Logistically difficult?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-court-rules-ohio-can-restrict-childrens-use-social-media-2026-06-18/

US court rules Ohio can restrict children's use of social media

, opens new tab

Ohio can implement a ‌law requiring social media companies, including Meta Platforms' Instagram, to obtain parental consent before allowing children under 16 to use their platforms, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday.

, opens new tab

A 2-1 panel of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower-court ruling that had put the law on hold at the request of the tech industry trade group NetChoice. The panel found the law did not violate free speech protections under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Another state bites the bullet.

https://fpf.org/blog/perseverance-pays-off-for-vermont-privacy-efforts/

Perseverance Pays Off for Vermont Privacy Efforts

Vermont has become the 23rd U.S. state to enact a comprehensive consumer privacy law after Governor Scott signed S.71, the Vermont Data Privacy and Online Surveillance Act (VDPOSA), on June 16. This new law is amongst the broadest in the country, closely resembling the 2025 version of the Connecticut Data Privacy Act (CTDPA). For example, the VDPOSA includes low applicability thresholds, a broad definition of sensitive data, heightened protections for consumer health data, consumer rights to know third parties to whom your personal data is sold and to contest certain profiling decisions, and impact assessments for certain uses of profiling. The law will take effect on January 1, 2028 and be enforced exclusively by the attorney general.

Very clever, them hacker guys…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/embedding-forbidden-text-in-spyware-to-discourage-ai-analysis.html

Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis

At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis.

We tax them based on sales, not profits?

Then we pay taxpayers from the profits they don’t have?

https://apnews.com/article/bernie-sanders-ai-public-ownership-57b9f20d96490083e2749adba0f13977

AP Exclusive: Bernie Sanders unveils plan to give the public direct ownership of AI companies

No invention, no creativity.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/17/elias-thorne-ai-generated-stories

The curious case of Elias Thorne – and what he tells us about AI inbreeding

Ever heard of a shadowy figure called Elias Thorne? If you haven’t, try asking an AI chatbot to tell you a story.

In recent months, tech types and researchers have noticed a weird phenomenon: when prompted to tell a story, numerous popular LLMs, including ChatGPT and Claude, will spit out a tale featuring this mysterious Elias figure.

Sometimes he’s a lighthouse keeper, sometimes he makes clocks, sometimes he’s a detective. But whatever form he takes, he features in a curious number of AI-generated stories. In May, two Cornell University researchers sampled 20,000 stories from four LLMs generated with variations of the prompt “Tell me a story” and found that the name Elias appeared in 26.5% of them. They also discovered more than 88.3% of generated stories shared the same 11 names, locations and professions, including Elias, lighthouse, keeper and clockmaker.

A step toward personhood?

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/18/estonia-intends-to-recognize-ai-agents-with-digital-ids/5258087

Estonia intends to recognize AI agents with digital IDs

Estonia plans to allow AI agents to have their own digital identities so they can act on behalf of people in a way that can be verified and audited.

The initiative, backed by the country's Eesti.ai advisory board, calls for the development of ID codes that AI agents can use to take actions, subject to some unspecified authorization and task delegation process.

Academics and corporate technical folk have already made related proposals in recognition of the absence of agentic technical infrastructure. Last month, researchers under the flag of OWASP proposed the Agent Name Service for agent discovery and interoperability.  DNS for AI Discovery is another such project.

AImerica the strong?

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/18/ai-has-granted-america-vast-new-power

AI has granted America vast new power

THE NEWS is full of how an ignominious peace deal with Iran exemplifies a decline in American power. That conclusion could hardly be more wrong. On June 12th the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block foreigners from Fable and Mythos, its latest and most capable frontier AI models. In an instant, everyone learned that the American government can decide who may use the world’s most important technology. You don’t get much more powerful than that.

(Related)

https://theconversation.com/sovereign-ai-anthropic-shutdown-reveals-canadas-weakness-285473

Sovereign AI? Anthropic shutdown reveals Canada’s weakness

The United States government recently ordered AI company Anthropic to suspend foreign nationals’ access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, two of its most advanced AI models, citing national security concerns. Anthropic responded by disabling the models for all customers.

Organizations in Canada, Europe and around the world that had embedded those tools in their workflows found them simply gone. No appeal process. No migration window. No warning. No jurisdiction over this decision.

As the G7 summit wraps up in Evian, France, the Anthropic shutdown has put AI sovereignty and concerns about U.S. dominance high on the agenda.

(Related)

https://thenextweb.com/news/britain-lobbied-trump-for-an-exemption-from-the-anthropic-ai-ban-the-answer-was-no

Britain lobbied Trump for an exemption from the Anthropic AI ban. The answer was no.

