Another “sounds good on paper” idea.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/californias-ab-412-still-demands-developers-do-impossible

California’s AB 412 Still Demands Developers Do The Impossible

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.

… A.B. 412 sounds simple: just have AI developers create and keep a list of all the registered copyrighted works they use in AI training. 

That may seem straightforward. In practice, it’s anything but. 

There is no machine-readable “list” of copyrighted works at the U.S. Copyright Office. And many copyright holders can get a copyright without even depositing a publicly viewable sample of the work—for example, software companies may register copyright on proprietary code without revealing it to the public. 

And on the open internet, copyright information is often incomplete, unavailable, or impossible to verify. One image may be registered with the copyright office, while the next is licensed under a free Creative Commons license (like the images that EFF creates), and the next is public domain. A message forum user might post an original story, photograph, or poem without any indication of ownership or registration status. 

No sure I follow the logic.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/elon-musk-tries-again-to-escape-ftc-audits-of-x-data-handling/

Elon Musk tries again to escape FTC audits of X data handling

… According to Musk, the FTC should stop its monitoring because Twitter no longer exists, as X was merged into xAI, and then xAI was folded into SpaceX. Musk also argues that since none of the leadership or engineers responsible for the two-factor authentication error remain at the company, and “X has since built a world-class privacy and data-protection program” that protects consumers, the FTC doesn’t have to intervene anymore.

Soon he entire network will belong to AI.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/ai-worm.html

AI Worm

Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm.

The coolest thing about the prototype is that it carries its own LLM with it, and runs it on computers that have been broken into.

This is the closest to John Brunner’s original 1975 conception of a computer worm that I’ve seen.

Not the first industry I thought of…

https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-bubble-surreal-toilet-industry-toto

The AI Bubble Has Become So Surreal That It’s Now Propping Up the Toilet Industry

With AI company valuations screaming into the trillions of dollars, it can be hard to find the pulse of the AI boom. So to put it in terms the average person might relate to, let’s just say AI hype has gotten so ridiculous that it’s now propping up the Japanese toilet industry.

Absurd as that might sound, it’s now financial reality in our AI-obsessed world economy. According to Bloomberg, the Japanese company Toto Ltd — arguably the most famous smart toilet brand for US consumers — now expects more than half of its total capex in the coming years to revolve around AI.

Tools & Techniques. (For your amusement)

https://www.bespacific.com/deflock-an-open-source-project-mapping-license-plate-readers/

DeFlock An open-source project mapping license plate readers.

DeFlock: “Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time. They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points. These cameras collect data on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime. These systems are marketed as indispensable tools to fight crime, but they ignore the powerful tools police already have to track criminals, such as cell phone location data, creating a loophole that doesn’t require a warrant…”

Time to re-think your investment choices?

https://thenextweb.com/news/the-ai-hype-cycle-will-slow-down-whats-next-decides-the-winners

The AI hype cycle will slow down. What’s next decides the winners

Artificial Intelligence is entering the late stage of its hype cycle.

Not a collapse. A correction.

For the past two years, AI has dominated venture capital flows, with capital pouring into the sector at unprecedented scale and startups multiplying rapidly as funding concentrates around AI-driven businesses.

What began as acceleration has now started to show the early signs of saturation. The expectations built into the market are beginning to exceed the returns being delivered.

The hype is beginning to fade.

This is the predictable arc of every major innovation cycle. From railroads to the internet, transformative technologies move through a familiar pattern: rapid enthusiasm, inflated expectations, and an eventual reset where economic reality reasserts itself. AI is following the same trajectory.

What is different this time is speed.

Entire market cycles are compressing into a fraction of their historical duration. Adoption, investment, and saturation are happening simultaneously.

As that happens, companies built primarily on narrative rather than durable value creation will come under pressure. Funding will tighten, valuations will reset, and some of today’s most visible players will not survive the transition.

This phase is the beginning of AI’s real test.

But this way Trump isn’t in charge…

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/03/openai-white-house-ai-safety-rules-00948478

OpenAI diverges from White House on AI safety rules

A new OpenAI proposal for regulating advanced artificial intelligence systems splits from President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on at least two key points, with the tech giant now working to nudge the White House and Congress toward its preferred approach to governing AI.

