, all of which allow students to upload documents to generate different kinds of study materials. To gain traction, Adobe is making Adobe Acrobat Spaces free, and it’s hosting it on a separate URL. Plus, users can get started with Acrobat Spaces without logging in.

Oh look, another one! (#23 is Trump related?)

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/a-further-group-of-useful-maxims

A further Group of Useful Maxims

Patient and friendly…

https://thehackernews.com/2026/04/285-million-drift-hack-traced-to-six.html

$285 Million Drift Hack Traced to Six-Month DPRK Social Engineering Operation

Drift has revealed that the April 1, 2026, attack that led to the theft of $285 million was the culmination of a months-long targeted and meticulously planned social engineering operation undertaken by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) that began in the fall of 2025.

The Solana-based decentralized exchange described it as "an attack six months in the making," attributing it with medium confidence to a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group dubbed UNC4736, which is also tracked under the cyptonyms AppleJeus, Citrine Sleet, Golden Chollima, and Gleaming Pisces.

Tools & Techniques. (For you spare time.)

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/harvard-opens-more-free-online-courses-in-ai-data-science-programming-check-full-list-and-direct-links/articleshow/130035669.cms

Harvard opens more free online courses in AI, data science, programming: Check full list and direct links

… The offerings span key areas such as artificial intelligence, data science, computer science, and web development, and are open to learners globally. These courses are available under a free audit track, allowing users to access study material and lectures, while a paid option is typically required for certification.