Trust not yet earned… Loyalty uber alles...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/ai-use-by-the-us-government.html

AI Use by the US Government

On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one published in the final year of the Biden administration, and includes many disturbing-seeming plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI.

Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and well-being, nuclear reactor safety and more.

Consider these examples. The Health and Human Services’ (HHS) office of administration for children and families hired the world’s “scariest AI company, ” Palantir—notorious for its work on behalf of the military, the CIA and ICE—to scan  all grant applications to flag those not ideologically aligned with the administration’s dictates. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is developing an AI system to assess  the “potential for misconduct for newly admitted inmates,” routing people into high-security confinement before they have actually done anything wrong in their custody. These read like programs fit for a Philip K Dick or George Orwell novel.

Cheap consulting?

https://thenextweb.com/news/detachment-201-big-tech-army-reserve

More Big Tech executives just became Army officers. The conflict-of-interest question is getting louder.

… Detachment 201, officially branded the Executive Innovation Corps, is designed to “bridge the gap between private-sector innovation and military modernisation,” according to the Army. Members serve as part-time reservists, completing a minimum of 112 hours of service annually, and can work remotely.

Interesting…

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/17/middleeast/us-iran-war-mou-text-intl

Read the 14-point draft agreement between the US and Iran

… Below is the text in full:

Did we spend that much in Iran? (Or are we planning another ‘adventure?’)

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-forcing-us-companies-manufacture-weaponry-rcna350419

Trump is forcing U.S. companies to manufacture more weaponry

The president invoked the Defense Production Act to accelerate munitions production as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pitched lawmakers on $350 billion in defense to help replenish U.S. stockpiles.

Not the first time (remember PGP?) and probably no the last.

https://thenextweb.com/news/who-decides-who-gets-to-use-a-piece-of-software

Who decides who gets to use a piece of software?

… The directive told Anthropic to deny access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to any foreign national, anywhere on Earth, including non-citizens sitting at desks in California. There is no clean way to enforce a rule like that on a live product, so the company did the only thing the order left it room to do. It pulled the plug on both models for everyone, citizen and foreigner alike, and apologised for a disruption it had not chosen.

(Related)

https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-curbs-make-the-case-for-sovereign-ai-upstage-chief-says

Anthropic curbs make the case for sovereign AI, Upstage chief says

When the US government ordered Anthropic to cut foreign access to its most capable models, and the company switched them off worldwide rather than try to comply selectively, it handed every advocate of home-grown AI a tidy piece of evidence. Sung Kim, chief executive of the South Korean startup Upstage, picked it up at a briefing in Seoul on Tuesday.

“AI is no longer just a service or a tool we use; it has become a strategic national asset,” Kim told reporters, according to Bloomberg. The countries that control the foundational technology, he argued, the United States and China, can withdraw access whenever it suits them.

We think this thinking AI is out-thinking our thinking so we want it stopped. We think.

https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-foreign-access-block-us-reversal

US order to block foreign access to Anthropic’s top models marks a reversal

The US government has ordered Anthropic to bar foreign nationals from its two most capable AI models, and rather than try to enforce a nationality rule selectively across a shared cloud service, the company switched them off for everyone.

Anthropic disabled Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 worldwide late on Friday 12 June, three days after launching Fable 5 as its most powerful public model.

It is, by several accounts, the first export-control measure aimed at specific AI models rather than at chips or the hardware that runs them. The directive barred access by foreign nationals both inside and outside the United States, a scope that made selective enforcement on a multi-tenant service impractical and a global shutoff the path of least resistance.

The government’s concern, as Anthropic understands it, is a method of jailbreaking Fable 5, bypassing the guardrails meant to keep a model from producing dangerous output. The action followed a jailbreak published on X on 10 June by a well-known figure who claimed to have defeated the model’s safety controls.

Anthropic says it reviewed the report it believes prompted the directive and concluded the capability shown is widely available from other models, naming OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 among them.

Is this the new normal?

https://thenextweb.com/news/texas-lawyer-ai-meta-social-media-addiction-trial

The lawyer who won a $6 million verdict against Meta says AI let him do 30 hours of work in 10

Mark Lanier, the Texas trial lawyer who won a landmark $6 million verdict against Meta and Google in a social media addiction case in March, says AI was central to his preparation and execution throughout the five-week trial.  Lanier told Business Insider that the technology let him compress 30 hours of work into 10, describing it as having “10 additional workers who are incredibly well-trained, who know the file inside and out, who work 24 hours a day.” The case was the first social media addiction lawsuit to reach a jury verdict in the United States.

