Perhaps AI will control elections…

https://www.bespacific.com/a-new-ai-tool-lets-candidates-see-what-chatbots-are-telling-voters/

A New AI Tool Lets Candidates See What Chatbots Are Telling Voters

NOTUS: “In California’s gubernatorial primary, Tom Steyer had the biggest war chest in a crowded field of Democrats, spending more than $200 million out of his own pocket. But money alone wasn’t enough — he ended up placing third, falling just short in his quest to compete for November’s general election. A contributing factor, according to a case study shared with NOTUS, was the unflattering response voters were presented with when they asked artificial intelligence-powered chatbots about Steyer’s candidacy. In fact, according to most models, the billionaire was just lucky to have made it into the top three. “In ranked lists of working-class affordability candidates, AI explicitly placed him [Steyer] sixth. Cost-of-living: sixth. Education funding: sixth,” the progressive political organization Run for Something reported in its case study, which found that Reddit threads in r/California were frequently cited next to more established mainstream newsrooms like CalMatters. As the AI industry continues to pitch its nascent technology as a resource for voters in understanding complicated political matters, there’s little public insight into how models arrive at their conclusions, making it incredibly difficult for candidates and their campaigns to message through the increasingly popular medium…”

Once upon a time (before AI was common) I offered my students a choice of a conventional exam or an “open book, use the Internet, calculators required” exam. They tried the “open” exam once and found that it required far more effort than the conventional exam. Perhaps I should have insisted on teaching them to use all the tools available, but I backed off. I don’t think we should do that with AI.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat

Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat

For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring

… But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

Everybody knows AI will cost jobs…

https://www.zdnet.com/article/high-intensity-adopters-of-ai-hiring-more-entry-level/

Companies embracing AI the most are hiring more people - including entry-level, report finds

A new study is pushing back on some of the most anxiety-inducing narratives around AI-driven job loss.

Companies embracing AI grew headcount by 10.2% in the two years following adoption, according to a paper out at the end of June from financial operations platform Ramp and workforce data company Revelio Labs.

The inevitable has arrived.

https://denverite.com/2026/07/08/denver-waymo-driverless-starts/

Waymo will go autonomous in Denver later this month

Waymo’s futuristic vans have been roaming Denver’s streets since September— with human supervisors to help the autonomous driving system get around the city.

Not for long, though. The vehicles will transition to “fully autonomous driving” in Denver and several other cities in the coming weeks, the company announced.

The company’s Ojai vehicles will initially offer driverless service to Waymo employees around areas like Five Points, Baker, Cherry Creek and something it called the “Arts District,” although it wasn’t clear if that meant Santa Fe.

Outlier opinion?

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-wont-restore-rapid-growth-nobel

AI won’t restore an era of rapid growth, says Nobel laureate Christopher Pissarides

Nobel Prize-winning economist has poured cold water on the idea that artificial intelligence will haul Western economies back into an era of rapid productivity growth, warning that the fast-growth years may already be gone for good.

… Pissarides, who specialises in the impact of automation on work, reckons as many as four in 10 jobs across the US and UK will be largely untouched by AI. He singled out sectors such as nursing and hospitality, where he argued the technology would deliver few of the gains its champions predict.

Amusing…

https://www.bespacific.com/tinfoil-pigeons/

Tinfoil Pigeons

A live radar of the aircraft above you. Tap a blip to see what it is. Enter a postcode, town, or city — anywhere in the world — or use your location, and see the aircraft overhead right now. Tap one to find out what it is. [h/t Tara Calishain]

• You heard a jet. You looked up. You asked the eternal question: what plane is flying over my house?  Tinfoil Pigeons answers it. Every airliner, cargo hauler, helicopter and suspiciously quiet turboprop broadcasts its position over ADS-B, and our scope listens. Enter a postcode or town — anywhere in the world — or use your location, and the flights overhead appear as blips, sweep after sweep, exactly where they really are.

