Martin Eve on Shadow Libraries, the pirate architectures and infrastructures that circumvent academic scholarly paywalls. dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica...

This case brought by @awo.agency will have to deal with a few big questions: 1. how much platform input in content negates the user-to-user dimension that might usually grant intermediary shielding? 2. will English courts apply the logic of the CJEU in Russmedia or come to a different conclusion?

after Brexit, any of the pan-European PLC type company, the ‘Societas Europaea’, were converted into ‘UK Societas’. This is now a highly endangered species of legal person, with only seven active, and no way to form new ones.

wow, save energy by not saying please or thank you to your AI. the individualistic ‘turn of the lights’ moment for LLMs. models use tools and hidden thinking that expend thousands of tokens in seconds. two or three tokens of nicety isn’t going to move the needle. www.newscientist.com/article/2529...

on vibe coding as an ADHD multiplier — a strong, short blog on the author’s personal experience of building repeated things they don’t need as a form of pseudo productivity thoughts.hmmz.org/2026-05-31.h...

Peter Mandelson was asked for his Whatsapp messages on his phone but refused to hand them over. A legal minefield: @vmantouvalou.bsky.social and I have written about it here in 'Bring Your Own Device — Now Hand It Over!' digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cllpj/vol45/...

Cloudflare protects a quarter of the internet from cyberattacks, including Follow the Money. The downside? The US tech giant needs access to an enormous amount of sensitive data to do so. That’s why we’re switching to a European alternative.

Unfortunately, it looks like it's time for me to repost my article about the relationship between First Amendment protection and security research (again). IYKYK. scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/nulr/vol107/...

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...

In Memoriam: Prof William Twining currentlegalproblems.org/article/in-m... (Philip Schofield, David Sugarman, Jane Holder)

Can law stop criminals misusing #AI? 🤔 Join us for a free online open event with Prof Michael Veale (@michae.lv) exploring AI, technology law and digital regulation - followed by an intro to our new LLM Law and Technology specialism and Q&A. 📅 10 June, 12:00–13:00 BST 🔗 Register: shorturl.at/pEHAH

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

“It has not been a productivity booster at all, it feels like a speedrun towards severe mental exhaustion” www.404media.co/software-dev...

more Hugging Face content moderation challenges — the model marketplace finds itself hosting infostealers disguised as legitimate models www.heise.de/en/news/Info...

Digital Markets Act sees jump in alternative browser usage on Android and iOS due to choice screens, says Firefox blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/20...

Canvas pays presumably enormous ransom to end extortion of universities and schools — receives questionable promise that data has been deleted. Moodle less of a monoculture but unis must harden it, possibly rebuild from the ground up in something other than PHP… www.theregister.com/security/202...

Amazon employees race to automate non-essential tasks to expend tokens to impress managers on internal AI usage leaderboards. Great outcome, all. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Musk’s xAI rapidly appoints an EU representative for the DSA following Grok investigation, choosing an entity with an address in Estonia but no registered presence in the country. www.ftm.eu/articles/elo... @alexfanta.bsky.social

really useful primer on data, ai and trade law from @streinz.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/books/a... especially good if the issue comes up in teaching

if screen time isn’t a useful concept, who benefits from it? this new paper argues that it’s tech firms (shift the heat off their design), govs (doing something!) and researchers (£££) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A good start to a proposal for reviews, requiring authors of submitted papers to expend tokens to submit and earn them back through reviewing. Needs to be more radical though in light of AI slop: cap on total submissions, earn further at steep rate through reviewing. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

‘Going to the cloud’: renting servers, or integration of deeply proprietary services? “both options go by the same name, and orgs often slide from the first into the second without realizing the fundamental difference, until it’s too late” @ccs.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2 year research postdoc at UCL @laws.ucl.ac.uk on data and democracy, public law focus — could focus on surveillance and/or AI issues www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

It seem that archive.today has been blocked at some technical level by an order by the Roskomnadzor — seemingly from laws cited not for piracy (these sites, and their .is and .ph domains, avoid paywalls) but under disinformation law — they are often used to document/subvert Russian media censorship.

It seem that archive.today has been blocked at some technical level by an order by the Roskomnadzor — seemingly from laws cited not for piracy (these sites, and their .is and .ph domains, avoid paywalls) but under disinformation law — they are often used to document/subvert Russian media censorship.

more backlash to scraping, this time to Common Crawl — a notoriously intransparent org for what they moderate (if they moderate, or eg remove csam) or what they include www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Firefox raises the alarm about Google’s attempt to build ‘Prompt API’ into Chrome-like browsers — de facto standardisation towards local Gemini models, required agreements to terms of use despite being local — a Chrome infrastructure play all over again? www.theregister.com/2026/04/30/m...

