in america, if you go over your 3 minute allotment to speak, men with guns come to take you away.

Our Age Verification Resource Hub is the one-stop shop to answer all of your questions about online AV mandates. What’s at stake for users? How do we push back? What even IS age verification, anyway? Visit www.eff.org/age now to explore our resources and join the fight to protect the internet.

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

“The co-founder of Palestine Action has won a legal challenge to the home secretary’s decision to ban the group under anti-terrorism laws.” Excellent news. The British government’s continued attacks on the right to protest, especially on those who speak out against genocide, must be challenged.

Spike Lee’s cameo at the end of the Oakley Super Bowl ad saying “Hey Meta film this in slo-mo” really underscored that the main use case for these “smart” glasses is men filming people without their knowledge

“The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently rolled out a new policy that permits university officials to record classes without notifying the instructor. It’s a practice administrators have used in the past to investigate professors but have now formalized in writing.”

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

R1: No we're not hiring on the tenure track because our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track R1: Our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track because we aren't hiring on the tenure track R1: wtf our grad students aren't getting hired on the tenure track R1: No one could know how this happened

While this absolutely sucks, we are going to see a lot more places implementing universal global age verification over this next year, because the number of states and countries legally requiring it has gotten to the point no one can keep up anymore.

i wrote about the pup-opticon

FAMU can't use the word Black on anything posted around campus related to Black History Month, to stay in compliance with Florida state laws against DEI. Black students can't use the word Black at their Historically Black College during Black History Month.

Many of my science colleagues are not speaking out-I suspect due to the fear Phil notes, that they'll targeted for loss of funding. I hope they read this account of what happened at a faculty meeting at Frankfurt University in 1933 as the Nazi's took control 🧪 www.facinghistory.org/resource-lib...

Bad design makes work worse Pittsburgh airport has these new fancy bag scanners but they work so poorly each station has a stick they use to manually fish the trays through the machine or fish out items that fall off trays

NEW: Here's my report on Texas A&M ending its gender studies program as part of its ongoing crackdown of teaching LGBTQ topics in the classroom (i also do not use the loaded phrase 'gender ideology' passively) www.chron.com/culture/arti...

Starting February 2, many people connecting from the UK will not be able to access the porn site and many others.

I interviewed two of the mods of r/Minneapolis about their tireless work this month: “I just wanted a local subreddit to know what was happening in my city, and now all of a sudden, we’ve turned into this de facto hub of information for basically how to fight fascism.” www.wired.com/story/reddit...

We need to document how this ownership change shifts the content. Would love to see scientists studying and reporting on this as it happens, as well as everyday people documenting the changes in their feeds with TikTok diaries or something similar. I’ll assume we won’t have much if any API access.

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

The scale and speed of state censorship of campus really is amazing. More than half of America's college students attend institutions in states that have passed laws censoring higher education since 2021. From @penamerica.bsky.social pen.org/report/ameri...

New: Grok is generating far more graphic sexual content than on X. Grok’s image generator, Imagine, has been used to create explicit sexual videos of celebrities and violent sexual videos, a review of public posts shows. 70 Imagine URLs appearing to depict minors were sent to regulators today

What have users done this week on X? Used Grok to generate AI visuals of - Charlie Kirk with huge breasts and huge nipples - Sexualize and “nudify” women and underage girls - Generate an image of Maduro in a bikini Welcome to the AI CSAM shitshow—it’s only going to get worse.

Congress is debating the Kids Online Safety Act — an overbroad bill that risks censoring everything from jokes and hyperbole to useful information about sex ed and suicide prevention. This isn't about safety, it's about control.

Porn and erotica are important and societally valuable forms of speech, and the defense of them, in the face of state and church attempts at repression, is a necessary political act.

Silver lining: this outage made me put my research down for the night

Our new age verification resource hub will answer all your questions about the dangerous new age-gating mandates sweeping the US and the world. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

well, archivists gonna archive. torrents remain undefeated www.404media.co/archivists-p...

This is 404 Media's @jasonkoebler.bsky.social waving at himself through a Flock camera; one of 60 we learned was left exposed to the open internet. Not only could anyone with a link livestream it, but some admin portals were open with no login credentials required. www.404media.co/flock-expose...

“The message that it sends is that the people impacted by racial discrimination and harassment don’t matter,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, an attorney with a Texas nonprofit that has worked with families who’ve filed racial harassment complaints with OCR. www.propublica.org/article/trum...

My professional artists peers! We got a survey request! Researchers at the University of Carnegie Mellon is doing a research to see how generative Al has (or has not) impacted your work and/or sentiments in the industry. Folks in creative fields only, please consider filling this out 👇

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

Clearly the folks working at ACM haven’t read any of the HCI or FAccT papers published in their own Digital Library

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

Congress is trying to force through mass surveillance/censorship laws THIS WEEK BOOST THIS EVERYWHERE before it’s too late. 👇 www.badinternetbills.com Call and tell your rep: —NO to KOSA —NO to Section 230 reform —NO online digital ID laws —NO age verification laws

Sooo many folks I’m excited to work with on Mamdani’s technology transition committee. All hands on deck to bring the Affordability Agenda to life: childcare, housing, transportation. While its easy to get swept up in personality, this is a group focused on peoples real needs. LETS KEEP THE FOCUS.

Begging researchers not to turn the Epstein emails into the next Enron dataset

This is the real reason behind all the “online safety” legislation being pushed atm: silencing queer and trans voices

These companies already pulled ICE tracking apps in the US. I don't have high hopes if the Trump admin demands it, they won't also pull LGBTQ apps from their app stores. www.wired.com/story/apple-...

BREAKING: Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to block transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers.

A law that requires "age assurance" sounds reasonable and moderate. But if that law defines age assurance as requiring government ID verification, it's not moderate at all—it's mass surveillance. Here’s a guide to what all those terms mean: www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

gonna offer extra credit if my students go to a sub-200 person venue to see a loud show and write me a little essay about it

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

This is why two companies shouldn’t get to decide what apps are on everyone’s phone

1. Protests at Fenway have erupted this week, and further ones are planned. The protests are in response to the capitulation of the institution to the Trump administration. They have ended trans youth care. The latest from writer S. Baum. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Busy applying to HCI jobs on some of the worst designed websites imaginable. Current one I'm working on doesn't allow you to have multiple degrees from the same university so I have to choose between putting in my undergrad or masters degree...

We're surveying researchers about name changes in academic publishing. If you've changed your name and dealt with updating publications, we want to hear your experience. Any reason counts: transition, marriage, cultural reasons, etc. forms.cloud.microsoft/e/E0XXBmZdEP

NBC News has reportedly eliminated its NBC BLK, NBC Asian America, NBC Latino and NBC OUT teams

We are launching our Graduate School Application Financial Aid Program (www.queerinai.com/grad-app-aid) for 2025-2026. We’ll give up to $750 per person to LGBTQIA+ STEM scholars applying to graduate programs. Apply at openreview.net/group?id=Que.... 1/5

Good rundown of the current situation on Bsky (written before Rudy's update that Blacksky is going to make Link available to its users) plus.flux.community/p/banning-co...

THEY BANNED ERIN TOO!?!??! NOO!!!!!!!

Just got a "upsell error" message from Adobe 🙃