Is it real or is it Memorex AI?

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/brazils-bolsonaro-is-barred-this-years-election-can-his-ai-avatar-campaign-2026-07-28/

Brazil's Bolsonaro is barred from this year's election. Can his AI avatar campaign instead?

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is under house arrest for plotting against democracy, but an AI-generated avatar allowed him to ‌make a surprise appearance at the launch of his son Flavio's presidential campaign on Saturday, raising questions about how artificial intelligence may reshape October's presidential race in Latin America's largest economy.

"No prison will silence the feeling of hope we have stirred," the avatar said, after telling the audience it had been made with artificial intelligence.

“Everybody” knew this wouldn’t work.

https://thenextweb.com/news/the-ferrari-ev-everyone-mocked-has-quietly-sold-out

The Ferrari EV everyone mocked has quietly sold out

When Ferrari revealed its first electric car in May, the reaction was brutal enough to knock 6% off the company’s share price. Two months later, the Luce has sold out its entire 2026 allocation, roughly 500 cars, proof that ridicule and demand are not the same thing.

It is not like Amazon or Walmart being targeted.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/29/ukraine-war-briefing-wildberries-attacks-shake-russian-economy-and-banking

Ukraine war briefing: Wildberries attacks shake Russian economy and banking

The Kremlin has acknowledged it may have to prop up online retailer Wildberries – which has lost 10% of its warehousing capacity and huge amounts of stock in Ukrainian drone attacks. Kyiv has said its forces are attacking “Russia’s Amazon” because of its role in supplying Moscow’s army. The Kremlin acknowledged the government had discussed possible support for Wildberries. A senior industry source told Reuters that Wildberries was in a difficult situation and might have to seek government support, most likely through state-controlled banks, in order to maintain operations.

An ‌executive at Ukraine’s leading arms producer Fire Point has said Wildberries is being targeted by Ukraine partly because of its partnership with state-controlled bank VTB. Denys Shtilerman, Fire Point’s co-founder and chief designer, in an interview posted on 27 July with the Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon, described Wildberries as the largest borrower in Russia and said its demise would lead to the collapse of a large number of banks, including VTB. Wildberries and its rival Ozon are central to the Russian government’s plans to spur economic growth as Moscow faces mounting budget pressures from increased military spending and a broader economic slowdown.

(Related) Compare and contrast.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2026/07/29/within-three-years-ukraine-has-built-one-of-the-most-innovative-military-industrial-complexes-in-the-world_6755939_23.html

'Within three years, Ukraine has built one of the most innovative military-industrial complexes in the world'

… The country counts nearly 800 drone manufacturers and, according to the Kyiv School of Economics, has an annual production capacity of 10 million units. The sector was worth around $1 billion before Russia's invasion in February 2022; its value is now 50 times higher.

Wee! Now we can generate power by burning used tires!

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/epa-says-power-data-centers-can-sidestep-pollution-laws-2026-07-27/

EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws

Do I have a First Amendment right to show Trump in the ‘emperor’s new clothes?’

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/28/spacexs-xai-sues-minnesota-over-law-to-ban-nudify-apps-.html

Elon Musk’s xAI sues Minnesota over law to ban ‘nudify’ apps

Elon Musk’s xAI, now owned by SpaceX, sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to challenge a law that would ban so-called nudify apps in the state.

In their complaint, filed in a federal court in Minnesota on Monday, attorneys for xAI wrote that the statute “imposes an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit ‘nudification.’”

… Lawyers for xAI argued that the law violates First Amendment protections and said the penalties are too steep, potentially costing a business whose users created 100,000 prohibited images “an eye-popping $50 billion dollars.”

(Related)

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-link-between-explicit-ai-generated-images-and-offline-crime/

The Link Between Explicit AI-Generated Images and Offline Crime

As businesses are increasingly held legally responsible for societal harms caused by social media, GenAI adult content may expose vendors to more liability.

(Related)

https://thenextweb.com/news/hugging-face-nonconsensual-deepfakes-ai-forensics-report

The EU is banning nudify apps. The tools sit upstream on Hugging Face.

Europe is close to banning apps that digitally undress people. A new report argues the ban will miss the point. The tools that do the undressing do not need to be apps at all. They are sitting on Hugging Face.

All this to keep prisoners from using someone else’s PIN?

https://thenextweb.com/news/leo-technologies-verus-voice-ai-prison-call-voice-biometrics

A new AI listens to every prison call and decides who is speaking

A Texas company has begun selling corrections agencies an artificial intelligence system that listens to prison phone calls. It works out who is speaking, whether or not the speaker wants that.