On 'Claw Code' — after 8,100 DMCA takedowns by Anthropic of leaked Claude Code source, devs used OpenAI Codex to reimplement it — thus no clear copyright claim — and are now building on it github.com/ultraworkers... see also ipkitten.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-claude-code-leak-that-spurred-8100.html

The techlash against AI amongst the young – early signs, but culturally something to watch. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

the government of zambia is announcing that it canceled RightsCon. this is a serious attack on civil society, the global & local ones. thousands of people - activists, academics, govt etc - are en route to lusaka. to cancel at this late stage is just horrible.

Still waiting for the AI Act advisory forum (Art 67), meanwhile the all important, de facto compulsory, privatised harmonised standards, made w/o democratic process (yet part of EU law), charge ahead. EC opines on their suitability without civil society input or views. edri.org/our-work/the...

wired italia highlight that when spyware companies say they’re going to cooperate with understanding how their tools have been abused against journalists etc, they often go immediately AWOL before the ink on the press release is dry www.wired.it/article/para...

quite interesting (if very partial) interview from the NSA Deputy Director during the Snowden affair. he says the quiet part out loud — that people didn’t understand how the FISA law relates to technology was itself an NSA capability www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/n...

Blind and partially sighted students struggle to use SPSS as IBM misleads universities about its accessibility. Yet another reason to purge it from the curriculum in favour of open source tools. www.pocklington.org.uk/education/ed...

keep an eye on the post office’s new scandal, the Capture software system accused of miscarriages of justice while Horizon was still just a twinkle in the behemoth’s eye www.computerweekly.com/news/3666423...

all cool and normal as SXSW use automated trademark takedown requests to censor criticism of their event and funding model. context free takedown is seemingly growing (as trust and safety budgets fall) despite more potentially context sensitive AI tools than ever! www.404media.co/sxsw-used-ai...

content liability in the UAE - lessons of warning to those who have or want to make broad brush communications offences (cough england and wales cough) www.wired.com/story/why-sh...

a useful reminder that some countries still *shut down the internet for a time* to stop people sharing exam papers… www.accessnow.org/campaign/no-...

quite fantastical decision of the polish supreme court; if consent to data processing given, little a DPA can do to query failures in data minimisation/purpose limitation. Consent, they say, is consent - as long as it meets consent’s conditions. But whenever does it? #EUDP doi.org/10.1093/grur...

south africa withdraws own government AI policy over hallucinated citations www.reuters.com/world/africa...

human trafficking for online scam compounds recruiting from new regions and hubs beyond south east asia, say interpol. recruitment indicates targets of scammers too, as language and culture often key to successful eg romance/pig butchering scams. www.interpol.int/content/down...

Arizona State University (an institution of great researchers also famous for questionable rethinking-of-the-university promoted by faddish narcissists) decides it’s a good idea to AI clip 2 min bursts of unrelated lecture videos into auto-modules for alumni and more www.404media.co/asu-atomic-a...

useful summary of the geofence warrant case in the US today. expect this to extend semantically — which type of people were talking about this type of thing today to their chatbots... as soon as law enforcement discovers vector embeddings! www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/u...

Google using bot scraping free-for-all to further solidify infrastructural power, moving away from CAPTCHA puzzles (don't anyway work across languages, deafblind, AI solvers, etc) to a CAPTCHA QR code to scan w/ a mobile. Google's reCAPTCHA is already surveillance-heavy www.heise.de/en/news/Inst...

Academics amass large database of paper mill services, depicting a global academic fraud network. www.nature.com/articles/d41.... In some jurisdictions , you may be able to get takedown for these ads under contract cheating laws (Aus, E&W), based on PhD students submitting them as work.

Amazon’s use of tech to privately police registered trademarks on its platform is contorting and stressing the law. firms register generic words in weirdly stylised ways (too generic to register otherwise) yet Amazon lets them have exclusivity based on the text alone dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Good worked example of how substack’s roach motel works in practice, and why I don’t begrudge people who won’t move their businesses but do advise people against building new ones on the platform

Palantir sells AI tool to the Met Police to discover bent coppers, trawls over presumably IT & telemetry data that few look at, starts hundreds of investigations for non compliance, WFH, roster fraud, and dozens related to… undeclared membership of the Freemasons? www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Months of investigative work at @foxglovelegal.bsky.social, now covered in the Guardian, have led me to one inexorable conclusion: the government hasn’t a bloody clue what it’s doing about data centre carbon emissions. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

on computing education in prisons, where students write code in Word and send to their instructors as the facilities forbid them from executing it on their own dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...