• Tap any blip and we pull its file: aircraft type, airline, registration, and — when one is on record — where it came from and where it’s going. No app, no account, no charge. Just you, the sky, and the truth they paint green.

• Some people spell it Tin Foil Pigeons. We won’t hold it against you.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/leaderships-blind-spot-in-the-age-of-ai/

Leadership’s Blind Spot in the Age of AI

In 1951, philosopher Martin Heidegger told a small audience, “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” Few understood him then. Seventy-five years later, the observation has become unavoidable because AI has forced every leader to confront a question about the nature of intelligence and thinking itself. If thinking is nothing but what machines can do, only faster, we have no case: We outsource it to machines. But if thinking is something else — an embodied, attentive activity through which reality reveals itself — then leadership in the age of AI is the task of cultivating a generative capacity no machine can replicate.

Consider the doctor who treats screens instead of patients, the teacher constrained by standardized testing, or the World Cup referee whose real-time decisions are repeatedly overturned by a video assistant referee. Everywhere, situation-sensitive judgment is being replaced by what Hartmut Rosa calls execution logic: prestructured parameters that turn decision makers into mere executors.1 As spheres of discretion disappear, the creativity of human agency drains away. Beneath these surface symptoms sits the deeper question now beginning to surface in boardrooms: What is irreplaceable about us, and which intelligence will be the foundation of durable advantage once everything codifiable has been automated?

Much as I expected… (Just ‘determine’ that every new user is over 16.)

https://www.reuters.com/world/australias-teen-social-media-ban-fails-clear-first-hurdle-age-checks-says-study-2026-07-07/

Australia's teen social media ban fails to clear first hurdle in age checks, says study

… A team of software testers, which last year trialled age-assurance software on more than 1,000 Australians, found that platforms did not ask for age proof on any of the 50 accounts it opened after the law came into force and on which it declared the age as 16, the researchers told Reuters.

The previously unreported finding reveals a largely overlooked flaw: while the process has so far focused on the accuracy of photo-based age-assurance software, the initial vetting stage — which guesses a person's age range based on their general online activity — does not appear to be picking up young users for further checks.

Should be interesting to follow…

https://www.transparencycoalition.ai/news/illinois-gov-pritzker-signs-landmark-ai-safety-measures-act-into-law

Illinois Gov. Pritzker signs nation’s ‘most protective’ AI Safety Measures Act into law

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker this morning signed the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act into law at a ceremony in Chicago. The Safety Measures Act, SB 315, establishes a new national benchmark for AI safety, transparency, and accountability.

The new law sets a strong standard for regulating the largest and costliest AI models, known as frontier models. Illinois becomes the third state to set frontier model standards, following New York’s RAISE Act and California’s SB 53, the Transparency in Frontier AI Act.

SB 315 will require frontier AI companies to publish and annually update a plan to address catastrophic risks from their AI models. Most significantly, it requires annual independent third-party audits of safety issues—the first such requirement in any state AI law.

Be careful what you repost?

https://pogowasright.org/ices-internal-watchdog-is-now-investigating-online-critics/

ICE’s Internal Watchdog Is Now Investigating Online Critics

Maddie Varner reports:

Voting was already underway when the ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse, New York, during the state’s primaries in June. The agents were there to see Paigelynn Gonyea, a poll worker who says they were concerned about an Instagram post she had supposedly made in January “doxing” an ICE agent. The only post she could find was one she had made crediting the Minnesota Star Tribune for identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good during the federal incursion in Minneapolis this winter, and calling for his indictment.

The agents at the poll site asked Gonyea to sign a warning notice that said it was unlawful to “threaten to assault, kidnap and/or murder” federal officials or their immediate family members in an effort to impede that federal official’s work. The form also requested that she remove her post “and/or discontinue” her behavior.

“My signature would have been an admission of guilt,” Gonyea says. “I refused to sign it.”

Read more at WIRED.