In a new policy paper, OpenAI calls on the federal government to require mandatory evaluations of advanced AI models for potential risks, but places the responsibility for overseeing that process on civilian agencies.

And they don’t see this as an indication that their profession is doomed?

https://www.bespacific.com/law-professors-prefer-ai-over-peer-answers/

Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers

Reuters: “Law professors overwhelmingly preferred answers drafted by AI over ones written by fellow professors, a new Stanford Law School study found, suggesting that the technology is capable of legal reasoning and that law students may benefit from AI ‌tutoring. Professors from 14 U.S. law schools developed a list of 40 questions representative of those first-year contracts students ask during faculty office hours. The professors wrote answers to the questions, and researchers had two AI platforms — Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and NotebookLM — also answer them. The same professors blindly judged the short answers head-to-head and chose the AI-generated ones as most beneficial to students 75% of the time. The AI platforms performed just as well as the professor rated most highly in the study. “We were frankly surprised by the magnitude of the results,” lead researcher and Stanford law professor Julian Nyarko said in an article on Stanford’s website  about the study. “These weren’t just simple questions with obvious answers.” The study comes as law schools and the legal profession grapple with how to incorporate rapidly evolving AI into teaching and law practice. Earlier studies have found that AI can pass the bar exam, earn A+ law school grades, ‌and effectively grade law school exams …”

Can you think of any other businesses that are equally vulnerable to an AI takeover?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/06/02/thrive-holdings-to-bet-1-billion-on-ai-powered-accounting-roll-up/

Thrive Holdings To Bet $1 Billion On AI-Powered Accounting Roll-Up

In Thrive Holdings’ live-fire testing ground, self-improving AI models are achieving up to 98% data-entry accuracy, offering a blueprint for the automation of professional services.

Is this the only field where the practitioners have an opinion?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/science/ai-mathematics-leiden-declaration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nFA.v6n1.vQ52ZDoCvFBV&smid=url-share

As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution

Recently there are signs that some branches of higher mathematics, among the most rarefied realms of human achievement, are vulnerable to a shake-up by artificial intelligence. Mathematicians, in turn, have been thinking about how to respond.

On Tuesday, a group of 16 mathematicians, in consultation with colleagues and math organizations worldwide, published the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It aims to “frame the conversation about future directions,” said Dame Ursula Martin, one of the authors, and a mathematician and computer scientist at Oxford.

These are not the droids you are looking for…

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-presidential-records-act-2676990330/

Trump's own library says his DMs don't exist. A federal court disagrees.

The newly operational Trump Presidential Library claims it cannot turn up a single Twitter direct message sent by Donald Trump during his first term in office — a striking claim given that court records confirm such messages exist.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Washington Post at 12:01 a.m. on January 20, 2025 — exactly five years after the end of Trump's first term — the library stated it had been "unable to locate any records" related to any direct message sent from Trump's @realDonaldTrump or @POTUS accounts. The request covered the entirety of his first administration, during which Trump sent more than 25,000 public tweets.

The no-records response stands in direct contradiction to evidence produced in federal court, the newspaper reported. During special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Twitter complied with a warrant and handed over at least 32 direct messages sent to or from the @realDonaldTrump account between October 2020 and January 2021. A Twitter attorney confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that "there are confidential communications" in the account.

Altering reality for fun and profit?

https://www.bespacific.com/won-the-civil-war-now-banning-books-about-why-civil-war-was-fought/

The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought

LitHub – Tom Zoellner on the Antebellum Precedent of Trump-Era Censorship: “In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers. Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest. I wrote about this censorious mania to preserve the fiction of “happy and contented slaves” in a recent book about the important role played by enslaved people in achieving their own freedom. It was published in September under the title The Road Was Full of Thorns. I could not have dreamed that my book itself would be censored—by the U.S. Government, the side that supposedly won the Civil War. Censorship often works like this—indirectly, requiring no specified demands but rather a vague climate of intimidation that encourages “an abundance of caution” when making decisions about what voices should be heard.