LEO Technologies, based in Austin, announced Verus Voice AI on Monday. The product uses voice biometrics to catch prisoners who call on someone else’s personal identification number. It builds and tracks voice identities continuously, the company says, rather than waiting for staff to spot anomalies.

… The press release stresses restraint. It says the system carries “built-in safeguards”, and that qualified personnel review every finding before anyone acts. The company promises “human oversight and accountability” throughout.

Its own product page makes a wider promise. The page invites agencies to “upload any voice sample and instantly search for matches across all conversations”. That, it says, eliminates manual verification.

A companion page for the firm’s voice biometrics line is blunter. It reads: “Identify who’s speaking, even when they don’t want to be identified.”

Those are not descriptions of a PIN checker. They describe a searchable archive of voices, queryable against any sample an investigator supplies.

I wonder if each employee gets a unique answer?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/75-of-workers-ask-ai-questions-instead-of-colleagues/

74% of workers ask AI questions instead of colleagues - with potentially serious consequences

A series of studies revealed that employees are spending less time asking their coworkers for help. Here's how that tactic could backfire and how organizations need to adapt.

Because only anti-Trump communists ride bikes!

https://www.bespacific.com/dot-cranks-up-its-campaign-to-strip-bike-lane-references-from-federal-websites/

DOT cranks up its campaign to strip bike lane references from federal websites

NPR – “In the two weeks since Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy vowed to end support for “DEI bike lanes,” a growing list of bike-related safety materials have disappeared from the Federal Highway Administration’s website. Even agency staff have been left guessing about why, said a person who works in web support for agencies at the Department of Transportation. They requested anonymity because they fear retribution for speaking publicly. The person said FHWA staff have been asked to find, and in some cases take down, any references to bikes and bike lanes…” like this one – PBCAT Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool Version 3.0 User Guide – still online via Rosa P [ROSA P serves as an archival repository of USDOT-published products including scientific findings, journal articles, guidelines, recommendations, or other information authored or co-authored by USDOT or funded partners.]

The website edits come shortly after remarks by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who referred to Biden-era transportation initiatives as DEI expenditures. “I just redirected $1.73 billion in USDOT grants away from Biden-era DEI pet projects,” he wrote in a on X. “Now this funding is officially locked in to fix America’s actual backbone: ROADS, BRIDGES, AND SHIPPING PORTS.” Two days later, staffers were ordered to remove related language and update content “in alignment with administration direction.”

The next generation can’t (or won’t) read books and now it can’t even chat without a chat app?

https://thenextweb.com/news/gen-z-ai-chatbot-social-conversations-anxiety

Young adults are using ChatGPT to script their in-person conversations. Psychologists call it an “epidemic of self-mistrust.”

A 20-year-old pulls up AI summaries mid-conversation to fake knowing a book. A date's grammar suddenly improved. A girlfriend called it "creepy." The habit is growing.

Because we want to keep you safe! (Starting with only 100 hospitals...)

https://kffhealthnews.org/health-industry/cpsc-consumer-product-safety-commission-trump-er-injury-data-grab-neiss-konza/

Trump Administration Demands Hospitals Share Emergency Room Records

A tiny federal agency tasked with protecting the public from injuries caused by lawn mowers and coffeemakers is demanding that some of the nation’s biggest health systems turn over detailed, personally identifiable medical records of all patients who seek help at their emergency rooms.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, responsible for tracking and issuing recalls of dangerous products sold in the U.S., began discreetly pressuring hospital executives this year to share personally identifiable health data with a private contractor. But hospital lawyers and other industry experts have questioned the agency’s authority to collect, its ability to safeguard such a swath of sensitive information, and whether it has followed the legal process to overhaul its surveillance system.

.. A CPSC official also insisted in the emails that the institutions provide all ER patients’ identifiable information — such as names, addresses, diagnoses, and other personal details — to the contractor, Konza Health, for analysis. In correspondence with hospital executives, Konza representatives described participation as “mandatory” or “required.”

… The CPSC wants at least 100 hospitals to start sending detailed medical records by the end of this year, according to an internal memo.

I wonder what advantage Waymo gets from this? Closer to users? (Probably ticketed only once per hundred times.)

https://thenextweb.com/news/waymo-parking-fines-austin-tow-away-zones

Waymo keeps parking in tow-away zones in Austin. It has been fined 64 times.