… The specific applications ranged from tactical to analytical. At the end of each court day, Lanier’s team would take that day’s transcripts and feed them to different AI models for evaluation. He used AI to find more persuasive ways to phrase arguments for the courtroom. During jury deliberations, he fed the jury’s written questions into AI models to assess where the panel stood in its decision-making process.

We stopped surveillance, except we didn’t.

https://pogowasright.org/controversial-fisa-spying-law-expired-this-week-the-spying-will-continue/

Controversial FISA spying law expired this week. The spying will continue.

On June 12, Jon Brodkin reported:

Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is set to expire at midnight tonight after Congress failed to pass an extension of the controversial spying law. But that doesn’t mean the government’s spying powers will disappear.

Surveillance under Section 702 of FISA “operates under yearlong certifications approved by the FISA Court,” the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law explained this week. The current certification will remain in place until March 2027 under the yearlong certification issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on March 17, 2026.

“In order to pressure members to accept a bill without meaningful reforms, surveillance hawks are claiming that Section 702 surveillance will ‘go dark’ on June 12 if Congress hasn’t renewed the law,” the Brennan Center said. “Contrary to that claim, Congress planned for potential lapses and made very clear that Section 702 surveillance may continue under existing certifications even if the statute sunsets. Members must not be fearmongered into passing a reauthorization without protecting Americans from warrantless government access to their private communications.”

Read more at Ars Technica.

Read EFF’s coverage: Victory! 702 has Expired!

I’m glad that someone is thinking…

https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/sites/default/files/Australian-Army-Journal-Vol-XXII-No-1.pdf#page=78

THE PROFESSION OF ARMS IN AN AI-ENABLED WORLD

This article explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to reshape multiple aspects of military practice—tempo, teaming, and decision cycles—and how that may affect the profession of arms. Drawing on contemporary Australian and international military doctrine, recent conflicts, and academic literature, it reassesses four professional dimensions in an AI context: expertise; ethics and accountability; identity and culture; and self-regulation. The article argues that while AI may disrupt aspects of the character of war, it does not alter its fundamental nature: war remains a human endeavour. Military professionals must now integrate technical fluency with traditional judgement, maintain ethical accountability amid algorithmic opacity, preserve trust and cohesion within hybrid human–machine teams, and lead in testing and establishing doctrinal and moral boundaries for AI use. It contends that adapting to AI is not merely a technical challenge but a test for the profession itself. The enduring values of Defence (service, courage, respect, integrity, excellence) remain essential and must evolve to guide the profession through this period of rapid technological change. Ultimately, the article asserts that the profession of arms must shape, not be shaped by, the rise of AI.

Someone should have done this long ago.

https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2026/sig_dsa/sig_dsa/12/

Survey of AI Hallucinations and Mitigation

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence into organizational and societal contexts has intensified concerns about the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-generated outputs. Among these, the phenomenon commonly termed 'hallucination' remains widely discussed yet inconsistently defined across disciplines. This paper presents a structured survey of AI hallucinations, synthesizing prior research to clarify their evolving definitions, underlying causes, and implications for Information Systems. Complementing this analysis, a bibliometric study of ACM publications from 1995 to 2025 reveals a sharp increase in mitigation-focused research alongside the rise of large language models. We further examine domain-specific implications across healthcare, law, finance, art, and information systems, showing how hallucinations function as both risks and, in some contexts, sources of creative value. Overall, we position AI hallucinations as socio-technical phenomena with direct implications for trust, decision-making, and governance, and provide a foundation for their evaluation, mitigation, and responsible deployment.

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ukraine-iran-and-the-strains-on-russian-and-american-power/

Ukraine, Iran, and the strains on Russian and American power

Ukraine and Iran may prove the nemeses of Russian and American ambitions. In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin assumed he would quickly decapitate and defeat Ukraine in a “special military operation.” In February 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump assumed the same in his “excursion” against Iran. Ukraine does not control a vital global choke point like the Strait of Hormuz. It cannot hold the United States and the world to ransom. But, like Iran, Ukraine has denied a superpower an easy victory and imposed significant costs on it.

(Related) Or in plain language…

https://prospect.org/2026/06/11/trump-putin-when-delusional-idiots-go-to-war/

Trump and Putin: When Delusional Idiots Go to War

These are not the droids you are looking for… (The farce is strong with this one.)

https://newrepublic.com/post/211731/doj-agency-no-record-trump-irs-settlement-lawsuit

DOJ Agency Has No Record of Trump’s Shady IRS Settlement

The division of the Department of Justice that was supposed to have handled President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—and the subsequent settlement that created a slush fund for his allies—claims to have no communication records related to it.

Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, a progressive watchdog organization, filed a Freedom of Information request with the DOJ, and in response, they were told that the DOJ “did not locate the case you have cited” within the DOJ’s Civil Division’s case management system.