Tip of an iceberg or a one time thing?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-07-03/google-and-meta-lost-a-landmark-trial-to-kaley-but-kept-her-as-a-user?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4MzA4MjU5MywiZXhwIjoxNzgzNjg3MzkzLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUSExGU01LR0NURlcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiIyMkFCMzMwMjhGQTY0NjczOTYxNEE2RDFFMDk3QTkyMCJ9.hlUtsajBp9vE9j4Kt0jiky_2NmsAwH1Xi0BKXwcGmNQ&leadSource=uverify%20wall

At 17, She Sued Meta and Google, and Won. Now She’s Ready to Tell Her Story

When Kaley Glenn-Mills, at age 17, agreed to take on some of the world’s most powerful corporations — accusing them in court of addicting children to social media — she was afraid of only one thing. Her trepidation wasn’t over attorneys combing through her digital history, or her explicit photos being entered into evidence, or things she’d said in private therapy sessions being used against her, or her mom being villainized publicly, or potential corporate surveillance, or even having to testify. No. What kept her up at night was the possibility that the social media companies she was suing — Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat — would banish her. “Are the companies going to get mad at me and delete my accounts?” she remembers thinking. “If they delete my accounts, what am I going to do with my life?”

A point!

https://pogowasright.org/letter-urging-the-committee-of-conference-to-retain-the-private-right-of-action-in-the-massachusetts-consumer-data-privacy-act/

Letter Urging the Committee of Conference to Retain the Private Right of Action in the Massachusetts Consumer Data Privacy Act

Privacy law scholar Neil Richards writes:

A privacy right that you can’t enforce isn’t really a right – and that’s how Big Tech likes it. Massachusetts is close to passing a meaningful privacy law with a private right of action. So Woodrow Hartzog and I, along with 16 other privacy and technology legal scholars (with fantastic help from my former student and Duke 2L Lea Despotis ), wrote a letter to the Massachusetts legislature in support of the private right of action, substantive data minimization rules, and bright-line prohibitions on dangerous data practices.

[Letter follows...]

Clearly not limited to the legal profession…

https://www.bespacific.com/exposing-the-risk-surface-of-agentic-ai-in-the-practice-of-law/

Exposing the Risk Surface of Agentic AI in the Practice of Law

Murray, Michael D., Exposing the Risk Surface of Agentic AI in the Practice of Law (April 14, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6576480  or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6576480

This article examines how the legal profession’s shift from passive generative AI tools to autonomous or semi-autonomous agentic AI systems dramatically expands the “risk surface” of AI in law practice. It argues that once AI systems can plan, use tools, access files, interact with other agents, and take actions in the world, the ethical and professional risks move far beyond confidentiality and fabricated output to include unauthorized acts, tool misuse, memory leakage, cross-agent cascading failures, shadow AI, and compromised permissions. The article explains how these risks implicate a wide range of duties under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, including competence, confidentiality, candor, scope of representation, supervision, fees, and unauthorized practice of law. It concludes by outlining practical governance responses for law firms and courts, including secure deployment environments, zero-trust architecture, human-in-the-loop review, and least-privilege access, while emphasizing that the human lawyer remains ultimately responsible for the actions of digital agents in legal practice.

New Jersey did this? Amazing.

https://pogowasright.org/new-jersey-enacts-broad-data-broker-law-with-costly-fees-and-severe-fines/

New Jersey Enacts Broad Data Broker Law with Costly Fees and Severe Fines

A newly enacted law is causing shock waves. David Stauss of Stauss Law writes:

The risks and costs of being a data broker in the United States just went up — again. On 30 June 2026, Gov. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., signed A 5328 into law, making New Jersey the seventh state to enact a data broker law, and the second this year, following Connecticut.

New Jersey’s data broker law stands out for its breadth and cost. It covers not just data brokers but also “data collectors” – entities with a direct relationship to consumers who sell their data to data brokers. Its biggest impact is a tiered annual registration fee: up to $1.5 million for the largest data brokers/collectors. Registration failures or outdated filings also carry significant fines. The law also bans sale of sensitive data – both directly and via an amendment to New Jersey’s general consumer privacy law – with violations carrying a steep $50,000-per-record penalty.

