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...

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

In short, the problem here is not that Signal ‘chose’ to run on AWS. The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players. 11/

So, yes, Signal runs on AWS. It also runs on your phone, which runs on iOS (Apple) or Android (Google). And on Dekstop, via Windows (Microsoft). Each of these presents similar dependencies on large entrenched tech companies, and concomitant barriers and risks. 10/

Grammarly is now an enemy of education "Universities risk putting students in impossible positions where they’re simultaneously told they can use a tool and that using certain functions of that tool constitutes cheating." Seriously, ban it. It's no friend of education wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/...

We’ve all heard of AI being used for fraud, but in China, people are now losing their life savings and going into huge debt as scammers offer them fake ‘bargain’ Nvidia H100 chips that are supposed to rocket in value. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tNrs9xIAVl...

The viral "Definition of AGI" paper tells you to read fake references which do not exist! Proof: different articles present at the specified journal/volume/page number, and their titles exist nowhere on any searchable repository. Take this as a warning to not use LMs to generate your references!

are you absolutely sure these are the small english channel boats you want to stop

it’s because you want paying customers to try and fill the financial chasm (especially those that don’t need mega huge expensive context windows) not because you have a commitment to free expression

I‘m giving a public talk at UCL on Thurs 16 Oct. The title is “Bureaucracy and distrust: the civil service in the constitution” looking at the civil service’s constitutional foundations, and how it might respond to a populist govt. @sirJJkc.bsky.social will chair! www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/...

Do the Zendesk agents resolve 80% of customer service issues in the presence or absence of a proper FAQ and easy-to-use and powerful customer user interface?

Does your university have a contract with Grammarly? Write to the decision-maker asking if they think the university should be paying for a tool that is fast integrating features that can only be used for academic misconduct and cognitive offloading and request they drop the contract.

🚨 BREAKING: Microsoft illegally tracked students, data watchdog finds. The Austrian DPA has ruled that Microsoft 365 Education used tracking cookies without consent — illegally collecting student data - following a complaint supported by @noyb.eu noyb.eu/en/noyb-win-...

OpenAI’s Sora opt-out for IP is clearly OpenAI trying to do a Google ContentID pivot to turn rightsholders of key trademarked characters into price-takers not price-setters.

ppl are so angry about article that poorly summarises v good work in JAMA. Advocates for ‘silent swaps’ of clinically appropriate, environmentally harmful inhalers to better ones. There are bigger villains, but in a climate crisis we cannot ignore such opportunities. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

National wage bargaining for academics is failing. UCU will likely argue to retain for solidarity, but with it no university can meaningfully respond to strike action due to an untenable tryst, amongst a sector with vastly different financial models. Local bargaining? Tiering? It needs discussion.

Might try an experiment in criminal law this year where for my public order offences lecture I just read through all the current and proposed protest offences and the students can place bets over whether I can cover them all in 2 hours or if I run out of time.

Discord customer service data breach leaks user info and scanned photo IDs

so the US government just forced a tech company to delete an app it doesn’t like, which is totally normal stuff www.404media.co/iceblock-own...

Six years ago, almost to the day, Apple removing a similar app from the Hong Kong App Store was seen as such a breach that Tim Cook wrote an all staff email to defend it www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Nothing says "free speech" like "you shall abstain from speech relating to societal and political events"

Note: including mainland China.

Trying to grow the UK AI sector by building data centers is like trying to grow the university sector by building paper factories.

“microsoft agent mode: better than random”

Either real-time bidding data or app SDK data is being bought and used by ICE to seize people from the streets. If you didn’t believe that the adtech stack is a human rights concern, I’m not sure what more evidence you need. www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

put this in the eu and openai qualifies as a virtual assistant under the dma

this is real, and only $111!

finally we will find out how she got to the delta quadrant!

OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

Note however: Ofcom report that 4% of people in the UK do not have a smartphone in their household (2024). www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/r...

Doing 5Live in a minute on ID cards and I'm wracking my brain as to why anyone would need an ID card to report a pothole? Could people get some kind of gold star for reporting more than 10 potholes? Penalised for reporting too many? WHAT IS THE USE CASE?