last year the UN "ai for good" flagship conference mistreated me and censored my talk because i made the link between the ai industry (their sponsors) and genocide explicit. this year, ITU issues "content guideline" that, on a close read, sounds like a licence to silence criticism of ai/the industry

This is absolutely nuts: hackers are hijacking high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI chatbot to change the email on the account. Meta's AI does it, hacker gets password reset code, they're in. A staggering security issue www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

My heart loved this essay by @terrygodier.com. My head however has been in meetings with 23-year-old policy staffers openly advocating for the elimination of privacy and freedom of speech, because the internet of hell is the only thing they've ever known. www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-i...

Jonathan Haidt helped set off this moral panic about technology, which has resulted in social media and smartphone bans supported by feels rather than evidence. www.frontiersin.org/journals/dev...

Me: In the 80's there were many movies where someone was tortured with car battery cables hooked to their nipples. Then it stopped & for 35 yrs the tortures have been gruesome. Too much. It's time to go back to the car battery nipple torture genre My Boss: I mean suggestions to improve productivity

Meta's latest attempt to stop the progress of my 2018 GDPR access complaint dramatically failed in the Irish High Court last week www.irishtimes.com/business/202...

The UN said its attempts to fully investigate the issue had been obstructed by the Israeli government and threats made against detainees to prevent abuse being reported.

Great piece on the gullibility of the Irish state on AI.

UK lawyers - could this be treated as an in-kind political donation?

"But it will take scores more of these thrusts, aimed at officials far higher up the political food chain, to pierce the veil of invulnerability currently launching warships toward the Strait of Hormuz. We are going to have to make war their problem." www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-y...

Been following this guy for a while, this piece is on the nail, prompted by Thiel decamping to Argentina LOTS of history rhyming right now

very traditional for nazis to seek sanctuary in Argentina: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratline...

"It would be funny, if it weren't so troubling." - terrific column on the rise of Nigel Farage's own Eric Zemmour by @robertshrimsley.bsky.social:

And governments wonder why cybersecurity and data protection experts raise concerns about age verification platforms

The Harvard allegations can be read here.

Remember the dishonesty researcher who was fired for fabricating data? She has now been accused of fabricating more data in her case against Harvard, with the alleged assistance of her lawyer who also left Harvard under a cloud. (www.insidehighered.com/news/institu...)

Olga Cronin, ICCL Senior Policy Officer, spoke at the AI Committee this week, highlighting the work we have done with Digital Rights Ireland to urge An Garda Síochána, Coimisúin Na Meán and the DPC to fully investigate Grok’s faciitation of the creation of CSAM and other illegal and harmful content.

The Netherlands preventing a US firm from purchasing a tech provider on national security grounds is an important moment.

Together with @petefussey.bsky.social and @daragh.bsky.social we are releasing "Pushed into the Shadows: evidencing digital surveillance chilling effects and the erosion of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association” 1/ www.ohchr.org/en/documents...

"Entire regions... are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information. These have become the new “rare earths” of power..."

Pope Leo addresses the Synod Hall after presentation of his first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen."

an entire edifice of belief about medical opiates being non-addictive was built off a citation chain that led back to a four sentence letter to the editor about anecdotal observance. www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/...

JFC, Rosenbaum refuses to take responsibility and he's still promoting the book on his socials without coming clean. His book is supposed to be about truth. AI-Writing Scandals Are Getting Very Confusing www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

This, coupled with the incredibly shoddy extract from the book in WIRED, really does not suggest someone who was in any position to write a book about truth. Unless it's some deeply meta performance art thing, in which case carry on I guess.

one of the reasons i am always on about elite persuasion is that i have seen elite persuasion operate in real time. as toby documents here, the radical anti-trans push in the uk didn't come from some "bottom-up backlash," but was orchestrated and organized primarily at the most elite levels

Hey Siri.. show me an article about a new kind of tech bro stupidity. www.independent.ie/business/in-... He axed his HR department and now he isn’t getting any HR problems. Causation/Correlation error. All capped off by the bullshit commentary about “left leaning graduates” dominating HR teams.

Not now, space war.

Great description of the 'gender critical' from @faduda.bsky.social.

Terrible news from Turkey. Turkish internet rights pioneer @cyber-rights.org is quoted in the piece. www.newarab.com/news/turkeys...

High Court judge Siobhán Phelan rejected all grounds of Meta’s case against the Data Protection Commission. www2.courts.ie/acc/alfresco...

This is a very clever study (no surprise given the author list) that uses a deception protocol to elicit user behavior toward age verification by making them think the study is about “R-rated romantic media” and then confronting them with an age verification barrier to access the movie clips.

The battalion commander "would say, 'The way it once was will never be again. What we destroy will never rise again.' When somebody talked about going back to Israel, he'd correct them: 'This is Israel, too.'" #lebanon

""It used to be necessary to 'incriminate' a structure to destroy it, to find weapons in it, to prove the presence of terrorists. But today, they just destroy, even schools, clinics; the only thing we didn't touch was the cemetery."

"The village we were operating in belonged to wealthy people, full of villas with pools, luxury cars, jewelry. Almost every house had valuables... Once we realized that the area was clear, the real mission would begin – to find valuable stuff." www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

What creepy nonsense are companies up to when they try to guess your age or take your ID for age verification? www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

If you are in the Bluesky demographic, you probably use an adblocker and just don't see how scammy and unusable the web has become for everyone else.

On the tube

The US ambassador told the EU to back off its own cloud and semiconductor laws or risk the trade deal. Calling it “protectionism” doesn’t make it less of a shakedown. That’s not diplomacy. This is blackmail! When will the European Commission finally stand up for Europe?

Quote with a fictional band that’s not Spinal Tap.

Shoutout to the very senior professor in HCI who gave a talk last month about how AI can do qualitative data analysis better than people now.

Here’s a video from the same podcast as linked in my previous post where you can hear the audio too. I love this because it really lays bare how LLMs fool us - but really they’re just slotting words into linguistic patterns that we’re familiar with. Genres like a podcast or LinkedIn post.

Podcasts generated from the empty PDF file revealed the underlying template NotebookLM uses to generate its podcasts. The deep voice starts the podcast: "All right, so topic redacted, awaiting remaining source material." There was nothing in the source material. dataverse.no/file.xhtml?p...

New dataset published: this is the audio + transcripts of AI-generated podcasts using NotebookLM to analyse how it "translated" source documents from different times and cultures. My favourites are the 20 podcasts generated from an empty PDF. The paper about it is in press. doi.org/10.18710/RNT...

Lots of tech companies are releasing surveillance specs & I’m reminded of the internal Meta memo to put facial rec in their glasses during a “dynamic political environment” because people will be too focused on other issues to resist. Companies think now is the right time to foist these on us all.

“Nice little economy you’ve got there. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”

There are so many hilarious and awful things about this story but the coup de grace is the author responding by pledging to launch an investigation into his own book to figure out who wrote it www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...

A heartening tale of a scummy litigant and their equally scummy AI grifting lawyers getting their comeuppance.

Marco Rubio's State will exclude people for discussing moderating comments, but will invite corrupt far right operatives on run from the law.