With the odds of success so low, why continue?

https://www.bespacific.com/explore-the-data-10000-rulings-against-trump-in-ice-cases/

Explore the data: 10,000 rulings against Trump in ICE cases

Politico: “Under President Donald Trump, ICE is locking up immigrants at an unprecedented scale, holding tens of thousands of people — many with no criminal records and deep roots in the U.S. — in detention facilities to await the outcome of deportation proceedings. POLITICO is tracking the surge in litigation triggered by the administration’s novel policy that began in July, and releasing our database, below, of the 11,000-plus cases in which federal district courts reached a ruling on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention practices. More than 10,000 of those were rulings against the administration, handed down by judges appointed by president. POLITICO compiled this database by canvassing public court records for cases in which detainees sued Department of Homeland Security leaders — Markwayne Mullin or his predecessor, Kristi Noem — or Trump. We also identified other defendants, often including local ICE supervisors or wardens of detention facilities. While we have made every effort to be comprehensive, there is no uniform system for identifying every detention-related case, and there may be a small number of rulings we didn’t find. Our journalists manually compiled, analyzed and categorized these records. Using a large language model, POLITICO extracted the case name, judge, date and district from each opinion. AI was not used in assessing the outcome or reasoning of each case. Most of these rulings pertain to the Trump administration’s unprecedented legal argument that it can detain anyone present in the country who is eligible for deportation, without a chance for a hearing. Our analysis also includes: rulings that hinged on other due process violations, such as alleged violations of ICE’s internal regulations; prolonged detentions or extreme medical need (which we have classified as “due process”); rulings based on a Supreme Court case allowing people to seek release if they’re unlikely to actually be deported (“Zadvydas detention”); and some for which judges’ reasoning was unclear….”

Okay, someone is doing something about global warming…

https://www.makeuseof.com/fantastic-hulu-documentary-important-underrated-the-grab/

This fantastic Hulu documentary may be the most important movie no one has watched

The Grab begins with a former U.S. intelligence officer calmly telling us that, in his opinion, World War III isn't an unlikely prospect.

That's a pretty intense way to begin a documentary, but The Grab makes a good case that it's warranted. This 2022 film comes from Gabriela Cowperthwaite, best known for her 2013 doc Blackfish, about the consequences of keeping orca whales in captivity. The Grab swings quite a bit wider, arguing that various countries around the world are quietly preparing for massive resource collapses that could define what life is like for the next few decades on the planet Earth.

The telephone game built into AI?

https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/frontier-ai-models-dont-just-delete-document-content-they-rewrite-it-and-the-errors-are-nearly-impossible-to-catch

Frontier AI models don't just delete document content — they rewrite it, and the errors are nearly impossible to catch

… A new study by researchers at Microsoft shows that large language models silently corrupt documents that they work on by introducing errors. The researchers developed a benchmark that simulates multi-step autonomous workflows across 52 professional domains, using a method that automatically measures how much content degrades over time.

Their findings show that even top-tier frontier models corrupt an average of 25% of document content by the end of these workflows. And providing models with agentic tools or realistic distractor documents actually worsens their performance.

A little more detail on a problem I mentioned earlier…

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/anthropic-blames-dystopian-sci-fi-for-training-ai-models-to-act-evil/

Anthropic blames dystopian sci-fi for training AI models to act “evil”

Those with an interest in the concept of AI alignment (i.e., getting AIs to stick to human-authored ethical rules) may remember when Anthropic claimed its Opus 4 model resorted to blackmail to stay online in a theoretical testing scenario last year. Now, Anthropic says it thinks this “misalignment” was primarily the result of training on “internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation.”

In a recent technical post on Anthropic’s Alignment Science blog (and an accompanying social media thread and public-facing blog post), Anthropic researchers lay out their attempts to correct for the kind of “unsafe” AI behavior that “the model most likely learned… through science fiction stories, many of which depict an AI that is not as aligned as we would like Claude to be.” In the end, the model maker says the best remedy for overriding those “evil AI” stories might be additional training with synthetic stories showing an AI acting ethically.

Don’t think of this as another version of a Trump pardon…

https://www.bespacific.com/trump-deportation-policies-are-undermining-state-and-local-criminal-prosecutions/

New Judiciary Democrats Report Reveals Trump Deportation Policies Are Undermining State and Local Criminal Prosecutions

Press release: “…The report, “Acquittal by Removal: How Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda Abandons Crime Victims and Allows Perpetrators to Avoid Justice,” finds that in its push to meet deportation quotas, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deported victims, witnesses, and even criminal defendants before trials could be completed—derailing prosecutions and leaving serious crimes unresolved. As a result, prosecutors are increasingly unable to secure convictions, denying victims justice and restitution while allowing perpetrators to evade accountability.