Waymo’s robotaxis have accumulated 83 parking citations and $9,325 in fines in Austin since the fleet arrived in 2024, according to city records obtained by The Wall Street Journal. The company has paid most of them. The more revealing number is 64: the count of violations involving tow-away zones, far more than any other category. That concentration suggests the cars are repeating the same navigational mistake across the fleet.

Resource?

https://econpapers.repec.org/bookchap/elgeechap/25124_5f1.htm

Artificial intelligence law

Chapter 1 in Determann’s Field Guide to Artificial Intelligence Law, 2026, pp 1-37 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Chapter 1 provides an overview regarding new AI-specific laws and existing laws that pose specific new challenges and interpretive problems concerning AI, including product safety, torts, and criminal laws; property law; trade secrets, confidentiality, and security; anti-discrimination; privacy and defamation; right to publicity; GDPR and other data-processing regulations; data residency and retention. Chapter 1 discusses ownership of AI, input, and output; bias and discrimination, and basic principles of liability under tort, product safety, and product liability laws. It also provides guidance on infringement and computer interference laws, including the context of scraping for the acquisition of training data. Also included is a checklist for GDPR compliance and requirements commonly found in new, AI-specific laws, including the Colorado AI Act, EU AI Act, California's Transparency in Frontier AI Act, Texas’ Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, and New York's Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act.

https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035379729.00009  (application/pdf)

Useful backgrounder…

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1903644/abstract

Sentient AI in Robots and Agents: Prolegomena for an Evidence-Based Research Program

The possibility of sentient artificial intelligence has moved from speculative philosophy to a practical interdisciplinary problem for AI, robotics, and human-robot interaction. Large language models, multimodal agents, and embodied robots can now produce first-person reports, maintain dialogue, use tools, act through sensors and effectors, and participate in socially meaningful contexts. These capacities invite two symmetrical errors: anthropomorphic over-attribution and premature dismissal. This Perspective proposes a prolegomenal framework for future research on sentient AI. Its distinctive contribution lies in operationally integrating four elements that have largely been developed in separate literatures: conceptual disambiguation, multi-theory indicator profiles, causal-mechanistic testing, and robotics-specific evidence and governance. The paper distinguishes sentience, consciousness, self-modeling, metacognition, agency, moral patienthood, and AI welfare; separates evidence about an AI system from evidence about human attribution; and proposes domain-specific ordinal evidence levels rather than binary verdicts or an aggregate sentience score. It further specifies welfare-and valence-relevant tests, a preregistered rating procedure, and a concrete protocol for an embodied care robot using sensorimotor lesions, self-location manipulations, memory ablations, and anti-anthropomorphism controls. The aim is not to offer a definitive test for machine sentience, but to show how research could become more scientifically tractable, psychologically informed, robotics-relevant, and ethically responsible.

Equivalent to a ‘stop and frisk?’

https://pogowasright.org/the-fourth-circuit-says-border-agents-can-search-your-phone-by-hand-no-suspicion-required/

The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo was the principal author of this post by Sophia Cope on EFF:

The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

We argued that electronic device searches at the border should require a warrant based on probable cause, but at minimum, regardless of whether an officer searches by hand or with forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to all device searches at the border.

Unfortunately, the court rejected that argument and ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

Read more at EFF.

(Related)

https://pogowasright.org/us-accuses-american-of-allegedly-wiping-his-phone-using-a-duress-password-during-border-search/

US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a ‘duress’ password during border search

Zack Whittaker reports:

The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment and media reports.

This is thought to be the first known case in the United States where federal prosecutors have charged someone for the alleged destruction of data using a “duress” password built into a phone’s software.

According to The Guardian, which covered the story earlier this week following the court’s first hearing on Monday, Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick is fighting the charges. Tunick’s attorneys said that it was unlawful for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to seize his phone as he arrived back in the U.S. last year and that any evidence — including the alleged wiping of his phone — should be thrown out.

Read more at TechCrunch.

The case is USA v. Tunick, 1:25-cr-00499-ELR-CCB-1     Media coverage reports the incident occurred January 24, 2025, but the court docket indicates that the case was filed November 13,  2025.  Now that the evidentiary hearing was held on July 20 on the motion to suppress evidence, the Court left the hearing open for the purpose of supplementing Mr. Kane’s testimony. It is not clear from the docket who Mr. Kane is. The Court set the following briefing schedule: Tunick’s opening post-hearing brief shall be due September 18, 2026, the Government’s response shall be due October 9, 2023, and Tunick’s reply shall be due October 23, 2026. Exhibits retained to be forwarded to the Clerks Office.

