Financial barriers to environmental litigation are against the law, because protecting the environment is an important public interest. The government now wants to make it super expensive (>€100,000) for ordinary people to go to court to protect the environment Please read and take action 👇

Over on Twitter/X, Bill Ackman (of Harvard/Claudine Gay/plagiarism/tennis debacle fame) has written another 3,000+ word post. He believes that Francesca Gino's RAs faked her data. And, plot twist, he's been funding Gino's legal battle against Harvard since 2024. x.com/i/status/200...

Happy New Year www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/inco...

As you’re watching a Disney film at Christmas, raise a glass to Disney’s lawyers who, in Florida’s 2021 social media law, had a blanket exemption placed in to except any theme park owner from the definition of ‘social media platform’ www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill...

Our new paper demonstrates that removing images of children from training datasets of text-to-image models fails to prevent the misuse of these models to generate child sexual abuse material (AI CSAM). A thread 🧵

We spent long time studying the question "does training data filtering help prevent generative models from generating unwanted content?" TL;DR: Nope. In some cases it slightly increases difficulty but not enough to prevent even average users from finding ways to create what they want.

Hey whanua with dual UK citizenship. Bad news. When the ETA travel authorisation comes in from February, UK citizens MUST use a UK passport to enter the UK. You are not allowed to get an ETA in your NZ passport if you are a UK citizen. www.gov.uk/guidance/ele...

Europe’s Digital Markets Act aims to open ecosystems: alternatives to app stores, fair access to OS features, real interoperability. But for many free and open source developers, those promises remain fragile without robust enforcement, write Lucas Lasota, Dario Presutti and Jithendra Palepu.

Tech whistleblowers say coming forward has unexpectedly derailed their lives... They became isolated among their colleagues, suffered severe professional damage, or were pushed out of the industry altogether... www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... by @naominix.bsky.social

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. 🧪

NSF under threat from itself.

VPNs starting to enter the regulatory frame: now in Denmark www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/d...

Not sure the Online Safety Acts — either UK or AUS flavours — are ready for kids setting up and running social media services themselves as regulated entities. This already happens: expect more. I ran online forums *as a child* that would now need child access assessments under the UK OSA!

EC has formally opened an investigation into Google for using publishers’ content without meaningful consent or compensation for its AI Overviews feature. Big win for civil society orgs like @foxglovelegal.bsky.social who’ve been asking for this. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

One thing I found odd was the reference early in the judgment to the content being manifestly unlawful. But if it was, the identity checks that the controller has to carry out wouldn’t be necessary. FWIW, it comes from para 17 of the referring court’s request. curia.europa.eu/juris/showPd...

it's a little known fact but the AI Act bans academic articles containing the words "in the Era of" — sorry if that's you, I don't make the rules

Russmedia case is out — CJEU says it's fine to put on data protection obligations onto an advertising platform to spot sensitive data and verify who is in it. But would this create an obligation to monitor that would break intermediary liability shielding?

Useful if terrifying read on the Chinese brand of smart watches for kids, Little Genius, which is forming an entire, insular — and seemingly pretty socially unhealthy — platformised and corporatised world. substack.com/@ivyyang/p-1...

Never come across 'WindowsCentral' as a media outlet but this piece is powerful and dense and absolutely spot on about where we are with AI and business models right now. Putting bigger outlets to shame. www.windowscentral.com/artificial-i...

"They're trying to change our habits, because all of the projections rely on people becoming truly dependent on the technology. Whether or not it's actually a good thing for society isn't considered to be a factor."

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

“This frustrating gap between initial ease and final effort is the essence of the Gen AI Paradox: better quality, worse motivation”

On AI’s ‘mediocrity trap’ — experiments indicates that while AI helps the less skilled make something passable, the highly skilled don’t use it to produce something better than they could have; they produce something ok, but lose motivation to make it great. www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/...

anyone made a rough calculation of the cost to unis both of the salary sacrifice schemes tax change and the int’l student fee tax? narrative here is surely that the people who are paying for this budget are UG students in their fee rises — these should be turning into teaching, not staying afloat.

me: does this two hour film really need two hours me: remember to give the students a 5 min break in their two hour lecture

oh whoa the models aren't just getting better and better consistently huh

don’t bet on the use of legitimate interest being successfully challenged under the current text though

This week Open AI walked back a call for the govt to backstop financing for its trillion dollar investments in data centers. This was only the tip of the iceberg; a slow bailout for AI firms is already underway. Read more from @ambakak.bsky.social and I in @wsj.com: www.wsj.com/opinion/you-...

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

New from @jpquintais.bsky.social & me: a critical and wide analysis of the Obligations of all General-Purpose AI Model providers under the EU AI Act. We give a deep ~50 page, 300 footnote treatment and find so many tensions, loopholes, inconsistencies and more. Link: files.michae.lv/papers/Veale...

The future that privacy advocates want:

NEW: The US Department of Justice issued a warrant demanding SpaceX seize and disable Starlink devices and accounts being used at a scam compound in Myanmar. At least 9 Starlink devices were linked to a crypto scam that stole $6 million people, an FBI affidavit says Story with @lhn.bsky.social

Another provision driven largely by the Chinese market here — Tencent has a growing power over Apple’s App Store governance.

Studies of abusers on dark web forums show that while mainstream AI models can produce CSAM, it’s not very realistic, so they use LoRAs to make it so. This testing won’t really do much because abusers aren’t using vanilla models. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Join us for an early kick-starter morning session with Prof. Orla Lynskey and Prof. Lee Bygrave on publishing in generalist journals and monographs, on 4 December at 9:00-10:00 AM CET ☕️– register here: tinyurl.com/ykw878md

We wrote this paper a while ago and since then OpenAI has claimed plans to be "core infrastructure" of education, Google has rammed Gemini into schools via its education platforms, and AWS showed it underpins most edtech platforms... 1/

James Watson was not just a scientist who was a racist. He was worse - a scientist who offered other racists the comfort of scientific authority.

We have found unreasonable that @ec.europa.eu applied a general presumption of non-disclosure to a risk assessment report drawn up by the social media platform X under the Digital Services Act #DSA. 🧵 1/3

No more Sora in Sora

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month. Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

Cornelia Woll (who has been slightly less silent on Palestine than other German higher education leaders) prohibited for running for another term as president of the Hertie School. table.media/research/ana...

Pretty interesting podcast from BBC Monitoring on the ‘responsible AI’ discourse within ISIS/Daesh and Al-Qaeda. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

“To leave our students to their own devices — which is to say, to the devices of A.I. companies — is to deprive them of indispensable opportunities to develop their linguistic mastery, and with it their most elementary powers of thought” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o... #AI #reading #writing #philsky

"Meanwhile, the regulations to bring in a requirement on providers to report CSAM content to the National Crime Agency have been revoked; they were due to come into force on 3 November and, at the time of writing, there are no further details available as to why they have been reversed." > Curious.

Logged in to ScholarOne for the journal I co-edit and jfc we had as many submissions in 2 weeks as we used to receive in 6 months 😱 Just so you understand why journal desk rejects these days give no feedback - we just can't at this wild volume. Is it the same for other journals and editors?

Apple Mail users: annoyed by Outlook spamy 'reactions'? I made a tool to prohibit ppl from reacting to your emails. Drag it into your applications folder; click then enable it in System Settings (it's not notarized); enable in Mail settings->Extensions. files.michae.lv/apps/badreaction.zip

The fun thing about having a small team working with you is you can say "hey you're spending this week digging for stolen mobile phones in London flowerbeds, I promise you it's a thing". www.londoncentric.media/p/london-pho...