A little background. In May of 2025, a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Order 3431 entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It directed the superintendents of national parks and monuments to “review property for inappropriate content” and scrub their facilities of “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.” The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie National Monument  no longer has information related to rising sea levels that threaten Charleston Harbor.  The order extends to books and materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and other Black leaders have been reportedly removed. My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S. Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National, the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore…

A strong clue to what happened might be found in a letter that went out to regional Park Service directors on November 25, 2025 asking for a review of “all retail items available for purchase in outlets operated by park cooperating associations and concessioners” to make sure they were in accord with the administration’s ideological goals. “Items identified as non-compliant with this order must be removed from sale immediately,” said the memo, signed by comptroller Jessica Bowron. A leaked database of inspections shows that officials at Yosemite National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, among other places, had singled out books in the bookstore for review. At the latter place, an anonymous official wrote that “out of an abundance of caution,” books such as The 1619 Project, which details the origins of American slavery, would be targeted for removal. This was their decision, not that of the Interior Department…”

I hope they are amused.

https://www.bespacific.com/one-company-may-know-everything-about-you/

One company may know everything about you

The American Prospect: “The world’s largest advertising conglomerate has proposed merging with the company that has built detailed profiles on every American. A disturbing story at the intersection of innovations in war and our surveillance economy broke last week. Reuters reported on a letter sent by U.S. Central Command to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) back in April, revealing that U.S. military troop locations had been tracked using commercial location data. Such information collected from phones and other connected devices can uncover patterns and movements to inform attacks on military targets. Wyden told Reuters that we need to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.” I can’t say that this danger was top of mind for us when we opted out of spying on our readers and eliminated programmatic advertising on prospect.org. But it’s indisputable that carrying around a tracking device in your pocket can lead to a myriad of potential dangers beyond getting a geolocated ad for a nearby restaurant. That this information can be sold to third-party data brokers heightens those threats. There are ways for the military to anonymize data on the devices it requisitions, and discourage use of browsers like Chrome that have surveillance embedded inside them. But endless tracking leads to more quotidian outcomes than deciphering troop movements. And soon, the architecture that makes the tracking work could fall into the hands of a foreign acquirer. Publicis Groupe is the largest of the Big Three global advertising conglomerates (the others are WPP and Omnicom), and by itself it captured almost one-third of all global billings last year. A couple of weeks ago, Publicis announced its intention to buy LiveRamp in a $2.5 billion deal. This is the company that combines multiple inputs of an individual’s personal data (web activity, subscriptions, apps, travel, retail, financial, and even medical history) to generate an “identity graph,” a precise profile of our lives and actions.

LiveRamp is said to have built identity graphs on 245 million Americans, virtually every U.S. adult. These can be used in any context, from web to apps to smart TVs. “LiveRamp makes possible the data integration empowering cross-platform tracking,” said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. And in the past, it has reportedly sold identity graph information segmented by military or pregnancy status, among others. Publicis, a French multinational, has been gradually acquiring data firms, from data broker Epsilon to “end-to-end data solution” Lotame. Publicis represents global juggernauts like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, and its global reach could expand the identity graph everywhere. It is even the largest Western advertiser in China, with about 20 percent of the Chinese media agency market and partnerships with Tencent and Alibaba. Its clients hold massive troves of personal information which LiveRamp can make more valuable through targeting at the individual level. Regardless of any international ties, the leading ad conglomerate controlling personal data on hundreds of millions of people courts risk on multiple levels.

Repeat?

https://pogowasright.org/connecticut-enacts-omnibus-privacy-law/

Connecticut Enacts Omnibus Privacy Law

Lindsey Tonsager, Laura Kim, Bryan Ramirez & Clare Mathias of Covington and Burling write:

On May 27, 2026, the Connecticut governor signed SB 4, an omnibus privacy law, which among other things, amends the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (“CTDPA”), establishes a data broker registry and accessible deletion mechanism, imposes restrictions on the use of price setting devices and surveillance pricing, and creates requirements for direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies.

The CTDPA amendments, data-driven pricing provisions, and genetic testing provisions take effect on October 1, 2026, while the data broker registration requirements take effect on January 1, 2027. Certain other data broker requirements would phase in between 2027 and 2031.

Read more about the amendments and provisions at Inside Privacy.