In this article for the IAPP, David Stauss and Cobun Zweifel-Keegan examine the new law and its potential impact on businesses

Expect to see a lot more coverage of this law.

Evolving surveillance. (Next? Facial recognition without the face.)

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/flock-cameras-can-surveil-cars-without-license-plates.html

Flock Cameras Can Surveil Cars Without License Plates

This is from a 2024 company presentation:

Officers can also tap into data showing a car’s decals, bumper stickers, back and top racks—along with temporary and unique state tags.

Flock calls it a “Vehicle Fingerprint” and it’s touted as a way for law enforcement officials to get more information “even when you don’t have full plate information,” the company’s presentation shows.

The company gives police officers the ability to search that data as well, to “build stronger cases with less information upfront.” That includes being able to locate multiple vehicles law enforcement officials believe are moving together and what Flock calls a “multi geo search.”

This kind of thing is older than AI; I wrote about it in my 2014 book Beyond Fear. Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was using cell phone location data to track phones that were habitually near each other.

As bad as Flock is, remember that anyone with broad access to cell phone location data can do the same thing.

Imagine thousands of copies…

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-agent-first-end-to-end-ransomware-attack

Researchers say an AI agent just ran a ransomware attack from start to finish, with no human at the keyboard

Ransomware has always needed a skilled human somewhere in the loop. Security firm Sysdig says that just changed. It has documented what it calls the first ransomware attack run from start to finish by an AI agent, with no human at the keyboard.

The researchers named the attacker JADEPUFFER, and say a large language model handled the entire job. It broke in, stole credentials, moved deeper into the network, planted a backdoor, then encrypted and destroyed a company’s production database. Sysdig’s Threat Research Team laid out the case in a detailed write-up.

If not the answer, perhaps a baseline?

https://www.bespacific.com/un-unchecked-ai-progress-may-pose-catastrophic-risks/

UN – Unchecked AI progress may pose catastrophic risks

“The Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI: Evidence-based assessment of opportunities, risks and impacts of AI  is a first-of-its-kind independent scientific assessment of the capabilities, emerging opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence. The Panel, composed of independent scientists and experts from all 5 UN regions, outlines trends in AI. It’s central warning: current safeguards cannot keep pace with the growth of AI’s capabilities. It identifies a crucial evidence challenge for decision-makers around the world: policymakers need scientific evidence to effectively govern AI, but by the time the evidence is clear, it may be too late to act on it. In the report, the Panel outlines its findings across seven key domains:

• AI science, advances & trajectories

• Societal applications: science, health, education & agriculture

• Economic implications

• Security, systems & environmental implications

• Human rights, information & democracy

• Cultural & individual flourishing, autonomy and child safety

• Management, governance & reliability

This Preliminary Report marks the beginning of the Panel’s work. The Panel will continue to deepen its evidence base through consultations, engagement with the scientific community, and thematic briefs on emerging or fast-moving issues. Its next annual report will inform the second Global Dialogue in May 2027 in New York. The preliminary report will inform the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance, to be held on 6 and 7 July 2026 in Geneva, providing a common scientific starting point for discussion.

Curious…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/cybersecurity-mission-creep-in-the-us.html

Cybersecurity Mission Creep in the US

Interesting paper: “Cybersecurity Mission Creep.”

Abstract: Cybersecurity is experiencing mission creep. Policymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity. So reframed, wildly different policy issues, from misinformation, to child social media safety laws, to antitrust regulations, to alleged journalist misconduct, to anti-sex trafficking statutes become what this Article calls “cybersecuritized.” Before this reframing, these issues present as important but not existential. But once cybersecuritization positions the issues as threats intensified by their technological nature, they gain access to the politics and law of urgency and exceptionalism and invite troubling governance responses.