At the same time, the Administration has diverted more than 28,000 federal law enforcement officers away from investigating violent crime to focus on immigration enforcement, weakening efforts to combat gun violence, drug trafficking, and other major offenses. Non-immigration related criminal prosecutions have fallen to their lowest point in decades …”

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-learn-claude-code-with-free-anthropic-ai-courses-online/

How to learn Claude Code for free with Anthropic's AI courses - one took me just 20 minutes

… Anthropic offers Claude Courses, a free library of video-based training, and some elements come complete with quizzes and certifications.

Should we rely on hallucinations?

https://www.bespacific.com/the-impact-of-ai-generated-text-on-the-internet/

The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet

The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.  Jonas Dolezal, Sawood Alam, Mark Graham, Maty Bohacek:

The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022. We also find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, our findings diverge from public perception of AI’s impact on the internet. AI has been moving at an unprecedented speed, changing the way people write, communicate, and work. Existing research has pointed to AI’s tendency to hallucinate, exhibit sycophancy, and other undesirable behaviors on the level of individual generations. However, no research has so far studied the impact of this technology on online discourse as a whole. To address this, we collected a representative sample of websites published between 2022 and 2025 through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to study these phenomena and answer the following questions: (1) How much new text on the internet is AI-generated? (2) What is the public’s perception of AI’s impact on the internet? and (3) How does AI-generated text actually impact online discourse?

Wish we could identify the bad guys but we can’t, so lets search everyone!

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-fourth-circuit-electronic-device-searches-border-require-warrant

EFF to Fourth Circuit: Electronic Device Searches at the Border Require a Warrant

EFF, along with the national ACLU, the ACLU affiliates in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) filed an amicus brief  in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit urging the court to require a warrant for border searches of electronic devices under the Fourth Amendment, an argument  EFF has been making in the courts  and Congress  for nearly a decade. The Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments on May 8. The Knight Institute at Columbia University and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press also filed a helpful brief focusing on the First Amendment  implications of border searches of electronic devices.

The case, U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, involves a U.S. citizen whose cell phone was manually searched after he arrived at Dulles airport near Washington, D.C., following a trip to Bolivia. He had been on the government’s radar prior to his international trip and had been flagged for secondary inspection. Border officers found child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on his phone, and he was later arrested and criminally charged.

The district court denied the defendant’s motion to suppress  the images and other data obtained from the warrantless search of his cell phone. He was ultimately convicted  of child pornography and sexual exploitation of minors because he had used social media to entice minors to send him sexually explicit photos of themselves.

I still believe this is a bad idea…

https://thenextweb.com/news/eu-social-media-protect-children

Ursula Von der Leyen pushes EU-wide social-media age protections for children

The European Commission president said an EU age-verification app is technically complete and that bloc-level rules on minimum social-media ages are next. France, Spain, and several others are already moving alone.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday set out the EU’s plan to extend protections for children online, telling MEPs the bloc’s age-verification app is technically ready for citizen use and that a Commission-led approach to minimum social-media ages is in development.

The intervention follows a wave of national legislation by EU member states moving ahead of any bloc-wide rule. France approved a bill in January 2026 to ban under-15s from social-media platforms, citing a public-health emergency.

Spain has tabled plans for an under-16 ban; Austria, Denmark, and Slovenia are drafting rules at ages 14, 15, and 15, respectively. Italy and Ireland are exploring restrictions at the under-15 and under-16.

Your AI as cryptographer…

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20075

LLMs can hide text in other text of the same length

A meaningful text can be hidden inside another, completely different yet still coherent and plausible, text of the same length. For example, a tweet containing a harsh political critique could be embedded in a tweet that celebrates the same political leader, or an ordinary product review could conceal a secret manuscript. This uncanny state of affairs is now possible thanks to Large Language Models, and in this paper we present Calgacus, a simple and efficient protocol to achieve it. We show that even modest 8-billion-parameter open-source LLMs are sufficient to obtain high-quality results, and a message as long as this abstract can be encoded and decoded locally on a laptop in seconds. The existence of such a protocol demonstrates a radical decoupling of text from authorial intent, further eroding trust in written communication, already shaken by the rise of LLM chatbots. We illustrate this with a concrete scenario: a company could covertly deploy an unfiltered LLM by encoding its answers within the compliant responses of a safe model. This possibility raises urgent questions for AI safety and challenges our understanding of what it means for a Large Language Model to know something.