It’s not that they left, it’s where they might be going…

https://www.bespacific.com/trump-administration-sees-striking-exodus-of-legal-talent/

Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent

The New York Times Gift Article: “President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data. Along with the usual retirements and turnover in the federal work force, the last year saw deep staffing cuts and the resignations of some staff members who objected to Mr. Trump’s policies. Their departures show how rapidly the president has eroded the image of the federal government as the gold standard for lawyers seeking public service roles. Instead, many of those looking for such work are flocking to the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofits that are challenging administration policies in the courts, boosting Mr. Trump’s opponents with seasoned lawyers. “There’s all this awareness that people in the federal government are dissatisfied, are angry, are frustrated, and want no part of it,” said Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, who has hired 22 lawyers from across the federal government in the last year. “That’s translating directly to people saying, ‘I want to be part of organizations that actually operate with integrity, that people want to be a part of, that people feel good about doing the right thing.’” Wariness of the Trump administration is also palpable inside law schools, where many aspiring lawyers who would have once jumped at the chance to hold a federal government job are seeking alternative paths, according to faculty members and students. “A lot of people my age are asking, ‘Is it worth getting a job, and will that help career wise — having one year of Trump administration experience on your résumé?’” said Matthew Duray, who described himself as a conservative Republican and just finished his first year at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. “Or will that hurt? And that’s the question I guess everyone’s asking, and that’s the bet you have to make ahead of time. But it’s hard to know long term.”

AI does not control nuclear weapons yet, right?

https://thenextweb.com/news/shangri-la-dialogue-ai-dangers-nuclear-weapons-defense

AI eclipsed nuclear weapons as the dominant threat at Asia’s premier defense summit

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, senior military officials warned that AI is compressing battlefield decision-making faster than humans can process, eclipsing nuclear weapons as the dominant strategic concern. Ukraine and the US-Iran conflict were cited as live examples of AI already shaping combat operations.

No doubt this bandwagon just got larger…

https://thenextweb.com/news/social-media-27-million-settlement-breathitt-county-details

Social media companies paid a school district more than its annual budget to avoid trial

… The combined $27 million is 8% more than the Kentucky school district’s $25 million annual budget.  The figures were released under Kentucky’s open records laws. The settlements were announced earlier this month but without financial details.

… The settlements allowed the companies to avert the first trial in the nation over a school district’s addiction complaint. The trial had been scheduled for 12 June in Oakland. The reprieve will be short-lived. More than 1,300 other school districts have filed similar suits. The next bellwether trial is scheduled for February 2027 in Tucson, Arizona.

The Breathitt County terms could signal openness to a mass settlement.  Bloomberg Intelligence has estimated the total potential liability at $400 billion. A $27 million payout per district across 1,300 districts would total $35 billion, a fraction of the theoretical maximum but still a transformative expense for companies accustomed to treating litigation as a cost of doing business.

The precedents are building.  In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a 20-year-old woman with addictive product design. The $6 million damages award was symbolic.  A New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in a separate case about failing to protect children from online predators.

Unintended consequences?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/hbe2/9550261

The Critical Role of Ethical Behavior in Digitized Markets: Lessons From Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic

This paper explores the critical role of ethical behavior by human participants in digitized markets, with a focus on autonomous vehicle (AV) ethics in mixed-traffic scenarios involving pedestrians and driverless cars. As AI systems, including AVs, become integral to urban mobility, their predictable, rule-abiding behavior introduces unique challenges. Using a static game model, this study demonstrates how pedestrians can exploit the predictable stopping behavior of defensive AVs (DAVs), resulting in a phenomenon termed “pedestrian supremacy.” This phenomenon reflects broader concerns, where the safe and cautious design of AVs inadvertently incentivizes reckless behavior among human road users. The findings reveal that ethical challenges in AV interactions stem not only from technical flaws or system malfunctions but also from the (un)ethical behaviors of human participants. To address these issues, this paper advocates for a dual approach: designing AVs with robust ethical frameworks while promoting ethical and responsible behavior among users. Insights from this study contribute to the ongoing discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) ethics, emphasizing the necessity of shared responsibility in human–AI interactions. The implications extend beyond transportation, offering valuable lessons for other digitized market environments, where the predictability of algorithmic decisions may similarly be exploited by human actors.