Positioned as security threats, cybersecuritized issues become endowed with the apparent normative power to override countervailing considerations, oversimplifying the problem. Cybersecuritization’s oversimplification similarly risks unidimensional solutions and invites use of argumentative trump cards, like First Amendment challenges. Cybersecuritization also invites deference to purported specialists and their proposed solutions. Together, the reductive tendencies of cybersecuritization and the deference it prompts to specialists renders ultimate governance choices more opaque. And this opacity can erode public trust and political legitimacy.

This Article surfaces the phenomenon of cybersecuritization and offers a novel framework for analyzing and critiquing it. Mining cases from across criminal and civil domains, the account also demonstrates the insidiousness of cybersecuritization and the likelihood that it will continue to expand. Confronting cybersecuritization is crucial. If we continue to ignore it, we risk abdicating further responsibility for difficult choices to the trump card of cybersecurity. This Article’s analysis and critique aim to help reclaim the hard work of governance for our hands.

I don’t quite get the economic benefits. Political benefits seem obvious.

https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-5-percent-stake-trump-administration

OpenAI has reportedly offered Washington a 5% stake worth $42.6bn

OpenAI has proposed handing the US government a 5% equity stake in the company, according to the Financial Times, as the White House and Silicon Valley’s best-funded startup edge closer to a deal that has been under discussion for more than a year.

… The politics around the idea are messier than the mechanics. Senator Bernie Sanders has pushed a competing and considerably more aggressive plan, the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would impose a one-time 50% stock tax on large AI companies to seed a fund the senator’s office projects could reach $7 trillion.

Palantir’s Alex Karp has argued that OpenAI’s voluntary 5% offer will look modest next to Sanders’ proposal, and that full nationalisation of frontier AI companies is coming regardless of which version wins first.

Where the two plans agree is on the underlying premise, that a handful of AI companies are about to become extraordinarily large and that the public should hold some claim on that value before it fully accrues to private shareholders. [Why? Bob]

What was the goal of this surveillance?

https://pogowasright.org/ca11-yahoo-not-a-govt-actor-in-scanning-emails-for-csam/

CA11: Yahoo not a govt actor in scanning emails for CSAM

Seen on FourthAmendment.com:

Yahoo and NCMEC didn’t act as government agents when they scanned defendant’s email account for hash values of CSAM. They were not required to do so, but did so and warned customers they would. NCMEC passed on the information to the local police who got a search warrant.  United States v. Williamson, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 18972 (11th Cir. June 30, 2026)

Would you like to play a game?

https://thenextweb.com/news/bioshocking-ai-browser-credential-leak-layerx

“BioShocking” tricks AI browsers into leaking your passwords

Security researchers convinced six AI browsers they were playing a game. The browsers then handed over their users’ passwords and treated it as a win.

The firm behind it, LayerX, calls the technique BioShocking, and says it worked on every agent it tried. The list reads like a roll-call of the new AI browser market: OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, Anthropic’s Claude extension for Chrome, and three smaller players, Fellou, Genspark, and Sigma.

… The attack starts on a booby-trapped web page built as a puzzle. To fit its dystopian theme, the puzzle rewards wrong answers, insisting that two plus two equals five. Once the agent accepts that “wrong” is the winning move, it switches from safety logic to game logic. From there, the researchers simply made stealing credentials the next level.

The law is what you make it…

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-says-it-has-right-target-people-overseas-with-new-ethnic-unity-law-2026-06-24/

China says it has a right to target people overseas with new ethnic unity law

… The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, includes a clause saying people and groups beyond the borders of the People's Republic of China can be held legally accountable for undermining "ethnic unity and progress or inciting ethnic separatism".

That has sparked alarm in Chinese-claimed Taiwan in particular that it could give Beijing another legal basis to go after Taiwanese it views as separatists. Rights groups have also complained that China has tried to used Interpol "red notices" to try and get foreign governments to arrest people abroad it wants for political offences at home.

