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After months of discussion and outrage from residents, the city council of the tiny town of Bandera, Texas voted 3-2 to immediately end its contract with the surveillance company Flock. In the aftermath of the vote, one of the dissenting council members crashed out and said he would be introducing measures to ban cell phones,…

The treasurer of Saline Township, Michigan, publicly resigned last week citing death threats she’d received related to the construction of an Oracle and OpenAI datacenter.  “I’m submitting my resignation effective May 29th. I can’t take it anymore. The threats. The ‘I’m gonna tar and feather you.’ I hope you get bit by ah […] it’s…

We start this week with Sam telling us all about the commencement speeches where speakers have been praising AI, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. That did not go down well! After the break, Jason tells us how he was offered the chance to buy a bunch of images of poop to train AI (really)….

An app that allows users to deepfake their appearance in realtime has predictably resulted in a streamer making nonconsensual and potentially defamatory content. Specifically, the streamer made himself look like Mr. Beast and said “I love touching little boys’ pee pees.” Sam Pepper, a British internet personality known for videos and streams in which he…

The guy who sued 27 women, one man, and several platforms after users in a Facebook group called him “clingy” and “psycho” had his case against Meta dismissed after a judge suggested that his attorney filed AI-generated errors and non-existent citations.  In Nikko D’Ambrosio’s complaint, he claimed Facebook profited off of disparaging posts about him…

The FBI wants to buy access to automated license plate readers (ALPRs) nationwide, which would likely allow the agency to track the movements of vehicles—and by extension people—across the country without a warrant, according to FBI procurement records reviewed by 404 Media. The documents show that ALPRs continue to be a sought-after tool for law…

University of Washington researchers planned to have preschool teachers wear cameras that would record everything they saw from a first-person perspective, including the children they were teaching, then use that footage to develop AI models. Crucially, the program was presented as opt-out, rather than opt-in, meaning that parents had to take steps to prevent recordings…

As you scroll around the web, how often to you think about the physical infrastructure—the miles of cables, acres of land—that makes up the internet? This is where real power lies, and there are ways to imagine it differently, as serving the people who use these utilities instead of big tech execs. This week, I’m…

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were long in the tooth, trapped in the lattice, unearthed in Thailand, and entombed in post-apocalyptic waters. First, scientists discover that even Neanderthals had to go to the dentist. Then: a nuke-born crystal, a 60,000-pound herbivore, and life after the death of most…