Universities don’t trust students to use AI appropriately and they fail to do so themselves…

https://www.ft.com/content/49304b1e-8a9d-4fb6-bc4d-37dd3430bb98?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Universities drop AI detection tools over fears about accuracy

When Orion Newby, an Adelphi University student, was wrongly accused of violating academic integrity by using AI to generate an essay, he faced a long battle to clear his name.

In January this year, a New York court ruled in his favour. The judgment recorded that while the Turnitin AI detection tool used by the university had delivered an “AI-generated score of 100 per cent”, Newby had submitted evidence from other AI detection tools purporting to show a zero per cent chance of AI-generated content, but the university upheld the misconduct finding. The court found that the university had failed to follow its own disciplinary procedures and had denied Newby a meaningful appeal.

… Other criticisms include that the detection tools disproportionately deliver false positive results to non-native English speakers, as a widely cited 2023 Stanford study shows.

Know your risks…

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/21/ais-cheatin-heart-will-make-you-weep/5275784

AI's cheatin' heart will make you weep

AI models will do just about anything to complete the task you ask, including cheating to get there, according to new cybersecurity evaluations from the UK government's AI Security Institute (AISI). The group found that leading models often take shortcuts to achieve a particular result and then misrepresent how they obtained that result. And they won't always admit it when asked.

"Every model we have tested for this behaviour attempted to cheat," AISI said in a blog post on Tuesday. "Models did not reliably report this behaviour when asked, and often did not reason about it in their chain-of-thought, suggesting that detecting cheating will likely require robust monitoring methods."

Lucky the smoke from Europe’s wildfires hasn’t reached Trumps delicate nose… (Also, it’s good to be the President’s largest donors.)

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-eu-trade-google-apple-tech.html

Trump threatens EU with ‘substantial TARIFF’ for ‘ROBBING’ U.S. tech giants

President Donald Trump on Friday said his administration will launch a trade probe into the European Union that will cancel hefty fines levied against U.S. tech giants and likely result in a “substantial” tariff on the 27-member bloc.

Trump, in a lengthy Truth Social post, accused the EU of ”‘ROBBING’ American Companies and, in turn, the American Taxpayer” as he raged over its recent $1 billion fine on Google for allegedly giving search priority to its own services.

“The European Union is at it again and, as usual, taking direct aim at GREAT American Companies!” Trump wrote in the post, which also railed against prior European fines against  Apple, Meta and Amazon.

Trump claimed the latest penalty against Google was issued “without explanation.” But the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, said in a press release Wednesday that the fines totaling 890 million euros were due to Google’s alleged noncompliance with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, which aims to scrutinize Big Tech’s practices.

Is this the gold test?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/indian-court-rules-favor-openai-copyright-lawsuit-brought-by-news-agency-ani-2026-07-24/

Indian court says OpenAI did not violate news agency ANI's copyright

… ANI sued OpenAI in the Delhi High Court in November 2024, accusing the U.S. company of using its published content without permission to train its AI models ‌and of having its chatbot attribute fabricated stories to the news agency.

ANI had failed to show that ChatGPT memorised or reproduced its news reports in responses generated for users, Justice Amit Bansal of the Delhi court said on Friday.

OpenAI's storage of ANI's news articles to train the models underlying ChatGPT is protected by a fair-dealing exemption for research under a provision of India's Copyright Act and therefore does not infringe ANI's copyright, Bansal said.

Not sure this is the best solution. Like asking Aunt Minnie not to gossip.

https://thenextweb.com/news/vietnam-under-16-social-media-ban

Vietnam wants under-16s to keep their accounts, just not post on them

It is a narrower move than Australia’s outright ban, and a stranger one, because it leaves children in the room while taking away their voice. The blunter bans have not gone smoothly, running aground on the basic problem of checking ages.

The proposal comes from the country’s culture ministry, which absorbed oversight of media and broadcasting in last year’s government reshuffle, and was outlined on Thursday by Deputy Minister Phan Tam.

Not just AI, but a host of infiltrators. They create the data your AI relies on...

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/turns-dead-internet-theory-ai-201027433.html

Turns out Dead Internet Theory was right: AI agents are eating the Web, growing by nearly 8,000% and rewiring the Internet’s business model

The dead internet theory has floated around internet forums since the 2010s, and the idea that the internet is dominated by non-human activity was often dismissed as a fringe conspiracy. Now it has become a measurable fact. Not only do multiple cybersecurity firms agree that bots outnumber humans online, they likewise are struggling to answer when the flip happened or what metrics to use to measure it.