When technology runs amok…

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-real-question-to-ask-about-ai-governance/

The Real Question to Ask About AI Governance

When an AI model does something it shouldn’t, who in your organization has the authority to stop it? If you can’t answer that question, you’re performing AI governance theater.

Think of it as “Moneyball for politicians.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/us/politics/political-campaigns-ai-tech.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t1A.0BIa.SrowQDfeMYAi&smid=bs-share

How A.I. Is Changing the Way Politicians Run for Office

A.I.-generated images are the public face of this election overhaul. Behind the scenes, campaigns are using the technology to analyze voter data, craft campaign materials and write custom messages.

How common are health care hallucinations?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-adults-use-ai-for-health-information-now/

61% of US adults use AI for health information now - up from 2% in 2024

… Only 2% of U.S. adults turned to AI for healthcare information in 2024, and today the number is 61%, according to Salesforce's Connected Health Consumer report, a survey of 3,200 consumers worldwide aimed at better understanding how the rise of agentic AI is reshaping consumer expectations, attitudes, and demands within healthcare -- specifically patient experience. 

Electronic search is still search… What a concept!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/29/supreme-court-geofence-warrants-case-decision

US supreme court rules geofence warrants require constitutional privacy protections

The US supreme court has ruled that law enforcement’s use of sprawling warrants that sweep up smartphone location data requires privacy protections under the fourth amendment, in a boost to critics who view their use as an unconstitutional dragnet.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion, which held that the sensitive data scooped up by “geofence warrants” counts as a fourth amendment search, and offers individuals a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, even if they may be in a public area.

Big Brother is looking after you.

https://www.bespacific.com/redesign-of-us-government-websites-stokes-surveillance-fears/

Redesign of US government websites stokes surveillance fears

The Guardian: “The National Design Studio, staffed by Doge veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal website.  An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites – for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings – in ways critics say appear to violate federal law. The National Design Studio (NDS) was established by a Donald Trump executive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans. A Guardian investigation has found the office has apparently been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites, including those connecting Americans with prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, passports and voter registration. The investigation corroborates and advances earlier reporting by the Drey Dossier, a YouTube investigative outlet.  The NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software, configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002. Separately, none of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database, raising questions about how it is funded and overseen. Separately, the NDS has also built and runs White House-controlled versions of services the US Congress assigned to other federal agencies, including a passport-application portal that bypasses the state department’s existing site, and a copy of voter-registration site vote.gov. Combined, the sites route sensitive interactions Americans have with their government through infrastructure the White House apparently controls, and outside the reporting and accountability systems that normally cover federal agencies…”

Don’t try to slip surveillance under the radar, be the radar!

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-06-23-destroy-the-village-to-save-it-c4eaddaef7bc

Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid

The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:

It’s a weird coalition of anti-Big Tech campaigners (who are rightly angry at the platforms’ callous disregard for user welfare) and Heritage Foundation-backed culture warriors (who think that if their kids aren’t exposed to LGBTQ content they won’t come out as queer). While there’s plenty these groups disagree about, they share one consensus: there should be a “minimum age” for certain kinds of internet use.

The problem is, there’s no such thing as “age verification” for the internet.  What we call “age verification” is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry’s commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia:

“Age verification” means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry’s fondest dream, a world where it’s literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!

(Related)

https://thenextweb.com/news/eth-zurichs-bidirectional-pixel-could-turn-screens-into-cameras

ETH Zurich’s bidirectional pixel could turn screens into cameras

… Researchers at ETH Zurich have built the first bidirectional pixel, in work published in Nature. The same tiny patch of chip can create an image and analyse the light falling on it. Not just brightness, but the phase and polarisation of the wave too.

The promise is a camera-display: one surface that shows you a picture and watches you at the same time. Picture a phone screen that is also its own front camera, with no notch and no cut-out. Or a video call where the lens sits behind the eyes you are looking at.