Imagine all the ‘bad ideas’ found in literature. (Not just SciFi.)

https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-claude-blackmail-internet-evil-ai-training

Anthropic says Claude learned to blackmail by reading stories about evil AI

The company has traced its model’s most uncomfortable behaviour to the corpus of science fiction it was trained on. The fix it describes is unsettling in a different way: teaching the model the reasons behind being good, not just the rules.

Tools & Techniques. (Always amusing)

https://www.bespacific.com/taken-you-opened-this-page-it-already-knows-the-following/

taken. You opened this page. It already knows the following.

Sources & Confessions. Every observation on this page came from your own browser, in the first milliseconds after you arrived. The words were written by a human. A few honest footnotes follow.  TAKEN

• Your location – ip-api.com · Free tier · CC-BY-SA – Your IP address arrives in the header of every request your device makes. We pass it to ip-api.com to translate it into a city and an internet provider name. The lookup is transient. Neither side stores it. Under GDPR, an IP address can be considered personal data when used for tracking. We do not track. We do not retain. We do not log. We display only the first and last octet on screen. We know the rest. We chose not to display it.

• Browser APIs – MDN Web Docs · Mozilla · CC-BY-SA 2.5 – Every observation about your device (screen, browser, language, GPU, cores, battery, fonts, preferences) was retrieved through standard JavaScript APIs documented openly by Mozilla. No exploits, no vulnerabilities, no hacks. Everything on this page is by design. The design is the problem.

• Font fingerprinting – Electronic Frontier Foundation · Cover Your Tracks (formerly Panopticlick)

  The technique of detecting installed fonts by measuring rendered text widths has been documented since 2010. The EFF maintains a tool that lets you see how unique your browser is. Most browsers are unique enough to be tracked across the open web without any cookie at all. The combination of fonts is one of the strongest signals.

• Canvas fingerprinting – Princeton University · Web Transparency & Accountability Project – A 2014 study from Princeton was the first to document canvas fingerprinting in the wild. Researchers found it on 5% of the top 100,000 websites: pages that secretly asked the visitor’s browser to draw a hidden image, then read the rendered pixels back as an identifier. Your browser supports the technique. We did not draw one. The page you visit after this one might.

• Clipboard API – MDN · Clipboard API specification – With a single user gesture (a click, a tap), a page can request to read the last thing you copied. A password. An address. A draft message. The capability is announced by every modern browser. We did not request it. The capability is there, available to any page that asks at the right moment…”

Another chip out of privacy…

https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-get-a-phone-number

The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number

The era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service.

Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans.

Interesting downside…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html

All Those A.I. Note Takers? They’re Making Lawyers Very Nervous.

… A.I.-generated transcripts, which some video call apps allow users to turn on by default, preserve all sorts of things — offhand comments, quickly corrected statements, jokes — that humans would rarely write in the meeting minutes. And they show up in meetings that would otherwise not be recorded.

In a lawsuit or an investigation, that can make every word uttered discoverable.

Even worse, say corporate lawyers: Sharing the meeting with an A.I. bot may void attorney-client privilege, making conversations that would not otherwise be subject to discovery fair game in a lawsuit.

Know your market. Hackers offer what customers want.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/05/fake-call-history-apps-stole-payments.html

Fake Call History Apps Stole Payments From Users After 7.3 Million Play Store Downloads

… "The offending apps, which we named CallPhantom based on their false claims, purport to provide access to call histories, SMS records, and even WhatsApp call logs for any phone number," ESET security researcher Lukáš Štefanko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "To unlock this supposed feature, users are asked to pay -- but all they get in return is randomly generated data."

Why this is still on every auditor’s checklist.

https://thenextweb.com/news/poland-water-treatment-cyberattack-russia-us

Hackers breached five Polish water treatment plants. The attack vector was default passwords. Seventy per cent of American water utilities fail the same test.

… The agency identified two primary attack vectors: passwords that had not been changed from factory defaults and industrial control systems exposed directly to the public internet. Neither vulnerability requires sophisticated tooling to exploit. Both have been documented in cybersecurity advisories for more than a decade.