Another frightening thought…

https://philpapers.org/rec/YAHATU

After the University: A Manifesto on the End of the Old Educational Contract

This manifesto records the structural crisis of the university in the age of widespread artificial intelligence deployment. The author argues that the debate on the ethics of AI in education ended before it began: once the cost of an "artificial" lecturer falls below two to three annual professorial salaries, the decision to deploy it will be taken neither by educators nor by ministries, but by those who sign the budgets. The text traces the disappearance of the diploma as a social document, the collapse of accreditation structures, the splitting of the university into two incompatible systems — mass-automated and tiny-elite — and the devaluation of intellectual labour as a market category. The central thesis: the new class boundary will run not through access to knowledge, but through the capacity to hold one's consciousness apart from the machine. This is not a call to resistance, but a stocktaking of the horizon and a positioning of professorial dignity once the old contract between the individual, the university, and the market has been broken.

Something worth considering?

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol128/iss3/4/

The Last Human Question: Generative AI's Existential Threat to Consensus and Law

The true risk of artificial intelligence (“AI”) is not that the toasters will rise up. It is that AI will be competent to perform human tasks and indifferent to human welfare. The risk is that we will be outcompeted by generative automated processes that create output similar to ours (although never the same, as this Article explains), but which need none of the outputs of the economy for food, shelter, or human flourishing. Further, a more precise and existential description of the threat is that generative AI will disrupt and crowd out humanity’s evolutionary superpower, our ability to generate agreement on how to live together—law. Generative AI disrupts our ability to generate consensus through the medium of meaning, culture, and language. As generative AI spams the channel, it drowns out human voices and human-constructed meaning. This Article describes how AI threatens our ability to create legal consensus, and proposes specific interventions to keep the question of how we live together—the last human question—one that permits human thriving.

Better snooping the AI way!

https://aisel.aisnet.org/asac2026/4/

Online Privacy in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence systems are fundamentally transforming online privacy. Unlike earlier digital technologies that collected and processed data in relatively predictable ways, AI can infer sensitive personal attributes from seemingly innocuous information, reconfigure data across contexts, and generate new personal data without direct user disclosure. This paper investigates how these capabilities reshape established privacy challenges and whether existing protective frameworks remain viable. Drawing on systematic review of literature spanning behavioural economics, computer science, and management research published from 2015 onward, we examine the evolution of online privacy from the post Web 2.0 era through the emergence of LLMs. Part I synthesizes what is known about online privacy prior to AI, examining behavioural gaps between stated preferences and actual disclosure, interface level manipulation through dark patterns and market constraints that limit choice. Part II examines how AI reshapes this baseline, analysing new and amplified risks, user perception and behavioural impacts, and governance limits in both legal and market contexts. Our analysis yields several significant findings. AI does not create entirely new privacy problems but recombines and amplifies existing ones, with approximately 93% of documented AI privacy incidents involving harms uniquely enabled or magnified by AI capabilities. User behaviour is shaped by anthropomorphism, personalization, and cross cultural factors that challenge assumptions of universal privacy preferences. Privacy research remains fragmented. We conclude that market mechanisms or existing regulatory frameworks fail to provide adequate protection against potential AI harms. Moving forward requires integrated approaches combining technical standards, regulatory constraints, market interventions, and recognition of privacy as a collective good rather than merely an individual preference]

I wonder how their database got loaded…

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/05/29/ice-awards-bi2-25m-contract-for-1570-biometric-scanners/5248733

ICE to keep an eye on your eyes under $25M biometric scanner deal

If you thought US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s widespread use of face recognition apps was a privacy violation, you’re about to get eye-rate over a new $25 million contract.

According to a largely unreported contract summary published last week by ICE parent agency the Department of Homeland Security, US immigration cops have doled out about $25.1 million to a company called Bi2 Technologies for 1,570 biometric recognition devices able to identify people through fingerprints, iris scans, and facial recognition.

Additional procurement data indicates that the devices can be used in the field in both mobile and stationary configurations, and they provide ICE agents with access to Bi2’s Inmate Recognition and Identification System (IRIS), which matches biometrics to a database of more than five million booking, arrest, and incarceration records from 47 US states. The Bi2 system is also able to access driver’s license and vehicle plate info.

The deal was made without seeking any competing bids, and ICE justified the sole-source acquisition by pointing not only to Bi2’s capabilities being “unmatched by any competitor,” but also to a contract from last year in which it paid the company $4.6 million for what now appears to have been a one-year trial run of its technology on a much smaller scale.