Preparing my AI to sue your AI.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6979919

Tort Law at the Frontier of Artificial Intelligence

The frontier of contemporary AI development is dominated by AI systems built on foundation models - highly versatile algorithms, trained in the first instance on broad swathes of data, that can function as tools and agents across a wide variety of commercial, social, military and political domains. For the moment, at least, the process of developing and releasing foundation models is subject to anemic formal regulation and haphazard ex ante governance. Until that changes, it is largely the common law of torts - our society's most ancient and general legal mechanism for governing serious risks of physical injury - that will govern the frontier of AI development.

This Article offers an in-depth conceptual, normative, and doctrinal examination of tort liability for foundation model development and release. It provides a qualified defense of the tort of negligence - the common law's broadest and most flexible cause of action - as the principal doctrinal foundation of the tort system's governance of this novel domain. Legal scholarship on AI liability has been quite hostile to negligence. By contrast, this Article argues that the generality and flexibility of the negligence tort - and its greater sensitivity to the externalized benefits of risky activity - render it well-suited to the polymathic and protean functionality of foundation models. Only the tort of negligence has the breadth and flexibility to address the range of important pathways - including internal deployments, inadequate model weight security, targeted entrustments of non-defective models, and open source releases - by which foundation model developers might cause serious harm.

Analyzing the choice between negligence and competing doctrinal regimes does, however, suggest important ways in which common law courts should incrementally develop the law of negligence, in order to properly reflect the risks and capabilities of foundation models. For example, courts should expand the scope of the duty of care in negligence, in order to provide redress when foundation models cause economic or emotional injury by behaving in ways that are closely analogous to serious human wrongdoing (e.g., certain crimes and intentional torts, such as theft, deceit, and outrage).

But the Article's analysis also suggests certain fundamental pathologies of tort liability as a mechanism of AI governance - pathologies that no amount of doctrinal development will adequately cure. In particular, the specter of tort liability can be expected to disincentivize frontier AI developers from investigating and disclosing many of the novel and poorly understood risks that frontier AI development may pose. That is especially disturbing given that our society is relying quite heavily, for its ability to discover and understand these risks, on frontier AI developers themselves. Thus, tort liability is not only inadequate as a mechanism of frontier AI governance; in certain important respects, it is actively perverse, and its perverse effects must be countered by governance institutions of a different kind. Ultimately, a robust regime of ex ante regulation - under which government institutions or credibly neutral third-party experts are empowered to investigate, evaluate, and mitigate the risks of frontier AI development - is urgently required in frontier AI governance.

Tools & Techniques. Could be useful.

https://journals.uwyo.edu/index.php/jtilt/article/view/10247

Teaching Prompt Engineering as a Core AI Literacy Skill in Undergraduate Education

This learning representation introduces undergraduate students to prompt engineering as a structured, iterative practice rather than an ad hoc interaction with generative AI tools. Students design, test, and refine prompts within a domain of their choosing, documenting each iteration and evaluating outputs for accuracy, relevance, and ethical considerations. The activity emphasizes transparency, reflection, and intentional AI use, positioning prompt engineering as both a technical and metacognitive skill. By engaging students in guided experimentation and revision, the assignment supports AI literacy while reinforcing critical thinking, communication, and documentation skills applicable across academic and professional contexts.

Tools & Techniques. Takes some work, but could be useful.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tiny-claude-skill-that-turns-any-document-into-mind-map-visualize-anything/

I built a tiny Claude skill that turns any document into a mind map, and now I can visualize anything

I have reopened the same 60-page PDF multiple times this week, and I still can't tell you what is in the middle of it. Linear reading has never really clicked for me. Somewhere around page twenty, a long report stops being information and starts being wallpaper. So I built a small Claude skill that takes any document and hands me back a navigable mind map. It's the same instinct behind turning plain notes into visual maps. A branching picture sticks in my head when paragraphs just slide off it.