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Nathan’s friends were worried about him. He’d been acting differently lately. Not just quieter in his high school classes, but the normally chatty teen was withdrawn in general. Was he sick, they wondered? He just didn’t get a good night’s sleep, he’d tell them. That was partially true. But the cause for his restless nights…
On one side of the world, a very online guy edits a photo of then-Vice President Nominee JD Vance with comically-huge and perfectly round chipmunk cheeks: a butterfly flaps its wings. A year later, elsewhere on the planet, a Norwegian tourist returns home, rejected from entry to the U.S. because—he claims—border patrol agents found that…
The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a data broker owned by the country’s major airlines which sells travellers’ detailed flight records in bulk to the government, only just registered as a data broker with the state of California, which is a legal requirement, despite selling such data for years, according to records maintained by the California…
We start this week with Emanuel and Joseph’s coverage of ‘FuckLAPD.com’, a website that uses facial recognition to instantly reveal a LAPD officer’s name and salary. The creator has relaunched their similar tool for identifying ICE employees too. After the break, Jason tells us about a massive AI ruling that opens the way for AI…
A software engineer in Michigan has coded a version of Balatro that runs off playing cards. The un-released demake of the popular video game is a prototype meant to run on the Gameboy Advanced through an e-Reader, a 2000s era accessory that loaded games onto the console via a strip of dot code printed onto…
Young people have always felt misunderstood by their parents, but new research shows that Gen Alpha might also be misunderstood by AI. A research paper, written by Manisha Mehta, a soon-to-be 9th grader, and presented today at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Athens, shows that Gen Alpha’s distinct mix of meme-…
A federal judge in California ruled Monday that Anthropic likely violated copyright law when it pirated authors’ books to create a giant dataset and “forever” library but that training its AI on those books without authors’ permission constitutes transformative fair use under copyright law. The complex decision is one of the first of its kind…
Explore the causes and consequences of ransomware in 2025 based on findings from a vendor-agnostic survey of 3,400 organizations hit by ransomware in the last year.
Unless you’re living in a ChatGPT hype-bro bubble, it’s a pretty common sentiment these days that the internet is getting shittier. Social media algorithms have broken our brains, AI slop flows freely through Google search results like raw sewage, and tech companies keep telling us that this new status quo is not only inevitable, but…
A new paper from researchers at Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University seems to show that one version of Meta’s flagship AI model, Llama 3.1, has memorized almost the whole of the first Harry Potter book. This finding could have far-reaching copyright implications for the AI industry and impact authors and creatives who are already…
